After shooting Raymond at the Gare du Nord, Alice was pardoned by the President from serving her six-month sentence, and only fined 100 francs. Her second marriage to Raymond was, Spicer believed, for love. Her children did not attend the occasion, but her bulldog did. Alice then traipsed around Europe, funding her new husband’s bad habits – including his gambling. Only after he had thrown a cocktail in her face in Paris did she pay for him to go to Australia. But later in 1933, the same year Alice had settled back in Happy Valley, Raymond reappeared. Frédéric, who had always been a true gentleman and remained a good friend to Alice until the end, died at the end of the year.
Although Raymond had a tendency to arrive drunk at Wanjohi, having driven all the way from his home at Njoro, Alice did her best to avoid him. She travelled regularly, including a courageous solo expedition to Congo. Raymond was deported from Kenya in 1939 for drunkenly striking and injuring an employee, but this didn’t sober him up, as he was then convicted and jailed in England for drink-driving and killing a woman cyclist.
Alice would have been delighted when her old friend, society beauty Paula Gellibrand, came to stay, also with two failed marriages behind her. Paula was single again – but not for long: she met Boy Long at an overnight party at Idina’s and married him soon afterwards.
One way to avoid sitting home alone with morbid thoughts is to keep on the move. Alice had her beach house at Tiwi, south of Mombasa and a cottage in Muthaiga – close to Joss’s Nairobi home and office. She would have busied herself, like Idina, throwing parties and keeping as many people as possible around her, in between having her many friends to stay at Wanjohi and the coast.
Meanwhile, as Lord High Constable of Scotland, Joss had to take part in the coronation procession of King Edward VIII. Edward’s subsequent abdication because he wanted to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson would also have engaged Alice’s sympathies: HRH was an old mucker from Alice’s London days. In 1938, after the coronation of Edward’s brother George, Joss was elected for Kiambu constituency and, according to Spicer, he was no longer supporting Mosley or the British Union of Fascists. Alice’s contribution to the war effort was to look after Julian ‘Lizzie’ Lezard, an old friend of Joss, whom Joss had stationed at Wanjohi farm to do intelligence work: presumably he was offering the lonely Alice some company, although apparently Lezard was generously endowed enough to cause much delight at Idina’s favourite after-dinner game. This involved several men standing behind a sheet, poking the necessary appendage through holes to get marked out of ten.
Lezard was a brief fling, whereas Dickie Pembroke was there for Alice when her father died and just after Joss was murdered. But then he was posted to Cairo. Alice was having health problems and, in early 1941, Dr Boyle performed a hysterectomy on her. Spicer writes that before Alice departed to Nairobi for the operation she gave her dachshund, Minnie, Nembutal – a barbiturate often used as a sedative. She preferred to put the dog down herself as it was experiencing panic attacks in the car. Alice felt she had murdered her dog, she revealed to Pembroke in a letter, adding that ‘the length of our own lives lies entirely within our own hands (unless someone else gets at us first!)’
Lonely and probably suffering from clinical depression, Alice had focused all her affections on Minnie, ensuring the little dog didn’t suffer. In spite of her irresponsible way of dragging wild African ‘pets’ off to inevitable sticky ends in foreign places, Alice always seemed more attached to them than to her children, making more effort to get the lion out of the zoo and back to Kenya than she ever did to take her children to Wanjohi. Animals are often easier company than people, their unconditional devotion comforting during life’s ‘downs’.
It is now generally agreed that depression is exacerbated by alcohol and drugs, as they further tamper with unbalanced chemicals in the brain. It is believed that substance abuse can actually cause depression, or advance it in someone who is already genetically predisposed to the illness. Whatever the cause, after the operation Alice was frail, depressed and missing Minnie. She sent her housekeeper, Flo Crofton, to excuse her from neighbour Pat Fisher’s joint birthday party with Joss’s former mistress, Phyllis Filmer, then took an overdose of Nembutal. There is no mention of how Alice was revived, but Spicer details how, a few days later, having sent Flo shopping in Ol Kalou, she took another large dose of Nembutal and shot herself in the heart. A servant broke in, but by the time Flo arrived Alice was dying. Dr Boyle borrowed a fast car from Dr Bowles and rushed from Nairobi to Wanjohi, but Alice was dead when he arrived.
