by Paul French
The girls wore the drab ‘gymnasium costume’ of England, adorned only by their house badges; the boys wore caps, ties and blazers; and they all studied the English curriculum. The entire student body assembled in the wood-panelled auditorium every morning, boys to the left, girls to the right, before the headmaster, who stood on the stage in don’s robes over tweeds. A ritual morning greeting was followed by a hymn, perhaps ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away,’ and then a rendition of ‘God Save the King.’
Classes started at 8:50, broke for lunch at noon, then resumed at 2:00, ending at 4:00. The school fees were eighty silver dollars a month, 50 percent more if the pupil lived outside the British Municipal Area of Tientsin, and an additional eighty-five dollars a month for boarders like Pamela. Tientsin Grammar was a little slice of England in warlord-wracked, Japanese-threatened northern China. Pamela and her classmates studied for the gruelling Cambridge matriculation exams; there was a lot of Latin. There was also a drill instructor and constant sports—hockey and netball for the girls; cricket, football and swimming for the boys.
Most of the students were day pupils from Tientsin; Pamela was one of only a half-dozen or so boarders. She lived at the School House, a sombre Gothic-style building that doubled as the home of the headmaster, who traditionally took in boarders to supplement his income. Students rose at seven, breakfasted at seven forty-five, left for school at eight thirty. After school there was high tea at five, then prep, reading and hobbies at five thirty. Bedtime was between seven and nine, depending on age.
It was a set routine with little to break it. Cocoa and biscuits were served at bedtime; guests could be invited to tea on Wednesdays and also visit on weekends, subject to approval. Pamela’s new friends in Tientsin were unaware she had been thrown out of schools in Peking. They knew her as a plain, quiet girl and a keen sportswoman, and assumed she was boarding because her father, whom everyone had heard of, travelled a lot for his work.
And it was true that Pamela had been turning over a new leaf, trying to behave and stay out of trouble, but her life was not all cocoa at bedtime. There was a boyfriend. Michael ‘Mischa’ Horjelsky was Polish-Jewish, Tientsin Grammar’s star athlete, a good-looking swimmer with a body that would have set the girls of the Upper Sixth on fire. Mischa had thick dark hair and a charming smile. He was cheeky and funny and a good scholar.
For Pamela he was a catch. Line up the boys of her year, and anyone would have tipped Mischa as the matinée idol, the one to have girls swooning in the aisles. And he doted on her—the two were inseparable, said some who knew them, and were rarely seen apart during the school day.
In early 1937, Mischa was planning to visit Peking for a few days. Mischa lived with his family in Tientsin, while Pamela had gone to stay at her father’s on Armour Factory Alley when term finished. Mischa’s visit to Peking was to be the first time Pamela brought him home to meet her father, but tragedy was to strike before that could happen.
‘Pamela!’ At the base of the Fox Tower, Commissioner Thomas moved quickly to where Werner lay on the cold ground.
The two men had known each other for many years, both veterans of Peking. Thomas effectively ran the Legation Quarter on a day-to-day basis, holding down the offices of Commissioner of the Legation Quarter Police and Secretary of the Administrative Commission of the Peking Diplomatic Quarter. He was more or less a mayor, chief of police and administrator, all rolled into one.
Thomas had seen Werner’s note only shortly before being called by Han to the Fox Tower. He’d thought nothing more of it, assuming it was a mystery probably already solved even as he read the note. But now both he and Colonel Han were aware that the horrifically mutilated dead girl lying before them was Pamela Werner.
Crime scenes can quickly become circuses, and this one was no exception. Colonel Han was swift to bring in extra constables to rope off the entire area at the base of the Fox Tower and push the onlookers farther out of range. The officers then canvassed the area, and in the ditch some distance away found an oil lamp, which was entered into the record as possible evidence. Han had ordered still more straw matting to be placed over the body to prevent gawking, but he was not going to remove the corpse until he’d made a thorough examination of the scene.
