Word: foxes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox Random House; 299 pages...
Connolly's original partner in detection and the heir to his notebooks was James Fox, a British journalist who went on to reconstruct the crime and, after trips to Kenya and interviews with Lord Erroll's friends, produce a plausible murderer. His gift for narrative immediately carries the reader into a long-gone, closed world of privilege and debauchery. White Mischiefs authentic cast of characters is as satisfyingly repellent a crew as ever peopled Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novel of English predators on the loose in Africa...
...servants whom they regarded as subhuman, the nobs did as they pleased. Lord Erroll's specialty was seducing married women. "To hell with husbands," was a favorite saying. "And to cuckold a man carelessly, while slapping him on the back or borrowing a fiver, added to his pleasure," Fox notes. Lord Erroll's first wife, Lady Idina, Countess of Erroll, was less selective. Her bed was known as "the battleground." Recalled one of her many house guests: "We all used to end up in it at various times of the day and night." Cocaine in Kenya was sniffed...
...Broughton was acquitted of the murder, he received a cable from the Earl of Carnarvon and Montgomery (HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING A NECK CLEVERLY), and was invited to recuperate from the trial at the palace of the Maharajah of Jhopur. Still, the smell persisted. Thirty years after the crime, Fox persuaded three people to talk about the murder confessions Broughton had made to them before he took a fatal dose of morphine in 1942, 17 months after his acquittal...
...most revealing anecdote in this enthralling tale comes from Diana, now Lady Delamere. When Fox caught up with the 68-year-old millionaire in 1981, he was impressed by her still handsome figure, her "ice-blue eyes," and her sapphires and diamonds. She told Fox about another crime, perhaps a worse one in the eyes of the denizens of Happy Valley. After the murder, Broughton had gone to Lord Erroll's estate and killed one of his dogs, a dachshund. As Lady Delamere saw it, there could no longer be any doubt that Broughton was "the most evil...