The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  The first person hanged during this time was Urewera mill-worker William Fiori, who was convicted in February 1952 of killing his boss and boss’s wife, in order to steal money. He was officially described as ‘borderline-feeble-minded’. Prison authorities conducted a clever ruse. ‘On Thursday 13 March 1952, a notice on the walls inside the prison advertised that Kerridge Odeon was to sponsor a movie showing in the prison that evening. Most prisoners attended the rare event.’57

  While the prisoners watched their film, Fiori was moved from the isolation cells in the west wing to the opposite end of the prison’s east block, where the metal scaffolding of the gallows was erected. He was held briefly in cells there, until he was stripped of his prison clothes and dressed in canvas overalls and slippers. His arms and thighs were immobilized with heavy straps and he hobbled up the 17 steps to the gallows platform. Once he was positioned there, his ankles were tied, a white hood was put over his head and the noose was positioned around his neck.

  Prior to this he had been given the option of taking religious counsel before going to the gallows, and now he was given the opportunity to say a last word. At 8.03pm, the sheriff lowered his hand with the warrant of execution in it, as a signal to the hangman to pull the lever to the trap door.

  The next hangings began after Juliet had been in the prison for 11 months. Frederick Foster, aged 26, was hanged on 7 July 1955 for the shooting of his teenage ex-girlfriend in Auckland; Edward Te Whiu, aged 20, was executed on 18 August for killing of an elderly woman in Whangarei while burgling her house; Harvey Attwood, aged 34, was executed on 13 October for killing a friend after a drunken altercation in Te Anau; and Albert Black, aged 20, was hanged on 5 December for stabbing a romantic rival in the neck in Auckland.

  The stress on many members of the prison staff was immense. Prison Superintendent Horace Haywood is reputed to have burst into tears when the news came through that young Edward Te Whiu was to be hung. According to prison psychologist Don McKenzie, the execution of Te Whiu was a ‘terrible drain on Haywood’ and every compassionate person within earshot.

  The whole [Te Whiu] family [were] crying and shouting in the courtyard … I can particularly remember Te Whiu’s father with his big hat on. And his mother and all the carry-on, crying.58

  A depressed mood, an air of general despondency, preceded executions at Mt Eden prison. Before hangings, trial-runs were conducted with the gallows mechanism that included a sandbag attached to the rope. The sandbag, estimated to be the same weight as the prisoner, was dropped through the trapdoor in ghoulish preparation for the real thing. This happened every 24 hours for 14 days after the death sentence was confirmed. Initially, the steel trapdoor created a loud echoing crash through the prison. Efforts to muffle it were not entirely successful.

  On the evenings of the hangings ‘an expectant hush fell over the whole institution as the hour of seven approached’.59 The prison went into lock-down, and all prisoners other than those on special duties were secured in their cells. In advance of the hanging, prisoner peepholes were closed and an immense length of seagrass matting was rolled out the full east – west length of the prison to deaden the footsteps of prisoner and hanging party along the resounding stone corridors. After the appointed hour there was some banging on the doors from prisoners, but otherwise routine was restored until the next awful execution.

  Like the rest of the prisoners, Juliet felt, heard and waited for these events. ‘There were some pretty bad things that happened,’ she remembers.

  An experience you don’t ever want to have again is to be in a prison the night before they hang somebody … And they did, that’s something else again … the atmosphere in a place like that when you know they are going to hang someone … That’s pretty bad.60

  ‘No psychiatric treatment has been given to Juliet Hulme, the 15-year-old [sic] now in the Auckland Gaol serving a life sentence,’ the New Zealand Herald announced in December 1954, and that was how it remained.61 Juliet received almost no counselling while she was in prison. Mt Eden’s psychologist Don McKenzie was directed to make an assessment of Juliet soon after she arrived, and continued to visit:

  for quite a while, I don’t know how long, to see if I was insane or sane. I used to enjoy talking to him. Nice man. But I remember eventually him saying: ‘Look you know really I can’t keep this up any longer. You’re the sanest person, I’ve ever met.’ I did enjoy speaking to him, but it didn’t last.62

  McKenzie’s task was to assess Juliet’s mental state, and his conclusion seems to have been exactly that of the expert medical witness for the prosecution, Kenneth Stallworthy. Once her state of mind was deemed satisfactory, McKenzie’s task was completed and the interviews ceased.

