The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  The next day was Saturday, and the date for a much-anticipated Ranfurly Shield rugby match, but Judge Adams decided that the court would sit in the morning, reconvening at 9.30am. This was the girls’ last trip by covered prison van to the Supreme Court. In the dock Pauline appeared more nervous than Juliet, and paler than ever. She scowled as she had throughout the trial, and sometimes when the tension got too much she bit her lip. Juliet, with just the faintest smile on her lips, presented a more self-contained and assured front. At one point in the proceedings, Pauline spoke to Juliet across the policewoman and she smiled.

  Counsel for the prosecution and the defence spoke for about 25 minutes each. Brown ended the prosecution’s address by saying, ‘they are not incurably insane, but incurably bad’. Gresson said that they were ‘two unusual girls of unusual personality and their association was … tragic for them. I think we can all agree on that … At the time they committed the murder they were ill and not criminally responsible for their actions.’81 At last, in his summing up, Judge Adams had his opportunity to direct the jury. After a lengthy expiation of the legal concepts of ‘knowing’ and ‘wrong’, he said that the jurors ‘really’ had ‘no option but to hold the accused guilty of murder on the ground that the defence of insanity of the required nature and degree had not been proved’.82

  The jury filed out at 12.10pm to rooms close to the courthouse to consider the previous five days’ evidence. At 2.53pm they returned. The atmosphere in the crowded courtroom was tense. Already Brown was showing signs of emotion. Juliet and Pauline glanced up as the 12 men filed in to their seats in the jury box. A flicker of a smile passed across Juliet’s face before she regained the largely expressionless demeanour she and Pauline had assumed for much of the trial. ‘For long periods both sat with their heads almost down to their knees, apparently engrossed in their own thoughts.’83 The registrar asked the jury foreman for the jury’s verdict. At that moment, Bill, who was sitting with Hilda in seating reserved for witnesses, reached over and put his hand on her arm. ‘Guilty’ in each case, replied the foreman, without hesitation.

  Suddenly, shattering the silence, a young man leapt forward from the back of the upstairs gallery, shouting: ‘I protest, I object!’ ‘Silence!’ boomed the court crier. The offender was quickly bundled away by two policemen who intercepted him from the aisle.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  Asmodeus, the Enemy, views everything from his vantage point in Erebus, a place of air and shadow that is neither the world nor Hell. He paces back and forth, distraught. Why did Tiyo-Mah pre-empt his instruction and leave Hell with all her hideous fiends? ‘A few more years and the warriors Tathea had forged would wither. Age would rack their bones and the waiting would dull their hearts.’ It was all going wrong, and it was not his fault.

  After all, who could have predicted that Sadokhar would defy all logic and enter Hell? How could anyone have anticipated that kind of ‘outrageous sacrifice’? Clutching the keys to the world, he boils in fury. With all this capriciousness how long can he hold on to them? He takes comfort in the knowledge that ‘God could raise as many bodies to live for ever as there are stars in the heavens, but He cannot make one soul better than it chooses to be’.

  Sadokhar is visited in Hell by a vision of Tathea, who tells him that to escape Hell he must forgive Tornagrain, the man who killed his wife. Forgiveness is Sadokhar’s ticket out, but he must become a purer soul than anger and the desire for retribution have made him. It is hard, and initially he fails. In his travels he meets Ozmander, the grotesque Lord of the Undead, an unimaginably ugly creature that towers over him on two enormous legs.

  It was almost human … At first it seemed as if the muscles rippled, then before his horrified eyes the flesh broke open and a new limb emerged, skinless and bleeding, only to be consumed again leaving nothing behind except a putrescent scar … The skin was scaly, bubbling, purple-dark … the face … [a] fractured, misshapen torment of legion souls locked together in eternal hatred.

  The air around Ozmander reeks with the stench of putrefaction. In the hideous creature Sadokhar glimpses the hatred inside himself, and is struck by a terrible thought: could he be consumed by it forever himself?

  In the end Sadokhar destroys Ozmander, the beast outside himself, and then revenge, the beast inside, by forgiving Tornagrain, so they can both escape Hell. With Tornagrain he shares his new wisdom.