Spicer records that Alice had left five letters: two to her children, one to Pembroke, one a suicide note and one to the police; all of which Boyle handed over to the police. The cocktail party Alice had requested at her grave was not held because many friends were away: only Pat Fisher and Flo Crofton attended the funeral, together with Alice’s staff.
Alice’s daughters, now in their late teens, were left to read about the death of their mother in the French newspapers, just as 15-year-old Dinan had read of her father’s death eight months earlier. The will stipulated that to inherit Alice’s farm her daughters must live there for a certain length of time: if they could not, the estate would go to the fatherless 8-year-old daughter of Alice’s good friend Noreen Pearson. The war made it too difficult for Nolwen and Paola to take on the farm, then Noreen remarried an American officer and took her daughter to Washington. Thus Alice’s farm was sold on the child’s twenty-first birthday, which would have been in the 1950s.
Paul Spicer’s mother, Margaret, had been a friend of Alice’s. Spicer’s interest in the elusive countess was further piqued by various coincidences, strengthening his conviction that Alice murdered Erroll. The book’s epilogue enlarges on this: he spoke to Noel Case, who described Alice as an unpredictable employer, usually forgetting to make Noel aware of her movements, and dwelling on thoughts about her proposed grave site. Apparently she never spoke of her past or her children, and only once mentioned her father, whom she was keeping in an expensive home in America. Noel thought it highly probable that Alice had killed Erroll, given her belief in the afterlife. Ethnie Boyle, wife of Alice’s doctor William, claimed she actually saw the letter in which Alice supposedly confessed all. Ethnie told her daughter, Alice Fleet, née Boyle (and later Alice Percival), who told Spicer.
Various others backed the theory that Alice was Erroll’s murderer, including Lezard, Betty Leslie-Melville (who said so in her memoirs) and the latter’s mother-in-law, Mary Leslie-Melville. A few years after Alice’s death, Mary’s headman had found the gun hidden under some rocks in the Wanjohi River just below Alice’s house. Mary had said it was the exact make and calibre of the missing revolver used to shoot Erroll, but that there was no point in dredging up the case again as he and Alice were dead anyway. She’d even shown Betty the same gun, in the cupboard of her Nairobi home.
Spicer writes that somebody had written two anonymous letters to defence lawyer Harry Morris, saying Erroll’s killer was a woman and a leading Nairobi socialite, spurned by Joss for Diana. Spicer also believes that Dickie Pembroke might not have noticed (or perhaps he ignored and later lied about) Alice’s leaving their bed for over an hour: besides, she could easily have driven quickly and unnoticed from Muthaiga to Karen on roads that would have been empty in the small hours. Alice would have known Joss’s movements, as she always did, stopped him on the road and shot him – not the first time she’d pulled the trigger on true love. In addition, Spicer agrees with Noel Case that, believing as she did in the afterlife, Alice would have anticipated her certain reunion with Joss.
Both Mary Leslie-Melville’s and Ethnie Boyle’s husbands were evidently great friends and supporters of Alice at different times. I wonder what their wives felt about such kindnesses, however innocent, shown to a woman who wasn’t partial to nuptial fidelity even when she did have a man around. While it seems common knowledge that William Boyle was a lover, whether or not David Leslie-Melville partook of Alice’s potent cocktails or s
ampled what went on between her expensive sheets is just another of many secrets Alice carried into her final resting place. And considering how even the Crown witnesses in court, supposed ballistic experts, confused guns, I’d be surprised if Mary Miller really knew enough about firearms to be so conclusive.
I do believe Alice would have killed herself at some point in her life regardless of whether Joss was alive or dead. I have observed a manically depressed friend’s existence, as if permanently in a fog, unable to see any way out and seldom able to think straight. I don’t believe that Alice, in her disturbed state of mind, would have been capable of planning such a well-executed murder. However, depression is a self-obsessed state of mind and engineering her own death would have been another matter.
Solomon, strangely enough, had never asked me my opinion on the murder. There isn’t a Kiswahili translation of Errol Trzebinski’s biography of Erroll or he, too, might have some political opinions on the subject.
