White Mischief (32 page)

Diana was a “wonderful woman,” a great animator of the scene. Her boyfriends before 1940 were Mark Pilkington, Rory More O’Ferrall and Broughton. They had had many happy times together, although he hadn’t seen her now for eighteen years. Yes, it was possible that she did love jewellery and clothes more than men. She was certainly not promiscuous.

Erroll was the greatest “athlete” in Kenya, where there were many “athletes,” and was undoubtedly the love of Diana’s life. He was much disliked and his reputation contributed a great deal to Broughton’s acquittal. There is no doubt, he repeated, that Diana loved Erroll madly, and he her, “in his way.” He kept himself immaculate and was always better groomed than anyone else.

Delves Broughton was
devious
above all—even capable of writing anonymous letters—very intelligent,
not
sour by any means, good company, friendly and sympathetic, but
two
-faced. He could be charming to someone and say “dreadful old cow,” etc. the moment after. He would pat you on the back and say “absolutely marvellous, old boy,” when his real feelings were “bloody awful.” He was crazy about Diana physically, but they hated each other like poison later—i.e.. at the time of the Erroll affair. It was natural for such love to turn to hate. He did not recall anything, or any conversation on the safari to suggest that Broughton had done it—it was, in any case, an unmentionable subject.

He last saw Broughton in Ewart Grogan’s office in
Nairobi. Broughton had fallen down a railway embankment in Mombasa, and his back was in plaster. He thought he’d gone round the bend, and said to Broughton, “Why don’t you go into a home or something?” Broughton said, “I can’t live without Diana. You know her best and you’re the only one who has any real influence over her. Won’t you see her and try to persuade her?” Dickinson told him that nothing would induce Diana to go back to him and he wouldn’t bother to try. Broughton was furious, began shouting. Dickinson said he could do nothing. He should cut his losses and go back to England. “He said a lot of mad things at the interview.”

Dickinson admitted that he had smuggled the syringe and the morphine into Nairobi jail in a chocolate box because Broughton had told him that if the case went against him he wanted to commit suicide. When it was suggested that Broughton had tried to frame him in an attempt to get Diana back, he replied that Broughton had a grudge against him because of his close friendship with Diana. He would say no more than that.

He thought Broughton was morally capable of committing the murder, but not physically so, and he couldn’t think of anyone else. He (Dickinson) was physically capable, but was away at Nyali in hospital. A cactus spine had pierced his foot (coral according to Poppy), and he had nearly had to have it amputated. He described the theories of African killers as unlikely, though “any African would disappear and never be seen again for a few shillings.” Erroll would have stopped his car for any European who flagged him down to ask for a lift, but for no African.

Dickinson did seem nervous when the murder was mentioned; but when the robberies were talked about he became distinctly uneasy. He was in the South of France with Diana, Mark Pilkington, Rory More O’Ferrall and a few others two months before the war started. Their car was outside the restaurant in which they were lunching
and the jewels had been left in the glove pocket by Dickinson. “Damn silly place …” etc. They were all interviewed by the insurance company, but only Freddie Mcllvray, who was a South of France playboy, saw the police. Dickinson knew nothing about the picture theft from Doddington.

The telephone call came from the photographer, and the lunch broke up. But Dickinson, instead of walking out of the side entrance of the Grill and into the photographer’s viewfinder, went back through the hotel to the front entrance, and got into a taxi. The only photographs taken that day were of two shamefaced reporters, Connolly and myself, flushed with claret, emerging from the Savoy Grill.

That Christmas of 1969, Dickinson went to stay with his brother Roy, near Newcastle. A description of the family gathering came to us by chance soon afterwards. It seemed that as a result of the article Hugh Dickinson had become the hero of the hour, and the talk in the house throughout Christmas was of nothing but the Erroll murder. According to our source, Dickinson told them that he knew who had done it, but had sworn total secrecy. He had not done it himself, he said, neither had Broughton, although Broughton, he said, had engineered it. He himself had been offered £25,000 for the story (sic) but there were certain things that couldn’t be done for money. To me the story echoed those Kenya rumours and the claims to unique knowledge that could never be substantiated.

