by Paul French
Dennis was interested in the story of the rickshaw puller, Sun Te-hsing, who’d been seen washing his bloodstained cushion cover by the Fox Tower. Han told Dennis that the puller had picked up a late-night fare on the evening of Russian Christmas, a foreigner who’d been drinking in the Badlands and had got into a fight. He had bled on Sun’s covers, and the puller had to wash them; nobody would hire his rickshaw with a soiled cushion.
The puller had been scared during questioning, Han claimed. He was a nineteen-year-old peasant who’d come to the city with no other options than pulling a rickshaw. He and some sixty thousand other pullers working in the city managed half a million fares among them daily, through cold or heat, for mere pennies.
Han described the business for Dennis. A country bumpkin, unwise to the ways of the big city, was charged high rent for a rickshaw and so had little left over after a day’s work. Only the toughest made it through more than a few Peking winters plying the streets and alleyways. It was easy to imagine a puller growing desperate enough to grab a chance at a drunk foreigner’s wallet, but that didn’t make him a deranged killer who sliced open young white girls’ bodies. And anyway, this wasn’t a case of robbery. The watch would have been the first thing to go.
Han told Dennis he had sent his detectives to the Legation Quarter address the rickshaw puller had given. There they’d rousted a hungover American from his bed, a member of the Horse Marine Guards that protected the American Legation. He confirmed he’d been drinking and fighting at one of the bars on Chuanpan Hutong, where he got a busted nose for his trouble and a few cuts. He’d bled on the seat of the rickshaw on his way home. Han had seen the stains himself, and they were nothing like what would have come from Pamela’s wounds.
The lead had gone nowhere, Han told Dennis. They should forget about it.
The two detectives divided up the interviews according to their backgrounds. Han would interview Werner’s Chinese servants and also try to trace shopkeepers, rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, staff at the skating rink, neighbours, and anyone else who could shed light on Pamela’s last days. Dennis would talk to Pamela’s foreign friends, starting with Ethel Gurevitch, and try to work out her movements. The murder was barely two days ago; memories should still be fresh.
Han went to Werner’s house on Sunday morning, where he started with Ho Ying, the cook. On the day Pamela was killed, Ho Ying had prepared a lunch of macaroni for her and Werner. Around three that afternoon he went to the nearby market on Tung Tan Pailou Hutong to buy, among other things, the pork for the meatballs Pamela had requested, as well as some traditional Peking sweetmeats. Pamela loved sugary preserved fruits and the glutinous rice dumplings known as hsiao chih, and regularly asked him to buy them for her.
Everything was in accordance with what the cook had told one of Han’s constables on Friday. Pamela had said she’d be going out around four and would be back at seven thirty. Ho Ying had prepared the meatballs and rice, which she never ate, and the master had grown increasingly anxious when Pamela failed to return. Ho Ying, who went home at the end of the workday to his family a few hutong away, had stayed later than usual at the house that night. Eventually Werner asked him to enquire after Pamela at the skating rink, but it was closed. The Chinese workers who were sweeping the ice told him that two hundred skaters had used the rink that night, but they didn’t know Pamela. Ho Ying dashed back to Armour Factory Alley to give Werner the bad news, and then went home.
Next Han talked to the sixty-four-year-old gatekeeper, Yen Ping, who confirmed that Werner and Pamela had had lunch together at one o’clock that day, and at two o’clock Werner left for his regular afternoon walk. Pamela went out shortly after three, by which time Ho Ying had left for the market. Werner returned at five, later coming and going several times to look for his daughter. Yen Ping remained at the gate throughout that night; he was there from noon on Thursday until Friday morning, keeping watch for her. He saw her leave just after three o’clock, and then he never saw her again.
There was little more Han could do at the courtyard residence until he returned with Dennis to interview Werner, a prospect neither of them relished. The old man was still recovering from shock. His doctor had told Han that Werner’s heart had suffered a severe strain.
