The Search for Anne Perry

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Every effort has been made to identify the photographers of images contained in personal collections. If a photographer has not been identified, please contact the publisher with details, and acknowledgement will be made in any reprint or future edition of this work.

DEDICATION

For Suzanne Vincent Marshall

&

thank you to my mother

Patricia Drayton, an old girl of CGHS,

whose special interest in this story helped to make it happen

&

Meg Davis and Kate Stone,

whose generosity and intelligence

have been unfailing.

The rest is for and about Anne Perry.

CONTENTS

Cover

Author’s note

Dedication

Prelude

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Picture Section

Postscript

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

PRELUDE

Meg hurried back from lunch. It was Thursday afternoon and the next day was her last in the office for two weeks. The weather was warming, and she and her partner, Pim, were going to Wales for their summer holiday. The lunch break had been a chance for them to quickly buy some lamps for their new home together. The day was hot and the streets fumy and noisy, with the hum of London traffic intermittently punctured by screeching sirens. The MBA Literary Agents Ltd office, on the corner of Fitzroy and Warren streets, was in a skinny, grey-brick building with white facings, a brown door with a large brass door handle, and a solid black iron railing. Butted against it on one side was a garish little coffee shop, and above the brown door long, thin windows were stacked in pairs; in all, it was three storeys high with a tiny flat on top.

The office was open-plan, so coming through the door was to become immersed in the clack of keyboards, the screech and whirr of the fax machine, the ringing of telephones, and the relentless buzz of other people’s conversations.

As Meg sat down at her desk, Sophie Gorell Barnes told her that a journalist from New Zealand had rung and would call back. Although this was odd — agents usually chased journalists — Meg gave it little more thought.

Two hours later, her telephone rang again. The woman on the end introduced herself as Lin Ferguson. Surprised to learn that Meg knew nothing about the Parker–Hulme case, she proceeded to tell her about two teenage girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, who had murdered the former girl’s mother in Christchurch in 1954. Then she said breathlessly, ‘And, I think Juliet Hulme is your client, Anne Perry.’

Meg exploded with laughter. It was too ridiculous for words. How could Juliet Hulme possibly be her author of 20 bestselling books, the matronly, ‘matching bag and shoes’ 55-year-old Anne Perry? Finally she recovered enough to say, ‘Come off it — I think you’ve got the wrong woman.’

‘Yeah. I guess I must have. Never mind,’ came a crestfallen voice from the other end, and the line went dead.

Meg recounted the conversation to everyone else in the office, and they all had a ‘fantastic laugh about the whole thing’.

‘It’s incredible,’ Meg gasped.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Sophie, laughing. ‘If you had really committed murder … you’d become Jane Asher and be, like, queen of cakes. You’d become Delia Smith and be the doyenne of cuisine. You wouldn’t go and write grisly Victorian murder mysteries.’ The next morning, 29 July 1994, the telephone rang again and it was Lin Ferguson.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I think it is Anne, and we’re going to publish the story in the Sunday papers.’

‘Well, you think you’re going to, but you’re going to have an injunction in five minutes, so just stay by the phone.’ A furious Meg decided to ring Anne immediately, then their lawyer.

‘Look, I’m really sorry to bother you,’ she began her telephone call to Anne. ‘You know how I have to ask you if we’re going to involve a lawyer? I think we’re going to need to do that.’ She quickly outlined the ‘ridiculous story’ that Lin Ferguson had told her. ‘Can you believe it? There’s a film being made about this murder, and some people have got hold of this crazy idea that it’s you … But we’re going to get an injunction.’

Meg’s words hit Anne Perry like the first wave of an atomic explosion. She felt physically sick. It had happened at last, the one thing in the world she feared the most. For a while she was almost senseless, listening but not hearing, the room receding and her head pounding like a drum. ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t … You can’t refute it — because it’s true.’

There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line. ‘I’m going to phone you back from a more private phone. I’m going to call you back in ten minutes.’

