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

by Paul French

  It was all too much for one woman, whose mind had been in turmoil for nearly a month. Eventually, two days after the inquest had adjourned, she called on the Morrison Street station. She was in a shaken state, asking for the detective in charge of the Pamela Werner investigation. Han directed her to DCI Dennis, since she was a foreigner—another rattled white woman.

  But this was one white woman who didn’t rattle easily—Helen Foster Snow, alias Nym Wales to her readers, aka Peg to her friends, of whom she had many. A vibrant, slim, attractive woman, Helen had a charm many found hard to resist, and she was very popular, a genuine beauty who could have been a model in another life. In fact she did occasionally make money modeling for the Camel’s Bell, an exclusive store in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel de Pékin whose furs, silks and cheongsams made it a favourite stop for rich tourists. Helen was less of a polarizing force than her outspoken husband. Where Edgar Snow could sometimes be abrasive, it was difficult not to like Helen.

  When Colonel Han saw her in the Morrison Street station lobby, he thought she was what Pamela would have come to look like if she’d lived. Dennis agreed; the resemblance was definitely there, though Helen was a decade or so older than Pamela. Neither Han nor Dennis had talked to the Snows about the murder. For Han, the pair would have spelt trouble, and in this case there were no suspicions attached to them anyway. And since they lived outside the Legation Quarter, they were also officially out of bounds for DCI Dennis.

  But now he arranged to call on Helen that evening and hear her out. How could he not? Her address, 13 Armour Factory Alley, was just two courtyards down from Werner’s, on the same side of the street. As she wrote the address down for him, she said, ‘It was me they were after, not Pamela; it was a warning.’

  Helen and her husband had been in Peking since 1935, after a few years in Shanghai, where Edgar had rather outstayed his welcome parodying and insulting the American community. Like Werner’s, their house was traditional, but unlike his it had plenty of modern conveniences. It was also bigger, covering about an acre, with a conservatory running along the front two wings. There were stables, a tennis court, and a glassed-in pavilion for garden parties. A garden shed had been fixed up as Edgar’s writing room, and a towering gingko tree in the courtyard provided shade in the scorching summer months.

  Helen Foster Snow referred to her home as ‘our haunted house near the Fox Tower.’ When Dennis arrived at the appointed time, dusk was settling in. Outside the Legation Quarter, Peking was all grey walls and no street lighting. The Werner house was in total darkness. Armour Factory Alley was quiet, not being accessible easily by cars or readily by rickshaw pullers, who were reluctant to enter the realm of the fox spirits at night.

  The Snows’ was easily the most impressive courtyard house on the street, but it looked to be under siege. Its walls were spiked with broken glass to prevent intruders. Outside the main gate stood four tough-looking young Chinese, probably from Shantung, the province that had provided the backbone of China’s armies for centuries. A brazier lit up the entrance and the quartet of men, who were equipped with large broadswords tied in sashes at their sides. They stood stiff-backed with their arms crossed, their faces implacable.

  Helen Foster Snow appeared, wearing black velvet trousers and an oversize black turtleneck pullover. Her hair was pulled back off her face, and she wore no makeup. Shivering in the courtyard, she looked frail and nervous, her thin lips forcing a smile at the guards to indicate that she was expecting Dennis. They relaxed and let him enter.

  ‘Ed hired them to make me feel safer,’ she told Dennis. ‘He thinks I’m being silly to worry, but they reassure me.’

  The interior of the courtyard house was everything Dennis expected of two youngish and adventurous Americans who were rich in China with American dollars. They had all the accoutrements of the China sojourner—the carved mahogany ashtrays, the Ning-po lacquerware, the Qing-style blackwood furniture. There were notice-ably more silk-covered cushions and silk drapes on the sofa than the Chinese would have used, and a display of chinoiserie and knickknacks—thumb rings, fingernail protectors, carved Buddhas, an ornate opium pipe on a stand. Gilt idols had been turned into standard lamps. There were also shelves of books, piles of magazines, a large wireless, a gramophone, records.

