The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll (15 page)

Next, Jock went to visit Joss at his Nairobi bungalow, demanding that he also reveal his intentions. “I take no notice of gossip,” Jock declared, “but it has been clear to me for some time that you are in love with Diana. I have spoken to her and she says she is in love with you, too.” Joss was truthful: He told Jock that he was “frightfully in love” with Diana, although he hadn’t realized she felt the same way until now. Jock reiterated that he wanted to take Diana away for a number of months. “If she still believes she is in love with you and wants a divorce to marry you, Joss, I’ll make no objection.” When Joss pointed out it was unlikely that Diana would agree to such a plan, Jock tried another tactic, begging Joss to allow him the chance to make something of the marriage: “Won’t you arrange to leave Nairobi? Perhaps if you apply to do service elsewhere, they will let you go.” Again, Joss declined, citing his attachment to Diana and pointing out that, apart from anything else, he could not go away, as there was a war on. Jock gave it one last try, demanding that Joss reveal how he intended to support Diana. “You’ve got practically nothing apart from your pay and allowances,” he reminded Joss. “I know Diana would not take a penny of the money I’ve settled on her if you two were to be married. She is the straightest person I know where money is concerned.” Joss’s reply did not reveal his own concern about Diana’s financial situation: “Of course, I would not expect her to take it, nor would I live on her money. But we’ll manage somehow.”

Jock’s attempt to save his marriage had resolutely failed. He told Diana he had no choice but to go ahead with a divorce. Later, at his trial, he would say, “I made up my mind to bow to the inevitable. The only thing for me to do was to cut my losses and go, say, to Ceylon. Perhaps I would return to Kenya in a few months. She might then no longer be in love with Erroll.” Jock still held out a final glimmer of hope that Diana’s infatuation would peter out and that “all might still come right in the end.” It was at this point Jock wrote to a friend, Jack Soames, to inform him that Joss and Diana were in love and that he was going to “cut his losses” and leave. “There’s nothing for me to live in Kenya for,” he wrote. According to Lizzie Lezard, who also gave evidence at the trial, Joss had informed him that “Jock could not have been nicer. He had agreed to go away. As a matter of fact, he has been so nice that it smells bad.”

On the morning of Thursday, January 23, Jock sent word to his lawyer that he wished to begin divorce proceedings. Over lunch, he informed Diana of his decision and told her that he would soon be leaving for Ceylon. That evening, the Delves Broughtons were expected at the Muthaiga Club, where they were to meet Joss and another friend, June Carberry. When Jock arrived, Joss and Diana were already lounging on a sofa, limbs entwined. The evening constituted an odd celebration of sorts: Champagne was ordered, and Jock even went so far as to toast his wife and her lover. He held his glass aloft and in a loud voice declaimed, “To Diana and Joss. I want to wish them every happiness in the future and may their union be blessed with an heir. To Diana and Joss.” Everyone in the room could hear his words. Jock was deliberately making a great show of giving up his wife. Later he would say, “The dinner party was a most cheerful affair. Mine was an attitude of complete resignation in view of the circumstances I had encountered. There was nothing else to be done. I realised it.” After dinner, Joss and Diana decided to go off dancing at the nearby Claremont nightclub, with Jock stipulating that Diana should be returned home by 3:00 A.M.. Dickie Pembroke was at the Muthaiga Club that night, and when he returned to Alice’s Portaluca bungalow, he informed her of the extraordinary celebration he had witnessed that evening.

The Delves Broughtons’ friend June Carberry later testified that she had remained at the bar with Jock while he drank a quantity of brandy. “We’ve only been married three months,” Jock told June, “and look how it is for me now.” When he left with June at 1:30 A.M., Jock came close to passing out from too much drink and the sudden impact of fresh air. Jock and June left for Karen, arriving at the Delves Broughton residence at 2:00 A.M.. June, who was staying at the house, went to her room. Shortly afterward, Jock stopped by her door to say good night. He was wearing his dressing gown. Fifteen minutes later, Joss and Diana pulled up at the Karen house in the Buick that Joss had borrowed, as his own car was out of order. Diana’s maid was there to greet them. Joss said good-bye. Diana cautioned him to “drive carefully.” Everyone knew that Joss always drove too fast. June and Diana chatted for a while before Diana went to bed.

