The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  I got a friend of mine, we hired a van, and we stuffed all my goodies into this van and we drove up in the November, in the snow. We got here in the snow. And I had two cats in the back, and a deaf and blind poodle lying on the seat underneath, doped up to the eyeballs because it was a long journey and I didn’t know if it was going to make it. And we drove all the way to Scotland.63

  After Meg had gone, she and Anne were in regular telephone contact, but life was not the same, and Anne was haunted by the memory of vistas of northern seas and Scottish Highlands. Meg had her first snowy Christmas in Scotland, while Anne worked through a wetter festive season in Suffolk.

  II

  Henry Hulme was one of the people absent from Anne’s Christmas table. He had married again in 1955 — ‘My wife is about my age with two children (boy 17, girl 12) and has similar interests to me and has been through very difficult times herself’64 — but new wife Margery did not approve of Anne or want her to be a part of their lives. As a result, Henry and Anne were forced to meet in secret, visiting museums and art galleries away from the Hulmes’ house. The only other thing Henry could give Anne was money, and he was as generous as possible to the daughter who began life as Juliet Marion Hulme.

  Born on 28 October 1938, in Blackheath, London, Juliet was less than a year old when the Second World War started. During the Blitz, the repeated rap of ack-ack guns, the whining sound of planes, and especially the explosions, woke her up screaming at night and gave her terrible nightmares. Hilda spent many anxious hours alone with her little daughter in air-raid shelters while Henry worked. There were just two brief evacuations from London.

  They might have moved to the country for the duration of the war, but for Henry’s job. From 1936 to 1938 he had been Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich; during wartime he was an essential part of Admiralty research, becoming Director of Naval Operational Research in 1945. At the end of the war ‘he was one of those detailed to go over and debrief Admiral Dönitz after the surrender’.65 As it did for many men, the war took him away from his family. Although Juliet had often been ill as a baby, Henry had happy memories of her early years. When she was a toddler she worked with him in the garden of their two-storey semi-detached brick house at 79 Foyle Road in Greenwich. He remembered showing her the weeds to pull out, and although the resulting extractions were not always correct she thought she was ‘the cat’s pajamas!’ When he relaxed at night in his armchair she would sit in his lap, or on the chair-back with her legs draped around his shoulders.

  His golden rule was never to talk down to children, and as a father who was an astronomer and a mathematician his pleasure was to share with her his sense of wonder at the mystery of the universe. ‘The sun is a star like any other star, and it is about nine minutes away at the speed of light,’ he told her. When she was three years old he explained ‘that Nazis and Germans were not necessarily the same thing’.66 While Britain was engaged in an horrific war that made people more xenophobic and anti-Germany by the day, he wanted his daughter to have an open mind and a sense of the liberal, intellectual Germans he had studied with in Leipzig.

  At the same time, however, Juliet witnessed the tragic consequences of German militarism at home:

  We had German Jewish refugees in the house whom my parents took in, and I can remember one — her name was Van Der Homberg — and she just cried, and cried, and cried. And I was about two and I didn’t understand that adults cried because crying was for babies, but I know now why she wept and wept.67

  Juliet would remember the sirens, and ‘going down every night to the air-raid shelter and standing looking at the fighter planes, and the tracer bullets. It was like watching fireworks.’68 This was a disturbing and disruptive time, especially for the adults around her. Her most memorable experience came at the end of the war:

  One of the things that thrilled me the most was watching the VE Day parade … My father had offices in Whitehall, so we stood in the window and watched … If there’s one moment in history that captures an overwhelming emotion, that’s it.69

  Juliet was bright, and in spite of her medical complications she could read the newspaper before she went to school. Hilda was responsible for most of this, and she had helped to create an imaginative world for Juliet through the books she read to her and the films she took her to see. There was a broad range of books on their shelves: Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote in translation, and the works of Shakespeare. Juliet was taken to see Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, and somehow on the way home from Lewisham she got lost. After her parents found her, Juliet told them vivid stories of how ‘after dark everyone became the Wicked Witch of the West’.

