Letter from Lake Naivasha: The Bell Inn holds a mythical place in Happy Valley history. Standing opposite the railway station in the bustling market town of Naivasha, it was once the place for visitors from Nairobi to take a stiff gin and tonic as they waited for a horse-drawn carriage to whisk them to a lakeside estate for a weekend of parties and shooting. Today it is known as Labelle Inn and the white faces disappear at dusk.
"This is not happy valley - it is a valley of fear," said one resident, sipping a gin and tonic on the veranda. "We live in fear for our lives."
She has given blood twice in the past six months for friends who have been shot. Naivasha is now a town where residents keep a database of blood groups.
A spate of murders targeting white farmers and an escalating number of carjackings - 14 in one recent 14-day period - mean people retreat behind steel doors at home once the sun goes down.
That fear was highlighted last week when Tom Cholmondeley, sole heir to the fifth Lord Delamere, was arrested on suspicion of murder. His family farms a vast tract of land along the banks of Lake Naivasha.
According to the local police chief, Cholmondeley shot dead an undercover wildlife ranger who was investigating complaints that workers on his Soysambu Farm were poaching wild animals. No one yet knows exactly what happened in the confusion as two armed wardens attempted to arrest 16 farm workers.
But speak to anyone in the old colonial town of Naivasha - about 55 miles from Nairobi - and they will tell you it was a tragedy waiting to happen.
"When I heard what happened to Tom, I immediately thought there must be more to this than meets the eye," said one friend of the family, who asked to remain anonymous.
"The only conclusion to draw from seeing unidentified people brandishing weapons on your land is that they are robbers." The fear stems from a series of attacks by gangs who shoot first and demand money later. Everybody knows someone who has been robbed at gunpoint, carjacked or worse.
Last August, Martin Palmer, a British farm manager, was shot dead on the ranch where he worked. And last month a five-man gang ambushed a Dutch farmer as he returned from the bank. Lloyd Schraven was shot nine times and died before reaching hospital.
Now razor wire and electric fences are going up around this part of the Rift Valley in stark contrast to the freedom that brought settlers here.
The shores of Lake Naivasha have been a playground for wealthy Kenyan families ever since the third Lord Delamere arrived from Britain at the end of the 19th century, buying thousands of acres from the colonial administration.
He encouraged other European settlers to farm the fertile lands around the lake and the legend of Happy Valley was born as residents and visitors indulged themselves in an orgy of hedonism.
The lifestyle was splashed across newspapers during the "White Mischief" trial of Sir Jock Delves Broughton in 1941. He was eventually cleared of murdering the 22nd Earl of Erroll, a central Happy Valley character, but tales of gin-soaked parties and erotic games transfixed newspaper readers around the old British empire.
Although the champagne and bed hopping are long gone, Lake Naivasha is still a water sports playground for visitors from Nairobi. Luxury camps at the water's edge charge up to $1,000 a night. The region is also home to vast flower farms. Many of the farms are owned by Europeans or white Kenyans and the aristocrats - such as Lord Delamere and Andrew Enniskillen - remain.
At the same time, a wave of Kenyan workers has flooded the area, increasing the population from about 30,000 to 350,000 in little more than a decade. Hundreds of migrant workers queue outside the farms each morning looking for work.
Simon Kiragu, the police officer in charge of Naivasha, insists his 90 officers are not swamped. "Crime is not escalating very much," he says, "but the perception of crime is getting out of all proportion." Few of the farmers around the lake or the hotel owners in the town agree. They have formed a security group, which will pay for a private firm to add manpower to the police presence - part of a rapid response unit in a region where the police can take hours to arrive, if they arrive at all.
Meanwhile, sympathy for Cholmondeley cuts across most of Naivasha's population. Only the local Masai community, who accuse the Delameres and other white settlers of seizing their tribal lands, have celebrated his arrest.
"Some people seem to think it is good that Mr Tom is in jail," says Joseph Kinuthia, a taxi driver, "but he was only protecting his workers."