Sweet Fanny Digby
(Gollanz, 1963) which contained evidence that Fanny Digby, who had a history of depression, had been seen to soak fly paper in an enamel bowl the day before she and her family were found dead. There is the case of the diplomat, Peter Fenton, who walked out of his house in July 1988, after his wife Verity committed suicide. Again, Hyde describes the background to these events in detail, referring to the Driberg Syndicate and Fenton's access to NATO secrets, but he makes no mention of Anne Cattrell's
Sunday Times
feature
The Truth About Verity Fenton
(17th June, 1990) which revealed the appalling brutality suffered by Verity at the hands of Geoffrey Standish, her first husband, before his convenient death in a hit-and-run accident in 1971. If, as Anne Cattrell claims, this was no accident, and if Verity did indeed meet Fenton six years earlier than either of them ever admitted, then the solution to her suicide and his disappearance lies in Geoffrey Standish's coffin and not in Nathan Driberg's prison cell...
Out of interest, Barry searched the microfiche files for the Sunday Times of 17th June, 1990. He held his breath as Anne Cattrell's feature appeared with a full-face photograph of Peter Fenton, OBE.
He was as sure as he could be that he was looking at Billy Blake.
THE TRUTH ABOUT VERITY FENTON
There have been few more effective smoke screens than that thrown up by Peter Fenton when he vanished from his house on July 3rd, 1988, leaving his wife's dead body on the marital bed. It began as a sensational Lucan-style murder hunt until Verity Fenton was found to have committed suicide. There followed a rampage through Peter's history, looking for mistresses and/or treachery when it was discovered that he had access to NATO secrets. Interest centered on his sudden trip to Washington, and easy links were drawn with the anonymous members of the Driberg syndicate.
And where did Verity Fenton's suicide feature in all this? Barely at all is the answer because minds were focused on Peter's inexplicable disappearance and not on the reasons why a "neurotic" woman should want to kill herself. The coroner's verdict was "suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed" relying largely on her daughter's evidence that she had been "unnaturally depressed" while Peter was in Washington. Yet no real explanation for her depression was sought as the assumption seems to have been that Peter's disappearance meant that her reference in her suicide note to his betrayals was true, and these were shocking enough to drive a woman to suicide.
Two years on from these bizarre events of July 1988, it is worth reassessing what is known about Peter and Verity Fenton. Perhaps the first thing to strike anyone researching this story is the complete lack of evidence to show that Peter Fenton was a traitor. He certainly had access to confidential NATO information during '85-'87, but sources within the organization admit that three different investigations have failed to trace any leakage of information to him or to his desk.
By contrast, there is a wealth of evidence about his "sudden" trip to Washington at the end of June which was painted as a fishing expedition to find out if Driberg was about to name his associates. The details of the trip were made available at the time by his immediate superior at the Foreign Office but they were ignored in the scramble to prove Fenton a traitor. The facts are that he was briefed on June 6th to attend high-level discussions in Washington from June 29th to July 2nd. It is difficult now to understand how three weeks' notification came to be interpreted as "sudden" or why, if he were part of the Driberg syndicate, he should have waited until eight weeks after Driberg's arrest to go "fishing."
The Fenton tragedy takes on a very different perspective if suggestions that Peter was a traitor are dismissed. The question that must then be asked is: What were the betrayals Verity talked about in her suicide note? She wrote: "Forgive me. I can't bear it anymore, darling. Please don't blame yourself. Your betrayals are nothing compared with mine.
But why have Verity's own betrayals been so consistently underexamined? The simple answer is that, as the wife of a diplomat, she was always less interesting than her husband. What or who could a "neurotic" woman possibly have betrayed that could compete with treachery in the Foreign Office? Yet it was imperative, even in '88, that her betrayals be examined because she claimed they were worse than her husband's, and he was branded a spy.
Born Verity Parnell in London on September 28th, 1937, she was brought up alone by her mother after her father. Colonel Parnell, died in 1940 during the evacuation from Dunkirk. She and her mother are believed to have spent the war years in Suffolk but returned to London in 1945. Verity was enrolled at a preparatory school before transferring to the Mary Bartholomew School for Girls in Barnes in May 1950. Although considered bright enough to go on to university, she chose instead to marry Geoffrey Standish, a handsome, thirty-two-year-old stockbroker who was fourteen years her senior, in August 1955. The marriage caused an estrangement between herself and her mother, and it is not clear whether she saw Mrs. Parnell again before the woman's death some time in the late '50s. Verity gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn, in 1960 and a son, Anthony, in 1966.
The marriage was a disaster. Geoffrey was described, even by close friends, as "unpredictable." He was a gambler, a womanizer and a drunk, and it soon became clear to those who knew him that he was taking out his frustrations on his young wife. There was a history of "accidents," days of indisposition, a reluctance to do anything that might upset Geoffrey, an obsessive protectiveness towards her children. It is not surprising then that, according to one of her neighbors, Verity described her husband's death in March 1971 as a "blessed relief."
Like so much in this story, the details surrounding Geoffrey's death are obscure. The only verifiable facts are these: he had arranged to spend the weekend alone with friends in Huntingdon; he phoned them at 5:00 p.m. on the Friday night to say he wouldn't be with them until the following day; at 6:30 a.m. on the Saturday, a police patrol recorded his car abandoned with an empty gas tank beside the All near Newmarket; at 10:30 a.m. his bruised and battered body was found sprawled in a ditch some two miles up the road; his injuries were consistent with having been run over by a car.
On the face of it, it was a straightforward case of hit-and-run while Geoffrey was walking through the dark in search of gas, but because of the last-minute alterations in his plans, the police attempted to establish why he was in the vicinity of Newmarket. They had no success with that line of inquiry but, in the course of their investigation, they unearthed the unpalatable details of the man's character and lifestyle. Although they were never able to prove it, it is clear from the reports that the Cambridgeshire police believed he was murdered. Verity herself had a cast-iron alibi. She was admitted to St. Thomas's Hospital on the Wednesday before Geoffrey's death with a broken collarbone, fractured ribs, and a perforated lung, and was not discharged until the Sunday. Her children were being cared for by a neighbor, so there is some doubt about Geoffrey's whereabouts on the Friday. Certainly he did not go to work that day, and this led to police speculation that someone, whose sympathies lay with Verity, removed him from his house during the Thursday night and cold-bloodedly planned his murder over the Friday.
Unfortunately, from the police point of view, no such sympathizer could be traced, and the file was closed due to lack of evidence. The coroner recorded a verdict of "manslaughter by person or persons unknown," and Geoffrey Standish's premature death remains unpunished to this day.