A
FTER SAYING GOOD-BYE TO
D
IANA,
J
OSS DROVE
back in the direction of his Muthaiga bungalow. It was after two in the morning and the road ahead would have been hard to make out. In accordance with blackout regulations, Joss’s headlights were half-shaded, and he would have been forced to lean forward in his seat to see his way. Despite the lack of visibility, there is no doubt that he was driving at his usual top speed. He would have been keen to get home. It was late, he was tired, and he needed to be at his desk first thing in the morning. Although Joss almost always lived up to his reputation as a philanderer, he rarely neglected his professional duties.

Joss soon approached the intersection of the Ngong-Nairobi Road, where he was intending to turn right, which would have taken him back toward Nairobi and Muthaiga, where his cottage was located. Only so much is known for certain about what happened next. What we do know is that he was persuaded to stop his car well before the crossroads. Two shots were then fired at him at close range. One bullet missed, but the other entered his neck under his left ear, passing through the base of his skull, and killing him instantly. Next, Joss’s body either fell or was pushed under the dashboard of the car. The Buick then rolled or was pushed off the road, its front wheels hanging precariously over a gravel pit by the side of the verge. The person who fired the shots fled the scene.

It did not take long for Joss’s body to be discovered. At around 3:00 A.M., two African dairy workers (milk boys) driving along the Ngong-Nairobi Road saw the Buick, which appeared to have swerved off the road. As the milk boys came closer, they could see that the car’s headlights were still on and that blood was spattered on the windshield. There was a man in the car, but it was difficult to see who this might be, as he was crouched down on the floor beneath the dashboard. The milk boys drove immediately to the nearest police station in Karen to sound the alert. Two constables arrived at the scene. Again it was assumed that some kind of accident had indeed taken place. Another set of tracks could be seen in the mud, heading off in the direction of Nairobi. Perhaps this was a case of a hit-and-run. At 8:15 A.M., an ambulance arrived and the body was taken out of the car so that a government pathologist could examine it. The driver was obviously dead; rigor mortis had begun to set in and there was blood clotted around his left ear. At this point, someone recognized the body as that of Joss Erroll.

Word spread quickly. Back at Joss’s bungalow, Lizzie Lezard was awakened by a hysterical Diana. She had heard that Joss had died in a car accident and she was inconsolable. After gathering up what she wanted of Joss’s possessions—his pajamas included—Diana departed in tears. Next to visit the bungalow was Idina, Joss’s former wife, in search of the Erroll family pearls, which she hoped to pass on to her daughter, Dinan. The pearls were nowhere to be found. Lizzie realized that it now fell to him to inform the other woman in Joss’s life, Alice. He drove the short distance to the Portaluca cottage, where he found Alice ensconced with Dickie. Here he repeated the news that Joss had died in a car accident. Alice’s reaction was immediate. While Diana and Idina had chosen to race to Joss’s home to retrieve his possessions, Alice had a very different idea. She asked to be taken to the mortuary. She wanted to see Joss. Lizzie agreed to this request and drove her there himself.

Together, Alice and Lizzie were permitted to view Joss’s body, which was laid out on the mortuary slab. What could have been Alice’s thoughts at the sight of him? Joss had been a key figure in her life for almost twenty years. Her on-again, off-again relationship with him had weathered their many marriages, divorces, and affairs. Now he was gone, his body stretched out, his pale features drained of all animation and life. But if Alice had come to say a final good-bye, this was not the word she chose to use. Instead, she bent down, put her lips on Joss’s, kissed him passionately, and declared, “Now you are mine forever.” The visit to the mortuary and her declaration while there were the first of many bizarre reactions on Alice’s part in the aftermath of Joss’s death.