  She was a vivacious girl whose fantasy life was as actively lived as her reality. When the other children put away their fairy and witch costumes, she played on, wearing them at the dinner table. It was fun, but also exhausting. Sometimes when they were living in Blackheath, and Hilda fell asleep as she lay on the bed reading a story, Juliet would prise her mother’s eyes open. ‘Are you still there? What happened next?’ Hilda was tired and ill, and after her second child, Jonathan, was born on 21 March 1944, she spent a long time in hospital. Hilda and Henry’s blood types were incompatible, and immediately after they arrived home from the maternity hospital she and the baby were readmitted, Hilda in a critical condition.

  Hilda’s convalescence was long and protracted, and it disrupted all their lives. Juliet took her mother’s absence to heart, as young children often do, and blamed everyone, especially Jonathan. But the main difficulty with the siblings’ relationship was the six-year gap in their ages, a gulf in life experience that would take years to diminish. The war, the absences of her parents, Jonathan’s birth — all these had conspired to make an exceedingly intelligent child determined and sometimes belligerent. Juliet’s behaviour could be mature beyond her years and seem free-thinking and creative; at other times, it was just a bad-tempered flouting of authority. She approached almost everything with a disturbing intensity.

  From 1945 to 1948 Henry was Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry, a job which took him on a long trip to the United States when Juliet was six-and-a-half years old. He returned to find her seriously ill with pneumonia. One night the doctor left the child’s bedside, telling Hilda: ‘There’s nothing I can do. I’ll be back to sign the death certificate in the morning.’70 Juliet spent months at home in bed and was frequently hospitalized with respiratory illness. ‘When I was in hospital, I wasn’t allowed to read. I survived in my imagination. I just shut my eyes and lived in my head. If you can’t read, you have to make your own stories — from what you have read.’71 For two years her schooling was disrupted and it was feared that if she did not move to a warmer climate she might die.

  On medical advice, the Hulmes finally approached friends in the Bahamas to have eight-year-old Juliet stay with them for a while. It seemed an expedient and logical solution. Henry had his work in England, and Hilda was coping with two-year-old Jonathan. With Juliet gone, they would have time to consider where they were going to live. In fact, taking Juliet away from her home and her parents’ care began a process that would end in disaster.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I

  Anne decided she had had enough of her secluded Suffolk life, and rang Meg MacDonald in April 1989: ‘I really loved it there [in Scotland]. I need to come up to visit and to do a manuscript.’1 So she drove up with her two cats, Poppy and Pansy, and stayed a whole month with Meg. The launch of the Monk series was her big project for the year, her début for Ballantine. She knew it had to be good. If it did not do as well as the Pitts, it had the potential to make things difficult with both Ballantine and St Martin’s.

  This was the first time Meg MacDonald had helped Anne in any sustained way with a manuscript. They worked solidly. Anne would spend the day toiling over a few handwritten pages, then read them out loud to Meg, who would, in h
er words, ‘pull them to pieces’. ‘“Why are you starting there?” and poor Anne would prickle defensively: “What do you mean, why am I starting there?”’ Meg challenged her about not jumping into the story quickly enough to grab the reader’s interest, about repetition, about losing the plot or forgetting details: ‘“You’ve just walked through a wall because you haven’t opened the door.” Or: “You walked in with two kids and you’ve walked home without them — where are they?”’ It was tough and ego-bruising, but Anne took it because she wanted the best from her work. She accepted criticism, she pushed her craft to its limits, she brought more of herself to the writing. Meg noticed the difference: ‘She went into darker places in a sense to find those stories, because they are a lot darker than the Pitt [novels].’2

  Writing is a lonely pursuit, and reading it aloud transformed it into an interactive experience. It also brought the text to life. When Anne read her material to Meg she picked up the difficulties and polished them out so that the writing flowed more smoothly. Occasionally, there were a few ruffled feathers and a spot of wounded pride, but almost always the process was revealing and sometimes downright entertaining. She liked knowing Meg was there to chat to, and loved the drives they took in the Scottish countryside.

