The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  Deborah rang and we decided to use a rock in a stocking rather than a sandbag. We discussed the moider fully. I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a Surprise party. Mother has fallen in with everything beautifully and the happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. So next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing.80

  It is remarkable how distanced Pauline was from the act of murder, and how abstract it was in her imagination. The girls clinically made plans to take someone’s life, yet their concept of death and killing was juvenile and unreal. The use of the hard-boiled, penny-dreadful word ‘moider’ distanced the act still further. They had no proper notion of what they were about to do or encounter.

  Pauline’s last diary entry, made before she got out of bed on the morning of 22 June 1954, anticipated a nightmare that would haunt the lives of those involved forever. The event she announced would rob Honorah of her life, and Pauline and her friend Juliet of their childhoods. It would shock sleepy, provincial Christchurch to its core and provide scandalizing copy for newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts and books worldwide. Under the heading, ‘The Day of the Happy Event’, she wrote:

  I am writing a little of this up on the morning before the death. I felt very excited and ‘the night before Christmas-ish’ last night. I did not have pleasant dreams though. I am about to rise.81

  CHAPTER SIX

  I

  Anne and Meg’s meeting at the Ardent offices on Charlotte Street in central London left them awestruck. The production company was located in a towering green and blue building with circular windows that offered vistas of fashionable corporate London. After checking in with security on the ground floor, they took the mirrored lift up to a suite of marble-finished offices where they were served tea in delicate bone-china cups.

  At the heart of Ardent was Prince Edward, who brought to the usually ruthless, money-focused and expedient business of film and television production the weight of royal tradition. For Anne and Meg, the ruthless appetite for revenue regardless of cost and the streetwise exercise of expediency, which would ultimately make other private ventures more economically viable, were comfortingly absent from Ardent. It was company lawyer and executive producer Eben Foggitt who had first approached them about televising the Pitt series, and he explained that Ardent came ‘with clean hands’. It was a newish company with an unsullied track-record, and things would have to stay pretty much that way because the company’s managing director and head of production was a senior member of the Royal Family.

  Meg already knew the ascendant producer Phillippa Giles, a force behind the Ardent offer, and a significant player in the group of people charged with kicking off Prince Edward’s venture into television drama. The fact that Ardent was prepared to work with freelancer Jane Merrow as principal producer also pleased Anne and Meg. Ardent would produce The Cater Street Hangman in association with Yorkshire Television, as a pilot for a Pitt series they hoped might run on ITV.

  The experienced Trevor R Bowen was chosen as scriptwriter. His most impressive credits included episodes of the Sherlock Holmes series, begun by Granada television in 1984 and starring the inimitable Jeremy Brett, and Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn Mysteries made by the BBC during the early 1990s. June Wyndham-Davies, veteran director of later episodes in the Sherlock Holmes series, was also co-opted as producer. Up-and-coming young actor Keeley Hawes was cast in the role of Charlotte ‘pretty early on, but it was hard to find the actor for Pitt’.1 In the end, Jane Merrow and director Sarah Hellings settled on Eoin McCarthy, an actor who impressed them on stage, and though he had never worked a great deal in television he was the spitting image of Anne’s Thomas Pitt.

  ‘The casting director picked them right out of my mind,’ Anne would tell Linda Richards of January Magazine.2 The only difficult moment was the inclusion of Kate Winslet’s sister, Anna, cast as Dora, because Anne was still very tender about Heavenly Creatures. Although she was impressed by Kate Winslet’s subsequent career, and ultimately even a little flattered by Jackson’s casting of her, Winslet’s successes only exacerbated Anne’s problems with the film. The more seriously Winslet was taken as an actor — and she was very highly regarded — the more credibility it gave her début starring role as Juliet Hulme. Anne was too mindful of herself and how she was perceived to be overtly annoyed, but the choice of Anna Winslet rankled.

