Prologue

      On 24 January 1941 Captain the Hon. Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, was shot in the head. His body was discovered in a hired Buick at a crossroads on the Ngong – Nairobi road, a few miles from Nairobi. The murderer has never been found. The prime suspect was Sir Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet, whose wife Diana was having an affair with Erroll at the time. Broughton was tried for the murder, but acquitted. There the matter rested – though not exactly in peace. The shooting of Lord Erroll set off a volley of speculation that resonates to this day.

      In the early 1980s James Fox’s White Mischief was published. An intriguing search for the culprit, it had all the ingredients of a classic detective story, enlivened by a cast of glamorous characters determined to be the sources of their own ruin, whether by excesses of drink, drugs or sex or general fecklessness. The main players in White Mischief were all members of Nairobi’s notorious Muthaiga Club – so snobbish that even Kenya’s governors were vetted for membership. Posterity found it convenient to regard Muthaiga almost as a stage upon which these colourful characters paraded their vices in all their glorious decadence. Broughton, the jealous old cuckold robbed of his luscious young bride, wreaked murderous revenge upon his rival. The implication was that he escaped justice thanks to his privileged position in a society that closed ranks and protected its own. Fox drew a dazzling portrait of this clique of 1930s settlers of the Wanjohi Valley – known as Happy Valley – in the Aberdare mountain range about a hundred miles north of Nairobi. His version of events was an indictment of this exclusive society, a perfect story for a post-colonial age when there was no room for sympathy for any European settlers – past or present – on the African continent. During the final years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the prevailing impression was that white settlers in Africa were simply no good.

      White Mischief was rapturously received in Britain and the States. The Wanjohi Valley settlers were not best pleased with the light in which the book portrayed their forebears, however. Its publication caused a furore there – some members of this community begged the Kenya-raised writer Elspeth Huxley to go into print to defend their reputations.¹ The pioneers’ lives had contained almost intolerable hardships and, for the majority of settlers, the struggle to survive the African climate and make a living continued into the generation that included Lord Erroll. Yet they all seemed to have been condemned by White Mischief for the sins of a few. Whenever the book came up in conversation among Wanjohi Valley’s European inhabitants, hackles were raised.

      The 1988 film version of White Mischief – with Charles Dance, Greta Scacchi and Joss Ackland playing out the ill-fated love-triangle