  You have to become different, so that even if exactly the same things were to happen to you, you would never do that again, but far more than that, you wouldn’t want to! … You must let go of all selfishness and come to know without question that everyone else is as precious, as real and as important as you are, as capable of joy and pain … Or if they aren’t, that’s God’s judgment to make, not ours.

  These are Anne’s lessons, and Sadokhar’s sojourn in the underworld is her trip to Hell and back with an answer that would help to salve the guilt and despair at the centre of her own life. As the Man of Holiness looks at Sadokhar he sees ‘the face of a man who had been redeemed from hell and returned to the earth … a man who had drunk the fullness of the grace of God’.

  But Sadokhar is not the only character whose experiences echo Anne’s. Tathea is her over-arching surrogate, and one of the numerous female figures who, Meg Davis believes, are brave enough to ‘speak against the status quo and get punished for it’.1

  Tathea’s travels through the Lost Lands carrying the Book can be read as metaphor for the great Mormon migrations. According to anthropologist-historian John Hayward, ‘the Mormons have been described as the most systematic, organized, disciplined and successful pioneers in American history’. In 1844 Joseph Smith, leader of the Mormon congregation, was murdered by a mob angry at the Church’s unorthodox practices. Brigham Young, its newly elected leader, began an exodus of Mormons west, towards the Rocky Mountains to Utah, where they settled, free from persecution. ‘The Mormons saw themselves as Israelites and Brigham Young was their Moses.’ Between 1849 and 1852 an estimated 20,000 people were part of the ‘Great Migration’.2

  They carried with them a sacred text, The Book of Mormon, which they believed contained the writings of ancient biblical prophets alive in North America from approximately 2600BC, recorded on golden plates and revealed to Joseph Smith in 1830.3 Like Tathea and her followers, the Mormons were a victimized people convinced of the sacred authenticity of their Book. In Come Armageddon, after a series of horrific battles in which the forces of good and evil are lost, the ultimate apocalyptic stand-off is between Asmodeus and Tathea. His strategy is to shatter her faith. With simmering satisfaction he surveys the total destruction, and hisses at her: ‘You wanted power and glory and the dominion of God! Well, this is what you have … desolation! You are Empress of nothing!’

  To this gargantuan struggle Tathea brings the weapons of hope and love, and these are themes that flow through the words of the Man of Holiness in the Book, the text of which is included at the end of both Tathea and Come Armageddon. Although the Man of Holiness is full of wise virtue, there is something deliciously sinister and memorable about his opponent Asmodeus’s utterances.

  Man is riddled with doubt and ingratitude. In his ignorance and impatience he destroys what he holds. Despair walks beside him and whispers to him in the hallows of the night.

  And:

  How can an unjust God command respect, far less love? I have heard the prayers, even of the righteous, echo unanswered in the empty caverns of the night.

  Asmodeus, or Lucifer, is a class act in literature. In Dante’s The Divine Comedy he is a tantalizing three-headed beast frozen in the Inferno; in Spenser’s Faerie Queen a proud female Lucifera; in Milton’s Paradise Lost the great antagonist Satan; and in Blake’s illustrations of Paradise Lost a terrifying incarnation of a nightmare figure. The power of Anne’s insight in Tathea and Come Armageddon is to give God’s fallen angel, and his voice of scepticism and doubt, as commanding and compelling a presence in the story as th
at of righteous certainty.

  The reviews, first for Tathea, then Come Armageddon, astonished Meg and Don, who had worked so desperately hard with Anne to see the books in print. Of Tathea, Meg said: ‘its publication saved me from cutting my own wrists, which I would surely have done if the sod had gone to any more drafts’.4 The reviewer for SFX described Tathea as an ‘innovative, well-written, intriguing novel, far removed from and far above the norm’, while Publishers Weekly called it ‘ambitious, engrossing … she has devised here a powerful, inventive meditation on the possibilities that lie in and beyond the origin of religion’.5 The Booklist likened it to Erewhon, Gulliver’s Travels and Candide.

  Starlog said Come Armageddon ‘demonstrates a growing authority’, and the critic for SFX identified it as a ‘towering work of philosophy. [Anne Perry] has created a vision of Hell that sticks with you.’6 Despite good reviews, however, neither of the books sold anywhere near as well as her detective fiction; Meg describes them as ‘slow-burners’.

