White Mischief (25 page)

Took some of DB’s cartridges at practice or at second visit. Discussed how to eliminate E. then—had motive connected with Alice or some other woman—could have produced native killer (almost only suspect with long experience of them)

Possibilities:

1. Did it himself

2. Provided killer

3. Framed DB

considered honest by Kaplan—“almost the only one”

Soames (Nanyuki) bullets were fired by Soames from a .32 S&W. He only used the .38 to fire one bullet when police came later.

He
had
a .38 but used a .32 at practice, and used same to shoot E.

The black powder was his.

Connolly had missed a crucial point, however. Soames claimed that he had practised with a .38, and the police did find five spent .38 cartridges in the grass during their search at Nanyuki, apparently left over from the revolver practice.

Soames’s evidence concentrates on the revolver theft, the “cutting of losses” by Broughton, his drunkenness, and the planned trip to Ceylon. And yet he was a prosecution witness. Harragin never pressed him. If Morris had been prosecuting, Soames would never have got off so lightly. The exchanges are worth looking at again.

The “drunkenness” evidence, the description of Broughton “passing out” at Soames’s house supports Broughton’s story of drunkenness and fatigue on the murder night. It was frequently emphasised by Broughton that this new habit of drinking spirits led to
sleep
(Broughton: “Since I arrived in this country I have taken to drinking whisky and gin as a night cap,” etc.), and that when the affair started between Diana and Joss, he began drinking to excess. At other moments Broughton let slip that he had been sleeping badly, and that weekend Soames started him on Medinal (“oblivion’s boarding card,” as Connolly described it) to make sure he would sleep (even though
he had already passed out). Soames almost went too far, once again, in his testimony:

Even Broughton in his own testimony found it necessary to tone down Soames’s descriptions of his excessive drinking.

Then, when Harragin had asked him, “Do you remember which hand the accused fired with?” Soames had replied, “the right hand”—in other words, the crippled hand. (Broughton agreed with this in his own testimony.)

“And how did Sir Delves shoot?”

“Very badly,” said Soames. “He looked like a beginner.”

Yet Broughton in evidence said that he had been taught in the army to shoot a revolver with either hand, but that he found it easier to shoot with his left hand. His vanity also forced him to disclose the fact that he had shot twenty elephants with a rifle since the accident to his right hand and the onset of arthritis.

What kind of man was Soames, and why might he have helped Broughton to kill Erroll? Frédéric de Janzé thought him worthy of one of his inimitable anonymous portraits in
Vertical Land
. He called this one “Just a Bold Bad Man,” and pencilled “Jack Soames” in the margin. It is one of his better attempts:

As he sits over his port, his slanting green eyes light when he sees one shiver to his tales of goring buffalo or tossing rhino.

As he walks in the garden moonlight his sensuous mouth tightens when the girl at his side gasps at his tales of debauch and treason.

His body, an athlete’s, surges around a weird and lurid mind; diseased things attract him in the abstract; rape and murder would be his profession.

When ’flu breaks out he believes in being scarce. He loves a noise; his spick and span hair licked to perfection; he hunts by profession.

But all must think that: “Nevil, Nevil, is such a little devil with the girls.”
*

In 1979 I traced Dushka Repton, the beautiful Russian exile who had been a neighbour of Soames in the late 1920s and the 1930s, to a flat in London near the House of Commons, in a block that was alive with armed policemen—on the roof, in the entrance hall, in the corridors. When the small, emerald-like figure came to the door and peered at me, it was clear that she had almost lost her sight. She told me that the security was for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who lived in a nearby flat. She had taken pity on the policemen and, despite her near blindness, took them down a cake each day, bought on her slow and difficult weekly expeditions to the Army and Navy Stores. She lived alone in the flat, which was dark, with a large sitting room. She felt her way into the kitchen, asked me to pour her a drink of
brandy and water, and said, “It is almost painful for me to talk about Kenya. I was so happy there.”

When we discussed Soames, she said that she had read the description in
Vertical Land,
and that it was more or less correct. She said that he was extremely handsome, a wonderful dancer, with broad shoulders. “But,” said Mrs. Repton, “he was a compulsive, pathological liar. He told me in great detail how he had been tortured by the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus. I was completely taken in and then, by an odd chance, I discovered that he had never been to the Caucasus.

“He loved to boast of fanciful things,” she went on, “and of his exploits with women, but a lot of it was talk. He would tell a story about a prostitute who liked to go about crushing little birds in her boots, for example. He had a vivid imagination of horror. He and Carberry were great friends, and well-suited to each other. They loved to sit around talking and planning murder. Carberry even boasted that he had committed two murders, and I wouldn’t be surprised. Poor Gloria, his wife, died a complete alcoholic.”

But she and her friend Nina Drury, formerly married to Soames, had discussed together whether Soames would have committed murder. “Nina said he would be much too frightened to perform an act of physical cruelty, even though he was at heart a sadist and a voyeur of a very low degree.”

Like many other men, Soames once took a fancy to Alice de Janzé, at the time of her affair with Erroll in the late 1920s. Soames, according to Mrs. Repton, made a pass at her and she turned away. In irritation he said to her, “You smell of death!”—a cruel reference to Alice’s lingering consumption. But would that be enough to turn him against Erroll, out of jealousy and hurt male pride?