That morning it was Dennis who was hearing new information—at the Gurevitches’ house on Hong Kong Bank Road. Ethel had already given a statement to police, claiming she’d reached the Wagons Lits a little late, just after five, and Pamela had turned up a couple of minutes after that. Pamela had told Ethel she’d been there earlier, but as Ethel hadn’t arrived yet, she’d gone for a walk. The two girls then had tea with Ethel’s mother and father, after which they went skating. Pamela had ridden off on her bicycle; Ethel had stayed at the rink with Lilian Marinovski until it closed at eight.
What had they talked about over tea? Dennis learned for the first time about Pamela’s boyfriend in Tientsin. According to Ethel, Pamela was excited that he was coming to Peking for a few days, although she didn’t say what his name was. Ethel assumed he’d be staying at Armour Factory Alley. Next Dennis asked what Pamela had eaten while she was with Ethel—had she eaten any Chinese food? No, said Ethel, just a little bread and butter and a slice of cake with tea. Her mother confirmed this. Pamela had eaten and drunk very little, claiming she wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t say when she’d last eaten. Nor did Pamela have any Chinese food at the skating rink.
What about Pamela’s clothing? Dennis asked. What had she been wearing that afternoon? Ethel recounted the tartan skirt, the fashionable Aertex blouse, the woolen cardigan, along with a belted blue overcoat, mittens, beret and stockings. No, Ethel didn’t know the names of any of Pamela’s friends in Peking, except Lilian Marinovski, whom they’d met at the rink that night. Ethel told Dennis she thought Pamela had seemed different—more outgoing, grown-up. She had new friends and new pastimes. She was invited to parties and dances. She was interested in boys; she hadn’t been when Ethel had known her in Peking. At school she’d been quiet but occasionally rebellious; she’d got into trouble and been sent to Tientsin.
From the Gurevitches’ house, Dennis went across the Quarter to visit Lilian Marinovski, but this time learned nothing new. At eighteen, Lilian was closer to Pamela’s age and still a student in Peking. She had done most of the talking at the skating rink, and hadn’t asked Pamela many questions. Pamela hadn’t mentioned any boyfriends, but Lilian too thought she seemed more confident, more grown-up. It had been a chance encounter with a girl she vaguely knew, nothing more.
Han and Dennis met back at Morrison Street at lunchtime, where there was nothing to be had but bitter police-station tea and a tin of Hatamen cigarettes. Apart from the boyfriend, there was precious little new information—everyone questioned had confirmed the times and details they’d given the previous day. Dennis made a note to ask Werner when they interviewed him if he’d been expecting Pamela to bring anyone home in the next day or two. Then he telephoned the station in Tientsin and asked one of his detectives to find out who Pamela’s boyfriend was, and where he’d been between seven in the evening on 7 January and early the following morning.
‘Dig around a bit,’ he told the detective on the phone. ‘Find out who her friends were, what her teachers thought of her, what her behaviour was like.’ The boyfriend was the closest thing they had to a suspect, though there was no apparent motive, and they had no idea if he’d been in Peking at the time. Or even if he existed, and wasn’t just a youthful girl’s fantasy to impress her friends.
There was one hole in the story. Pamela had left Armour Factory Alley just after three and had met Ethel Gurevitch shortly after five. The Wagons Lits was little more than a twenty-minute ride from Pamela’s house, or half an hour maximum along the Tartar Wall, her preferred route to avoid the Badlands. That left an hour and a half unaccounted for that afternoon.
Han gave his men pictures of Pamela and sent them to fan out between the house in Armour Factory Alley and the Wagons Lits
. Show the picture to everyone, he told them, every shopkeeper, café owner, market-stall trader; every hawker, hotel receptionist, gatekeeper. Someone must have seen her. And sure enough, someone had.
The break came quickly—Sunday evening. A concierge at the Wagons Lits had seen Pamela between three and four on the Thursday afternoon. One of Han’s uniformed constables phoned to say he’d found the man.
The detectives drove across the Legation Quarter to the hotel, where the constable was waiting in the lobby with the concierge. Han showed him the photograph of Pamela again, and he identified her as having come into the Wagons Lits on 7 January to enquire about taking a room there—he remembered that it was some time between three and four o’clock.
