The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Anne’s 1997 Monk, The Silent Cry, was also well reviewed. The novel begins on a shivering night in January, in a wind-whipped alley in St Giles, as Detective John Evan and PC Shotts stand over the crumpled and barely recognizable bodies of Leighton Duff and his son, Rhys. It is assumed from their horrendous injuries that both men have been beaten to death, but on closer inspection Rhys is discovered to be still alive. What could possibly have brought a respectable solicitor and his son to a London slum full of cheap women, moneylenders, cardsharps, fences and forgers? There is no easy explanation, because, as Rhys regains consciousness, it becomes apparent that he is ‘locked in his own world of isolation, hearing and seeing but unable to speak, unable to communicate with anyone the terror and the pain he must feel’. Rhys is still speechless at his trial, after his surprising arrest for the murder of his father.

  It is Monk who makes sense of this enigmatic case of patricide, when he is engaged by Vida Hopgood, a factory owner from Seven Dials, to discover who has been raping and beating factory women and part-time prostitutes in the area. In The Silent Cry there are thought-provoking reflections on both heterosexual and homosexual rape and, more broadly, on the patriarchal institutions that foster hypocrisy, condone abuse and exclude women. Why, thinks Hester, are women denied ‘their use of knowledge and authority … It was antiquated, blind, rooted in privilege and ignorance. It was worse than unjust, it was dangerous. It was precisely that sort of blinkered idiocy which had kept inadequate men in charge of the battles in the Crimea and cost countless men their lives.’

  But this is what it means to be human, according to acknowledged Christian John Evan. He is a voice for Anne’s theology when he explains to Monk that if the world is perfect ‘there will be no need for humility or forgiveness … For that matter, neither will there be need for pity or generosity.’ An imperfect world tests us all, and malignance, as much as goodness, creates the shades of grey that truly explain the human condition. ‘If you think the world is divided into those who are good and those who are bad, you are worse than a fool, you are a moral imbecile, refusing to grow up,’ Monk says vehemently to Vida Hopgood.

  At the beginning of 1997, six months after Robert McCrum’s article recorded Anne’s greatest fear, Pauline Parker was found living in Hoo, close to the historic city of Rochester in Kent, under the name Hilary Nathan. Anne consciously shut out the details of the discovery, but the revelation was still a shock, as was the surname Pauline had chosen. Nathan was the name of the prophet God sent to make King David face up to his betrayal and murder of Uriah the Hittite. As Anne had told Meg MacDonald back in Suffolk, the hypocrisy of seeing David as a virtuous statesman continued to anger her as it had when she and Pauline had discussed it. But of all names, why had Pauline chosen Nathan? Was it just coincidence, or was it deliberate — a constant, penitential reminder of God’s judgment?

  As Hilary Nathan, Pauline had lived a private, solitary yet constructive existence. At the end of her parole period in 1965, she had left New Zealand to begin a new life in Britain. Initially she worked in a London library, but gave away the profession she trained for in New Zealand to become an instructor at a riding school for disabled children and a teacher at the Abbey Court special-needs school in Strood. By the time she retired in the mid-1990s she was deputy headmistress. When her identity was unmasked, there was a flood of media interest in her story. Her old employers and the residents of Hoo were plied with questions by reporters from the Daily Mail, the Express and the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. Hilary Nathan emerged as a likable, quiet, almost introverted woman who adored horses, riding and the life of the stable.

  According to her neighbour, Joyce Hookins, she ‘always seemed very nice, and she clearly loved children’.36 Another villager described her as ‘eccentric’, a person who ‘very much keeps herself to herself. She is … well spoken and appears very intelligent and well educated. But she is quite childish in a way.’37 Hilary Nathan collected dolls, which she kept in her living room, and from the street you might just catch a glimpse of a large rocking horse inside the front door. Perhaps in the trappings of childhood she sought to reclaim a youth that had been lost. Only those who have leapt from juvenile to adult in a single act can understand the grief that that entails, and the urge to fill the resulting gulf with innocence. Abbey Court sources remembered her as a ‘loner’, but one who was ‘well liked’ and was apt, rather strangely, to turn up ‘for class in wellies and battered black sunglasses’.38

  It was not until Hilary Nathan was in her sixties that she talked to her sister Wendy about the murder of their mother. Hilary was still bemused by events. ‘It just got out of hand. Looking back … it was something that grew and grew out of all proportion.’

