by Peter Graham
Some time after eight o’clock, Senior Detective Brown and Detective Sergeant Tate arrived at the imposing Ilam home of the rector of Canterbury University College. They pressed the bell with a sense of unease. Behind these daunting doors was a world unknown to policemen. The two CIB men had hardly needed Inspector McKenzie’s anxious enjoinder to go easy in their dealings with Dr and Mrs Hulme. These people weren’t just anybody.
CHAPTER 3
The Investigation
On June 22, 1954, sunset was officially at 4.59 p.m: the shortest day of the year was followed by the longest night. It would be a very long night at 87 Ilam Road.
After Henry Hulme phoned their family friend Nancy Sutherland to say Juliet wouldn’t be able to attend the Léon Goossens recital, he did something odd: he telephoned Harold Norris, vicar of Saint Peter’s Anglican Church in Upper Riccarton. Although Henry and Hilda were parishioners, they were hardly regular churchgoers. Norris was more a social acquaintance, a sympathetic ear who could be relied upon to keep confidences entrusted to him. It was obvious Henry was upset about something: the vicar readily agreed to come and see him. After he arrived, the two talked for some time, closeted together where they could not be overheard.
Later, people would wonder why Henry Hulme had not instead talked to his friend Terence Gresson, a prominent Christchurch barrister and solicitor whom he had known since Cambridge days. What could Harold Norris offer but words of comfort: Be of good heart … trust in the Lord? Gresson, on the other hand, was a lawyer experienced in criminal cases. He could have given the practical advice the Hulmes needed there and then. What should they do if—when—the police came and wanted to interview Julie? Should she make a statement? Was it best to cooperate? Or was it in her interest to say nothing, claim the right of silence?
Henry and Hilda knew little about what had happened up at Victoria Park. The girls hadn’t said much, other than that Mrs Rieper had fallen and hit her head on some rocks. Perhaps they were leaping to conclusions—perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps Mrs Rieper wasn’t too badly hurt. They were clutching at straws, trying not to think the very worst.
It is possible, of course, that Henry Hulme did try to contact Terence Gresson but was unable to reach him—possible but not particularly likely. He, Hilda and Bill Perry probably thought it would be jumping the gun to get a lawyer involved at that stage. Standingon their rights might look bad to the police. If the situation turned out to be not as serious as they thought, the fact Henry had suspected his daughter of being involved in a bloody murder would be an embarrassment. It would overhang his friendship with Gresson for ever.
With the two girls in bed, in their nightwear, bathed, fed, lightly sedated, with soothing music on the wireless, Hilda, Henry and Bill waited downstairs in the drawing room to hear from the police. They were bound to come. Perhaps they would leave it until the morning? Probably not.
At seven-thirty the telephone rang. Henry answered. The police! They had been examining the scene of Mrs Rieper’s death. She was dead. A full investigation—the emphasis was unmistakable—would follow.
Deciding there was something she had to attend to, Hilda went upstairs to Juliet’s untidy bedroom and gathered up her scribblings: the two novels she had written in a pile of school exercise books, her poems, her scrapbooks, her letters from Pauline … her diary. She knew Juliet kept a diary and with a rush of panic worried about what it might contain. The last few entries gave her a heart stab. Flipping the pages, it was immediately clear the diary was terribly embarrassing and dreadfully incriminating. On no account could it be seen by the police. She tucked it away in a safe place, to be destroyed in the morning. The rest of Juliet’s writings, papers, and bits and pieces she stuffed into a suit box, to be handed to the police if they should ask to see such things.
A second phone call alerted the household that CIB officers would be arriving shortly to interview the girls. Perry proposed that in whatever time was available they should find out more about what had happened at Victoria Park, and, if they could, prime the girls a bit before the police questioned them. While Hilda talked to Juliet, Perry spoke with Pauline, who had been moved to the bed in the verandah room. He gently apologised for having to discuss the accident with her. As the police were grown-ups and she was a child, it would be best if she told him all about the accident so he could speak to them on her behalf. He trod delicately, not mentioning that her mother was dead; he thought she probably knew that already.
Pauline was very distressed. He had to pause at intervals to comfort her and allow her to recover her composure. Her mother, she said, had tripped on a piece of wood, and in falling had banged her head repeatedly on a stone. She demonstrated this with vigorous movements of her head.
“What sort of stone was it?” Perry asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I think it was a brick, or half a brick.”
“Was she having a fit?”
“It might be. I don’t know. She kept hitting herself.”
At that she became very distressed again. Perry asked if her mother had fallen down a steep ravine.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t very steep but very slippery. … We tried to pick her up but she was too heavy and we dropped her.”
She was worried they might have hurt her when they dropped her. That was when they ran up to the tea kiosk to get help. Perry asked whether her mother was alive when they left her. She didn’t know. Her mother was making gurgling noises. She had felt for a heartbeat but couldn’t feel anything.
Unconvinced by much of what he heard, Bill Perry tried another tack. “We must make quite sure we’ve got everything right. Policemen have all sorts of ways of looking at these things, and if a quarrel was the cause of the accident you must tell me about it. For instance, if your mother had been quarrelling with you and tried to hit you—”
“Oh no. My mother never struck me.”
Bill Perry went downstairs to rejoin Henry and Hilda in the drawing room. They both begged him to stay and help them deal with the police.
*
As Senior Detective Macdonald Brown and his detective sergeant stood beneath the colonnaded carriage porch waiting for the doors of Ilam to be opened to them, they held little hope of making any progress with their investigation that evening. Most likely Dr andMrs Hulme would tell them the two girls could not be interviewed until they had obtained legal advice. That would be understandable. Considering the girls’ ages, there could be no argument. They were not out to take any unfair advantage of the Hulmes or their daughter—or the other girl. They just wanted to get on with the job as quicklyas they could. Tate, in particular, had a reputation among defence lawyers as being straight as a die, incapable of pulling a fast one. Big and fair-haired, he was a good-humoured bloke who played rugby for Christchurch Police. Brown was a tall well-built Scotsman, a high-flyer. He was a Brethren but no wowser: he enjoyed a whisky off duty.
The way it went, the Hulmes couldn’t have been more pleasant.
Dr Hulme was distinguished-looking, professorial. Mrs Hulme was attractive, immaculately groomed, stylish in her way. A lady. Both were welcoming and courteous. Although Hilda Hulme could be—as Terence Gresson’s wife Eleanor would say—“cold as the Arctic circle”, that evening her inner turmoil was well concealed. Both she and Henry were urbane enough to know how to be charming when charm was called for. The detectives were promised their fullest cooperation. And the Canadian, Bill Perry, was a likeable man’s man: burly, handsome in a worldly Clark Gable sort of way, a natural diplomat.
Brown took Perry to one side and described the horrific injuries suffered by Mrs Rieper. Pauline’s story about slipping or tripping and banging her head on a brick or half-brick that happened to be lying on the ground couldn’t possibly be true. Perry provided the information that he had taken the girls’ coats to Hick’s Drapers for drycleaning. They could pick them up in the morning.
Henry Hulme opened the batting by quietly announcing that his
daughter Juliet had not been there—not actually there—when Mrs Rieper fell. She hadn’t seen what happened. She had been walking well ahead of Pauline and her mother, and when someone called out she went back to look for them. She found Mrs Rieper on the ground, unconscious, blood everywhere.
Brown decided they should interview Pauline first. Hilda took the two policemen up to the verandah room. Pauline was tucked snugly in bed but, as Archie Tate observed, awake and attentive. Hilda remained as Pauline recounted how she and Juliet and her mother had taken the bus to the Sign of the Takahe and then walked up to Victoria Park, where they had afternoon tea in the kiosk. Afterwards, she said, they walked down a path almost to the bottom of the hill before turning back. On the way back Juliet was leading, about six feet ahead of her. Her mother, at the rear, was immediately behind her.
As they were walking, Pauline continued, her mother slipped or stumbled, twisted sideways and fell, hitting her head on rocks or stones. Her head seemed to toss up and down convulsively, hitting stones
or rocks or something. Pauline saw half a brick there. She and Juliet tried to restrain her mother but couldn’t. They tried to lift her up but they dropped her. They ran back to the tea kiosk to tell someone she was dead.
“How did you know she was dead?” Archie Tate asked.
“The blood! The blood! There was a lot of it!” Pauline replied with feeling.
Brown asked if she had seen a stocking at the scene. She looked taken aback. “We didn’t take Mother’s stockings off. I didn’t have stockings on, I was wearing sockettes.” She thought a little. “I had a stocking with me. I usually carry an old one in my bag. I used an old one to wipe up the blood.”
Brown called Bill Perry into the room and Pauline repeated her account. It was not what he and Hilda were expecting or wanted to hear: the girl’s story placed Juliet right on the spot at the moment of Mrs Rieper’s death.
Bill, Hilda and the two policemen now trooped down to the drawing room, where the fire was well stoked. Hilda fetched Juliet to be questioned. All four listened intently as Juliet described the expedition to Victoria Park, and how, coming up the path, Pauline’s mother had slipped.
To their despair her story was practically identical to Pauline’s. Brown, reluctant to believe Juliet had been involved in the attack on Mrs Rieper, questioned whether she was telling the truth. They had reason to believe she was not present when the tragedy occurred, he told her. At this Juliet hesitated. Perry quickly intervened to ask if he might speak to her on her own. The detectives obligingly left the room. So did Henry and Hilda.
The police suspected it was murder, Perry told Juliet. From what he knew of Mrs Rieper’s injuries it could not possibly have been an accident. Juliet, grasping at that moment the seriousness of her situation, grabbed the lifeline being thrown to her. She would, she said, tell the truth as she had told it to her mother earlier.
Perry called Brown and Tate back into the room. Juliet wished to make a statement. This time it would be the truth. Archie Tate began to take it down on his portable typewriter.
She had, Juliet said, been to Victoria Park only once before, five years earlier. She had never been there before with Gina. After Mrs Rieper had tea and they had soft drinks and cakes and scones, they walked down a track through a plantation on the side of a hill.