  It was hard to go. She left on a Saturday, and all the way back to Suffolk she pored over the possibilities, not only of her writing, but of where she wanted to live. Returning to an empty house did not help. She no longer felt she belonged in Suffolk any more than she did in Scotland. Where was ‘home’ for her anyway? For a month she had wistfully watched Meg and could see in her a Highlander come home at last. Anne had no such place. At a pinch, perhaps it was London — but how many people really thought of London as home? The United States might be her spiritual home, but she was no American. Her most defining years had been spent in New Zealand, but that was certainly not home. It occurred to her that perhaps she belonged where she wrote, and now was as good a time as any to move on.

  The next day, Sunday, she telephoned Meg: ‘Oh, it was so lovely up there! If I’m not encroaching on your territory, do you think I could come and live in Scotland?’ Meg responded in her matter-of-fact way: ‘I don’t see any reason why not.’3

  Although Meg had a car, she did not have her driver’s licence, so a friend took her in his old van to Alness, which is just over 3 kilometres west of Invergordon. As she was going upstairs to see the estate agent, she noticed a photograph on the wall and said to her friend, ‘There’s Anne’s house.’ It was a perfect little stone cottage, sitting on its own in a field surrounded by old trees and dry-stone walls. Meg knew Anne would love it. The estate agent took them out to see it that very evening.

  ‘I shouldn’t really tell you this,’ he said, ‘but there are people coming up from London who are really struck on this house. If your friend wants it that much, I advise her to put a bid in now.’4 Anne should make an offer within the week. Exhibiting less scepticism than estate agents possibly deserve, Meg rang Anne, sending her into a panic. She trusted Meg’s judgement, but could see no way of selling her place quickly enough to raise the money. In the end, when she listed Fox Cottages the people selling it very kindly said they would lend her the money until her property sold. So on Meg’s word, Anne went ahead and bought her cottage in the Scottish Highlands, sight unseen.

  The responses to the detailed outline for The Face of a Stranger that Anne sent to Meg Davis and Leona Nevler were encouraging. She received their feedback early in the year, and it gave her a sense of where her agent and publisher were expecting the storyline to go. Both were intrigued by the idea of William Monk being a recovering amnesiac who can piece together his old self only from the outside, or from other people’s memories and reactions to him — and that as his case proceeds he does not want to solve it, just in case it turns out that he himself is the murderer. But Meg wanted more struggle. ‘He is after all repressing the memory of his murder of Grey, working against the terrible fear of facing what he’s done and acknowledging himself as a murderer,’ read one of her notes to Anne. Leona, on the other hand, was reluctant to make Monk a murderer at all. Finally she put her foot down and vetoed the idea. Meg remembers her rationale.

  [She] felt that Americans wouldn’t cope with that kind of darkness, so it had to turn out that he had left the guy for dead but in fact didn’t literally kill him, and weirdly for the Americans that lets him off the hook and everything’s fine. But it does mean that he can walk away and still be a member of society and solve crimes on a more traditional footing.5

  Meg thought the book premise was a perfect opportunity for suspense and for the conflicting emotions of a man probing his soul to find the truth about himself bit by bit. It ‘ought to build up like a pressure cooker,’ she told Anne.6 Leona thought that the phase of self-discovery should be longer. Anne had imagined that Monk would be fully revealed to himself by the end of the first book, but this seemed a lot to achieve, and perhaps a lost opportunity. Hester Latterly, who becomes Monk’s crime-solving partner and later wife, was also put under the spotlight. From the notes Anne circulated, they felt she sounded very like Charlotte. She must be different from Charlotte in the way Monk was different from Pitt. ‘What about making her more of a “head nurse” type?’ Meg suggested.7