But there was one other snippet from the Christmas weekend which I had thought nothing of, until I looked at the transcript again while writing this book. Dickinson had been asked by one of the guests whether his alibi—his stay in the hospital on the coast—was genuine, and he had replied by giving a large wink. In the witness box he made a slip that went unnoticed. He told Harragin that he went into hospital on January 18th or 19th, “for about a month.” But to Morris, who was questioning him about his meeting with Diana and Erroll at Malindi a week
or so before the murder, and who asked, “After that meeting when did you next see Lady Broughton and Sir Delves?” Dickinson replied, “I think the last day in January.” Was it a simple mistake? If Dickinson had taken trouble to establish a false alibi, he would not have exposed the flaw so glibly, and in court. Or would he? A slip, after all, is a slip.

19

A GOOD RACING MAN

Broughton was aware that he was taking a serious risk in returning to England. His son, Sir Evelyn, revealed to me in 1980 that his father’s affairs at home were in a chronically bad state. Broughton had hinted at this in his circular letter after the trial (“The wicked part is that it has cost me £5,000 which I have not got …”). He took pains in his letter to justify spending the money on his defence in what seemed like an appeal to the trustees in England.

It had filtered through to Evelyn, then aged twenty-four, through chance conversations and the mumbled commiserations of his father’s friends on the racecourse and in the City, that things had gone disastrously wrong with the estate. The vast wealth that Delves Broughton had inherited had dwindled to almost nothing in fifteen years.

Evelyn’s father had cheated the trust by selling around 32,500 acres of Chesire farmland at perhaps £50 an acre. He had pocketed the money—some £1.5 million—instead of channelling it through the estate.

“My father had a mania that he was hard up,” said Evelyn, “even when there was no justification for it.”

Broughton had also made consistent, almost compulsive mistakes with his investments—gambling, from the distance of Doddington, on the foreign exchange markets,
on the commodity market, and investing in “tin pot gold mines,” according to Evelyn. Betting took its toll as well (Broughton bet heavily on illegal cock-fighting) and Doddington, which had to be full every weekend, was still run on a roaring scale. Only trivial economies were attempted. The Hill Street house was closed down for a few weeks at a time; the staff was moderately cut down at Doddington.

Evelyn discovered that the trustees of the estate, some of them employees of Broughton himself, had put up no resistance to his father’s activities. So, at the age of twenty-four Evelyn asked his solicitors to challenge them, and confronted his own father. “I told him I’d heard that there was nothing left of my eventual inheritance,” he said, “and asked where the money had gone. My father lost his temper. He came round the desk and chased me from his study with a riding crop.”

Evelyn then hired his own solicitors, hoping to save what was left. “I tied him up to the extent of the estate in the first year of the war because he’d been a naughty boy. And whatever money there was in the kitty was practically bugger all. It was something like £50,000. All the money from the sale of the land was gone.

“I’d never thought of it before,” said Sir Evelyn, “but now I see why he left for Kenya and closed down Doddington.”

When Broughton arrived in Liverpool in November 1942, there was no member of his family, nor even Mrs. Woodhouse to meet him. That was perhaps not surprising in view of the difficulties of wartime travel and the secrecy surrounding shipping timetables. Instead, Broughton was greeted by two detectives from Scotland Yard, who were well informed of his movements. Cheated of his murder conviction, Poppy had sent information ahead that once more put Broughton under criminal suspicion, this time for fraud. But there was, for the moment, no hard case against him, and he was allowed to reach Doddington.

Nevertheless, the interview had a crushing effect on Broughton’s delicate mental stability, held in balance until now only by the hope of a dignified return. That disappointment explains much of his behaviour in the following three weeks. He returned to Doddington almost in secrecy. The
Chester Chronicle
reported later that “very few people were aware of his return,” and that he had stayed at the house of the butler, Mr. Martin, on a far side of the park, “where he had been seen out walking.” Doddington, meanwhile, had been turned into a wartime school.