  Still left in these books are some of the elements that annoyed Leona Nevler and prompted her refusal to publish. The cast of characters is epic, which makes it hard for the reader to bond with individuals, and sometimes even to remember names. Tathea can be too irritatingly good to be real, and the gratuitous killing of favourite figures can also annoy.

  Although Anne’s fantasy polarized people as her other writing did not — ‘Perry’s readers may not follow her here,’7 said one reviewer — Tathea’s exploits did create a new audience that was important to Anne. Not long after the publication of Come Armageddon, an email written in German arrived for her at the MBA offices. Staff member Dagmar Wolfinden translated it and sent it on to Anne.

  I have read your book, TATHEA, and I am overwhelmed. Only a human being with a deep inner belief could write such a book. I have bought 20 copies and given them to all my friends as presents … I have discussed your book for hours with friends belonging to our church. I can identify a great deal with what Tathea feels and senses. I have also had answers to some questions regarding my faith … the conversation between Asmodeus and the servant of the Magnificent, at the end of the book, has touched me very much … Thank you so much for your testimony.8

  While Anne anxiously followed the mixed progress of her fantasy novels, her detective fiction continued to fly off bookshop shelves. In 1999 she published Bedford Square, her nineteenth Pitt — this was the twentieth anniversary of the series — as well as The Twisted Root, her tenth Monk. Although neither had the impact of her millennium publications the following year, The Twisted Root was fascinating in terms of the character development of William Monk. In her unpublished paper ‘Keeping a Series Interesting’, Anne suggests that writing ‘a series [today] is a different challenge’ from the one faced by Arthur Conan Doyle when he was writing Sherlock Holmes. ‘Readers’ expectations are higher, and more sophisticated. We are less easily pleased.’ Above all, characters must develop in response to the challenges they meet in life: ‘No pain, no gain!’

  Face it, most of us only learn the hard way, and the hard way makes a better story! Parachuting onto the mountain top is nothing, climbing up to it is everything.9

  In The Twisted Root, Lucius Stourbridge appeals to Monk to help him find his missing fiancée, Miriam Gardiner. Monk, pricked by the poor man’s predicament after ‘having just returned from an extravagant three-week honeymoon in the Highlands of Scotland’, promises to help. Marriage is Monk’s mountain, and there is not a parachute in sight. His revelation is that he must stop trying to mould Hester into the ‘kind of woman he used to imagine he wanted’, and accept her pretty much as is. ‘Had he expected her to be a good cook? Surely he knew her better than that? Did he imagine marriage was somehow going to transform her magically into a housekeeper sort of woman? Perhaps he did.’ But not for long.

  Like Anne’s, Hester’s interests, when she is not working in tandem with Monk to solve crimes, are professional. She cannot cook, she is not interested in housekeeping. Her ambition is to see the status of nurses raised above that of labourer, and to establish community care units for returning soldiers. ‘You are dreaming, my dear,’ says her patron and friend Lady Callandra. ‘We have not even achieved proper nurses for the poor law infirmaries attached to the workhouses, and you want to have nurses to visit the poor in their homes? You are fifty years before your time. But it’s a good dream.’ Hester is indeed half a century ahead of her time, both in her professional aspirations and her ‘new’ marriage, but by giving her unusual ambitions Anne creates opposition and conflict and at the same time draws readers’ attention to the universality of these desires for women. While Monk reconfigures his view of gender, there is a happy spin-off: ‘something in him had softened’.

  In the year 2000, Anne published an astonishing three full-length novels and two short stories, all of which had some special significance. Of all her detective novels, her twentieth Pitt, Half Moon Street, is probably the most personally poignant. All her books deal with family dynamics, but when she writes about the Pitts the intensity changes and so does her involvement.

  In Half Moon Street she originally had Charlotte’s grandmother, Mariah, as the murderer. ‘That’s the only time, I’m pretty sure, that Anne comes close to a first-person account of what it feels like [to murder someone],’ recalls Meg. ‘Her US publisher at the time insisted that Anne change the story so Grandmama doesn’t actually do it.’