  Meg and Leona both saw Anne’s approach as a clever literary device. Since 1926, when Agatha Christie had smashed convention by making her narrator the murderer in Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, writers of crime detective fiction had been finding innovative ways of tricking the reader and freshening up a well-worn genre. Anne’s premise went a step further: the detective was the murderer, and he would carry the consequences of that act through his work and life, and the rest of the series. Crime detective fiction writer and commentator PD James, in her book Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), describes the England of the 1920s as:

  a cohesive world, overwhelmingly white and united by a common belief in a religious and moral code based on the Judeo-Christian inheritance … and buttressed by social and political institutions … [that] were accepted as necessary to the well-being of the state: the monarchy, the Empire, the Church, the criminal justice system, the City, the ancient universities. It was an ordered society in which virtue was regarded as normal, crime an aberration, and in which there was small sympathy for the criminal.8

  In the decades between the world wars, Agatha Christie’s detective fiction writing reinforced these ideas and institutions, making her an ‘arch-purveyor of cosy reassurance’.9 The world Anne creates, however, is both historical and post-modern. It assumes human existence is an ambiguous complexity of circumstance that means every act — even a moral one — has to be considered in its context. Only in such a framework can Monk be a good man, a sympathetic protagonist and a murderer.

  This premise also provided a perfect psychological landscape in which Anne could locate her own reflections on the struggle between good and evil and, on the many situations that make this absolute polarization inappropriate, fluid, even accidental. The Pitt series, to date, had been a measured examination of subjects on which Anne took a relatively liberal position: feminism, marriage, the family, poverty, religious hypocrisy, incest, rape, prostitution and homosexuality. But she understood how it felt to be Monk. She knew about choice, consequence, and what it was like to see, in other people’s eyes, the monster that is the perception of you. If she had been allowed to make Monk a murderer, his life would have been a fictional projection of hers. But Leona and Ballantine were not brave enough to trust that American readers would accept a murderer as a likeable, positive person.

  The Face of a Stranger opens on 31 July 1856, in a London hospital where Monk has lain close to death for three weeks. As consciousness dawns, he realizes he can remember nothing. He does not know how he got there or even who he is. ‘Panic boiled up inside him again and for a moment he could have screamed. Help me, somebody, who am I? Give me back my life, my self!’ He has no past, no identity. He is no one. What he d
oes have is an innate sense of self-preservation, and so he keeps this knowledge to himself. Revealing his amnesia will only make him vulnerable, and somewhere back in the dark recesses of his damaged mind he knows that vulnerability is dangerous. ‘Let a little more time pass, a little more identity build, learn to know himself.’ On his release from hospital he finds his rooms at 27 Grafton Street, meets his housekeeper, Mrs Worley, and discovers himself for the first time in the mirror. The face he sees looking back is a strong one. He is dark with a ‘broad, slightly aquiline nose, wide mouth … eyes intense luminous gray in the flickering light. It was a powerful face, but not an easy one. If there was humour it would be harsh, of wit rather than laughter.’ He estimates that he is anywhere between 35 and 45 years old. But it is in the reaction of others that he begins to see the inner man. Colleagues are frightened of him: they cower at his cruelty and despise his single-minded, selfish ambition. No one cares and no one likes him.

  But is this really fair? After all, ‘he was hearing only one side to the story — there was no one to defend him, to explain, to give his reasons and say what he knew and perhaps they did not’. His greatest fear, as he returns to work with the Metropolitan Police Force and begins to unravel the deadly bashing of Major Joscelin Grey, is that he is the murderer himself. It would not surprise Runcorn, his superior officer at work. He feels some immense unspoken animosity towards Monk that is not entirely untangled, even at the end of the book. Runcorn, a pompous, petty man, is not entirely appealing himself, but clearly Monk’s calculating and callous manner has caused him deep hurt.

  Runcorn guesses Monk’s identity crisis by spotting gaps in his memory. Towards the end of the book, Monk tells Hester Latterly, a usually independent, sometimes acerbic woman, about his amnesia. Although throughout Monk’s murder case they squabble often, she is completely sympathetic about his missing memory: