Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

by Paul French

  ‘I have never seen the girl in my life,’ he told the police outright.

  When asked where he was on the night of 7 January, he said he had finished work and then gone to see a film at a cinema on Morrison Street. No, he didn’t have the ticket stub, and yes, he’d gone alone. It was a perfectly natural thing to do, he claimed—he used to go regularly with his wife when she was in Peking, but now had no choice but to go by himself. He missed his family.

  Dennis pressed him. ‘Weren’t you her dentist?’ he insisted.

  ‘I was not. I have never seen the girl in my life.’

  Dennis terminated the interview, and afterwards looked for confirmation that Pamela had been a patient of Prentice’s. It would have been simplest to ask Werner, but Dennis was under strict instructions to make no more contact with the old man. He searched the dentist’s records—there was no listing for anyone called Pamela, or Werner. But there was a Gurevitch, Ethel, so Dennis went round to the Gurevitch residence again on Hong Kong Bank Road. Ethel didn’t know whether her dentist was also Pamela’s or not; she was unable to say whether Pamela even had a dentist in Peking.

  Dennis went back to the autopsy notes:

  . . . teeth—healthy—26 present, the usual number for a person of her age being 28–32 teeth—two back teeth missing—removed professionally at some earlier time—recent chips to two of front teeth—assumed to have occurred during struggle . . .

  Dr Cheng at the Peking Union Medical College confirmed that the removal of Pamela’s back teeth had been undertaken some time before her death: the gums had healed, which meant that the extractions weren’t recent. Her teeth showed no signs of recent dental work.

  Dennis and Han asked Prentice back for a second interview at Morrison Street. The dentist stuck to his story. ‘I was not her dentist. I have never seen the girl in my life. Why are you asking me about her?’

  Dennis then asked him about his association with Pinfold, explaining that he too had been questioned. Prentice admitted to hunting occasionally with Pinfold, with Joe Knauf too, and a few other men, mostly Americans. And why shouldn’t he? He was after all a well-known man about town, a member of several clubs, a Harvard Dental School graduate, a long-standing member of Peking’s foreign community. He pointed out, once again, that he looked after the teeth of some of the city’s best-known people. Dennis noted the veiled threat in the comment—the connection to influential people.

  What about the nudist colony? Dennis insisted. What about the nude dances?

  But Prentice didn’t even flicker. The nudist colony was respectable; naturism was well established in Europe and America. The detective chief inspector shouldn’t be such a prude; some of Peking’s most solid and reliable citizens were members. If anything inappropriate was occurring, surely the Chinese police would have objected by now, after several summers? As to nude dances, that was mere gossip. The gatherings in Prentice’s flat were simply like-minded men enjoying cultural activities in a private setting.

  The news that Prentice had been questioned was leaked. The Western Hills nudist colony made the papers, although the nude dance parties on Legation Street stayed secret, or perhaps they were a touch of voyeurism too far for the press. Many in foreign Peking were once again shocked. Prentice was to them a respectable figure in society.

  The day after the leak, a long editorial on Pamela’s murder appeared in the Peking Chronicle, a paper that most of foreign Peking still read, even though it had come under Japanese control. The article was written by George Gorman, fellow member of Prentice’s nudist colony. Gorman attacked the police and DCI Dennis for interrogating Prentice, claiming that he knew for a fact Prentice had been at the cinema on the night in question and that he was innocent. He was a man of good character, the Legation Quarter’s leading dentist. The police, both Chinese and British, were floundering, with no ideas, and they were therefore pulling in innocent foreigners when they should be looking among the Chinese for the killer.

  Dennis felt that Gorman protested too much about the direction of the investigation. He thought it worthwhile confronting the man about his criticisms, so he sought Gorman out. The Irishman lived with his wife and two adolescent children in cramped conditions in the Legation Quarter, something Dennis thought unusual for a regular at the Peking Club bar. Gorman was not at home, but Gorman’s wife told Dennis they were all distraught, that Pamela had spent the evening before her murder at their house, taking tea and then going ice-skating with the family. Pamela had left her bicycle at the Gormans’ house and collected it after skating. It was the Gormans who had introduced her to the French Club rink near their house. When Mrs Gorman had read that Pamela was last seen a day later leaving the rink, she was shocked.