The concierge’s desk was about twenty feet from the main reception, and the girl had entered the lobby, gone to the reception desk and taken a leaflet on the rates. She had been alone. The concierge couldn’t remember exactly whom she’d spoken to on the desk, but he was sure it was Pamela—the blond hair, the grey eyes.
But why was she interested in a room at the Wagons Lits when she lived just a mile or so away? Was she planning a rendezvous with her boyfriend from Tientsin? Or had she argued with her father, and wanted to leave the house on Armour Factory Alley?
The detectives needed to talk to Werner in depth. That could wait until tomorrow, Monday, not just the start of a new week but also the day of the official inquest at the British Legation into the death of Pamela.
That night Colonel Han went home to sleep after nearly three days of nonstop work. Dennis returned to the Wagons Lits, where he spent a few hours in the hotel bar tapping into the old China hands’ rumour mill, and the nightly session of gossip and tip swapping among Peking’s foreign bright young things. He told Inspector Botham to do the same at the bar in the Hôtel du Nord. Dennis knew that the only subject on anyone’s lips would be Pamela Werner.
If there was anything useful to be learned about her or her father, the hotel bars were where tongues would loosen.
An Old China Hand
The inquest into the death of Pamela Werner began Monday morning at the British Legation, standard procedure in the questionable death of a British national.
The British had the largest of all the foreign legations, a spacious compound of twenty-two buildings, guarded by soldiers of the King’s Royal Surrey Regiment and by two oversize stone lions at the gates. Britain’s imperial power and prestige radiated not just over Chinese Peking but over the other legations in the Quarter too. The British Legation was the place where besieged foreigners had huddled for their last stand against the Boxers in 1900. The vengeful slaughter and looting of Peking by the foreign troops had begun later that year on the same site.
A cold, functional, unadorned room inside the main building had been set aside for the inquest, which was presided over by His Britannic Majesty’s consul, Nicholas Fitzmaurice, this morning acting as HBM’s coroner in Peking. Fitzmaurice, the man with whom Werner had clashed in the past, was a career diplomat, formerly the consul in Kashgar, in China’s restive far west region of Turkestan, before coming to Peking in 1933. He was the archetype of the humourless, formal British envoy, although his aides said he was shaken at what he had been told of Pamela’s injuries. Still, his British stiff upper lip was on display now.
The consul had the only comfortable chair in the room; everyone else was relegated to hard-backed wooden seats behind a row of black-suited legation flunkies. Han, dog-tired, attended as the investigating officer, Dennis as official British liaison to the Peking police, and Commissioner Thomas represented the Legation Quarter police. The public gallery was crowded with the gentlemen of the press—the English-language papers of the China coast, stringers for the Times of London, the New York Times and a host of other international papers looking for a story. Pamela’s death had run on front pages syndicated from Adelaide to Winnipeg—pretty European girls being murdered in the Orient was big news in the wider white world.
The proceedings that morning were perfunctory. Just a single witness was called—Pamela’s father, E. T. C. Werner, described by the press as ‘bent and white-haired,’ a man broken in his grief. Fitzmaurice saw Werner as a cantankerous irritant; the two had fallen out in Kashgar, when disputes had arisen over the expeditions of the archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein across Central Asia, and specifically his acquisition of many ancient scripts from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang. These had been taken to the British Museum, and the Chinese were not happy about it. Werner, who’d become involved in the matter as a noted scholar, thought Stein’s removal of the ancient documents was tantamount to looting, and he argued about it with Fitzmaurice, who backed Stein and the museum. Now the old man sat before him as the bereaved father of a murdered daughter. It was awkward.
Dr Cheng and the other doctors at the Peking Union Medical College had held back their findings while they continued to examine Pamela’s body for clues, the new scientific term being forensics. Han had encouraged them to keep the medical details out of the inquest, and therefore out of the newspapers. Right now, making the details public would only up the number of crank calls and do nothing to assist the investigation. Han already had a steady stream of lunatics claiming to have murdered Pamela; he didn’t need a line of heart thieves outside the door too.