  Juliet’s mainstay among the wardresses of the prison was Grace Powell, whose sewing room was a sanctuary. ‘We are making prisoners’ shirts,’ she wrote to Nancy Sutherland:

  It is pleasant work. By the time I leave here I’ll be able to make all Father’s shirts, Mother’s dresses, my own and some underwear. Maybe! I’ve made 4 pairs of brassieres since I’ve been here … Out of unbleached calico for us not satin but on the same sort of principle.63

  Grace Powell grew fond of Juliet and took an interest in her well-being. Many years later, when interviewed by Robert McCrum, she would say, ‘Juliet was quality. You couldn’t help but like her. I treated her like a daughter.’64 When Anne’s identity was revealed, Grace Powell sent her a book on roses and they corresponded until she died.

  Juliet hated being continually ‘grubby’, and was repulsed by the lice-infested hair of other prisoners. There was a dearth of regular showers, and medical and dental treatment was also scant. Juliet remembers when her wisdom teeth became impacted and abscessed. ‘It was a week before they got around to doing something about it. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink — I could hear the crack [when the abscess popped]. It was not a place where your [health was a priority].’65

  There were few distractions other than work. There were no games, exercise was brief and only on weekends, and there were no radios until an inmate had been there for a number of years. Juliet, however, found her métier in knitting, which she was allowed to do. ‘I am still knitting hard so I also understand about counting pennies,’ she wrote to Nancy. ‘I knit 3 times as fast as I earn. But I manage & I enjoy it.’66 Juliet worked with a book propped on her knee. She sent Nancy a picture of a red jersey she was knitting. ‘I’ve done four more since, nearly finished a fifth, started well on a sixth and got a seventh planned. I knit and read at the same time.’67

  CHAPTER NINE

  I

  In 2004, an email from Meg Davis arrived in Joe Blades’s office at Ballantine in New York. ‘Anne just rang me,’ she explained, ‘she’s seen the bound galleys and the dedication [for Long Spoon Lane] is missing … It should read: In memory of Mother H Marion Perry with gratitude 30th January, 1912 – 19th January, 2004.’1 These words marked the end of an arduous and heartbreaking time for Anne. After Marion’s stroke, Anne visited her in the nursing home in Invergordon four times a week.

  I used to go Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and I only failed if I was away on business … I always took her the nicest flowers, or the raspberries or the grapes or something, and I would sit and talk to her and she could understand but she couldn’t respond. I hated that … I hated even the smell of the place.2

  Marion’s face would light up when Anne arrived, but towards the end she was often asleep through the entire visit ‘and didn’t know I’d been, but I knew I’d been’. It was a one-and-a-half hour round trip, which Anne did, in spite of her daunting schedule, for nearly two years. Elizabeth, her secretary, visited, occasionally Meg MacDonald, and Jonathan too, although not as often as his sister. As Anne says, ‘Your daughter’s a daughter for all of your life.’3

  She became Marion’s mainstay, and when her mother died, something important to Anne died with her. ‘I miss her badly. I still find the best rose in the garden and then thin
k, with a pang, that I can’t take [it] to her.’4 In a life marred by turbulence and tragedy, Anne and Marion had found peace. They accepted one another’s limitations and renounced any thought of blame. The closest Anne has ever come to recrimination was a general comment she made in a conversation on parenting. She was talking about leniency and punishment.