Ruth Needham, glancing up from her desk and noticing the expression on Meg’s face, shot off to Diana Tyler’s cupboard, poured a large Scotch and brought it back for her. Meg emptied the glass, steadied her nerves, then climbed the narrow staircase to the hush of MBA’s attic flat to ring Anne at her home in Portmahomack, in the Highlands of north-eastern Scotland.

‘OK, I still love you. Now, you have to tell me about this.’ And so for the first time they had a proper conversation about Anne’s past, and things began to fall into place. The gaps in Anne’s life that Meg had wondered about, the late teenage years that evaporated in sickness, the furtive glossing-over of certain matters, the way Anne had always made questions disappear as if by sleight of hand — all this Meg had put down to Anne being Anne, but now she realized that it meant a whole lot more. Collecting herself, she began to strategize.

‘What we need is a lawyer to manage the press for us. This is going to be big and we need expert advice.’ She told Anne to sit tight and talk only to her mother and her closest friend, Meg MacDonald. As soon as she got off the telephone, Meg rang their lawyer, who immediately gave her the contact details for Lynne Kirwin, a publicity agent who would help limit the media fallout.

Lynne Kirwin recommended a plan that she hoped would contain things and reduce the trauma for Anne. ‘Anne will have to do an interview for the [Daily] Telegraph, [as that’s] the paper in the UK where other journalists get their facts from. We’ll have one interview there telling the whole story, and Anne doesn’t need to talk to anyone else — we’ll just kill it dead right there.’¹

In this ‘huge crisis’, should Meg continue with her holiday plans to Wales, or cancel everything and go up to Portmahomack with a ‘shotgun picking off journalists and fielding phone calls’?² Finally, she decided to trust Lynne’s reassurances and go to Wales. If she had realized what was going to happen, she might well have changed her mind. As it was, Anne rang her every day she was away. Meg and Pim spent their first week at a bed-and-breakfast in an old farmhouse. There was only one public telephone, in the hall, and the good-natured staff would serve Meg’s cooked breakfast there, while she stood with the receiver in one hand and a fork in the other.

Anne was terrified she would lose everything — her friends, her career, her income and her house. Would it be a repeat of the past, with the same vilification? ‘Am I never to be forgiven?’³ She worried about her brother, Jonathan Hulme, and about the impact on his wife and young children. She feared, too, that the ordeal of having the past raked up again would kill her mother, now known as Marion Perry, who was then 82 years old and in poor health and living a kilometre or so away at Arn Gate Cottage. But when Anne went to tell her mother the news, Marion showed herself to be stronger than anyone could have imagined; she stood by her daughter in steely fashion. There was something cool, self-assured and calculating about Marion. In her day, her coiffed hair, perfect presentation and glamorous looks had hushed party conversation and stopped men mid-stride. Even in old age, something of the coquettish grace and elegance survived. She was clever at reading people, and past humiliation and social disgrace had made her more astute and determined not to give up the life she and her daughter had rebuilt. ‘There’s no place for tears. If there’s any crying, it’s to be done much later,’ she instructed Anne, and sent her back to her semi-restored stone barn ‘to draw up a list of friends and … do battle’.⁴ Anne, who would not remember much of what she did during this time, sat down and worked out the people she should see in person, and those she must telephone.

Afterwards she had a conversation which remains vivid in her memory, and which she describes as the hardest thing she has ever done. She rang her friend and contemporary Peggy D’Inverno, proprietor of the village post office and general store, and asked her to come to the house. Anne told her that she and another schoolgirl had killed a woman in New Zealand in 1954, and that it would be all over the newspapers in the morning. This was the first time in 40 years that she had told her secret to anyone beyond her most intimate associates.

That evening she went to see the minister of her local Mormon Church in Invergordon and told him everything. She wept uncontrollably. They prayed together, and the minister predicted that she ‘would not lose a single friend’.⁵ Her faith was a consolation, but the task ahead was daunting. She had got to know people during her five years in the quiet provincial backwater of Portmahomack. How would they feel about her now? If they felt uncomfortable about her living in the village, she resolved to leave.