  Trevor Bowen worked with her on the screenplay, and although there were departures from the original storyline she was pleased with the outcome. ‘The characters are exactly as I wrote them and quite a lot of dialogue is straight from the book.’ she observed.3 As well as her work behind the scenes, Anne ‘had her moment of glory when they agreed to let her play a non-speaking role’, although, as Meg Davis remembers:

  [S]he was a bit miffed to find herself a dowager duchess. The dowager bit took some of the shine off it. But she got all dressed up in a tight corset and really enjoyed herself. They filmed round a stately home near Liverpool. I was also invited up for a day to watch the filming, which was a real treat, and took the train back to London with Edward. He’s a quiet man but a thoughtful and interesting (and very nice) guy.4

  When they reached the railway station, Meg was not sure how to explain to the prince that she had a ticket for a standard and not a first-class carriage, so she thanked him and said goodbye so she could slip surreptitiously to another part of the train. ‘But aren’t you returning to London by train, now?’ he asked, bemused. When, with embarrassment, she explained the situation, Edward smiled and without hesitation said that he and his bodyguards would accompany her in standard class. It was not long before the train heaved its way out of the station. They chatted for a while about the filming and their inordinately long day on set, and finally, with amorphous shapes whizzing past in blackness outside, things drifted into a drowsy self-contained silence. When Meg nodded herself awake over the manuscript she had on her knee with all good intentions to read, she wondered in horror how long she had slept, and more chillingly what she had looked like while she had done so. The good-natured Prince Edward seemed not to notice, and, if he had, was too magnanimous to say so.

  Ardent’s made-for-television adaptation of The Cater Street Hangman, titled The Inspector Pitt Mysteries, screened on ITV one weekday night in December 1998. ‘It got an audience of 14.9 [million], an unheard-of size these days, and “won the slot” in that it was the most-watched programme at that time that night.’5 Reviews were positive, and the company so pleased by the outcome that it threw a big celebrity dinner to mark the success. The signs were good: Ardent’s production values were high; the programme was given a prime viewing slot. It seemed only a matter of time before a Pitt series was commissioned by ITV.

  Also launched in 1998 were another Pitt novel, Brunswick Gardens, which offered a powerful and well-received reflection on Darwinism and feminism, and a Monk, Whited Sepulchres (released in the United States as A Breach of Promise). Publishers Weekly described Whited Sepulchres as an ‘exceptional novel’, while People selected it as ‘A Page-Turner of the Week’. Their critic called it ‘captivating … One of Perry’s most engrossing puzzlers … A period piece in the best sense, the action seamlessly growing out of the social tapestry she weaves.’6

  The story revolves around brilliant architect Killian Melville, who is in serious need of Oliver Rathbone’s help to defend a breach-of-promise case after the daughter of his patron, Barton Lambert, believes he has proposed and is not prepared to proceed with the marriage. It is an odd predicament for a man who is ‘probably one of the most original and daring thinkers of his generation’. The season of debutante balls is in full swing and the eligible Rathbone is horrified: ‘I was so aware of the matrons parading their daughters, vying with one another for any available unmarried man, I felt like a quarry before the pack myself. I could imagine how one might be cornered, unable to extricate oneself.’ Is this what has happened to Killian?

  Just months before, Rathbone had
almost proposed to Hester, but had been held back by the distinct feeling that she would turn him down. So the elegant barrister is still a free agent, while Monk is being drawn to Hester, in whom he begins to find a soul mate. Her interest in things outside the home and family, her professionalism and reliance on logic make her ‘in many ways more like a man, less alien, less mysterious’. Monk is, apparently, one of the few men in Victorian England to find these qualities attractive in a woman.

  During Killian’s breach-of-promise trial, he is suddenly discovered dead in his flat — poisoned. The trial has been going badly, the prosecution arguing that Killian is having a homosexual relationship with Isaac Wolff. Rathbone is forced to scrutinize his feelings about homosexuality. ‘I suppose I imagined that what a man did in his bedroom, providing he injured no one, was his own affair.’ But the need to consider this difficult subject becomes redundant when it is revealed that Killian is a she, not a he.