That was becoming difficult. Word had spread like wildfire that a dead white girl had been found at the Fox Tower, a place known for its bad spirits and sorcery. Curious locals continued to arrive, along with the press, both Chinese and foreign, tipped off perhaps by a constable looking to supplement his pay packet. The Reuters pressman had a camera; there was a local stringer for the Shanghai-based North-China Daily News, and also reporters from the Peking and Tientsin Times, the most widely read paper north of Shanghai, and its rival, the North China Star. Han ordered them to stay back from the body while his own photographer from Morrison Street documented the crime scene.
Two young constables had meanwhile accompanied Werner back to his house on Armour Factory Alley. Han and Thomas now had to make sure that the dead girl was indeed his daughter—they needed a formal identification, and that, ideally, should come from a family member. Werner had seemed certain, but he was in a state, and many foreign women had fair hair, not least the legion of Russian women, the most likely foreigners to be found dead in the city. They needed confirmation. If the corpse was Pamela, then a British subject had been murdered on Chinese territory, and the daughter of a former British consul, no less.
Thomas suggested calling Constable Pearson at the British Legation, who knew Pamela personally. Pearson was sent for, and he got to the crime scene at 2:15 p.m., but was unable to make a definite identification, such was the degree of facial mutilation.
Then Han had an idea. He sent a constable to Werner’s residence to bring back Yen Ping, the gateman. The old man, when he arrived, reported that Pamela had still not returned home. Werner himself hadn’t spoken a word since coming back, and he was now resting in a state of shock, with pains in his chest. A doctor had been called to examine his heart.
Han showed the gateman the silk chemise found under the corpse, but Yen Ping was unable to identify it as Pamela’s. So Han showed him the body. Like everyone who saw it, he reacted with shock. No, he said, he could not identify the face, but the hair was unmistakable. Moreover one eye was less damaged than the other, and Yen Ping recognized the unusual greyness of the iris.
Constable Pearson, who was still there, confirmed that Pamela indeed had rare grey eyes, and he also recognized the expensive diamond-set watch, as did Yen Ping.
It was enough. The corpse at the Fox Tower was officially recorded as Pamela Werner, British subject, resident of Peking, daughter of E. T. C. Werner, the former British consul at Foochow, now retired.
Winter nights in Peking draw in fast and early, and it was already getting dark. Han sent for a coffin and gathered up the evidence: Pamela’s loose clothing, including her tartan skirt, which had fallen off as the body was lifted, her belted overcoat, a pair of torn silk stockings, a comb, her shoes, a handkerchief, the bloodied card for the French Club skating rink, and the wristwatch. When the coffin arrived, four constables carefully placed Pamela’s body inside. A sheet was found to cover her below the waist.
It had once been Chinese tradition, and the law, that a murdered body should not be moved until the murderer was caught. But the Peking police force now prided itself on its contemporary practices, taught in the modern police academy. Han placed the recovered items inside the coffin and put the lid on it. The constables then carried it to a small, deserted temple inside the Fox Tower until an ambulance arrived. From there the body was taken to the Peking Union Medical College for the autopsy.
Wild Dogs and Diplomats
It was Commissioner Thomas who grasped the ramifications of the murder first. Thomas had joined the British diplomatic service in Peking in 1898, aged just nineteen, then resigned due to ill health a few years later. But he’d stayed on in China, finding a job with the administrative commission and building a rep
utation as an efficient, skilled hard bargainer, a trait perhaps gained from his father, a canny Shrewsbury cattle dealer. Thomas knew well that Werner was seen as a friend of China by the Chinese government, and the pressure would be on the Peking Detective Bureau to solve this murder quickly.
When a foreigner died under suspicious circumstances in Peking, it was standard procedure for the appropriate legation to be invited to nominate an envoy to monitor the investigation. The envoy had no rights as such; he couldn’t arrest anyone, nor could he question suspects without permission from the Chinese police. His role was purely that of an observer, a go-between.