On 31 July, the story broke in the Sunday News in New Zealand, under the headline: ‘Murder She Wrote! Best-Selling British Author’s Grisly Kiwi Past Revealed’. Anne opened her curtains the morning after to see that ‘her driveway was a sea of journalists from Australia and New Zealand, who had just got on the first plane [to the United Kingdom] and were now pointing with huge telephoto lenses’, and that television crews were wandering over her property.⁶ Day and night the telephone ran hot with tabloid journalists soliciting her comment. One journalist who woke her swore ‘on the life of his child’ that he would not send the story out until it was approved, all the while faxing the article to his newspaper.

Anne would spend the next three days ringing the people on her list — family, friends and business associates. She would put long-distance calls through to the United States: to her editor, Leona Nevler; her New York book agent, Don Maass; her film and television agent in Hollywood, Ken Sherman; and her publicist, Kim Hovey. She had no idea how any of them would react, and she feared the worst.

CHAPTER ONE

I

To a Londoner, Darsham is unforgivably remote, bypassed even by the area’s main road, the A12. Its redemption is the East Suffolk railway line, which clatters across the county’s infinitely flat stretches of farmland, linking the ports of Ipswich and Lowestoft. The journey from London takes two trains and too long. The connection at Ipswich is intermittent; the antiquated carriages baking under brilliant blue skies in summer, and in winter breathing draughts of freezing air that whip ankles, knees and necks. Darsham Station is a mile from the village. In cold and rain, it is a damp, dreary trip between fallow fields; in the warmth, it is a delight of soft, sweet air and narrow country lanes edged with wild flowers and lush hedgerows.

This is an ancient part of England, with a history so old it stretches back to the margins of memory, where myth and legend merge with fact. Just a little way down the East Suffolk line, near Woodbridge, are the mounds that mark the grave sites of Sutton Hoo. Here, an early medieval Anglo-Saxon king, believed to be Rædwald — the legendary leader of East Anglia who died in about 624 — was buried in a ship that was intended to carry his immortal soul to its rest. Mounds mean something more in Suffolk, and so does the soil that has sustained human habitation for 700,000 years. Who knows what other ancient treasures are buried in the earth around Darsham? Whatever the answer, it has certainly proved a fertile site for the imagination.

The area has also been a rich hunting ground, especially in the eighteenth century, when game graced banquet tables and killing it was an aristocratic sport. There are reminders of the animals of the hunt in the village still. The name Darsham comes from the words ‘Deores Ham’ (home of the deer), and the local pub is The Fox. Of the half-dozen surrounding agricultural properties, White House Farm, with its home dating back to 1750, is probably the most illustrious. It has changed hands just a few times over the centuries. In the village there is a shop, a post office, a school, some tradesmen, a few small businesses (including a pottery and a tile factory), and two ghosts.

This is a modest ghost population for such an old place. One, known as Mandy, dances terrifying country jigs; the other, dubbed the Window Dweller, is believed to be a manifestation of the harrowed soul at Thomas Farriner’s bakery who inadvertently lit the Great Fire of London in 1666. There have been nocturnal sightings of the Window Dweller since the seventeenth century, when its smoky presence was detected against the glorious stained-glass window of All Saints Church.

It was in Darsham, in the far reaches of Suffolk just a few miles from the North Sea coast, that Anne Perry decided to bury herself on her return to England in 1972. It was an escape but also a planting of her imagination in home soil. For nearly five years she had lived in Los Angeles, that glitter city with its lights, billboards, huge buildings and cosmopolitan buzz. Although she had gone there to find herself and realize a dream, it had proved a fruitless search. She had moved from job to job, never settling, never finding her place. Then, almost at the same time as she lost her job, she learned of her stepfather Bill’s precarious health.

When she first went to California in January 1967, it was to take up a position as nanny with a family in Moraga outside Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.¹ She arrived to find them in turmoil. The wife, who had died suddenly, had ‘lain on the linoleum floor of the family room for hours … before they bothered to notice she was dead’.² The children, three sons aged eight, five and three, were unhappy and obstructive, and Anne felt uncomfortable, alone and physically isolated. ‘We were miles away from any public transport. I was totally islanded in a pretty grim situation.’³ She found her escape with the neighbours, Ray and Chlo Barnes, a couple whose faith in the Mormon Church was unshakeable. They were kind and nurturing when Anne was vulnerable and depressed. For years she had been considering alternative religions, and options within Christianity, but nothing fitted, or filled the gap that, if she focused on it, was an all-consuming abyss. This new faith was simple enough, but it answered everything. ‘Mormons believe we are all children of God, and that the fall from perfection is part of life.’⁴ Imperfection was not aberrant, emanating from something inherently evil, but everyday and ordinary.

She did, however, stumble over the Mormon version of Creation. Ray Barnes told her to pray about it. ‘He said, Don’t try to argue about Creation or whatever — ask God. When I woke up in the morning, the room was full of light.’⁵ This epiphany was beautiful and reassuring, and the threshold of a new beginning. The Mormon Church gave Anne permission to be normal. It was her true release from prison. She could be a child of God if she were a Latter-Day Saint, so she became one.

But there remained a huge hurdle: she would have to tell the officiating pastor about her past. How would he respond? Would she be rejected? What difference would it make to the way they treated her? She felt stripped bare again, ugly and exposed. What he told her, though, became seared in her brain: her sins could be ‘washed out of the Book of Remembrance in Heaven’. This is how she remembered it much later for Robert McCrum: ‘If you have something you [are] ashamed of, you want it washed away, and if you repent, it can be.’⁶

Forgiveness and salvation were the Mormon Church’s big-picture promises; the fine print involved no smoking, no imbibing of alcohol, tea or coffee, 10 per cent tithing, the wearing of very strait-laced clothes and passion-killing underwear called ‘garments’ day and night, and polygamy. To Anne, who had lived a restricted life, these matters seemed insignificant. She rapidly became enmeshed in the community of the Church; its strict structure became hers. There were regular social functions, special days of remembrance, fasting once a month, plus a marathon three-hour church service on Sunday (their day of rest). The drab life she had lived as a nanny began to drift into the background. Within a year, however, she bade a sad farewell to the Barneses, who had become like a second family, and relocated to Los Angeles. They promised to keep in touch, and did so.

Representatives from the massive Mormon Temple on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood were there to meet Anne when she arrived. She took a ‘Beverly Hills apartment on the wrong side of the tracks in a street lined with jacarandas’, and become a limousine dispatcher and an insurance underwriter. No job was ever more than the means to an end and an income, however.⁷ Although living became a purpose in itself, a voice in her head kept nagging her to become a writer. But her frenetic life gave her neither the time nor the opportunity. So when she heard that her stepfather, Bill, was seriously ill she felt called to go home, not just to support her mother, but also because she hoped to silence the voice.

When Anne arrived back in England she initially stayed with Marion and Bill at Watford, but then unexpectedly she found herself able to purchase a property. Her father, Henry Hulme, now Chief of Nuclear Research at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, gave her a lump sum of £8,500, along with a monthly allowance of £100. With this money she bought a rundown abode in Darsham, made up of two small farmworkers’ homes ‘knocked together and in a row of five or six tiny terrace houses called Fox Cottages’.⁸

Stolid, steady Darsham was cultural whiplash after Los Angeles. Her winterless Californian life was swapped for four distinct seasons, at least one of which brought driving wind, rain and sometimes snow to a rustic residence that never completely excluded the weather. The thick walls were damp and full of holes, the plumbing and wiring precarious, there were no stairs, mice rustled and squeaked audibly in the thatched roof, and you could send a cricket ball from one corner of the room to the other simply by placing it on the floor — it would be ‘travelling at quite a speed by the time it got diagonally across’.⁹ She camped on-site for months, spending her nights in a sleeping bag and doing most of the renovations herself. Fox Cottages was far from perfect, but it was hers, and so was the meagre unearned living that accompanied it.