  A male persona gave Killian access to the world of buildings and men. In his final summary address to the court, Rathbone pleads: ‘for God’s sake, why can’t we allow women to use whatever talents they have without hounding and denying them until they are reduced to pretending to be men in order to be taken at their true value?’ The prosecutor, on the other hand, speaks for many when he describes Killian as unnatural in her pursuit of a masculine profession. As soon as she is known to be a woman, the value of her architectural vision is diminished and scorned. The glimpse of hope for a new attitude to women is Monk, who at the end asks Hester to marry him.

  ‘Why?’ she asked …

  ‘Because I love you, of course! … And I don’t want ever to be without you’ …

  ‘I think that’s a good reason,’ she said very softly. ‘Yes, I will.’

  The beginning of 1999 saw Anne’s greatest personal coup: the publication of the novel that had been much agonized over, many times restructured and rewritten, and now had a new, improved spelling for its title — Tathea. This was her baby, and she swears ‘there is not a word in it that I would change’.7 Tathea and its sequel, Come Armageddon (released two years later in 2001), are the only books she has written that she rereads often and for pleasure. These books are her theology and her comfort, and the journey of the soul of Tathea, the principal female protagonist, is a metaphor for her own.

  Not long after Anne’s identity was revealed, Meg Davis ‘suggested to Anne she write her autobiography and she kind of grabbed this as a vehicle’,8 using this concept to rework and personalize the manuscript. Tathea and Come Armageddon are the closest she claims she will ever come to writing an autobiography: the details of her actual life are missing, but the essence of her struggle is there.

  Leona Nevler finally decided not to publish any of the incarnations of Tathea. As Meg Davis notes, ‘MY EAGLE COMES was … cannibalized into TATHEA and COME ARMAGEDDON. I think there was an interim stage, a ms called SADOKHAR. Anne originally saw this as a trilogy.’9 ‘Sadokhar’ was to be the first in the series, and ‘the one in which Anne tackled the subject of Armageddon’, with the other novels looking back at what had gone before. ‘We finally swallowed our pride and let Deseret, the Mormon publisher do it. But then were cheered up tremendously when after languishing with Deseret they were about to sell it as a two-book deal to Penguin Putnam in the United States. Leona was a bit put out when a perfectly distinguished publisher picked it up.’10

  Tathea opens with its namesake, the Queen of Shinabar, narrowly escaping a palace coup, but leaving behind a dead husband and a four-year-old son, both victims of the insurrection. It is a loss for Tathea, but also the beginning of her quest. ‘Everyone I loved is gone, everything I thought I knew,’ she tells the Sage. ‘I want to know if there is any meaning in life. Why do I exist? Who am I?’

  She begins her journey by meeting a woman grieving by a desert tomb over a man she hardly knows. When Tathea challenges her to justify this oddly placed emotion, she explains that ‘he had life … he had a chance to be brave and to seek the truth, to honour and defend it’, yet he wasted it. For Tathea, and for Anne, the ultimate tragedy is not to die but to let life slip through your fingers, but they also share an occasional nagging doubt: ‘Was all life … futile, a moment of consciousness between one oblivion and another?’

  It is possible to begin by reading Tathea as a fantastic spin on a piece of classical mythology, but very soon the Dantesque, perilous nature of the spiritual terrain becomes apparent. This journey is as much mystic as it is fantastical. As Tathea discovers during her nightmare encounters with different peoples and cultures, nothing is as it seems. Duplicity reigns and innocence often masks cruelty and violence. In this precarious universe Tathea is charged with recovering the ‘golden Book of the word of God’, which is a dialogue between The Man of Holiness and Asmodeus, and taking it safely back to her people.

  ‘There’s still a central figure battling to save the world, a magical object, a range of supernatural armies and mortal allies, but [Tathea’s] means of saving the world is ultimately by transmitting a religion, not by raising an army and waging war (although she does that too),’ writes the critic for SFX.11 It would be convenient to describe this as a battle between good and evil, but the dialogue at the heart of this story is between eroding doubt and spiritual conviction. It is a rhetorical debate that Anne has running on an endless reel inside her head. She polished this conversation for the book, but it was an expression of her internal debate between doubt and religious belief.