  The whole place was warm and inviting, modern but lived-in—very American to Dennis’s English eye. It couldn’t have been in greater contrast to Werner’s austere courtyard down the alley, where only the presence of a telephone indicated that it was 1937.

  Dennis lit a cigarette. Helen handed him an ashtray decorated with the logo of the Dollar Line, no doubt fashionably stolen from the cabin of one of their steamships. In the comfort of the Snows’ house, Dennis felt exhaustion ripple through him. His bones craved rest and warmth; his back ached from the lumpy mattress at the Wagons Lits, which held the dents of a thousand prior occupants. The bed itself wasn’t long enough for his lanky frame, and the steam heating in the room dried out his throat, already raspy from too many cigarettes smoked down to his fingertips. He had a cold he couldn’t shake, and his joints were sore.

  Helen later recalled that Dennis had been pale, green-faced and shivering that night—and ‘not only from the cold,’ she noted. She offered him a glass of brandy to take the chill off. He accepted and felt momentarily revived. Edgar Snow wasn’t at home, and Dennis and Helen settled in for a chat. What had she meant when she’d said that Pamela’s death was a warning? he asked her.

  It was a question with a long backstory. Helen and Edgar Snow enjoyed both sides of two very different Pekings, spending time with the Communists in their remote cave hideouts and starting a radical journal called Democracy, but also becoming regulars at the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, where they danced cheek-to-cheek in the ballroom that imitated the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. At their salons and garden parties in the courtyard on Armour Factory Alley, they mixed with revolutionaries and intellectuals, both Chinese and foreign.

  That month, Edgar was working on the final manuscript of Red Star Over China, his account of the time he’d spent with the Chinese Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1936. It contained interviews with the enigmatic Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, and everyone was whispering that it was going to be an explosive book. It accused Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang of corruption, and contrasted this with what Edgar believed were the glowing prospects and revolutionary purity of the Communists. He wanted to see a united front against Japan and against fascism, Asian or European.

  He also wanted Chiang to stop his Red-baiting, a policy that went back to 1927 and the slaughter in Shanghai of the Communists and others on the left. Chiang had been cleaning house, beheading troublesome union leaders along with Communist agents, and at least three thousand were left dead on the streets. The International Settlement, Frenchtown and Chinese Shanghai had run with blood for days while the foreign powers sat back and watched. A disgusted Edgar Snow reported on it.

  The fabled old China hands of Peking had failed to take Mao’s band of Communists seriously. They’d seen them smashed in Shanghai, then routed from their ad hoc Kiangse Soviet, a hastily conceived Communist-controlled territory, and forced into a long march to Shaanxi with Chiang’s army nipping at their heels. The Communists marched for 370 days, over a distance of eight thousand miles, enduring fatigue, hunger, cold, sickness, desertion and death. Only 7,000 of the 100,000 who set out made it to the Yan’an caves in Shaanxi, where they holed up beyond Chiang’s reach and plotted their comeback. Edgar had travelled to Yan’an to meet and interview them, and he sent back dispatches praising them. The foreign establishment now firmly distrusted him; Chiang and the Kuomintang hated him.

  Those whom Chiang disliked were added to a list. This was compiled by the Spirit Encouragement Society, known commonly as the Blue Shirts, an openly fascistic secret police, a paramilitary force intent on removing enemies of the Kuomintang. The list included every Communist in China, along with anyone, Chinese or forei
gn, who supported them. Helen believed it included Edgar, since details of his manuscript had leaked out, as well as herself.

  Within the Blue Shirts was a yet more secretive, yet more deadly group, simply named the Military Statistical Bureau. This was run by a shadowy figure called Tai Li, who was known even then as the ‘Himmler of China,’ and its organization was modeled on the Gestapo. Tai Li was the most feared man in China, the generalissimo’s ‘eyes, ears, and dagger,’ the spymaster general. He was known to despise foreigners, particularly the British, whose intelligence services he thought were far too meddlesome in China. Major General Tai was a remover of problems for the Kuomintang, an eliminator of enemies, a dispatcher of assassins. It was said that to be on the wrong side of Tai was to be on the wrong side of life. There were constant rumours about who was behind the assassinations and political killings in Peking that winter, and Tai’s name was whispered in every one.