  At what point does forgiveness turn into enablement and complicity with the person in doing [the wrong thing] … what you have said in words is ‘this is wrong and you must stop’, but what you have said in action is ‘there isn’t any price to it’ … It takes an event of some sort to make you realize ‘this is not what I want to do’. Then I think you do have the right to turn to the person who could have stopped it and say: ‘You let me go on doing that; you watched me walk off the brink of destruction; you watched me go right over the edge and you never said anything. You didn’t care enough, you wanted your peace and comfort and no difficulties, and you let me do that.’5

  No one will know whether Anne ever had this conversation with Marion, or whether her visits were something deeper — an expiation of guilt or an expression of repentance. Certainly Anne had come to understand the value to a daughter of a mother’s life, and the cost of taking it.

  The Shifting Tide, released in 2004, was the first Monk book Jonathan worked on with Anne. He was becoming more a part of her everyday life, helping her with research, then often cooking them both a midday meal. His office at Anne’s became a repository for books about Victorian England — Henry Mayhew’s London Labour & the London Poor, Lynn McDonald’s Collected Works of Florence Nightingale and her letters from the Crimean War, Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, Benita Cullingford’s British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeps, the London Encyclopedia. He and Anne decided that Monk needed a change of scene and a new revenue source after his patroness, Lady Callandra Daviot, had fallen in love with Dr Kristian Beck and was planning to marry and move to Vienna.

  ‘Why don’t we put him looking after the longest street in London, which is the Thames,’ Jonathan suggested to Anne. ‘In fact, the first police force formed in England was the River Police and they pre-date Robert Peel’s Bobbies, or the Peelers, by about twenty or thirty years.’6 In The Shifting Tide Monk moves from the streets of London to the tidal Thames, where the Maude Idris, loaded with ‘ebony, spices, and fourteen first-grade tusks of ivory’, has just arrived from Zanzibar.

  When the precious tusks are found to be missing and the sailor guarding them dead with his head bashed in, Monk is charged with recovering the prized cargo and apprehending the murderer. The back-story to this brackish tale of intrigue is the progress of the paupers’ hospital that Hester has established for women who are destitute and, as so often in Victorian England, prostitutes. It runs on charitable donations and the philanthropic labour of well-placed women looking for a mission in life, like Margaret Ballinger and Claudine Burroughs. Hester works relentlessly, ‘her face exhausted with days and nights of snatched sleep’.

  While Hester is washing down the murdered body of Ruth Clark, she finds the horrifying signs of bubonic plague. This unhappy woman is the harbinger of catastrophic Black Death. Where could the disease have come from other than Africa — and what link does it have to the Maude Idris? The hospital is immediately quarantined. ‘No one can leave … at any time or for any reason,’ Hester explains to the patients and staff. ‘Whatever happens, we cannot allow the disease to spread. In the fourteenth century it killed nearly half of Europe.’ So no one can escape, and the clinic is patrolled by men with pit-bull terriers. Powerless, Hester must wait and watch as people succumb to the disease and die an agonizing death.

  In a novel released at last from plotting the unmasking of Monk’s identity, suspense is brilliantly maintained. The apocalyptic threat of the Black Death tests values and pushes the main characters to the brink. When a whole continent is threatened with extinction, what is the value of saving one life from the gallows, thinks Rathbone. ‘Then he knew that in its own way, it was the shred of sanity they had to cling to. It was one thing that perhaps was within his power, and in that they could hold onto reason, and hope.’

  Rathbone decides that it is Margaret Ballinger rather than Hester whom he loves. Hester finally emerges triumphant from the hospital quarantine, but not without witnessing the sad end of Mercy, a woman torn between family ties and the need to save the world.

  Slowly, Hester … bent to her knees. She had prayed often for the dead … but before now it had been for the comfort of those remaining. This time it was for Mercy, and it was directed to no listener except that divine power who judges and forgives the souls of men.

