White Mischief (16 page)

Gwladys Delamere was the only really hostile witness, and her responses to Morris’s questions were brittle.

(Here Morris scored the point that Erroll had other enemies than Broughton.)

She described Broughton’s expression as he watched his wife and Joss Erroll dancing. “It registered many things: anger, misery, rage, brooding, intense irritation and restlessness.”

“Restlessness on his face?”

“Yes.”

Gwladys denied that she had said to him, “Do you
know that Joss is wildly in love with Diana?” and that this remark may have been the reason for his troubled expression.

The foreman of the jury asked, “When you described the accused’s disposition as morose, do you mean habitually so?”

“Yes, I have always thought so.”

“It may be,” said the foreman, “that he was only morose towards you?”

“If so,” said Gwladys, “he must have been morose for twenty years.”

Later, when Broughton was in the witness box, he was asked, “Why do you suggest she should have turned against you?”

“Only by her evidence,” he answered. “She said I had a morose disposition when she knows full well I have not, and her evidence as to my distress when I was sitting next to her watching the dancing was entirely fabricated and also her saying my face registered every emotion of hate against my wife in the Muthaiga Club. Nobody was more suprised than I was at her evidence.”

Two key witnesses were not called: Diana and Wilks. Diana could not be compelled to give evidence against her husband, though she had, of course, made a statement to the police before she was told how Erroll had died, in which she may have let slip that her dog had begun barking loudly at 3:30. Did the dog bark because it heard Broughton re-entering the house? Diana left the court only once, when Erroll’s ear, by now a ballistics exhibit, was handed round in a jar of spirits. She said, “This is really
too
much. Poor Joss.” When Broughton’s disabilities were being illustrated by Morris, she was overheard to say, “He’s not nearly such an old crock as he’s making out.”

The prosecution’s neglect of Wilks, who would have been able to confirm or deny June’s evidence, is more surprising. They gave as their reason that Broughton’s servant would not be believed; but this had not prevented
them from calling his other servants, or Erroll’s Leporello, Waiweru. or his Somali chauffeur. It seems that Wilks had made several conflicting statements, and was not to be trusted in the witness box by either side.

Morris called only eight witnesses, including Broughton and the loyal Major Pembroke, against the prosecution’s twenty. The eight were quite enough: he had already turned several of the prosecution witnesses into his own, all, except for Gwladys, testifying with impeccable politeness to Broughton’s amiability and tolerance, to his lack of temper and to what Broughton called the “unimpaired friendship” with Erroll all through the crisis. (The Crown saw this as Broughton setting a trap for Erroll; a ploy to have him always close at hand and under observation.) Among his witnesses Morris also put up his own ballistics expert, Captain Thomas Overton, to contradict the prosecution experts, although Morris had already damaged the prosecution’s ballistics case by then in cross-examination.

It was in his brilliant handling of the ballistics evidence that Morris’s expertise had been revealed. The technical battle that raged for days around a series of microscopic markings on a set of bullets was often confusing and difficult for a lay jury to follow. At moments, lawyers and experts were arguing only—as it seemed—for each other’s benefit. Yet Morris always made sure the jury knew when he had scored a point, and the ballistics evidence on which the Crown case rested provided some of the most dramatic moments in the trial.

Briefly, Morris had two propositions to attack. The first was the contention that the bullets fired at Soames’s farm (the “Nanyuki” bullets) and the murder bullets came from the same gun. If these two sets of bullets could not be matched, then, Harragin said, “The case for the Crown falls away like a pack of cards.” The second proposition
was that the gun that fired all these bullets was a Colt .32 that belonged to Broughton and which he had arranged to be stolen (with another weapon which is not relevant) from the house at Karen. This Colt .32 was registered on Broughton’s firearms certificate.

Morris proved that, given the markings on the bullets, none of them could have been shot by any Colt pistol ever manufactured—that was his “one point” on which he hoped to defeat the Crown case. The Crown, however, might reply that Broughton had another .32 hidden away, possibly a Smith & Wesson. To counter this Morris—using pedantry mixed with semi-terror tactics and the judicious use of ballistics textbooks—attempted to put grave doubts in the mind of the jury about the methods the prosecution experts had used in producing their conclusion that the two sets of bullets matched. There was no trace of doubt in the minds of these experts. But if the jury were at all uncertain, Broughton would have to be acquitted.