Who did he think it was, then, I finally asked him, wondering if he’d dreamt up anything incriminating.
‘Maybe Alice,’ he said, adding with a smile: ‘she was very naughty!’
After our initial visit to Alice’s, Solomon had written down more of his strange dreams in his ‘book of visions’. Now I read them tentatively, always slightly unnerved by his sixth sense. Solomon would have been burnt at the stake if he’d been born in England in the wrong century, but nowadays psychics are coming back into fashion. Indeed, here in Kenya, with lingering beliefs in ancestral spirits and the revered psychic powers of witchdoctors, he’s nothing unusual.
Solomon wrote about how he’d ‘seen’ Alice in her car on the road we’d walked along to his brother’s house – it had formerly been Alice’s private road through her farm. He’d stopped and talked to Alice about her farm workers, her children and her suicide. Amongst other revelations, Alice had told him she’d had gonorrhea, that indeed all the Happy Valley players had it. She’d also said she’d never been too worried about her children – they’d had rich relatives, while she, Alice, had died poor.
‘Don’t your dreams ever frighten you?’ I asked Solomon.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I am always having these dreams – about Alice and other people.’
I remembered his ‘conversations’ with his son, Caleb, after he’d died and realised the comfort they must have offered to him at the time.
By now events in my life had forced me to think more deeply about suicide – my close friend’s 16-year-old daughter, Jenny, had killed herself. This beautiful young girl’s ashes had lain in my house while my friend went through a roller-coaster ride of emotional purgatory. Jenny had suffered from depression, but medical help had failed her. I read the bleak words from her diary, reproduced in a book written afterwards by her mother: ‘People should be more afraid of the light than the dark. At least at night you can hide from all that is there.’ Alice, as well as suffering from depression, had been through enough to unhinge anyone: her childhood was short, her father’s behaviour appalling. Cocktails and drugs would have done nothing to improve any existing imbalances in Alice’s brain. Regardless of whether she believed in an afterlife, perhaps she could no longer distinguish between light and darkness in the whirlpools of her mind. Or perhaps she had simply become too ‘afraid of the light’.
When I revisited the area in 2010, the old wooden house once occupied by the manager was still standing, although strips of wood had been torn out of the walls, leaving gaps you could climb through. The inside was a splintering mess, but beside the door, the scarlet rose still bloomed defiantly. Alice’s grave, actually only a dozen feet from the place Danson Mwaura had pointed out, was a tangle of nettles and broken stones. Even in death, it seemed, there was no peace or sanity for Alice. I glanced at it once more and noticed, beneath the mess, that a profusion of miniature wildflowers covered the jostled turf. The earth Alice had walked upon and loved was giving back a subtle token of appreciation.
We zigzagged home through the smaller valleys and hills, a dark-grey sheet of rain hiding the Aberdares. We gave a lift to a young man, who to Solomon’s consternation had never heard of a colobus monkey.
As Solomon impatiently repeated the Kikuyu word for colobus: ‘Nguyo . . . nguyo,’ I wondered about Alice. She killed herself – finally. She tried to kill de Trafford. Did she really kill Erroll? It seemed unlikely somehow. Behind us, a rainbow arched over Kipipiri, like a bright promise for the future. Its end dropped into a dark fold of foothill, exactly where Alice’s old home must be.
Perhaps it touched her shattered grave.
22
An Unbroken Spirit
Early in 2009 we’d returned to Happy Valley after Kenya had been knocked sideways by the horrific post-election violence that had almost brought the tourist industry to its knees. But all was not bad, it seemed: Chinese labourers and engineers were finishing the smooth, wide tarmac road that wound through the hills and vales from North Kinangop, through to Ol Kalou and on towards Dundori. At last the struggling farmers of Happy Valley had a decent road on which to transport their produce.
But Solomon frowned when he saw the Chinese workers in their traditional pointed hats. ‘Since they arrived in this area many colobus monkeys have been trapped. The Chinese are buying the skins,’ he told us furiously, then with his voice cracking, ‘and there was even an elephant killed, the tusks were gone, and it is the first time I see an elephant killed in this area.’ Somebody else in the car pointed out that the Chinese had required 14,000 work permits, when as many unemployed Kenyans could have done the work. ‘They are eating all the dogs in the area,’ Solomon continued. This was a more debatable crime. Dogs are not spayed in rural Kenya – nobody can afford to have the operation done, or if they can they don’t care. Thus dogs breed indiscriminately and the resulting puppies are likely to have a wretched life.
The story got worse. Solomon had been at the road camp near Miharati, complaining loudly about the group of colobus that had been killed. He was certain it was something to do with the Chinese road workers in the area. Later that week, back at the camp again, he was followed home: a car was shadowing his matatu, waiting when it stopped to collect more passengers. Solomon, in hindsight, had noticed it, but at the time he hadn’t been intimidated. When he disembarked to walk the final stretch to his house, it was dark. There was no moon, just a sky full of stars. Solomon knew the way well – he’d often walked in the dark and it didn’t worry him. But then he suddenly noticed a group of hooded men. Afterwards he realised that they had pursued him stealthily from the roadside, waiting until they were out of earshot of any possible witnesses.
‘They broke my knee, they tried to twist my head so they could break my neck and they told me to stop interfering,’ said Solomon, who’d ended up in hospital. ‘I was saved by some dogs who began to bark. They stopped those men from killing me.’
‘But were they Chinese?’ I asked.
‘No, they were Africans,’ said Solomon, still limping two months later, ‘It was the Chinese who hired these bad people.’
Nothing, it seems, will halt Solomon’s determination to save wild creatures. Not long after this, he rang me. ‘There is a big python near Ol Kalou. It lives by a dam and takes sheep and goats, so the people there – they want to kill it!’
‘How big?’ I asked.
‘It is at least eleven feet long. But we could move it to near your house,’ he suggested.
‘Have you contacted KWS?’ I asked, thinking how much the python would enjoy feasting on my chickens.
‘Yes, they will come and shoot it!’
I agreed with Solomon – why kill an innocent creature? But I don’t know how to catch, nor do I have the sheer physical strength required to hold such a large snake. Eventually I found a friend of my son’s who was willing to come and catch it, bag it and bring it to me. I planned to release it somewhere safe, but not anywhere near my chickens.
It was a long day, a large area and they didn’t fin
d the snake.
This was after Solomon had to move home again. He’d remarried – a kind lady called Grace. Then his brothers had decided to force him off the land he’d bought from one of them after another had burnt down his hut and driven away Esther and the children.
‘But they can’t, legally . . .’ I began feebly.
Solomon sighed. ‘I do not have title deeds.’
‘But why are they doing this?’ I asked.
‘They have never accepted me,’ he said sadly, ‘because I am not from the same father. They always called me “roadside boy”.’
Meanwhile he’d been attacked again, Grace had been threatened and their calf had been poisoned. They had a young child now and Grace was worried what Solomon’s brothers might do next. She suspected his brothers were behind the death of the calf – and the threats.
I joined Astrid in trying to raise the equivalent of just over £1,200 to buy Solomon a small piece of land – just under 2 acres – near the Malewa River that runs down from the Aberdares, its waters swelled by those of the Wanjohi. The land was closer to Astrid’s home and hopefully would offer a measure of security for Solomon, farther away from the ‘bad devils’ of Happy Valley.
Astrid helped Solomon find a lorry which came and took them and all their possessions away before Solomon’s brothers realised anything was happening. The funds stretched to building a house too – a very basic wooden and tin affair, enough to keep off the heavy rain that had battered the area and swept away bridges.
I crossed fingers that Solomon would keep peace with his new neighbours, although before long he found a nest of barn owls in a school. Considering them to be birds of ill omen, a hysterical crowd of teachers, parents and students were determined to sentence them to death by stoning. Solomon, as usual, leapt into the fray. His admonitions that owls are important predators, vital to the ecosystem, fell on deaf ears. Even the teachers, it seemed, were influenced by superstition and the prevailing hysteria. So Solomon contacted local raptor expert, Simon Thomsett, and between them they rapidly engineered the moving process – although half the owl chicks had already been killed. The survivors were fed and cared for, then released when ready to hunt for themselves.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 23