  The reviews were rapturous, especially about the evocation of setting. ‘The images of Victorian London which she creates are so rich and thick you could almost grab them by the handful and squeeze out the drops. Perry keeps the reader guessing and puzzling right from the start,’ wrote the critic for the Yorkshire Evening Post. As always, said Publishers Weekly, ‘Perry uses her characters and story to comment on ethical issues that remain as relevant today as they were in Victorian times. Expect another bestseller.’ The New York Times wrote: ‘she doesn’t paint quaint pictures of a distant time; she projects herself into a living moment in the past, opens her eyes and describes what she sees … As the sailor says, “River’s full o’ tales”, and Perry knows how to bring them to life.’7

  From the response it seemed that Monk had made a successful transition to a new territory in London. In the next Monk, Dark Assassin, his role becomes professional as he takes over the role of head of the River Police from the inspiring Inspector Durban, who has been burnt to death in a shipboard fire. Anne’s cat — a namesake and identical down to a whisker — makes a guest appearance at Monk’s new headquarters.

  Humphrey, the station cat, a large white animal with a ginger tail, was provided with a basket by the stove and as much milk as he could drink. Mice were his affair to catch for himself, which he did whenever he could be bothered, or nobody had fed him with other titbits.

  At dusk, while Monk is out in a boat on the river with his men, they look up at a distant bridge. In the half-light they see a young man and woman plunge into the water struggling — or was it struggling? Was one trying to stop the other falling or jumping, or was this a murder that accidentally took both victim and perpetrator into the inky waters of the Thames?

  Dark Assassin is a tale of sinister big-business intrigue around the construction of London’s sewers. There are no labour laws to protect navy workers from the cruel conditions or from the terrible digging machines that bite and scour massive tunnels under the city, threatening fatal flooding from underground streams, gas explosions, and massive cave-ins.

  Monk must find his place in a constabulary that loved its dead boss. He must earn trust and respect while identifying and defeating his opponents. To solve this corporate crime he enlists the assistance of Scuff, a river urchin who knows the Thames’s ugly undercurrents, and his old opponent, Runcorn. When Scuff is shot by a professional assassin, a devastated Monk opens up to a man transformed — Runcorn. ‘There was a sudden gentleness in Runcorn’s face. Monk was beginning to realize how much he had changed in the last two years.’ The dénouement involves a thrilling multi-character chase through the sewer tunnels.

  Dark Assassin made the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Booksense bestseller lists and was nominated for a prestigious Macavity Award in 2007. The fine reviews included one from Jeffery Deaver, who wrote: ‘Dark Assassin is brilliant: that rare blend of novel that’s a page-turning thriller yet literary … [it] continues Anne Perry’s peerless tradition of blending compelling plotting with superbly realized human emotion and exquisite period detail.’ Such praise was enormously rewarding, as were the increasing number of references, in reviews, to the literary quality of her writing. The near-miss on the Macavity Award, though disappointing, also testified to this. But still she longed to write historical novels that were not part
of a crime series. Recognizing this, Meg did some research and discovered that little fiction had been written about the Byzantine Empire. ‘I thought that sensually, and with the intrigue, it was right up Anne’s street.’8

  Meg began making preparations for a trip. ‘I’ve been talking to Anne about our meeting at the end of the year,’ she wrote to Don Maass in August 2004.

  As for the venue, how would you feel about Constantinople? This is kind of tough on you because it’s a long way, but I think if we’re seriously going to sit down and develop a series set there, we should really see the place. I’m presuming you haven’t been. I haven’t. Anne has and says it’s marvelous … Also, I gather Anne’s planning to bring Jonathan.’9

  By September her plans were advancing. She got back to Don with some reasonable prices for hotels and extremely cheap flights, because nobody else seemed to want to go there. Earlier, she had had some qualms. ‘It’s not far from a couple of war zones and it’s a very long journey for you, so maybe this is really a bad idea. And I don’t speak much Turkish.’10 The other option was Venice — also one of the theatres of the Byzantine Empire for the story they were hatching — but it was deathly cold at that time of year. The trip finally took place towards the end of 2004, and Jonathan recalls a ‘marvellous few days’ exploring the Greek Orthodox sectors of an ancient city that was once the centre of the Christian world. The magnificent Hagia Sophia, with its glowing mosaics, was breathtaking as were, in a quieter way, the tiny churches off the tourist track, with their richly painted, intimate icons that have been the focus of devotion for hundreds of years.