  Tai Li and the Blue Shirts, Helen told Dennis, were out of control. They were running amok, settling scores. They were everywhere in Peking, underground and sometimes overt. Young aspirant Blue Shirt thugs met nightly on top of the Tartar Wall near the Fox Tower, within spitting distance of Armour Factory Alley. Her tailor claimed to be a member. They revered Tai as omnipotent, they practiced tai chi and swordplay, they remembered and honoured the Boxers of 1900, they believed in magic and in organ medicine. They cut hearts out, or so they claimed.

  The Blue Shirts wanted Edgar dead, claimed Helen. They wanted Red Star Over China buried. Since they were assassinating enemies of Chiang and Tai all over Peking, what was to stop them assassinating foreigners too? Helen believed she may have been the real target on the night of 7 January. The Blue Shirts had wanted to kill her as a warning to her husband, but they got Pamela by mistake.

  Dennis had to concede that the theory made sense. In fact, it was the only theory so far that made sense. It supplied motive. He appeared willing to consider it.

  Helen Snow was scared. She had hoped a Scotland Yard detective would tell her to stop being silly, to get a grip, to put these foolish ideas out of her head. Her husband refused to take them seriously. He felt himself to be ‘the favoured child of providence’; he believed that ‘foreigners were still sacrosanct in China.’ But if that had ever been true, the mutilation of Pamela Werner showed it wasn’t any longer. There was nothing sacrosanct about being murdered and having your heart ripped out.

  On the night of 7 January, Edgar and Helen had been at a party with fellow Americans Harry Price, an economics professor at Peking’s Yenching University, and his wife Betty. The two couples socialised regularly with each other, and spent the summer together on the beaches of Peitaiho, discussing the deteriorating world situation and the great ideological hope of Marxism. That Thursday night, the Snows had caught a taxi home to Armour Factory Alley around ten o’clock, and when Helen heard the news of the murder, she realised they couldn’t have been far away at the time of the killing.

  Helen had of course heard all the rumours surrounding the case, those concerning Werner, and Pinfold and Prentice. She knew of the nudist colony in the Western Hills, and caught the servants’ gossip about fox spirits. But why kill a young girl home from school for the holidays? she wondered. There had to be another reason. The thought that it was a case of mistaken identity chilled her to the bone.

  The Snows’ address was hardly difficult to discover, especially given their social calendar and Tai Li’s reach. Anyone could quickly find out that Helen regularly walked or bicycled along the Tartar Wall to Armour Factory Alley. Like Pamela, she always took that route home from the Legation Quarter: it was unlit at night, but it avoided the confusing warren of hutong that formed the Badlands.

  Helen Foster Snow dressed smartly—high heels, long skirts, fur stoles. Her style was radical politics with chic couture. Put Pamela in her glamour shot next to Helen, and in the dark, in a rush, they could be mistaken. Especially by an unknown assailant such as Helen was suggesting. The two women were about the same height and had the same colouring; both were fair-haired and slim. Helen wore her hair pulled tight to her head, sometimes parted to the side, sometimes down the centre—just like Pamela. They lived virtually next door, they both rode their bicycles around the area. The cover of night would easily remove the ten-year age difference between them.

  Dennis didn’t know what to say to Helen. Sitting by her fire, he looked out at Armour Factory Alley, listening to the howling of the huang gou carried on the wind from the Fox Tower. He was amazed that Edgar had gone out and left his wife alone in this state. Dennis had always found Armour Factory Alley ghoulish at night, but this seemed to be the reason Edgar and Helen liked it. They knew it was supposed to be haunted by fox spirits living in the Fox Tower, but she was, she laughed, living ‘alone’ with fifteen servants, four of them tough men armed with swords.

  ‘Don’t you realise,’ Dennis asked her, ‘that the murderer has to be hiding somewhere, probably nearby?’

  The DCI was at the end of his tether. He found himself slipping out of character. No longer the detached copper, he was taking the case too personally. Helen Snow’s brandy had left a bad taste in his mouth, or perhaps the virus he had was messing with his sense of taste. He needed rest; he needed to go home to Tientsin. He felt sick and useless.