  Dennis left the Gorman home with nothing new, other than now knowing Pamela’s movements of 6 January in more detail.

  He wanted to question Prentice further, find out more about the hunting in the hills, search the man’s flat, which Dennis had noted contained hunting equipment. The sudden departure of the dentist’s family didn’t sit right with the detective, although it wasn’t evidence of anything illegal. Han agreed with Dennis that the nudist colony, too, was strange, but that wasn’t illegal either, and there’d been no complaints about it. The nude dancing, if it had occurred, had been in the Legation Quarter and was therefore not Han’s territory.

  Dennis appealed to Consul Fitzmaurice to let him arrest Prentice for further questioning, but once again the consul refused, citing insufficient evidence. Many men went hunting, and Dennis had no proof that Prentice had known Pamela, or ever treated her. Naturism, nude dances, were all very odd, but they didn’t link the dentist to the dead girl as far as Fitzmaurice could see. He was not about to start a tradition of Legation Quarter residents being arrested and taken to Chinese police stations.

  Dennis had to concede that Fitzmaurice was right. He didn’t have any evidence; he was just going by his copper’s guts. There was something about Prentice’s manner that was hard to define. Perhaps it was his smile, the way he seemed to mock Dennis with his eyes. It was nothing tangible, more an attitude, an arrogance. And it was far, far from enough.

  Dennis was back to square one.

  Radical Chic

  The investigation had stalled, the days dripped away with no new evidence, no more witnesses, no sign of the blood. Colonel Han’s twenty days since the murder had now elapsed, and DCI Dennis was on the verge of collapse. The long hard winter and the bitter cold of Peking were taking their toll. He hadn’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since the eighth of January. He’d had too many cigarettes, too many whisky sodas, and he’d acquired a nagging cough he couldn’t shake. His limbs were frozen from walking the winter streets, and the foul-tasting green medication from the Wagons Lits’ in-house doctor was doing no good. Dennis was exhausted but unable to sleep. And he had a detective’s inevitable doubt that he was missing something obvious in the case.

  Colonel Han was now saying he believed the case would never be solved. As the Japanese moved ever closer, the killer became more distant. Peking was obsessed with its own survival. Assassination had become a daily event; a guerrilla war was being fought on the streets of the city, and the Japanese army was now dug in at the Marco Polo Bridge, a mere nine miles from the Forbidden City and the Legation Quarter, where it was waiting for orders to advance. In Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek remained ominously silent on Peking’s fate.

  Dennis’s resources were dwindling. Sergeant Binetsky had been recalled to Tientsin—the situation was escalating there also. Dennis too was wanted back, but he’d requested a few more days, pleading to be permitted to stay and see the investigation through. In his sleepless nights and dog-tired days, Pamela was constantly in his mind’s eye—schoolgirl, glamour girl. He was almost coming to believe in fox spirits himself, imagining he saw them dancing along the top of the Tartar Wall, loitering in the eaves of the Fox Tower, wandering the endless hutong at night. They were laughing at him as they sought their victims, or balan
ced skulls on their heads. They were as intangible and unreachable as the killer he sought, disappearing into the Peking darkness without even shadows to trail them by. They faded into the air of the Tartar City beyond his gaze, just as the murderer had dissolved into the city.

  He put the hallucinations down to the green medicine.

  In public, Dennis sought to kill the rumours about fox spirits and organ thieves. He laughed at the talk and attacked the Chinese newspapers who made comparisons with the heart eaters in Boccaccio’s erotic and bawdy Decameron, a book that was read widely in China in translation at the time. The press were fixated on the stolen-heart angle, egged on by sources unnamed.

  But Commissioner Thomas had given Dennis a tip-off on that score. Inspector Botham had been heard holding court in the back bar of the Hôtel du Nord, drinking too much, bragging, enjoying being the centre of attention. Thomas’s contacts had also reported the loose-tongued inspector spending too much time in the Badlands, not on official business. Dennis dispatched him back to Tientsin to plug the leak.