  Wendy believes Hilary didn’t fully understand the finality of death. ‘After it happened she was very sorry about it. It took her about five years to realize what she had done … [The girls] were ill fated and they went overboard and committed a dreadful crime they have paid for their whole lives.’39

  After her retirement, Hilary took up an ascetic life of religious contemplation. Hilary does not have television, radio or internet access, and Wendy has become her spokesperson and media interface. ‘She is a nun in her way … she’s deeply religious … she doesn’t have any contact with the outside world — she’s a reclusive, really. She’s a devout Roman Catholic and spends most of her time in prayer.’40 According to Wendy, Hilary is ‘living the life she always dreamed of as a girl’ — a genteel country existence with a stable of her own.41 But it is a solitary life lived in faith and seclusion, and she has taken the name of a prophet synonymous with murder and judgment.

  II

  Juliet Hulme and Pauline Rieper were both high academic achievers in their first year at high school. They were interested in art and music, and both were excused sport, Juliet for respiratory problems and Pauline because of her osteomyelitis. This threw the two girls together when the rest of the class donned their white blouses and voluminous navy-blue rompers and went to the gymnasium to play netball, or to a grass strip down the side of the school to do field events.

  They walked together arm in arm around Cranmer Square and held hands in the playground. Classmates remember that ‘they would stay sitting outside the gym, and there was no way they would have a conversation with anyone else’.42 The exceptions were Margaret Tyndall and Caroline Spencer, who were identified as potential allies.

  The girls shared a growing passion for horses. Juliet had her own horse, and they would borrow one for Pauline so they could ride together, sometimes, it seems, illicitly at night. Juliet approached Margaret and Caroline, thinking they might make co-conspirators:

  She stalked over: ‘We (that is to say Pauline and Juliet) have decided that you (that’s Caroline and me) are wild enough to join us riding horses in the night-time.’ I just thought of Caroline’s mother and my mother … my mind raced, I thought it would be cold, then I thought I would have to get on my bike and I am scared of the dark.43

  The plan came to nothing. While none of the others in 3A could imagine being that daringly disobedient, Juliet and Pauline were becoming more adventurous, sometimes escaping at night to pursue their hair-raising schemes. They acted in skits that they wrote and directed. They dressed up in costume, took photographs, listened to the radio, played records, sang, danced and talked endlessly together over cards and board games, read books, went to the theatre and were regular movie-goers.

  They spoke on the telephone for hours. Their friendship was intense and euphoric. Now each could share the hormone-driven exhilaration of adolescence with someone of like mind. Pauline filled a huge gap for Juliet. At a time when teenagers naturally rebel and seek the company of their peers, there was an unusual degree of distance and disconnection between Juliet and her parents, caused by her illness, repeated long separations, and Hilda and Henry’s high-powered professional and social positions.

  Marjorie Webb used to catch the Riccarton tram with Juliet after
school. It was just a short walk down Gloucester Street, through Chancery Lane and into the Square. She let Juliet lead the conversation. Although it was:

  a privilege to think she would let me walk with her … I always used to feel there was a loneliness there when she got home. Somehow or other her father seemed to be her pivot. She never talked much about her mother. She would be going home — and it always seemed to be to her father and her brother.44

  There was a sense, too, among some of her contemporaries, that behind the flashy intelligence and haughtiness was someone who needed help. Even as a young teenager, Marjorie Webb wondered if much of what they saw was not a façade.