Later in the day, Joss’s body was taken to be examined by a pathologist, Dr. Vint. When the clotted blood behind his left ear was cleaned away, Vint could see that Joss had been shot at close range in the neck. The bullet had passed through his neck below the left ear and was lodged in the right side of his neck. Joss was right-handed, so it would have been impossible for the wound to have been self-inflicted. He had been murdered. There were black powder marks around the wound, which meant that the killer had most likely been sitting in the passenger seat or standing on the car’s running board when he or she took aim. Later that afternoon, another .32-caliber bullet was found under the accelerator pedal of the Buick. Joss must have ducked the first bullet, but the second shot killed him on impact. Dr. Vint estimated that the murder had taken place between 2:30 and 3:00 A.M. He also suggested that the body might have been pushed into its curious position beneath the steering wheel so that someone else—the killer or an accomplice—could then drive the car off the road. The car itself was virtually undamaged and the mechanic who examined it asserted that the car was being driven at no more than eight miles an hour when it had stopped. The gear lever was almost, although not quite, in top position, an oddity. In the front of the car was further evidence: a bloodstained hairpin.

Despite Vint’s revelation that Joss had most definitely been shot, the newspapers were duly informed that Lord Erroll had died in a car accident. Assistant Inspector Arthur James Poppy, formerly of the Metropolitan Police, London, and head of the Nairobi Criminal Investigation Department, had been immediately assigned to the case, but he deliberately chose to keep the truth under wraps for twenty-four hours, until more details could be ascertained. It seems that the police were keen to stave off speculation until more was known. After all, Joss was a high-ranking official and a well-known British aristocrat into the bargain. This was an investigation that needed to be handled with diplomacy and care. Joss’s funeral took place the following day, January 25, 1940, at St. Paul’s Church in Kiambu, Lord Erroll’s constituency. Here he was buried next to his wife, Mary, his headstone inscribed with the following words:

The funeral was well attended. Most of Kenya’s officials were present, including the governor, Sir Henry Moore, as well as an impressive lineup of military and governmental representatives. Alice had composed herself enough to make her appearance among the other mourners. Jock Delves Broughton arrived late. Diana was too upset to attend, but she had given her husband a note to drop into the coffin. Almost everyone who was present was still under the impression that Joss had been killed tragically in a car accident. This made sense: Joss had always driven too fast and recklessly. Alice even went so far as to suggest to Jock that perhaps Joss had suffered from heart trouble and that this could have been the cause of his death.

It wasn’t until Monday afternoon, January 27, the day of the inquest, that the news broke that Joss had probably been murdered and that an investigation was under way to find the killer. Assistant Inspector Poppy was known to be thorough and expert, but the odds were stacked against him from the start. Many aspects of the crime scene had already been carelessly bungled. Joss’s body had been removed from the car before exact measurements of the position of the body could be ascertained. The car had been washed out before fingerprints could be taken. No one had thought to put a rope around the Buick, so a second set of tire tracks going off in the direction of Nairobi had been trampled into the mud by the police before they could be correctly recorded. With hard evidence in short supply, Poppy was going to have to rely on psychological factors and a great deal of supposition to determine the identity of the murderer.

Of course, the most obvious suspect was Jock Delves Broughton. It was common knowledge that Joss had been having an affair with Diana, and in the eyes of most, Jock was immediately cast as the cuckolded husband, seeking revenge on the man who had stolen his wife. In the coming weeks, the assistant inspector drew up a list of suspects, with Jock high on the list. Poppy’s suspicions were heightened further when he went to visit Jock at his house in Karen. Here he discovered a fire burning in a pit in the garden, with remnants of a bloodstained golf stocking in the ashes. The blood type, although human, could not be established, and, strangely, Jock could explain neither the presence of the stocking nor why it had blood on it.

Other names on Poppy’s list included that of Phyllis Filmer’s husband, Percy. He, too, fit the description of jealous husband, but his secretary confirmed his whereabouts the night of the murder, and besides, he just “wasn’t the type.” And what of Diana? She was the last person to have seen Joss alive and possibly had some hidden motive for wanting him dead. But Poppy could not conceive what such a motive might be, and Diana’s obvious distress at the death of her lover seemed to rule her out. Although many in the settler community later hissed “murderess” behind Diana’s back—and it was later rumored that she had killed Joss in a fit of pique after he refused to marry her—it is hard to imagine her motive for doing away with the man she evidently hoped to wed. In practical terms, it would have been very difficult for Diana to kill Joss. After saying good-bye to him, she had chatted with June Carberry for some time before going to bed. In order to shoot Joss, Diana would have had to make the drive to the crime scene in an impossibly short amount of time.