Los Angeles had enchanted Anne as a child, and later she had loved it for its gaiety, its licence, its anonymity — and for its crazy, irrational investment in the American dream — but it was not conducive to writing. In five years she had composed just a few short pieces from ideas that had never taken root. In Darsham she could write for the best part of the day and do part-time and occasional work to eke out her allowance. This, she felt, was her last chance, and she was determined to take it.

Ironically, for someone who treasured anonymity, Anne was a conspicuous newcomer in this out-of-the-way place. A globe-trotting ex-Londoner, with precise upper-class diction and arresting good looks, she stood out in Darsham. At 34, she could turn heads with her elegant, long-legged gait and thick, rich, shoulder-length auburn hair. Her features, if not refined enough to be those of a great beauty, were made inconsequential by her eyes. Grey-blue, aquamarine, they changed in colour like the sea, and they could pierce a person with their astuteness while remaining fathomless.

And then there was her manner. Trivial conversations either made her glaze over or try too hard to appear interested. On the other hand, she was apt to turn a casual chat into a high-flying philosophical discussion. Intense, intelligent and covetous of brilliant facts, she stashed away historical information and aphorisms to bring out later in clever conversation. She was widely read, with a disarming propensity to quote from memory unnaturally long swathes of GK Chesterton, James Elroy Flecker, Rupert Brooke and Shakespeare. Her capacity to judge the moment and the audience was not always perfect, though.

If Anne Perry was a little aloof, sometimes distant even, away in her imagination, she was nonetheless sincere. But it was a larger-than-life sincerity, bigger than any normal situation required. If she had shared more of herself with people, they would have seen that her earnestness was consciously adopted and was galvanized by pain.

There was something fleet of foot and fearful about her. She never talked about her past or opened up about the stockpile of childhood memories that form such an important part of friendship. A direct question about her background could freeze her like a deer, before she bolted under the cover of some vague response. She was more than just different; she was downright mysterious. But this was accepted.

Perhaps Anne Perry might have been more of a known quantity if she had not been a Mormon in traditionally Church of England Darsham. She arrived in the village with her community of Latter-Day Saints close by. In fact, they lived and worshipped at Lowestoft, just a few miles up the East Suffolk line. And the Mormon Church supported Anne again when she moved to Darsham: living proof that every Mormon soul counted.

In fact, the Mormon Church in East Anglia had been anxiously counting souls since its shaky beginnings in the 1840s, when its progenitor and great patriarch, Thomas Price Smith — a short, stocky, zealous man who walked 112 kilometres between villages and slept rough in all weathers in barns and under trees — began spreading the word. He was a fervent campaigner for God, but God was just as ambitious for him.

Thomas Smith climbed both the earthly and the sectarian ladders of success, beginning as a poor farm labourer earning just 10s to £1 a week, and finishing as a wealthy and cherished father of the Mormon Church in Utah. After a short time, in his early twenties, as a labourer in Norfolk, Smith became a preacher in the Wesleyan Church. Not long after his wife died in 1835, he broke away from the Wesleyans, taking 550 members of the congregation with him to form the United Brethren. In 1840 he encountered the Church of the Latter-Day Saints and led enormous numbers of the United Brethren to convert to Mormonism.