Thomas knew that this was an investigation for which the British would want to appoint an envoy, and that it would be someone from the legation staff. As Pamela was the daughter of a high-ranking foreigner, the case would be high profile. Things would be further complicated by the fact that the British consul had a dislike for Werner; the two had fallen out some years ago during the course of their work.
For Han, though, the idea of an envoy from the British Legation was problematic. An envoy would interfere, he protested to Thomas while both men were still at the crime scene. And this was no casual back-alley stabbing, no mugging gone wrong or heart attack in a bar; this was something horrific, unfathomable. Domestic arguments that turned tragically violent, disputes over money or women or both that flared into murderous rages—these were bad enough, but the killing of a young English girl at a time of tension in the city was alarming to the authorities.
Thomas, aware they had to act quickly, suggested a compromise. Han should outflank the British Legation by nominating an envoy himself, someone the British could not object to. The commissioner knew there was no one attached to the legation who was senior enough, or experienced enough, for something like this anyway. Nor, given the magnitude of the crime, could it be anyone from the Legation Quarter police.
Thomas thought the legation might want to bring in someone from Shanghai, where law and order in the British-dominated International Settlement was run by the tough and experienced chief commissioner Major Frederick Gerrard, a Highland Scot who’d served with the Indian army and the British police in India before a stint as deputy commissioner of police in Basrah, Mesopotamia. Thomas knew Gerrard was good, a copper’s copper, but thought that in these darkening days he’d have one foot in the police and the other in British Intelligence and Special Branch in Shanghai. He’d also have his hands full battling the city’s rival gangs, who were fighting for control of lucrative narcotics and prostitution rackets with Chicago-style shootouts on the streets. Recently there’d been a rash of kidnappings of prominent Shanghai citizens, and more than enough trouble with an increasingly belligerent Japanese community. Gerrard had plenty of murders on his own patch and would be loath to spare any of his men, let alone himself.
Fortunately, Thomas told Han, he knew of a police officer with the perfect background for the investigation—Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, chief of police, British Concession, Tientsin. DCI Dennis was a most capable man, experienced and independently minded. He had trained at Scotland Yard.
The legation couldn’t easily argue against the qualifications of a senior ex–Scotland Yard detective. Moreover, since Dennis was with the British Concession authorities in Tientsin, he didn’t technically work for the British government. The legation might apply pressure, but Dennis would be able to resist it. He was a seasoned policeman of the old school, the sort who wanted to get at the truth, and he’d been trained by the best.
In other words, Thomas managed to convey to Han, Dennis wasn’t a diplomat, he wasn’t part of the old boys’ network, he wasn’t political. He was a copper, pure and simple.
Colonel Han agreed, and left Thomas to call the British consul in Tientsin to formally request that DCI Dennis be temporarily assigned to Peking.
Later that evening, Han made his way through the hutong behind the Morrison Street station to the Peking Union Medical College, a short distance away. This college was Peking’s most advanced centre of medicine. Established with the help of missionaries in 1906 and now funded by the American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and his foundation, it had always mixed Western doctors with Chinese, sending bright young Chinese to be trained in the United States and recruiting American and European experts to work at the college, going so far as to build a series of Western-style houses for the foreign personnel. By Peking standards the college was modern, clean and efficient. There was no medical facility like it in China, outside of Shanghai.
Han entered the mazelike complex, which was laid out in traditional Peking style but with newer Western buildings on all sides. The place could have been in New York or Boston, four or five floors high and purely functional, until you looked up and saw that the architects had incorporated Chinese flourishes—green saddleback roofs and traditional floating swallowtail eaves. What Han wasn’t to know was that these adornments had been added after a suggestion by one of the members of the committee that established the college, a man who was an expert on Chinese architecture and who believed deeply in preserving Peking’s traditional skyline—E. T. C. Werner.
The complex was silent at night. The gatemen were warming themselves around a charcoal brazier in a hut at the entrance. Han made his way to the pathology department, where he was met by Dr Wang, the medical superintendent. This was good—Han knew that Wang always worked with Cheng Hsiang-hu, chief professor of pathology and a man Han admired. Cheng was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and very experienced.