  The DCI also scotched talk of psychopathological sadists, and declared the gossip around Werner to be ‘irresponsible nonsense.’ But he kept quiet about Sydney Yeates and his behaviour at Tientsin Grammar School.

  Meanwhile he had nothing to link Pinfold to Pamela, or Prentice to Pamela, or Pamela to the Badlands. He had links between Pinfold, Prentice and Joe Knauf, who all hunted together, were all part of the Western Hills nudist colony, and attended Prentice’s dances. They were all linked to the Badlands, to foreign Peking’s sinful side, just not to Pamela.

  Even the dime-droppers were drying up now, or changing tack. There’d been no more cranks confessing to the murder—now they called to say they’d seen Japanese agents poisoning the wells, or Emperor Hirohito walking in the Western Hills with Chiang Kai-shek.

  It was time to finish, time to go home. Pamela’s murderer was beyond reach now. There remained just the formalities to complete.

  The inquest into the death of Pamela did not resume until 29 January. At eleven o’clock on that Friday morning, Consul Fitzmaurice once more took the chair in the British Legation, which had again become an official coroner’s court. This time the inquest would hear the testimony and evidence of witnesses and the police, and the full report of the autopsy on the corpse.

  Snow had arrived overnight in Peking, and the city was blanketed in a white that was turning rapidly to grey-black sludge. It was if anything even colder in the room than the first time the inquest was convened. Back then it had still seemed that a quick arrest might be possible. Back then the more gruesome details of the killing had not been widely known.

  The public gallery had been specially enlarged for the resumption and was overflowing. The benches were packed with witnesses—the Gurevitch family, Lilian Marinovski, Werner’s household staff and others who could help with details about Pamela’s final days: Chang Pao-chen the old bird fancier, Corporal Kao and Constable Hsu of Police Post 19. Commissioner Thomas and Constable Pearson from the Legation Police were there, and of course Colonel Han and DCI Dennis.

  Sitting alone and talking to no one, stiff-backed as a statue, was E. T. C. Werner. He was silently fuming at having been frozen out of the investigation by Consul Fitzmaurice, at being ignored by Dennis.

  The inquest into the death of Pamela Werner proved to be the longest in Peking in living memory, its second sitting lasting three days. Snow was still falling outside when the first witness, Chang Pao-chen, stood to retell through a legation interpreter his story of finding Pamela’s body. He was followed by the Chinese policemen Kao and Hsu, reading from their notebooks.

  Colonel Han told how he had handled the scene at the Fox Tower, leaving out the most gruesome details but trying to finally quash the huang gou rumour once and for all. Thomas and Pearson backed up Han’s account of the crime scene.

  Han then reconstructed Pamela’s last day as he knew it, and the gateman and cook at Armour Factory Alley repeated their testimonies. Pamela’s amah broke down in tears when she took the stand. The court was adjourned for the day.

  The second day, a Saturday, began with Ethel Gurevitch struggling through her story. Her mother and father confirmed Pamela’s visit to their house that Thursday. When Lilian Marinovski gave evidence, she distanced herself from Pamela, saying the two of them had been only casual acquaintances. Chao Hsi-men, the receptionist at the Wagons Lits, repeated his story about Pamela’s mystery visit to the hotel that afternoon.

  It being the weekend, Fitzmaurice broke at lunchtime, announcing that he would hear the last witnesses, the doctors from the Peking Union Medical College, on Monday morning, in camera. The journalists objected; Fitzmaurice ignored them.

  On Monday, snow flurries were still whipping Peking, and the streets were icy. Legation guards manned the door to the courtroom, where Dr Cheng was the first to take the stand. He ran through the findings of the autopsy and the cause of death—a fractured skull followed by a brain haemorrhage. He detailed the apparent struggle beforehand, the postmortem mutilation, the almost surgical cuts, the broken ribs, the missing organs, the detached stomach. He tried to remain professional and exact while describing what had been done to Pamela, but he kept pausing, shocked anew at the immensity and horror of what he was saying.

