Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  The daily entries in Pauline’s 1953 diary were interspersed with her fiction. As early as March she was writing a piece described by some­one who read it as “bedroom scenes … highway robberies and often more than one violent death a day”. No doubt it owed something to The Highwayman, a film screening at the time, starring Philip Friend as the romantic masked bandit. Posters heralded it as “Nobleman Turned Outlaw! Adventure from the black hell of torture dungeons to the sweet aroma of scented boudoirs!”

  Pauline was creating a cast of violent characters. In April, she had Roland slapping Carmelita’s face when Carmelita turned down his marriage proposal on the grounds she was engaged to Roderick. In a fit of black rage, Roland shot Roderick. A horse called Vendetta killed Gianina on the eve of her marriage to Nicholas. On the ledge of Satan’s Hollow, Vendetta’s crashing hooves trampled Nicholas to death.

  The main inspiration for the girls’ subsequent novels—and, for a time, a large part of their imaginative world—was the 1952 MGM film The Prisoner of Zenda, which opened at the Majestic in Christchurch on April 17, 1953. The setting is the fictitious Mitteleuropean kingdom of Ruritania at the close of the nineteenth century. An Englishman, Rudolf Rassendyll, layabout brother of the Earl of Burlesdon, is the spitting image of Prince Rudolf of Ruritania. Stewart Granger plays both Rassendyll and Prince Rudolf. The two men’s striking resemblance is explained best in the book. Rassendyll’s great-grandmother, an earlier Countess of Burlesdon and a great beauty, gave birth to a child illicitly fathered by King Rudolf III of Ruritania when he was on a visit to England. Every so often the blood of the royal house of Ruritania surfaces in the Rassendyll family.

  Rudolf Rassendyll, one of its inheritors, goes to Ruritania for a spot of quiet fishing. It turns out that Prince Rudolf, soon to be crowned king, is being held captive in the castle of Zenda by Black Michael, Duke of Strelsau, who is keen to get his hands on both the throne and Princess Flavia (Deborah Kerr), the prince’s betrothed. He is abetted by his evil, handsome henchman Count Rupert of Hentzau (James Mason).

  Lurking about is a woman of mystery, Antoinette de Mauban (Jane Greer), recently arrived on the train from Paris. A year or two over thirty, tall, dark and of rather full figure, she is attached to the wicked duke Black Michael, but not as permanently as she would like.

  To thwart the treacherous plot against the prince, Rudolf Rassendyll is forced to impersonate the missing king at his coronation. Princess Flavia is astounded by how much her intended has changed for the better— the Rudolf she remembers was overfond of the bottle and lacked any sort of way with women. She falls deeply in love with the new Rudolf, as he does with her. In pursuance of his plan, Black Michael is prepared to forsake Antoinette de Mauban and marry Princess Flavia, by force if necessary. Rupert, meanwhile, has plans of his own for Antoinette…

  Rassendyll manages to free the prince from the castle of Zenda after a showdown with Rupert of Hentzau, featuring some of the finest swordplay ever seen on film. Rupert, the devil incarnate, lives to fight another day by diving into the moat as the king’s cavalry thunders across the drawbridge into the castle. Being an upright fellow and the brother of an English peer, Rassendyll restores the lovely princess to the real king with her virtue safely intact. The princess’s sense of duty obliges her to forsake Rassendyll, the man she loves, to remain in Ruritania as queen.

  Juliet had adored James Mason as the oily, treacherous valet of the British ambassador to Turkey busy selling military secrets to the Nazis in 5 Fingers, which had screened in Christchurch a few months earlier, but The Prisoner of Zenda was the beginning of her intense adulation of Mason—“the dark young god”, as the director, Michael Powell, called him—and her fascination with the ruthless cold-blooded characters that were his specialty. After seeing Mason as Field Marshal Rommel in The Desert Fox and The Desert Rats, she was captivated by Rommel and what one English journalist called “the suggestion of romantic evil” attached to the German army. She began to side with masterful villains: men not tied, like lesser beings, to petty morality and the tedious path of virtue.

