White mischief

Shortly before three in the morning on 24 January 1941, while London was enduring the Blitz, police found Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, slumped in his Buick at a crossroads a few miles from Nairobi. He had been shot in the head. Erroll was a prominent member of Kenya's European settler society and had lately been named Military Secretary, yet his reputation rested on affairs with other men's wives. The husband of his latest lover, Sir Henry Delves Broughton, had an obvious reason to want him dead, but no one was ever brought to trial. The unanswered question made the killing a lasting mystery and a sensation.

Cyril Connolly became one of the many people gripped by the case. In 1969 he teamed up with James Fox to investigate it for the Sunday Times magazine. When Connolly died, Fox took over the pursuit, returning to the case in the late 1970s and working in both England and Kenya. Eventually, on a veranda above the Indian Ocean, he found a piece of evidence that appeared to tie the scattered facts together and gave him what he believed was the whole story.