And there was public security to think about. Organ theft was a delicate subject in China—rumours ran riot of unnatural medicines, strange rituals, triad ceremonies. All the more so when it was a young foreign girl. Peking was ever closer to tipping over into blind panic and chaos; Han didn’t want to give it a further push.
Formalities. All Fitzmaurice had to do was convene the inquest and call on Werner to positively identify his daughter. Because of her disfigured state, Werner did this through her clothing and her watch.
Pamela’s name was then entered into the record by Fitzmaurice’s clerk. When asked his daughter’s age, Werner gave it as nineteen years and eleven months. The press scribbled away—every newspaper thus far had got her age wrong.
With that, Werner sat down. Fitzmaurice declared the body to be that of Pamela Werner, British subject. He noted that Colonel Han of the Peking police was the investigating officer and adjourned the inquest, pending further medical testimony. Dennis’s presence was not formally noted. Fitzmaurice then asked Han when Pamela’s body might be released to her family for burial.
Han, standing before the bench with his hat in his hands, wearing his black dress uniform and leather boots for the occasion, said he would ensure the body was released the moment the doctors at the medical college had completed their work. Fitzmaurice nodded and banged his gavel.
The procedure had lasted barely twenty minutes. The crowd filed out of the cold room. More press were massed outside the front gate, milling between the acacia trees that lined British Road. Flashbulbs popped and Han repeated his customary ‘No comment.’ Werner slipped out a side door to avoid the scrum, a small courtesy arranged by Fitzmaurice. The press was left with no headline but WERNER INQUEST IS HELD.
Han and Dennis headed back to Morrison Street. Dennis had arranged to meet Werner at Armour Factory Alley that afternoon, having decided against bringing him in to Morrison Street for questioning. It wouldn’t look good, and besides, Dennis wanted to see the house, Pamela’s room, get a feel for her and her father in their own environment. Both detectives had the sense that the Werner household had been far from normal.
Now they sat smoking in the incident room. Han’s officers had cleared some space, pushed back the regulation blackwood furniture, and pinned up the photographs taken at the crime scene. Black-and-white photographs with thick black arrows pointing to where the body had been found; close-up shots of Pamela’s wristwatch, her silk chemise, the bloodied skating-rink card, her shoes, the oil lantern that had been recovered nearby. Han kept the photos taken at the medical college in a bland manila envelope locked in his desk drawer. He had shown them to Dennis, of course, but they were too grueso
me to be put on display, and the risk was too great that some constable looking for extra money at New Year would sell them to the press.
Han had been hearing gossip about Werner, and what he’d learnt he now told Dennis.
The servants’ talk was that Pamela’s father was a strange man, though a respected one. He paid fair; he didn’t mistreat his staff. He could speak more Chinese dialects than they could; he knew their culture, was a scholar. But with no mother’s influence, the daughter had been wild, and there was trouble at school. The old man couldn’t control her; he went off on long expeditions and left her alone with the servants. It wasn’t a harmonious household.
Her return home for the Christmas holidays had been a fraught time, according to the local gossip—the servants reported arguments, shouting, even a fight between Werner and one of Pamela’s suitors, on the street outside the courtyard. She’d been dating men, going out for tiffins, dinner, dancing, late nights. Werner had not been happy about her newly independent social life; he was old-school, saw it all as too modern. He’d been particularly concerned about one suitor, a half-Chinese, half-Portuguese man called, oddly, John O’Brian, who had become obsessed with Pamela in Tientsin and apparently proposed to her. This man was now living in Peking.
Pamela had rejected him, but the whole affair worried her father. Then he’d taken against a Chinese student who’d called for her several times. The gossip was that Werner told him to go away and stop bothering Pamela, and it had escalated into a fight out on Armour Factory Alley, a spectacle witnessed by the neighbours. Werner, in his seventies, had rapped the boy across the face with his cane, breaking his nose.