Then there was Alice. Of all Joss’s many former mistresses, no one was more unsettled by his love affair with Diana than she. More important, she had known that Joss would be returning home from Marula Lane before 3:00 A.M. Alice’s lover, Dickie Pembroke, had been at the Muthaiga Club the night of the murder and had overheard Jock say to Joss, “Bring Diana back before three o’clock, there’s a good fellow.” Dickie had duly related this to Alice on his return to her cottage that evening. In a further strike against her innocence, Alice had a history: She had already been convicted of attempted murder in Paris, after the shooting of Raymund at the Gare du Nord. When Poppy’s men questioned the erstwhile countess, however, they discovered that she had an airtight alibi. Dickie Pembroke swore that Alice had been in bed with him at her Portaluca cottage during the early-morning hours of Friday. Alice’s name was removed from the list.

In the period after Joss’s death, Alice’s state of mind was precarious, to say the least. Fate had decreed that the two most important men in her life would die within a week of one another, Joss on January 24 and William Silverthorne, her father, on January 30. William was nearly seventy-four at the time of his death, and he was buried in Savannah, Georgia, where he had been living. Alice did not contemplate attending the funeral. Apart from the fact that she was unable to travel due to the war, she was consumed with the events of Joss’s murder investigation. We do not know her reaction to the news that William had passed away, but we can only assume that his death, coming so soon after Joss’s murder, placed even more pressure on her already-fragile equilibrium. Alice’s relationship with her father had always been central to her unhappiness, and now the lifelong rift between father and daughter had been made perpetual, dangerously mirroring her separation from her beloved Joss.

With Alice and Diana discounted as suspects, the police refocused their attentions on Jock. If they could find the murder weapon and link it to Jock—or at least establish that one of his guns had fired the bullets that had been recovered from Joss’s body and car—then they would have sufficient evidence to charge him. The Karen house and its grounds were duly searched, but nothing was found. After Jock was questioned further, it turned out that his two revolvers had been stolen the Tuesday before the murder. Poppy was immediately suspicious. The stolen pistols were a Colt .32 revolver and a Colt .42. Joss had been shot with a .32-caliber bullet. Had Jock deliberately arranged for the guns to go missing prior to the murder to divert attention from himself? It was also discovered that Jock had shot rounds from his revolvers at his friend Jack Soames’s farm. Bullets taken from Soames’s shooting range were examined and deemed to match those found in Joss’s car and body.

Poppy felt certain he had found his man. Jock had the motive to kill and also seemed to have owned the gun that could well have been the murder weapon. Even so, the police still had to ascertain how Jock could possibly have left the house in Karen and then returned there without anyone hearing his movements. June Carberry was prepared to testify that she had seen Jock at 2:00 A.M. and again at 4:00 A.M. The shooting had taken place before 3:00 A.M., but the staircase at Karen creaked loudly, and Diana, June, and the maid had not heard anyone going downstairs, driving away, or coming back between two and four o’clock that morning. Could Jock have climbed down the drainpipe at the side of the house or over the side of the balcony? Did he lie in wait for Joss, driving away with him until they were at a far-enough distance to accomplish the shooting without anyone hearing the shots? Was Jock capable of the physical prowess required to climb out of the house and walk the two miles back home from the scene of the shooting? This was a man who walked with a limp and had a fractured wrist, which would have severely impeded his climb and his ability to walk long distances. Jock also suffered from night blindness and had been advised by his doctors not to drive after dark. As a further impediment, he had drunk excessively that night, as June would attest.

Despite shaky evidence, Jock was arrested on March 14, 1941. Jock’s words to Poppy at the time of his arrest were, “I’m sorry. You’ve made a big mistake.” That evening, he was placed in a cell at the Nairobi police station, and the following day, he was charged with Joss’s murder at the resident magistrate’s court. Immediately afterward, he was sent to Nairobi’s Kilimani Prison and given his own cell (where he was permitted to order the food of his choice from the nearby Torrs Hotel). By mid-April, the magistrate had ruled that the Crown had a prima facie case of murder.