  Young people often put on a front and they appear all in control and quite happy, but you don’t really know what they really feel underneath … and I did wonder [about Juliet] even in those years at school if that was a front and she were protecting [herself] to a degree.45

  In spite of her privileged way of life, Juliet’s essential needs — a reassuring and loving relationship with her parents, balanced by authority — were not being met. Because long separations had not allowed her to bond with her parents, the links she had developed, especially with her mother, tended to be intellectual rather than instinctive.

  Pauline was infatuated with Juliet and everything she represented. It was a Cinderella story. Her own sleepy Christchurch childhood of hospital wards and sickness had been one of constraint. There was never enough money, freedom or opportunity. Her father, a dapper little man, was older than most, and her mother more authoritarian. Neither of her parents was highly educated, and education was something she aspired to. Her father’s lack of income was embarrassing at school. Writing about children from lower-income families, social scientist Tess Ridge notes:

  Friendships represent secure social assets for children and play a vital role in the development of self and social identity … All the children in the poverty study saw friendships as having a very protective effect, and the girls in particular viewed their friends as confidantes and supportive alternatives to family … [but] inadequate housing and lack of resources, including bedroom space and insufficient income to provide extra meals and treats … [made] it difficult to invite friends to stay.46

  The Riepers were not desperately poor, but Pauline’s mother had to work to the point of exhaustion to keep their boarding house running. A succession of itinerant strangers took up residency for a time, then, when they were familiar figures around the house, moved on. Sometimes Pauline even had to shift rooms to accommodate them. There was no privacy for an intimate joke: every space was public, including the bathroom. The only opportunity for recreation or culture — listening to the radio or a gramophone record, or reading a book — came at the end of a tiring day. It was a ‘have-not’ working-class life in which Pauline would be trapped, unless she could get away or escape to university.

  Juliet was an awakening of hope, the door to another world. She represented money, flamboyance and prospects — and she had chosen Pauline to be her friend, exclusively. It was head-spinning and addictive.

  For years Pauline had taken riding lessons. It was a sport she could manage physically, and her English mother still wished a better, more genteel life for her children. Without her parents’ knowledge Pauline bought a pacer she named Omar Khayyám and arranged grazing for it at Ilam. When her father found out, months later, he quickly came to see the horse as a positive outlet, and as a distraction from Juliet. In the end, though, even Omar Khayyám came second to the friendship. He was more likely a typical teenage symbol of defiance, of independence.

  It was probably Pauline who introduced the idea of plasticine modelling, but Juliet quickly became so involved that an essay she wrote on the subject was published in the school magazine at the end of 1952. In ‘My Holiday Hobby’ she explained how she made herds of plasticine horses. She began by modelling the stallion, which established the correct scale for the rest. ‘This one is a black (taken from “Shetan”), which is Arabic for “the devil”. He was a killer and a throwback to the ancient Arab horses.’ she wrote. She demonstrates an impressive knowledge of the anatomical structure of horses and of the different breeds. ‘I have them all on a green shelf in my bedroom. On the shelf is a hill with an imitation clay bank on one side.’ Included with the essay is her competent nocturnal drawing of a racing stallion, and a poem:47

  Juliet and Pauline became increasingly caught up in writing Arthurian-style fantasies. Initially, they acted out or produced plasticine figures for their main characters and modelled recreations of the scenes they were imagining. At one stage they manufactured a complete masked ball. Eventually, however, the writing dominated everything.

  Pauline’s 1953 diary, a Christmas present from her father, became an extension of this writing. She began with a New Year’s resolution written at the front: ‘To be lenient to others’. There was also a key for the ‘Saints’ Juliet and Pauline had created. This was a list of characters they had made up, based in part on the film actors and singers they idolized and each with an ideal quality or characteristic. Occasionally, they would have a clear-out and introduce new names.