Morris dealt with the last point first. Until he began his cross-examination, the close similarities between the two sets of bullets, as demonstrated by the Government scientists, Ernest Harwich and Maurice Fox, seemed unanswerable. Fox, the chief Government chemist, had spent almost two months in the laboratory with a comparison microscope, photographing and analysing the bullets and carefully cataloguing these similarities.

A bullet passing through a barrel will pick up, in reverse, the impression of the rifling—the lands (ridges), grooves and striations, or thin lines, caused by irregularities in the barrel. Fox had photographed these features in each bullet for comparison, but through bad marking and classification, the large pile of pictures—as Morris showed—turned out to be almost useless, hopelessly confusing to a jury. Morris suggested that Fox had wasted his two months in the laboratory. From the start Fox had been defensive and pigheaded, resisting all Morris’s definitions, and quibbling with his questions. (When Morris mentioned
a work by a Major Burrard called
Identification of Firearms and Forensic Ballistics,
Fox said, “It is not a book on ballistics.” “What title would you give it then?” Morris asked. “I would not like to give a title to another man’s book,” answered Fox.)

Fox spent seven hours in the witness box for the Crown. Morris questioned him for a further fourteen hours, with many interventions from the judge when the two men seemed to be coming to blows. Their mutual antipathy brought comic relief to the court which had become bored and muddled by Morris’s minute examination of lands, grooves and striations. Morris asked at one point what the letters “S” and “W” signified on a cartridge.

“That the cartridge is suitable for a Smith & Wesson,” replied Fox.

“Where did you get that from?” Morris asked.

“My mother told me,” said Fox.

“Are you trying to be insolent or impertinent, Mr. Fox?”

“No.”

“Well, you are succeeding.”

The similarities were one thing, argued Morris, but what about the
differences?
Morris knew that there were always minute differences between two bullets fired from the same gun. He now discussed every chink and scratch visible on the bullets as if they had equal value with the Crown’s universal similarities. He went into great detail, producing anarchy out of order to a jury already bemused by ballistic science. And could the comparison between different bullets really be conclusive without the firearm itself, which the Crown would never be able to produce? Under his own tireless assault from Morris, Harwich had already agreed that the identification of a bullet by its markings was “a very complex proposition” without the actual firearm. Having got both Harwich and Fox to qualify, accept, concede certain points, Morris would then ask (turning to the jury with a look of weary exasperation),
“And you
still
maintain that the bullets are from the same weapon?”

And now Morris moved in for the kill. It had been argued, he said, that all the bullets came from a revolver whose barrel had five grooves in the rifling, which twisted along the barrel in a right-handed or clockwise direction.

MORRIS:
In all these bullets, was the direction uniform?

HARWICH:
Yes, it is right hand in all the bullets.

MORRIS: IS
the direction in a Colt revolver right or left?

HARWICH:
Left in the barrel.

MORRIS:
Can you say what kind of a gun the bullets came from?

HARWICH:
I can say they came from a revolver.

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE:
But not a Colt.

HARWICH:
As far as my experience goes, all Colt revolvers have six grooves and a left-hand twist.

It was a heavy point for the defence, and the mystery remains of why, with all its ballistic experts to hand, with Fox working on the case for two months before the trial, the Crown should have ignored this flaw in its case.

There was still the problem of Soames’s memory of the gun Broughton had used for target practice. He had said in evidence that he thought Broughton had shot with a Colt on his farm, although he wasn’t certain. He thought, too, that it was a revolver that was hinged, in which the breech is broken—a characteristic of Colts.

Morris took the weight out of that with another question: “If Sir Delves tells his Lordship and the Jury that his gun was not a gun that broke, but one in which the cylinder fell out, you would not dispute that?”

“I would believe him,” said Soames.

The similarity between the two sets of bullets—which nobody, not even Morris, disputed in the end—remained one of the most tantalising elements of the mystery. There was the added similarity of the black powder marks on Erroll’s wound, and the live bullets found at Nanyuki, also charged with black powder, which was extremely rare at
the time of the events under discussion, but widely available before 1914.

HARRAGIN:
When did you tell us you bought these revolvers?

BROUGHTON:
I cannot remember the date—12 or 15 years ago.