This may seem an unbroken, almost corporate, rise to glory, but it was not without its setbacks. As Ron Larter has written in his biography of Smith, his ‘effort to take the restored gospel to virgin grounds … was beset with personal challenges, physical suffering and emotional anguish’. His wife died, as did some of his children, and there was an unsettling degree of local hatred towards this upstart sect. The progress of Smith’s church was jealously watched by the ministers of other denominations. He was accused of being a false prophet, a fake turned flock-rustler, a stealer of souls. There was suspicion and hostility, too, from other laities. Crusading zealots from ‘true churches’ took delight in disturbing the Mormon peace. ‘Meetings were sometimes disrupted with banging, bell ringing, rattling tin kettles, jeering and shouting. Stones were thrown at the door of … meeting places and small riots rose up.’¹⁰

But the Saints marched on, and so did Thomas Smith, to Utah in 1851. It is out of this history that the Mormon Church at Lowestoft sprang. And it was here that Anne found sanctuary and a spiritual home.

The port and resort town of Lowestoft is the easternmost point in the United Kingdom. Its name, tempered over time, comes originally from marauding Vikings, for whom this coast was their first sight of land. And while the sea has brought foes, it has also nurtured livelihoods. The fishing industry was a huge employer, and, even after those jobs declined, its sandy beaches brought tourists; and beneath its waters, in the seabed, was the hidden treasure of North Sea oil.

However, it was not fishing, tourism or oil, but the naval base that brought Invergordon-born Meg MacDonald to Lowestoft. She was following her husband, and the journey — first to Devon, then to the open sunlit lowlands of Suffolk — was something of an escape from the grey, dour intensity of the Scottish Highlands, her adventure having begun when she left her working-class family home at the age of 17. Meg was pretty, with blonde hair and large blue eyes, and had a generous, forthright personality that was appealing and could be charismatic.

In spite of a hole in her heart and other congenital health problems, she married young and had five children in quick succession. But the sudden, unexplained death of her third child, Peter, when he was just a few months old, tore her apart. She could not cope with the cruelty of it, and her husband had no answers. They fought, argued and became strangers. Meg MacDonald would find the answers she sought in the beliefs of the Mormon Church, and there she met Anne. In many respects they could not have been more different, yet they shared an essential need to cope with grief, and to find a friend.

Anne wrote relentlessly. It was something she felt compelled to do, and the process so consumed her and filled her imagination that she barely noticed the days and the seasons roll by. She wrote manuscript after manuscript. There was one that recreated early medieval England using Arthurian legend; there were stories about the Crusades, the English Civil War, the French Revolution; there was a science-fiction thriller, and an allegorical fantasy that kept shape-shifting in various incarnations between her head and the page.

This last was a religious allegory about the journey of the spirit. She forced it into the fantasy genre, but because it was really a philosophical, emblematic tract containing the ethos and beliefs of the Mormon Church, it refused to gel as a piece of fiction. In fact, nothing gelled. She received one rejection slip after another. Each time a publisher’s letter arrived thanking her for sending them her manuscript and regretfully declining it, the disappointment was numbing. She would telephone her mother and stepfather for consolation.

The other thing that kept her going was her faith. Deeply embedded in Mormonism is the buttressing puritan belief that good things will come to those who work for them, and that rewards will materialize in God’s good time. So she worked on. Two things gave God a helping hand, or perhaps they were part of His mysterious plan. A repeated criticism from publishers was Anne’s lack of a good plot. The writing was rich and sensual, and the characters often evocative and convincing, but the plots were flabby, ill-defined and endless. The solution, which came from her stepfather, was astonishingly simple: ‘Why don’t you write a murder mystery set in the time of Jack the Ripper?’

The Ripper story had fascinated people the world over since 1888 with its entrée into the macabre mind of a murderer and the compulsions of serial killing — and the fact that the identity of the killer remained undiscovered. Then there was the potential for nineteenth-century costuming, the Victorian detail and the romantic allure of the period: it was a perfect fit for a history buff like Anne. But it was the plot-trimming strictures of the detective form that Bill recommended which would give crucial definition and shape to her writing.