  The list of Saints was also a code: HE was Mario Lanza; HIM, James Mason; IT, Harry Lime; THIS, Mel Ferrer; THAT, Jussi Björling; and HIS, Guy Rolfe. The concept was playful, witty and secretive. It reinforced their communion and separateness from the adult world they were beginning to shun. Beyond these recognizable names, the list continued as an exploration of language:

  WHOSE+THEY=THEM

  THEY+WE=US

  WHOSE+WE=WHICH48

  After the Saints was a summary of the major events of 1952, and, from March on, synopses for stories Pauline was planning to write and a number of poems. Much of the body of the diary consists of matter-of-fact details competently and sometimes evocatively communicated. There are frequent references to the housework Pauline did to help her mother, which she mostly completed willingly. But it was also a place for dreams, thoughts and wild ambitions.

  The diary was both a companion and a confessional. It allowed her to express a new, separate, more adult voice, and it was personal and safe. Pauline could record things she knew would be completely unacceptable to her parents, such as the Ceylonese students she sneaked out at night to see, or her sexual liaisons with Nicholas, a law student boarding with the Riepers. She wrote down everything and never hid her diary, so, although her life lacked some of the normal boundaries of privacy, she never feared that her mother or anyone else would read it. It is possible that Juliet kept a similar record, but this was never found.

  Pauline’s stays with the Hulmes increased in frequency and length. When they were together at the Ilam homestead, the girls disappeared, intent on some planned occupation. There was a personality shift when they were together. Apart, they were vulnerable and morose: together, they were powerful and focused. This initially pleased both the Hulmes and the Riepers, who wanted their daughters to be happy, but it was not long before the attachment seemed too intense. They began spending time together writing that should have been devoted to schoolwork and preparation for examinations. Christchurch Girls’ High School contacted Hilda Hulme to express concern that the girls’ friendship was ‘unhealthy’ and having a detrimental effect on their academic progress. Hilda’s reaction was predictably liberal: she ‘wasn’t prepared to interfere in her daughter’s friendships’.49

  Over Easter, the Hulmes took Pauline away with them to their weekend cottage at Port Levy, on Banks Peninsula, 55 kilometres south-east of Christchurch. On the night of Good Friday, 3 April 1953, Pauline wrote ecstatically in her diary:

  To-day Juliet and I found the key to the 4th World. We realize now that we have had it in our possession for about six months but we only realized it on the day of the death of Christ. We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on the edge of the path and looked down the hill out over the bay. The island looked beautiful. The sea was blue. Everything was full of peace and bliss. We then realized we had
the key. We know now that we are not genii as we thought. We have an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the 4th World. Only about 10 people have it. When we die we will go to the 4th World, but meanwhile on two days every year we may use the key and look in to that beautiful world which we have been lucky enough to be allowed to know of, on this Day of Finding the Key to the Way through the Clouds.50

  Pauline’s Port Levy revelation story was a parable of exclusivity and exclusion, bolstered by the arrogance of youth. It separated Pauline and Juliet from the throng of ordinary souls and linked them in eternity to their Saints. It was the poetic, boastful, silly rant of a teenager. The dangerous thing was not the key they discovered to the 4th World, or the megalomania they would later be accused of, but the door that was beginning to shut behind them on ordinariness and adult intervention.

  Pauline’s Port Levy holiday was a defining and indoctrinating experience. It was here that she began to feel part of the Hulme family. ‘The days I spent at Port Levy were the most HEAVENLY ones I have ever experienced. Mrs Hulme did my hair. She calls me her foster daughter.’ This was followed on 26 April by: ‘Mrs Hulme said she wished I was her daughter.’51 Hilda was merely attempting to make her daughter’s friend feel welcome, but Pauline, understandably, pounced on her light comments as proof of something more. Her own parents seemed insignificant compared with the Hulmes.

  Hilda’s languid discipline looked liberating and sophisticated beside Honorah’s strict regime. Pauline’s enchantment with the Hulmes grew in direct proportion to her estrangement at home. She started to separate herself from the family unit, spending more and more time in her room writing, and very significantly she stopped sharing her thoughts and plans with her family. The Riepers, who were being progressively shut out of their daughter’s life, felt impotent to do anything about it.