  ‘There are no lights anywhere,’ he said to Helen. ‘Anything could happen way out here in the dark.’ He implored her to pack up, move out, get away from Armour Factory Alley. It was cursed. DCI Dennis sensed he was losing out to panic—he needed to get a grip. He was the one who ought to get out of Peking.

  Brutal though Tai Li and the Blue Shirts were, their assassinations tended to be fast, decisive—a shot to the head, and then they moved on to their next enemy. Tai was fond of the term liquidation. His methods didn’t square with what had been done to Pamela. Anyway, Dennis was a realist—it would be impossible to ever confirm or rule out Tai’s involvement. Nobody—not Han, not his bosses at Ch’ienmen—would ever dare approach Tai about the matter.

  However plausible Helen Snow’s theory about mistaken identity might be, it could never go anywhere. There were some questions that would just never get asked, some men in China so powerful they could get away with murder. Tai Li was one such. He was the dead end of all dead ends.

  The Element of Fire

  The Year of the Ox began at midnight on Wednesday 11 Febru-ary. Han and Dennis were at Morrison Street, where the station was like a ghost town. Even though both men were expecting it, they still jumped when the sound of a hundred thousand firecrackers burst over the city.

  Peking had shut down a few days beforehand for the Spring Festival holiday, but the days leading up to that were a flurry of activity. Outside on Morrison Street the thoroughfare had been busier than ever, louder than usual, as rich Chinese piled their purchases into their chauffeured cars and stubborn foreigners braced themselves against the cold, holding their hats to their heads as they headed for tiffins at the Grand Hôtel de Pékin.

  For commercial Peking, the end of the old lunar year and the start of the new was the time for settling accounts. Merchants and banks tallied up the year’s business on abacuses with flying fingers and sent their messengers scurrying around the city to collect outstanding bills. Chits that had been issued were redeemed, China’s unique credit system of trust and face invoked. Unless by special arrangement, no new accounts would be opened until the new year began. People hurried to make the last trading day for Peking’s markets—wheat and bean cake, flour, cotton, stocks and shares—which was on the Saturday, although the gold-bar market always stayed open.

  The poor of the city and the newcomers from the countryside walked along Morrison Street gazing at the modern stores and the gleaming black cars. Rickshaw pullers did good business, swarming around anyone with a parcel. Bank messengers darted in and out of rickshaws, the sparking trolleybuses and the lines of cars. Here and there shopkeepers emerged with bags of cash, flanked by bodyguards who escorted them to th
e bank.

  For several days Peking’s banks and countinghouses had extended their opening hours as queues formed to settle debts. China now had a paper currency, its own dollar, backed by the national bank in Shanghai, but jittery Peking didn’t trust it—in this city, cash might have been king, but silver was God.

  As the New Year approached, all Han’s black-jacketed constables were out on street patrol, truncheons drawn, whistles blowing, to manage the crowds that gathered at the temple fairs and on the food streets, or to watch the impromptu performances of acrobats and opera singers. Crowds were good cover for pickpockets and other criminals, and plainclothes police were also on duty, mingling with the throng to watch for signs of trouble.

  Patrols had been doubled at major intersections to prevent stampedes caused by delays and anger. Han predicted that marauding bandits would disrupt the roads and train lines out of the city. Thomas, Pearson and their small band of constables were also increasing the guards on the entrances and exits to the Legation Quarter. The Peking police bicycle squad was monitoring the temples and parks, while the thousand-strong Peace Preservation Brigade, volunteers with armbands, had been called out to assist the regular constables in patrolling the major commercial districts over the holidays. A celebrating crowd could easily turn into panic and frenzy, and this year the mood was heightened. Who knew what would be left to celebrate, next New Year? Peking was living while it could.

  The receding Year of the Rat was characterized by opportunity and good prospects, but with the possibility of bleak years to follow. The incoming ox symbolized problems that appeared never-ending, and those years were times for discipline and sacrifice. The ox’s element was fire: ox and fire combined to make a beast motivated by combat.