On November 24th, Broughton telephoned Eustace Bowles, a solicitor from Market Drayton, whom he had known for thirty years. He told him that he had been thrown from a horse (no mention of the fall on the railway embankment); that his back was in plaster; that it was very uncomfortable and that he was shortly to go into hospital to have it removed. Broughton asked, “Can I come over and see you sometime?” Bowles suggested December 6th, a Sunday.

By now it must have been clear to Broughton that his family knew of the extent to which he had defrauded the estate. He told Mrs. Woodhouse that he would contact them “in good time.” He did visit Vera, who was living with her mother near Wrexham, to try to persuade her to come back to him, but she refused.

At some point soon after his arrival, Broughton had a chance meeting with an old friend, Alan Horne, a local horse breeder who had known him since the late 1920s, and in the middle of a long conversation, Broughton confessed to the murder. It was the first of two confessions he was to make in this period.

Tipped off by Quentin Crewe, we discovered that Horne was now living in retirement in Worthing, Sussex, and we met him there, in the Beach Hotel, in May and June of 1969. Slight, wiry, humorous and direct, he was immediately likeable. He was neatly dressed in tweeds, scrubbed and shining—a man obviously more at home in
the stable-yard than in retirement in a genteel town on the south coast.

Horne had brooded for so long on his conversation with Broughton, had felt the burden of it so acutely, that he had written a play about the incident in a laborious longhand, in a red exercise book like a small ledger with a hard cover. Where his conversation with Broughton had been sketchy on facts Horne had used his own imagination. Connolly described the play as “too far fetched and hopelessly wooden, but exciting.”

As a breeding consultant, Horne had often visited Doddington in the 1930s, but had given up horses in 1941. By 1942 he was a censor in the Security Branch in Liverpool.

On the day he met Broughton, Horne was travelling to see a friend in Malpas. He described what happened:

I broke my journey at a small village on the outskirts of Nantwich, Walgerton, I think, and had lunch there. I saw Sir Delves when I came out of the pub. He sat in a car belonging to a friend of his, and his friend got out to visit another friend, leaving Sir Delves in the car.

As I walked by he put his hand out of the car. He told me his friend would be back in half an hour. We started chatting, chiefly about racing matters, and eventually I touched on the trial. I said I was sorry to hear he’d been involved in all this trouble and strain and I saw it had ended all right. As I say. I was an old friend and we chatted for about an hour. He said. “I didn’t do it, you know.” I said. “I didn’t think you did. Sir Delves.” He began about the affair himself. He went from strength to strength. He needed no prompting from me. He was a distressed man. He was on perpetual edge, nervous, agitated. He used to be a happy-go-lucky fellow in the early days. He was smart, erect, handsome, military bearing, you know. But I think in his latter years, he drank quite a lot.

I remember he said, “If I tell you a few things. Horne, will you promise not to spill the beans?”

Broughton told Horne that he had planned the murder with a friend. He wouldn’t mention names and referred to the
accomplice as “Derek,” who for reasons of his own, wanted Erroll out of the way. Broughton had allowed himself to be goaded into a plan whereby he would pay for an African, hired by “Derek” for £1,000, to assassinate Erroll. He also agreed to the revolver thefts. Broughton, who had been drinking too much, then regretted the plan, tried to call it off, but was told by “Derek” that the African was now uncontactable. According to Broughton, Erroll was in fact shot one day ahead of schedule.

The African had hidden in the back of the car in the driveway at Karen, shot Erroll at the junction and disappeared. Broughton then said that when the trial was over and he was brooding about it in Ceylon, he formed the idea that “Derek” had double-crossed him, and had gone ahead with the murder in spite of Broughton’s efforts to stop it. Horne quotes Broughton as saying, “When I returned to Kenya I challenged ‘Derek.’ He flushed angrily and denied it, and there was something sheepish about his manner and reply which I didn’t like.” (It must be remembered that Horne had re-created the conversation from memory.)

We asked Horne why he thought Broughton had decided to tell him the story. He replied, “We were interested in racing and those connections create some bond which is hard to define—probably because some of them know a lot about each other, something which you don’t find in other walks of life. If you’re a good racing man, you’re a good loser—I can’t explain it.”