In Kenya in 1979, searching for clues and characters, I went to Soames’s old house at Bergeret near Nanyuki, thinking that some of his former servants might still live
in the area. The house is still there, with its large stone fireplace, occupied now by a white settler who was shortly selling up. The garden was still kept up on an impressive scale, with its enormous lake, surrounded by the nearest African equivalent to an English country park of the eighteenth century. In Soames’s time, I was told, elephant and giraffe would appear from the low scrub at the foothills of the Aberdares almost every evening, and rest in the grass just across the river which flowed past the house, as the guests took their sundowners on the veranda. But the forest has since been cut back here for settlement, and the animals have moved elsewhere.

I did find Soames’s former Somali servant, the anonymous witness who has already described the routine of Soames’s house parties, living beside Lake Naivasha, working for a young polo-playing businessman. He was an old man, dressed in a red fez and sneakers, with a dry sense of humour and a somewhat snobbish longing for the standards of the colonial days. He gave a vivid description, translated here from the Swahili, of Soames’s irascibility and unpleasantness:

Soames was very bad tempered and unreasonable. If he was driving along the murram and a car in front threw up dust as he approached, he would overtake the driver, make him stop and swear at him, telling him he shouldn’t throw dust in his face.

Often, he would lose his temper with the car itself if it skidded in the mud, or slowed on a hill. He would shout, “Go on, get on you bloody old car,” and slap its side like a horse.

One day we were at Limuru, going down the escarpment on our way to Nairobi. Everybody’s car was stuck in the mud and Bwana Soames said, “Oh fuck this, I’m not going to get stuck in the mud. I’m going to
GO, GO, GO, GO,
and if I don’t get through, I’m going to burn the car.” Then he kicked and hammered it, and almost turned it over trying to get it out of the mud. All the other people were stuck. The mud was very bad. I [and another servant] made a track and we got through. We were all wet through and cold, and the colour of Soames’s wife’s hat was running down her face.

She said. “What about our friends? We’ve got to help them.” Soames said. “Bugger them.” We got as far as Muthaiga. very dirty and wet. We went to No. I cottage. The servants were given money by Mrs. Soames and told to go away and come back tomorrow, but on the way out we met Soames who said, “Where are you going?” We said, “Memsahib gave us the money to go away.” Soames said, “Certainly not. Not until we’ve showered and dressed.”

On a trip to the Kenya coast the same year, I picked up confirmation of a story that Poppy had mentioned in passing, which might explain Soames’s anxiety at the trial. Soames had left the country soon after the case for an extended holiday, said Poppy, “in case more bullets were dug up in his garden.” There was a suggestion that Soames was involved in illegal arms dealing at the time of the murder. One hot Saturday I drove down the flat coast road, south of Mombasa, past the palm forests and tourist hotels to look for Dan Trench, the son of Maxwell Trench, who had been Carberry’s partner in the distillery at Nyeri. Dan had been in his twenties when the murder took place. I was told he was a senior beachcomber, down on his luck, and a drinker. He lived near the hotel that his family once owned, which now belonged to the Government. He was said to be a bar historian of some accomplishment, whose pedigree as a member of the inner circle of old surviving settler families gave him a certain distinction along the coast. He had become, in other words, a “character.”

I found him about midday in the compound of the Trade Winds Hotel, in a Crusoe-like shack shaded by jacarandas, near a hire shop called Mike’s Bikes. He was sitting at a wooden table on the “veranda”—which was no more than the exposed front half of the wooden box in which he lived, and roughly the size of a small ship’s cabin. He was not so old, and there was no trace of senility about him, but he was emaciated, skeletal almost, and marked with severe skin cancer. As I began to talk to him he picked at a plate of fish with a fork, with a deadly lack
of interest. I recited the names of the people in whom I was interested. “How the hell do you know all those names?” he asked.

On the veranda railing was a sign saying “Office,” and on the table itself another that said, “Private.” “They come and think they can sit around,” said Trench. “I don’t get half what I’m owed.” I had been warned not to drink with Trench. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hold his liquor, but he had a serious ulcer which he had neglected—mostly through lack of proper nourishment—and a drinking bout, it was said, might kill him. The conversation began slowly and reluctantly on his part. He was forcing himself to eat the fish. Then he called for a beer, and then another. We proceeded to the hotel bar on the beach, and drank for four hours by the sea. He refused not to drink. He was amazed that I should know so much about the old Happy Valley crowd, even though I told him that I had been working on nothing else for some months. “I must say, you buggers who come out here really know your stuff,” he said, and then having conceded the point, he addressed himself in intimate detail, varying fancy with accuracy, insult with praise, to characters who had died, in some cases, thirty years before. He talked a lot about Carberry, his father’s partner, especially his cruelty to animals, which, he said, was legendary, and which had begun according to Trench when he was four years old. “His mother said to him, ‘Today is Christmas Day and I want you to be especially kind to animals, particularly the cat.’ John came back later and said, ‘I’ve given the cat all the canaries to eat.’”

“He had one horse called Morning Glory and another called Mafuta,” said Trench, “and he used to race them against each other. He’d put gramophone needles in the bits to see if they would go faster. He’d time the horses, swap the bits, and run them again and again.”

Dan Trench remembers the tortures inflicted by Carberry on Dan’s sister, Nancy: a toy was sent to her when
she was quite small with the message on it, from Carberry “Not to be opened until my arrival.” When he arrived the box was put in the middle of the room, he opened it, and produced a large child’s doll. Then he took out a knife and slit its stomach open. The child wailed and screamed in terror as hundreds of gold sovereigns poured on to the floor. The rule was that all foreign exchange must be declared and Carberry had devised many ingenious ways to circumvent it. When he was finally jailed for eighteen months he called it “the happiest period of my life.”