  The writing of Come Armageddon took Anne to a place she struggled to return from and pushed her to the brink of a nervous breakdown. She rang her closest friends in a mood of despair that worried them intensely. When the novel begins, Tathea has spent 500 years in a forest guarding the Book, but the time predicted for the great conflict at the end of the world is drawing near, and when a woman dies giving birth, she knows that the child, Sadokhar, is the leader she has been waiting for. Twenty-eight years later, Sadokhar is the benevolent ruler of an island kingdom at the Edge of the World, where peace and justice reigns. Tyrn Vawr, a beautiful city, has been built, where ‘artists and poets, philosophers and dreamers, architects and musicians’ live freely. Anne named her home after this mystical, creative place. It is the golden age before the apocalypse.

  Eerie expectation of the final war gives way to the terrible realization that Asmodeus, the Enemy, is biding his time. He will live as long as life exists, but his adversaries are mortal. His greatest weapon against his human opponents is Time. The brave Sadokhar decides to provoke the battle — ‘We’ll make the war happen, I promise!’ — and he enters Hell in order to unleash its fury. ‘Fool!’ screams the hideous Tiyo-Mah, one of Hell’s monstrous inhabitants, because no one can leave Hell until the apocalypse. According to his plan, Sadokhar baits her and the forces of evil, until they leave Hell through a portal in a slow, diseased procession to wreak havoc on the world.

  Tiyo-Mah, riding a white mule … and behind her came the Lords of Delusion, Corruption, Terror and Despair. After them, on foot, shambled four creatures unlike any … seen before, muscles bulging beneath purple-black skin scarred and pitted, as if from innumerable pustules burst and healed over years.

  Hell is brilliantly evoked in some of Anne’s most outstanding writing. But even with its high-profile inhabitants gone, Hell is not a nice place to be, especially forever. There is no sign of life; not the slightest wind to disturb the white sky. Sadokhar breathes, but there is no air in his lungs, because Hell is not oblivion but endless living death.

  He felt neither hot nor cold, and the only sound was that of his feet on the pebbles, and even they slithered and fell without echo … But when he reached the crest there was nothing ahead of him but more dun-grey dust and rocks and shale to the horizon in every direction, except for the drop behind him … There was still no sense of perspective … He passed an outcrop of rock, and although he walked without turning, he seemed to pass it again. He had no idea whether it was the same one, or any of th
e countless others that looked alike.

  II

  Pauline was in a state of suppressed excitement as she helped her mother with the usual round of housework. Before leaving her lavish Ilam home, Juliet went to the garage, where she found half a brick and wrapped it in newspaper. Bill Perry noted that when she left the house ‘she was more excited than usually and very gay. She was [wearing] a new dress or skirt which she had purchased only the day before.’12 Henry drove her to the Riepers’, dropping her off in town so she could do some shopping on the way.

  Juliet arrived as Honorah was beginning to prepare lunch. After chatting for a while, the girls disappeared upstairs to Pauline’s bedroom. There, Juliet handed over the half-brick, which was put inside an old stocking, which in turn was knotted near the ankle and placed in Pauline’s shoulder bag. Juliet carried a little pink stone that had come from a brooch. The preparations were complete.

  Pauline’s father arrived home at noon, earlier than usual, and while he was waiting for lunch he did some work in the back vegetable garden. At the meal the girls laughed and joked, which pleased Herbert. Just before 1pm, he returned to work and Wendy went back to her job selling lingerie in a department store, leaving Honorah and the girls to clean up and begin their afternoon’s adventure.

  It was a quick walk from the Gloucester Street house into Cathedral Square, where they caught the bus. The day was crisp and clear. The view from Victoria Park out over the city of Christchurch and across the plains to the Southern Alps would be worth the trip, but Honorah was hoping for more. Thinking back over the past few months, she realized she and Pauline had clashed terribly. There had been the frank chats with the Hulmes about the nature of the girls’ relationship, the visits to school, the eating problems they had argued over, and the visit to Dr Bennett — everything had put her at odds with her daughter.