Had she not been in tiny Darsham, Anne might have missed the second thing that changed her life. Writing was isolating her, but her absent-minded detachment from ordinary village life was no mystery for Maggie Elliot, a writer who had moved in next door. She understood the loneliness, the dedication it took to write, and the deep depression that followed rejection. She made a suggestion. Anne had been making her own approaches to publishers, but Maggie knew of a very good literary agency in London. Why didn’t she approach them? So, in late January 1977, Anne penned her first letter to Diana Tyler, the senior partner of MBA Literary Agents Ltd:

I enclose herewith the manuscript of a science-fiction/thriller novel which I hope you will consider handling on my behalf. I have your name from Maggie Elliot, who is my next-door neighbour; I believe she is writing to you under separate cover. I look forward to hearing from you favourably, but if you are unable to handle it, please return it to me at the above address.¹¹

She was accustomed to disappointment and did not expect much. The answer that came back was mildly reassuring, her first ray of hope. Under instruction from Diana Tyler, Anne’s case was picked up by Canadian-born Janet Freer, a young writer who was making ends meet by doing agency work. ‘Let me say at the outset that I do think it needs cutting,’ Janet wrote back:

but on the other hand, I enjoyed it and feel that it is certainly publishable. I am very much in two minds as to whether it would go better as a thriller or a Science Fiction novel. Instinctively, I feel it is more a thriller, because the Science Fiction element isn’t really all that strong.¹²

Janet Freer resolved to send Anne’s manuscript to Elizabeth M Walter, the Crime Club editor at Collins.

Hopeful now of making progress, Anne worked on and completed a new project that was the incarnation of Bill’s good advice. The relationship with MBA was still new and formal. ‘Dear Mrs Tyler,’ Anne wrote on 1 June 1977, ‘I enclose the manuscript of another thriller, this time late Victorian, with quite a bit of romance in it. I hope you will also feel able to handle this.’¹³ MBA liked it and was quick to move. Janet Freer telephoned Anne, full of positive comments. ‘Dear Ms Freer,’ Anne wrote in response, ‘Thank you for your telephone call today, it encouraged me greatly and I feel like working hard again.’¹⁴

This second manuscript that Anne Perry submitted to MBA was The Cater Street Hangman. ‘I don’t have a character unless I have a face for them,’ Anne has said.¹⁵ She might almost have been looking in a full-length mirror when she found the face and physical appearance of Charlotte Ellison. In Charlotte’s long auburn hair, grey-blue eyes, pale skin, tall statuesque figure, and ample and often proudly displayed bust there is more than something of a match for Anne.

Thomas Pitt is another matter. On his visits to the home of the upper-class Ellison family in Cater Street, Charlotte eyes him sideways with the same contempt Anne might well have felt. ‘He came into the morning room, filling the doorway, coat flapping, hair untidy as always. His affability irritated Charlotte almost beyond bearing.’ His tatty scarf is wound once too often around his neck, and his pockets bulge with a provision kit of essential detection hardware that includes a length of string and two marbles. Pitt is from the wrong side of the tracks, or rather the estate, because his father is a gamekeeper — and one unjustly accused of poaching estate game and deported to Australia.

This history provides Pitt with two things: a posh accent because he has been educated with the son of the house, and a drive to right injustice. It was an ideal combination, perhaps, for an ambitious working-class man in a late Victorian English police force that was changing from a hierarchy dictated by nepotism and privilege to a professional organization.

Anne had her two main characters, and she would set her story in London and build her plot around a murder within a family. The family is Charlotte Ellison’s, and the victim is her older sister, Sarah. The Ellison household is ruled over by Charlotte’s papa, Edward, a true Victorian patriarch. She can steal only glimpses of the newspaper, because it is considered inappropriate reading for a young lady. This means she must either flout the house rules by appealing to Dominic, Sarah’s husband, or discreetly slip into Maddock’s pantry and read the newspaper there.