  So enthralled were she and Pauline with the film version of The Prisoner of Zenda that they read Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling novel on which it was based and its sequel, Rupert of Hentzau. The girls’ imagin­ary empires, Borovnia and Volumnia, owed much to the fictional kingdom of Ruritania, but in them violence was incomparably more rife and moral standards practically non-existent. Other books firing their imaginations were Dark Duet by Peter Cheyney, Robert Graves’ I Claudius, Lord Hornblower by C.S. Forester, These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer, Cage Me a Peacock by Noel Langley, and the Scarlet Pimpernel novels of Baroness Orczy.

  Where Juliet led Pauline followed, but Pauline’s writings showed she was more than a match for her friend. As might be expected of the girl with “hatred burning bright” in her eyes, she was preoccupied with her own fantasies of blood-letting and violent revenge.

  CHAPTER 13

  Charles and Lance

  The great excitement generated by The Prisoner of Zenda sparked another round of midnight sprees, mostly in and around the grounds of Ilam. Summer was over and the nights were now cool and damp. When she was not at Ilam, Pauline was at home writing into the early hours of morning. She calculated that she slept four and three-quarter hours a night on average during the week of April 20. Juliet was living a similarly sleep-deprived existence.

  Around this time it was decided that Henry Hulme would represent Canterbury University College at the 1953 Congress of the Universities of the British Commonwealth in London. Hilda was desperate to accompany him. Neither had been back to England since they arrived in New Zealand five years earlier. They decided to combine the trip home with a short visit to the United States. They would be away for three months, leaving on May 28 and returning at the end of August.

  There was no difficulty about Jonathan, who could become a boarder at Medbury. The problem of what to do with Juliet was solved in early May when Nora Rieper contacted Hilda and offered to have Juliet stay with them. The offer was accepted gratefully. Evidently none of the parents had any great concern about the girls’ relationship at this time. Nor, it would seem, did Nora regard Juliet as an objectionable presence in her house or an unwelcome influence on her daughter.

  Within a week or so it became clear that Juliet would not be staying with the Riepers after all. The late nights capering about out­doors in early winter had proved disastrous for her health. On May 15 Pauline wrote in her diary: “Mrs Hulme told me they had found out today that Juliet has tuberculosis on one lung. Poor Guilietta! It is only now I realise how fond I am of her. I nearly fainted when I heard. I had a terrible job not to cry. It would be wonderful if I could get tuberculosis too!” The romantic appeal of the consumptive—the pallid, ethereal young girl destined to die, Violetta in La Traviata—was not lost on Pauline.

  On May 21 Juliet was admitted to Cashmere Sanatorium for treatment. The sanatorium was on Huntsbury Hill in the Port Hills, high enough to escape the fog and smoke that hung over Christ­church in winter, when low-grade coal from the West Coast was the main source of domestic heating. Although by 1953 a diagnosis of TB was no longer the death sentence it had been not many years earlier, it was still a nasty disease requiring painful treatment and a long slow recovery. The powerful antibiotic streptomycin, usually in combina­tion with para-aminosalicylic—PAS—was effective but had unpleasant side-effects such as loss of balance and hearing problems. Hospitals didn’t like the expense of it: each excruciatingly painful jab in the backside cost one pound. And PAS, which was taken orally in large doses, caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and drug rash. The inexpensive new drug isoniazid, available only since 1952, was a considerable advance.

  In light of Juliet’s serious illness and hospitalisation, Hilda and Henry decided there was only one thing to do: carry on regardless. Although they arranged for Nancy Sutherland to visit Juliet whenshe could and take care of her laundry, it was another heartless abandonmen
t at a time of need and must have awoken in Juliet bitter memories of her early childhood.

  On the eve of his departure from New Zealand, Henry Hulme was approached by a deputation of council members, who told him that while he was in the United Kingdom he should look for another job. He told them he had a fixed appointment and would do no such thing, but the rejection was a blow for the man who only a few years earlier had been touted as “really too good” for New Zealand. It has been suggested that the real purpose of Henry’s return to Britain was to be interviewed for an appointment at Cambridge, and for that reason it was necessary for Hilda to accompany him. It was not so. Hilda went because—notwithstanding her daughter’s tuberculosis—she would not deny herself the pleasure of a trip home.

  Juliet was fourteen and a half when she went into the sanatorium. She remained there for one hundred and twelve days and did not see her parents again until August 30. For long days she “lay in bed not allowed to talk, not even allowed to read … a long needle in your behind every third morning. They’d catch you while you were still asleep.”

  Hilda, quite unable to understand her daughter’s sense of aggrieve­­ment, was tetchy about how little correspondence she had received from her. “Dr Hulme and I were absent for three months and during that time I received only two letters. Both were short and appeared to have been written without much care. … When I returned to New Zealand she seemed very much more withdrawn. I noticed the friendship with Pauline was the only thing that mattered to her.”

  Juliet’s sense of abandonment by her parents had made her more and more dependent on Pauline. It was now absolutely proven that Paul Rieper was the only person in the world who loved her.

  Visitors to the sanatorium were restricted. Nancy Sutherland went once a week. Jan and Diony visited a couple of times but were made to stay outside and could only call and wave to Juliet. At Henry Hulme’s request, a psychiatrist, David Livingstone, dropped in regularly “just to see if she was all right”. Pauline came with her mother three times—a visit per month. She was there one day when three or four Girls’ High classmates came to visit Juliet, bringing her a potted cyclamen. Seeming pleased to see them, Juliet reclined in bed and chatted graciously. Pauline stationed herself behind the bedhead and glowered, willing them to leave.

  The correspondence between the two girls during Juliet’s time in the sanatorium was prolific. Pauline came up with the “brainwave” that they should write to each other as Charles and Lance. Charles was a Juliet character: Prince Charles, second son of the emperor of Borovnia. Lance was a Pauline character: Lancelot Trelawney, a soldier of fortune who had wheedled his way into the affections of the Empress of Volumnia.

  In the story Lance and the empress have a vicious daughter, Marioli, who herself becomes empress at the age of thirteen. In Borovnia, Charles stages an insurrection and deposes his elder brother to make himself Emperor Charles II. Deborah, his mistress, by whom he has fathered an exceptionally evil bastard son, Diello, becomes empress.

  A few days before Henry and Hilda Hulme set sail for England, Pauline launched the correspondence with a six-page letter in the person of Lance, and two pages from herself, signed “Paul”. Juliet responded with a letter from Charles and one from herself, and this became the usual pattern of their correspondence: Juliet wrote dispatches from Borovnia as Charles, Deborah or Diello; Pauline wrote back from Volumnia, mainly as Lance or Marioli.

  In Volumnia and Borovnia, vengeful murder, suicide, rape, seduction and betrayal were daily occurrences. Marioli, the teenage empress of Volumnia and obviously Pauline’s alter-ego, was merciless in wreaking revenge on all those who crossed her. Pauline described her as having “a violent temper and when in a tantrum has killed all the people who have incurred her wrath”. She is “very proud” and “refuses to interview anyone in the lower classes” but is loved, never­theless, by her subjects.

  Not to be outdone, Juliet’s Diello kills without compunction or conscience, with insouciance reminiscent of Rupert of Hentzau. “Barton … silly bounder … tried to shoot me, and I have a terrible temper when roused and I am afraid I broke his back and put him in the mere … (stupid blighter). And Linker … poor fellow … you know I really quite liked him … indiscriminate in his choice of friends and is now … alack! … in the mere with Barton.” The face and caramel voice of Juliet’s evil persona was that of James Mason.