  In spite of the change, Half Moon Street remains a powerful novel. It opens with a spine-chilling discovery. Drifting in a punt is the unidentified body of a man, ‘wrists encased in manacles chained to the wooden sides, its ankles apart, chained also’. He is dressed in a long green velvet robe like a dress, his head ‘thrown back, mimicking ecstasy’, and all around are strewn artificial flowers, in hideous parody of the famous Millais painting Ophelia. This is an image that lingers, but then comes the unfolding drama at Caroline and Joshua Fielding’s residence.

  Caroline’s marital bliss with the much younger Joshua is under threat, partly from the amorous attentions of renowned actress Cecily Antrim, but largely because of Caroline’s dissolving self-confidence, aggravated by her former mother-in-law, Grandmama Mariah.

  She was seventeen years older than Joshua. It was like poking at an unhealed wound just to say it to herself. Perhaps the old woman, with her vindictive, all-seeing eyes, was right, and she had been a fool to marry a man she was absurdly in love with, who made her laugh and cry, but who in the end would not be able to protect himself from finding her boring.

  In order to protect a scandalous secret, Grandmama orchestrates a cunning estrangement of the newly-weds. When she goes to bed that night, expecting a blissful state of satisfaction after her successful meddling, she is surprised at how little pleasure she feels. In fact, ‘she drifted in and out of nightmare. She was alone in an icy swamp. She cried out and no one heard her. Blind, inhuman faces peered and did not see. Hate. Everything was drenched and dark with hate. Guilt brought her out in a sweat.’ She had hated watching their pleasure in each other’s company, but her cruel separation of them has only brought despair. When Caroline discovers Grandmama’s duplicity, she is devastated, angry and then pitying, because there is a terrible reason for the old woman’s destructive behaviour.

  Although Grandmama does not murder anyone, she has unwillingly participated in behaviour for which she cannot forgive herself. ‘She has hated herself so long she can find no way back,’ Vespasia explains to Caroline. Censorship is hotly debated in this novel. Cecily Antrim believes everything should be open and accessible to everyone, but Vespasia’s parting good advice about Grandmama challenges this opinion: ‘The most you can do for her is to treat her with some nature of respect, and not allow your new knowledge of her to destroy what little dignity she has left.’

  While Half Moon Street was well received, it was Slaves and Obsession, published in the United States as Slaves of Obsession, that made a real impression in 2000. For years Anne’s
American fans had read Pitts and Monks set in London, the United Kingdom or Europe. Now they were finally rewarded by a book set largely in their country and during their own Civil War. ‘American readers loved it. They keep asking when Monk’s going to visit America again,’ said Don Maass in 2011.10

  Slaves and Obsession opens at a dinner party at the Alberton mansion in London. Lady Callandra has called Monk in to investigate the blackmail of her friend Daniel Alberton. As the evening proceeds, it becomes apparent that Alberton, an arms dealer, has promised the Confederate South a consignment of 6,000 muskets as they prepare for war. Alberton, hotly challenged by his abolitionist daughter, Merritt, explains his dilemma. He has made a promise, taken a deposit and his word is his honour.

  But honour is a dangerous thing in detective fiction. Alberton and his associates are found murdered, and Merritt is suspiciously missing with her Union lover, Lyman Breeland. Merritt’s mother appeals to Monk and Hester to follow the eloping couple to the United States and bring them back. On their trans-Atlantic voyage to Washington, Hester observes the departing immigrants:

  Many were looking to travel west beyond the war into the open plains, or even to the great Rocky Mountains. There they could find refuge for their religious beliefs, or wide lands where they could hack from the wilderness farms and homesteads they could not aspire to here.

  From Washington, the Monks follow the couple’s trail to the battlefield of Bull Run. Seeing young soldiers mortally wounded takes Hester back to the carnage of the Crimea. She tends a dying man for whom nursing seems redundant except as a comfort, ‘perhaps some kind of dignity, a shred of hope, an acknowledgement that he was still there, and his feelings mattered, urgent, and individual … the reward was in the doing, and in the hope.’ Monk watches, choked with emotion. ‘How did Hester keep her head, bear all the pain, the dreadful mutilation of bodies? She had strength beyond his power to imagine.’