  The fatal blow to Pamela’s head would have caused death within a few minutes, Dr Cheng told the court, and the butchery of her body had occurred no more than five to six hours after death. If this had taken place out of doors in the dark, it must have been done by someone who knew what they were doing, such as a butcher or a hunter. It was Dr Cheng’s opinion that the person or persons responsible had had the intention of dismembering the entire body, but had abandoned their task.

  Dr Cheng was followed by James Maxwell, professor of gynaecology and obstetrics at the medical college. Maxwell testified that Pamela’s death was ‘not the work of an ordinary sexual sadist.’ Rather, he said, it ‘displayed signs of being the work of a maniac.’ Maxwell also said that Pamela ‘had been sexually interfered with,’ discreetly referring to the mutilation of her genitals, adding that it was ‘not possible to state definitively whether this occurred pre- or post-mortem.’

  The pharmacologist Harry Van Dyke then testified that no poisons had been involved, and Pamela had not been given chloroform. The last meal she had eaten was Chinese food.

  Finally Han retook the stand and told Fitzmaurice that the police had no suspects and had made no arrests. Dennis corroborated Han’s statement and then promptly sat down. He chose not to mention that Fitzmaurice had personally refused Han permission to arrest either Pinfold or Prentice, nor that Werner had been made persona non grata to the police by official order. He chose not to mention that he, Dennis, was being pressured to return to Tientsin and his normal police work.

  Werner, for his part, had remained quiet throughout. He was not called to give evidence again. He assumed that Fitzmaurice had taken his impromptu press conference on the steps of the legation as a personal slight—as indeed it had been, just as Werner intended. The old man sat through most of day three with his head in his hands.

  Having heard all the available evidence, Fitzmaurice declared Pamela’s death to be an unlawful killing. His decision meant that the case remained open, an unsolved murder; it was subject to ongoing investigation.

  The next day, all the most gruesome aspects of Pamela’s murder, the very details Fitzmaurice had hoped to suppress by having the evidence heard in camera, became public. The press had managed to get hold of the testimony of the Peking Union Medical College autopsy team.

  Peking was horrified to read about the extent of the mutilation to Pamela’s body, and about the sexual interference, but interest in the case was beginning to slip. The front pages were dominated by other fears now, and Pamela was relegated to the inside pages, after the bad news from Europe. Franco-German relations were at an all-time low; Göring had been welcomed in Rome by Mussolini; German troops had landed in Spanish Mo
rocco.

  Meanwhile, the situation in China as a whole was deteriorating. The Japanese were angry at decisions taken by General Sung’s political council, and a Japanese plot to stir up anarchy in rural areas had been uncovered. Agents were everywhere, and people worried that their neighbours were spies. Anyone could be a collaborator in the pay of Tokyo.

  One veteran Western journalist in Shanghai described the times as like ‘living on the rim of a volcano.’ Chiang Kai-shek, who was supposedly in a united front with the Communists, had suppressed a Red revolt in Kiangse Province. And in Peking itself, Japanese tanks had appeared on the streets.

  They rumbled through the business districts, down Morrison Street, past the detective bureau. Japanese Zero planes buzzed the skies like mosquitoes, taunting the populace. The Japanese Legation strenuously denied that these were anything other than military exercises, goodwill parades. It didn’t feel that way to the residents of the city, where there wasn’t much goodwill going round.

  Japanese garrisons to the north of Peking were being strengthened. Mere miles from Peking’s outer limits, there were more men and machinery than could be justified for simple replacements. Japanese-smuggled dope continued to pour into the city and be sold off cheaply. The Peking police were busting dens and dealers, but when they caught one, another three took their place, financed by Japanese yen.

  Cocktail hour at the Wagons Lits, tea dances at the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, tiffins at the Peking Club, steins at the Hôtel du Nord, were all depleted as people slipped out of the city, getting away while the going was good. Foreign Peking was starting to shrink fast.

  DCI Dennis, though, was determined to remain. He argued hard with his bosses on the British Municipal Council in Tientsin, who agreed to give him more time, but he could not remain in Peking indefinitely. He had until the Chinese New Year, and then he had to return to his normal duties.