The news, as always, is terrible. It is 20 April 1881 and Benjamin Disraeli has just died: ‘Her first thought was to wonder how Mr. Gladstone felt. Did he feel any sense of loss? Was a great enemy as much a part of a man’s life as a great friend? Surely it must be. It must be the cross thread in the fabric of emotions.’ Anne Perry opens with this powerful reflection on friends and enemies, and continues throughout the novel to make searching and profound comments about human behaviour. She explores power and sexual inequality, incisively giving the most misogynistic lines to the women who police patriarchal boundaries. Class difference and poverty, and lack of education and opportunity are considered, too. She shows how greed and callousness may cause human deprivation, but also how this is maintained by those who turn their backs or live in unfeeling ignorance.

Anne is most cuttingly critical, however, of the hypocrisy of established religion. There are few characters more abhorrent than the pompous Reverend Prebble, who is called on to minister to grief-stricken friends and family after a series of apparently random garrottings of young women whose flesh and clothes are ripped in a sexually perverse manner. Prebble, who believes that women and sexuality are evil, is callous and inhumane. His poor wife, Martha, convinced by his fundamentalist reading of Genesis, is filled with self-loathing and hatred.

Initially, the murderer selects victims from the downstairs staff, then from among the daughters of gentry, including Sarah. Her death catapults the Ellisons into a new world of revelation and suspicion. Pitt’s investigations uncover secrets that will leave no one unscarred. It is an agonizing process, and Pitt feels for the family.

In conducting his interviews, he finds himself increasingly attracted to the independent and forthright Charlotte, who is waking up from a protracted infatuation with her brother-in-law, Dominic. Suddenly Charlotte finds herself suspecting Dominic and even her father of her sister’s murder. At first she openly despises Pitt, but she comes to realize that his slovenly working-class persona is only superficial, and that it is the person inside who counts. This epiphany is the beginning of her maturing as a character. And at the end of the novel she agrees to jump the social divide and join Pitt in penury as the wife of a detective.

After sending all Anne’s manuscripts to Thomas J McCormack, president of St Martin’s Press in New York, Janet Freer received this response in October 1977:

I confess that in going through the other scripts here we have not yet come across any that ignite us the way that CATER STREET did. Perhaps rather than keep you and the author waiting any longer, we should simply make an offer on CATER STREET alone at this stage.¹⁶

He suggested an advance of US$3,000, 7.5 per cent for the first 5,000 copies and 10 per cent thereafter, and an 80/20 split; St Martin’s would hold world rights. He offered to send a contract immediately.

His message of confirmation was warm and reassuring:

I’m sorry to say that THE CATER STREET HANGMAN remains the only one on which we can offer a contract. This is not nearly so discouraging to us as it sounds because I realize that CATER STREET was the last manuscript that Ms. Perry completed and I like to think two things: First, that the writing of the earlier manuscripts taught her her craft and the second, that she has also discovered her genre — and possibly the historical era at which she will be most comfortable.¹⁷

Janet Freer was delighted. She was so relieved that Anne had a contract at last that she did not think to quibble over terms. She had already discussed with Anne the unlikelihood of St Martin’s taking the other scripts, so neither of them was surprised by the outcome. Besides, Tom McCormack was right: Anne had honed her skills on her failures and she had found her genre. Janet Freer asked him to return the rejected manuscripts, and added enthusiastically: ‘Anne has reached Chapter 4 on the sequel to CATER STREET and is talking of completion around the end of February … she is using the same characters as in the first book and she tells me she has ideas for three or four more.’¹⁸

Before the book came out, Anne supplied St Martin’s with an author photograph for the back cover. She had some shots taken professionally at a studio. It was a new experience, she was anxious, and the photographer did nothing to make her feel at ease. While she waited for the pictures, she saw a film on television about Edith Cavell, the English nurse who was executed by a German firing squad in the First World War.

Being put out in the yard and refused a blind-fold and she was shot and she looked less scared and more composed than I did in those photographs. I thought: ‘This is dreadful. She looked better the second before she was shot’ … [I looked like] a rabbit in the headlights.¹⁹

So she threw out the professional photographs and sent instead some amateur snaps, one of which appears on the front cover of this book.

Anne, now 39