Superintendent Wang escorted Han to the autopsy room, where the contrast with the outside world was stark. There were spotless white tiles, gleaming stainless steel, bottles of chemicals on shelves, a tray of scalpels catching the light, along with other medical instruments Han didn’t know the name of.
Professor Cheng nodded acknowledgement to Han as he washed his hands. Wang stood ready with a clipboard and pen to record the details. Attendants wheeled in Pamela’s body on a trolley and lifted it onto the autopsy table, which was slightly angled and had gutters to catch any blood. The smell of antiseptic and cleanliness gave way to the smell of the dead and damaged—the familiar metallic tang of dried blood that caught in the back of the throat was mixed with a smell not unlike that of the fried pork in the Soochow Hutong market. Chinese or foreign, the odour of the dead was the same.
Pamela’s body had been undressed and washed but was still an unsightly mass of cuts, slashes and bruises. Her sternum was still the same gaping hole Han had seen at the Fox Tower. In fact, with most of the blood and mud cleaned away, he could see just how many stab marks there were—they seemed numerous to him. The naked body was strangely wide where it had been cut open across the chest. Han found it hard to picture Pamela’s face—he had yet to see a photograph of her—but under the intensely bright lights, he could now see that she was freckled. He noticed too her small hands, clenched rigidly tight, her thumbs locked inside her fists, trapped there by rigor mortis.
There was a second pathology expert at the autopsy, Dr William Graham Aspland, a senior consultant who had formally ordered the postmortem and appointed Cheng as Pamela’s chief pathologist. Both men wore green gowns with Western suits, shirts and ties underneath. Like Han, they thought this was one of the worst cases of mutilation they’d ever seen, and that was saying something. Cheng conducted postmortems almost daily, and Aspland, an English physician who specialized in opium addiction, had cleaned the dead from the battlefields of France and Belgium during World War I.
It was now past ten p.m., but Han had asked for the autopsy to be done this evening so that the investigation could get under way. Tradition decreed that he had twenty days to solve the case—after that it got much, much harder, as detectives got reassigned and the bosses at police headquarters lost interest. Aspland had agreed to the late-night procedure and called in Cheng immediately.
They began. First they weighed the corpse—nine stone, four pounds—and measured her—five foot
, five inches. Distinguishing marks? None, though Cheng noted her uncommon grey eyes and long eyelashes. The estimated time of death was somewhere between ten p.m. and two a.m. the previous night, but Cheng could be no more precise than that. The specific cause of death was several blows with a blunt instrument to the area around the right eye, which had split the skull and caused massive haemorrhaging in the brain. Death would have taken perhaps two to three minutes from the first blow. Most of the horrific wounds had been inflicted postmortem.
Superintendent Wang’s account for the night showed that Pamela had to have been standing and facing her attacker when she was hit, suggesting that she knew him. The fatal blows were delivered from a short distance away and were extremely powerful; Pamela and her killer had been up close to each other, probably in a confined space. He had most likely been taller than she: the blows had been struck down on her skull, cracking it like an egg. The flow of blood from the wound had no doubt blinded her, causing her to sink to the floor and die where she lay. In all probability, Pamela’s killer had looked her in the eye as he’d ended her life.
Cheng catalogued all the injuries for the record. Han confirmed with the doctors that the blood loss caused by them would have been significant, and because there’d been little blood at the Fox Tower, this substantiated his suspicion that Pamela had been killed elsewhere. Somewhere, there had to be a lot more blood.
The knife used to slash the body after death had a blade approximately four inches long, Cheng estimated, possibly with a double edge. The throat had also been cut postmortem; the windpipe was completely severed. The slash and stab marks appeared random and were of different lengths and depths—Cheng described them for the record as ‘frenzied.’ Han noted that although Pamela’s tartan skirt and Aertex blouse had been ripped, there were no slash marks on her clothing: she had been stripped before being repeatedly stabbed.