  On May 29 a girl sharing a table with Pauline in a milkbar compli­mented her on how beautifully she spoke English: she “almost had an Oxford accent”. Pauline delightedly recorded the remark in her diary: she had clearly succeeded in imitating the way Juliet and Hilda spoke. That same day a young New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, anda Nepalese Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, became the first people to stand on top of Mount Everest. The news reached the world on June 2, the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, and caused tremendous excitement in New Zealand, Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. It was seen as a brilliant portent of a happy and glorious reign to come.

  The royal coronation was a source of inexhaustible fascination in New Zealand. Every schoolchild in the country was given a fold-out panorama of the coronation procession. Countless children and adults acquired models of the gilded coach, drawn by eight greys in gold and crimson harness and escorted by Yeomen of the Guard on foot, with the Household Cavalry riding fore and aft. Almost every man, woman and child had a commemorative coronation mug, thousands of which sit in china cabinets to this day.

  For weeks it was impossible to open a newspaper or magazine without receiving riveting new snippets of information, such as the names of the aristocratic ingénues chosen as maids-of-honour to the queen. Many New Zealanders went by ship to England especially for the event. Those who were not so fortunate sat close to their wirelesses listening to every unctuous word of Richard Dimbleby’s commentary.

  On June 12 the pupils of Christchurch Girls’ High were marched in formation to see the documentary A Queen is Crowned. “I thought the picture was rather boring as a picture,” Pauline felt bound to record. But she was impressed by the pageantry, ritual, rigmarole and regalia, which far outshone even the MGM studio’s enactment of the coronation of King Rudolf of Ruritania in The Prisoner of Zenda.

  Pauline’s detailed report would help Juliet create the forthcoming coronation of Emperor Charles II of Borovnia, and there was much to pass on: the girding with the sword; the clothing with the royal robe; the presentation of the orb with the cross, the ring and the sceptres of Justice and Mercy. Then came the anointing: holy oil was poured from the ampulla into the anointing spoon, from which the Archbishop of Canterbury lubricated two fingers before touching the new sovereign on her head, her breast, and the palms of both her hands while intoning, “And as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be you anointed, blessed and consecrated queen over the peoples, whom the lord your god hath given you to rule and govern.”

  The queen’s heels were touched by the Lord Great Chamberlain with St George’s golden spurs, the symbol of knightly chivalry. Saint Edward’s crown was taken from the high altar and the archbishop held it aloft for a moment before lowering it on to the queen’s head. At that instant the peers and peeresses in their ermine robes put on their coronets, the trumpets sounded, and the guns at the Tower of London boomed. It was wonderfully inspiring stuff.

  An alarming passage appeared in the Borovnia-Volumnia cor­res­pondence. “I don’t kill people,” a female character said. “I thought you might like to know since you asked me some time ago. My father hasn’t killed anyone for quite a while. I would like to kill someone some time because I think it is an experience that is necessary to life… .”

  Pauline Rieper was certainly avid to gain experience of life, but right then it was sexual experience she was looking for. In 1950 Commonwealth foreign ministers, meeting in Ceylon, had set up a new aid programme “designed to achieve security [through] eco­nomic assistance to and friendship with under­dev
eloped countries whose enmity would be dangerous should low living standards foster the growth of communism within them”. New Zealand embraced the Colombo Scheme enthusiastically. By 1953 there were a dozen male students from Ceylon at Canterbury University College. When Pauline and Juliet met some of them at a reception given by Henry Hulme at Ilam, they were fascinated by the young men’s exoticism and became friendly with three of them, Nada, Muthu andJaya. Pauline eyed Jaya’s lithe mahogany body with interest. OnJune 26, and again a week later, she visited his room at night. They talked about sex and she hopped into bed with him, but nothing happened.

  Unlawful carnal knowledge—the law’s majestic phrase—of a girl under the age of sixteen was a criminal offence, commonly drawing a prison sentence of six months or a year, although this was usually suspended if it were a first offence and the age difference between the parties not great. The crime was committed only by the male, the law’s premise being that girls younger than sixteen needed protection from predatory men. Pauline was just over fifteen. Jaya seems sensibly to have decided to steer clear of such jail bait.