by John Kerr
Hamilton quickly glanced around the sun-filled room, as though he wanted to remember the smallest details. With a smile, he said, ‘Goodbye,’ and then turned and walked to his waiting car.
EPILOGUE
THE TRIAL OF Alfred de Marigny for the brutal murder of Sir Harry Oakes captured the attention of the English-speaking Press like no other, dominating daily headlines from Miami to New York and London despite the fact that the story was competing with the breathtaking events of the Second World War. Apart from the well-known antipathy between the accused and the deceased, the prosecution’s case hinged on a single piece of forensic evidence: a fingerprint attributed to de Marigny lifted from the Chinese screen at Sir Harry’s bedside the night he was bludgeoned to death. The accused maintained that he’d spent the evening in question quietly at home playing cards with the Marquis Georges de Videlou and his girlfriend, a story which de Videlou corroborated from the witness stand. In his skilful cross-examination of the homicide detective summoned by the Duke of Windsor to conduct the murder investigation, de Marigny’s Nassau lawyer demonstrated that the fingerprint had in fact been fraudulently obtained during the police interrogation of de Marigny from a water glass he’d been offered, a revelation so stunning it prompted the chief of the Miami Homicide Division to bolt from the packed Nassau courtroom and become violently ill on the sidewalk, to the horror of the large crowd gathered outside. At the conclusion of the six-week trial, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty. De Marigny’s joy was short-lived, as the jury, in an act unprecedented in Bahamian law, also voted to deport de Marigny and his young wife Nancy forthwith from the Colony. The murder of Sir Harry Oakes has never been solved.
Following the sensational Oakes murder trial, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were largely absent from Nassau for the duration of the war, pleasuring themselves in the United States, where they would eventually take up permanent residence at the Waldorf Towers in New York. The duke never fully recovered from the blow to his prestige caused by his role in the botched Oakes murder investigation and the public exposure of the pro-Nazi activities of his Swedish friend, on whose innocence the duke would insist to his dying day.
The notion of opening a resort hotel and casino on Hog Island also died with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. Meyer Lansky continued to enjoy a monopoly on casino gambling in Havana under the watchful eye of the corrupt Batista regime until its violent overthrow by the young Fidel Castro in 1958. With Havana suddenly off limits to American tourists, a wealthy American by the name of Huntington Hartford persuaded the Bay Street regime in Nassau to pass legislation authorizing casino gambling in the Colony. By the early 1960s, Hartford had acquired Hog Island, which he re-christened Paradise Island, connected it to Nassau with a bridge, and opened the first resort hotel and casino in the Bahamas, which thrives there to this day. Shangri-La, abandoned since the war, was renovated by Hartford into the world-renowned Ocean Club, along with its famous marina: Hurricane Hole.
By the Same Author
Fell the Angels
Copyright
© John Kerr 2012
First published in Great Britain 2012
This edition 2013
ISBN 978 0 7198 0970 5 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7198 0971 2 (mobi)
ISBN 978 0 7198 0972 9 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7090 9905 5 (print)
Robert Hale Limited
Clerkenwell House
Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.halebooks.com
The right of John Kerr to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988