She thought it had been decided before they left the Riepers’ house to go down that track but it was not her idea. They went quite a long way down the track, the three of them walking together. She found a small pink stone on the ground. She still had it. Before they reached the bottom Mrs Rieper decided she had walked far enough. Gina and she went on a bit further, then decided to turn back and rejoin Mrs Rieper. She herself was in front nearly all the way. At some point she left the other two and went on ahead to the place where she had found the pink stone, thinking she might also find the ring it had come from. She spent some minutes looking for a ring. While she was looking she heard someone call out back down the track—Gina or her mother, she couldn’t be sure. She shouted back that she was coming—something like that—but didn’t go back immediately. After an interval she turned back to look for Gina and Mrs Rieper. She had no idea how far back she walked until she came upon Mrs Rieper lying there. There was blood all round her head and Gina was hysterical. Mrs Rieper seemed to be unconscious. She cradled Mrs Rieper’s head in her lap. Gina said her mother had slipped and banged her head against a stone. She believed it at the time. She didn’t remember seeing a stocking with a knot in it, nor did she notice a brick.
When they rushed back to the tea kiosk, she went on, they said they had been together when Mrs Rieper got her injuries but it wasn’t true. She only said it because she thought Gina and her mother might have quarrelled. She thought it would be better for Gina if she said she was there and supported her story that Mrs Rieper had been injured as the result of an accident. They didn’t have any quarrel in her presence. She only said she was there when it happened because she wanted to be loyal to Gina, didn’t want to see her in any trouble.
The two detectives were convinced they were now hearing the truth. Obviously Juliet Hulme had played no part in the crime. They felt only sympathy for this lovely girl whose eyes filled with tears as she recounted in her beautiful English diction the gruesome events of the afternoon. It was understandable—forgivable—that out of misplaced loyalty to her friend she had at first spun the yarn that she was there when Mrs Rieper was injured. Young Pauline was definitely a queer one, but Juliet was obviously a decent type of girl whose upbringing had been very sheltered. It was impossible to believe that a girl brought up here, by parents like these, in this house, would have willingly taken any part in the brutal murder of a defenceless woman.
While Tate was hammering on his typewriter taking down Juliet’s statement, Brown, escorted by Hilda, went back upstairs to confront Pauline. They had reason to believe Juliet was not there when her mother was attacked, he told her. At this she looked surprised. Brown cautioned her: “You are suspected of having murdered your mother. You need not say anything. Anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.”
Pauline quickly realised Juliet had told the police she wasn’t there when her mother was killed. She knew nothing more than that, but if she could support Deborah she would—and Mrs Hulme. Mrs Hulme called her her foster daughter, said how wonderful it would be when we—including her, Gina—were all back in England. She always called her Gina. And dear Dr Hulme was the dearest man she had ever met. She was one of the family. They would be grateful to her if Deborah could be kept out of it.
“You ask me questions,” she had the wit to say when Brown asked if she would like to tell him what happened: it would give her a better chance to tailor her account to whatever it was Juliet had told them. In answer to Brown’s questions she admitted she had assaulted her mother using a half-brick in a stocking. She was carrying both the half-brick and the stocking in her shoulder bag when she went to Victoria Park.
Brown asked her why she had killed her mother.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t answer that,” she coolly responded.
“What did she say when you struck her?”
“I should rather not answer that question.”
“How often did you hit her?”
“I don’t know. A great many times I should imagine.”
Bloody little madam! I don’t know. A great many times I should imagine. It was staggering. She was a different person from the distraught child he and Tate had found on their arrival. Once she had abandoned the lie that her mother’s death had been an accident, there was no need for her to pretend she was in shock and grief-stricken. But she was still steadfastly insistent that Deborah knew nothing about it, that she was somewhere else and did not see her attack her mother.
Brown helpfully rendered this into police verbiage. “I wish to state that Juliet did not know of my intentions and did not see me strike my mother. I took the chance to strike my mother when Juliet
was away.”
A handwritten record of the interview was read back to Pauline, and the second she signed it as correct she was arrested for murder.
If Hilda Hulme was not brimming with joy, she was profoundly relieved. Juliet had been rescued from a very nasty situation indeed. Bill had been wonderful. Even her ridiculous husband hadn’t cocked things up too badly. She was fairly sure Pauline wouldn’t let them down. She was a strange little thing but she loved them and would want to protect Julie come hell or high water. Anyhow, she could hardly back-pedal on the statement she had just signed.
Hilda found Pauline something to wear and the girl was escorted downstairs. At the foot of the staircase it occurred to Brown to ask
her where she had got the half-brick. Hilda jumped in. “She didn’t get it here.”
“No,” Pauline said, taking her cue, “I took it from my own home.”
Brown asked where she had left the bag in which she carried the brick, and there it was, hanging on the banisters at the foot of the stairs. The police took it away with them. It contained only a purse with one pound seven shillings and three and a half-pence, and a small handkerchief.
As Pauline was driven in the back of the patrol car to Central Police Station, Juliet was frantic. Gina would be alone in a dark dungeon living on bread and water. She would have to face being done for murder alone. Juliet paced about the house excitedly, reciting much-loved poems to herself, as a Buddhist chants a mantra to block negative thoughts:
“We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: