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

by Paul French

  Sitting in the Morrison Street station, Han and Dennis were thinking not of oxen or rats but foxes, not of fire but blood. Where was Pamela’s blood? It was a question they’d never been able to answer. Those photographs, looked at a thousand times, had given up nothing.

  Pamela herself had been born in the Year of the Sheep, the most feminine of symbols. People born in those years were considered to be readily overwhelmed by emotions, negativity and gloom; they had a tendency to be hopelessly romantic, were easily manipulated and needed to be cared for. The sheep was a little self-centred but had a kind heart. Pamela Werner had been more like a lamb to the slaughter.

  Exploding fireworks were lighting up the sky across the city and over the Fox Tower. Firecrackers sounded along Armour Factory Alley, rockets were launched from the top of the Tartar Wall. Crowds surged through Soochow Hutong, where sweetmeat hawkers were doing a roaring trade. The Legation Quarter was alive with parties; the bars at the Wagons Lits, the Hôtel du Nord and the Grand Hôtel de Pékin were all packed, maybe for the last time. Champagne, whisky and gin flowed like rivers among the incessant chatter and gossip: the Durham Light Infantry had arrived in Shanghai to bolster defences, it was said, and more American marines were coming. Peking’s Hopei-Chahar Political Council was impotent now, and General Sung was expected to flee at any minute.

  In the Badlands, too, the bars were having their best night of the year, or at least since the Russian Christmas. The Kavkaz, the Olympia Cabaret, the White Palace Dance Hall, and all the other dive bars and seedy cabarets were packed. The Korean-run, Japanese-supplied dope dens were booming, despite the crackdown and the executions. The junction of the Chuanpan and Hougou hutong thronged with pimps and heroin dealers.

  At 27 Chuanpan Hutong, the Oparinas passed drinks across the bar at a furious rate to the transient, the displaced and the stateless, who were drinking Armenian brandy and cheap Ukrainian wine to try to forget where they were and why they were there. Next door at number 28, the brothel had reopened and the girls were busier than ever. All across the Badlands, drunken bravado, émigré despair and homesickness was boosting the coffers in the bars. The whole place was spiralling out of control. It had always been morally bankrupt, ever corrupting, but now it was succumbing to Bacchus, one last fling before the lights went out, for that was surely coming soon.

  On Armour Factory Alley, which for once was not deserted at night—fox spirits shy away from loud bangs—children were running up and down as firecrackers bounced off the walls, ricocheting like rifle shots, welcoming in the good spirits and scaring away the bad. But one house remained in darkness.

  And out past Armour Factory Alley, beyond the Legation Quarter and the end of the Tartar Wall, the British Cemetery was as quiet as its graves. By one of them—a grave that held two bodies, beloved wife, beloved daughter, together in death six feet under the recently churned earth—an old man was standing, looking down, remembering.

  Back at Morrison Street, the two detectives sat welcoming in the Year of the Ox, the year of fire. Somewhere out there in the crush was a man or men with blood on their hands, killers who needed bringing to justice.

  It seemed that all accounts had been settled across Peking except one.

  A few days later, Detective Chief Inspector Dennis returned to Tientsin permanently. He left the way he’d arrived, by train, from Peking Central Railway Station. As the train pulled out, he looked to the left and saw the Fox Tower looming over the Tartar City. He was leaving behind the fox spirits, the dead, the bereaved and the killers. DCI Dennis never returned to Peking. Colonel Han was assigned other cases, other duties, and life in the city moved shakily on.

  Not until late June was the final session of the inquest held. Once more E. T. C. Werner sat in the British Legation while Consul Fitzmaurice presided as coroner. There were decidedly fewer journalists than for the previous session back in January. Not only was Pamela no longer front-page news, but the case, with nothing new to report on it, had been virtually absent from the papers for months.

  These days it was the ever-tightening Japanese encirclement of Peking that grabbed the headlines. Or, from the wider world that June, the wedding of the abdicated Duke of Windsor and his former Shanghai-flapper divorcée, Wallis Simpson: theirs was still the celebrity story of the decade so far. The aviatrix Amelia Earhart was capturing hearts and headlines with her solo flight around the globe; two hundred thousand people had walked across San Francisco’s new Golden Gate Bridge; Hitler’s Hindenburg airship, the pride of the Nazis, had gone down in flames in seconds. And all the while the Great Depression and the Japanese rolled relentlessly on.

  Just a few stringers were in court now, hoping for a couple of lines worthy of their pay cheque. It was Saturday 26 June, and spring had given way to summer and the rainy season. This year had been the rainiest in recent years, and the windows of the legation were curtained with raindrops now, rather than snow. Once the rain departed, the serious humidity of the blistering hot months would kick in.

  Foreign Peking had continued to dwindle in number. On Armour Factory Alley, where the courtyard cherry trees had finished providing their annual spring carpet of fallen blossoms and their wonderful perfume, many of Werner’s neighbours were gone. Edgar and Helen Snow had returned to the Communist-held cave city of Yan’an. Werner himself stayed stubbornly on, but remained mostly indoors and was rarely seen.

  The third and final session of Pamela’s inquest was brief. Colonel Han, having nothing new to report and being busy with his other cases, sent a deputy. No new witnesses were called, no new evidence was submitted, and Fitzmaurice was quick to declare his decision.

  ‘The evidence is inconclusive as regards the identity of the murderer,’ he announced. ‘Verdict: Murder by a person or persons unknown.’

  Werner appealed to Fitzmaurice for the investigation to be continued, but the consul was curt. The case was not to be an ongoing one.

  Fitzmaurice left China the following week for his traditional extended summer holiday in England, while Werner remained at Armour Factory Alley alone.

  The Rising Sun That Chills

  And then it was all over. Peking fell to the Japanese troops on 29 July. The Chinese portions of Tientsin succumbed a day later. All that month, as the summer heated up, Peking had grown edgier and edgier. It started to sweat. The ice-cold terror of winter had given way to a pervasive humid fear as the days grew longer and the city’s time grew shorter.

  In June, bubonic plague had broken out in eastern China—a bad omen, and right on Peking’s doorstep. People ducked involuntarily at the sound of doors banging, a rickshaw tyre blowing out, a taxi backfiring. The sudden sharp screech of the ungreased wheels of the trolleybuses on Morrison Street sent shudders through people, where before it had gone barely noticed. What had once been just the frenetic cacophony of Peking life now rang alarm bells in the city’s subconscious. Were they here? Had they finally come? At times the tension of waiting seemed worse than the inevitable attack; at times it seemed it would never happen.

  In early July the Japanese provocations at the Marco Polo Bridge intensified to firefights and skirmishes, and eventually the Japanese moved to open confrontation. When Peking finally fell, the city was declared the seat of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China—a collaborationist puppet institution that would have been laughable if it wasn’t so brutal.

  The wait was over, and the ancient city was occupied. The lights of Peking went out, food queues lengthened, inflation spiralled, arrests and disappearances intensified. Day after day, the Japanese military poured into the city along Front Gate Avenue—tanks first, followed by infantry marching in columns of four. They took over the hotels, as well as large houses and courtyard residences abandoned by Peking’s intellectual class and foreigners, who had mostly fled. Outside the city, the Japanese policy of the ‘Three Alls’—kill all, burn all, destroy all—amounted to a scorched-earth policy for a hundred miles in all directions from Peking. To the victors
the spoils.

  Barbarism came to China with a vengeance, accompanied by the flag of the Land of the Rising Sun. Peking and Tientsin were just the start. In August the Japanese moved to swallow Shanghai, leaving the foreign sections of the city a solitary island surrounded by outright war. The heavily populated Chinese district of Chapei burned. Europeans in the International Settlement and Frenchtown took time out from their dinner parties at the Cathay Hotel on the Bund, or their whisky sodas at the American Club and aperitifs at the Cercle Sportif Français, to stand on balconies and pass round binoculars as the flames licked across the northern portions of the city.

  The South Railway Station in Shanghai was destroyed, and a trainload of civilians seeking sanctuary in Hangchow was machine-gunned. Refugees flooded into Shanghai’s International Settlement as the Imperial Japanese Army swarmed up the Yangtze River.

  In December it was Nanking’s turn. Chiang Kai-shek was forced to retreat inland to Hankow as the Japanese army descended on Nanking and indulged themselves in a six-week orgy of violence, unseen on such a scale in modern times. In what quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking, some three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped, tortured, mutilated or killed by an out-of-control Japanese military. By the end of 1937, it was clear that China was in a fight for its very survival.

  Amid such unprecedented horror, the first anniversary of Pamela Werner’s murder passed unnoticed, and went unremarked upon in the Peking press. Who was left to remember her? Martial law was firmly in place by then. All the gates of the city, except Ch’ienmen, were closed. Sandbags were piled at the corners of every major thoroughfare, and Japanese machine guns watched over the Chinese populace. All but the most essential commerce was at a virtual standstill, and the crowds that had once thronged Jade Street, Lantern Street, Silver Street and Embroidery Street were now gone. Shops were shuttered, the curio market was closed, food was rationed.

  Wealthy Pekingers had packed up and left. The weekend bungalows at Paomachang, where foreigners had once raced their stout Mongolian ponies, were now empty, as was the Pa Pao Shan golf course. Residents no longer weekended in the temples nestling among the Western Hills—all these places were off-limits by official order.

  The city was icy cold once again. Chinese New Year had come early, on 31 January, but firecrackers were banned; they sounded too much like gunshots. Out went the Year of the Ox and its great sacrifice, and in came the tiger, fearless, courageous, determined. China desperately needed the attributes of the tiger in 1938.

  What was left of foreign Peking felt eerily empty. The wives and families of diplomats had been repatriated, along with the U.S. Marines who had guarded the American Legation. European and American government officials warned foreigners living outside the Legation Quarter that their safety could no longer be guaranteed, and urged them to move inside the Quarter. The few remaining foreigners who could still afford the inflationary prices moved into the Quarter’s hotels, which all overflowed but managed to continue to provide heating, food and hot water.

  Poorer foreigners lived in canvas tents hastily erected on their legation’s grounds, where they ended up stewing through the summer and freezing in the winter. Some ignored the orders sent out by officials and hunkered down in their homes across Chinese Peking, hoping to ride out the storm. Some, like the White Russians and the Jewish refugees, had no choice—they had no papers and no legation, and most of them had no money.

  But even with the departures, the overall population of Peking swelled. Tokyo’s Three Alls forced yet more peasants to seek sanctu-ary in the city. The number flooding in more than outweighed those leaving, and many of the newcomers were desperate and close to starving. Crime soared.

  The Chinese rumour mill was taken up with new topics. It was said that the Imperial Halls were being refurbished and prepared for the return of the last emperor, Pu Yi. Communist agents were planning to blow up the Forbidden City. Chiang Kai-shek, still in Hankow, would either move the government to the fortress city of Chungking, at the head of the Yangtze, where he would fight to the death, or he would sue for peace with Tokyo and fold before spring ended.

  Even the occupation of Peking could not shift Werner’s thoughts from the murder of his daughter. When Consul Fitzmaurice had slammed down his official gavel the previous June and declared the investigation closed, Werner was a broken man. His heart had been weakened, and his doctor ordered him to rest. With the diplomats, the police and the press all giving up on the case, he sank even lower into despondency.

  The summer of 1937 had been Peking’s most humid in living memory, and to escape the terrible clammy damp—what the Chinese called fu-tien—Werner retreated to his beach house at Peitaiho. There he took the sea air and tried to restore his energy. He also took with him all the material he could gather on the case—newspaper articles, the records of the inquest, the autopsy report—along with the numerous letters sent him by sympathetic people. These he studied as closely as he had previously pored over his ancient Chinese scrolls.

  Throughout the autumn and the start of winter that year, he appealed repeatedly to the British authorities in China—to the British legations in Peking and Shanghai—for his daughter’s case not to be abandoned. ‘I shall not let the matter rest as long as I have breath in my body,’ he wrote.

  He also wrote letters to the newspapers—the North-China Daily News, the Tientsin and Peking Times, the North China Star. He self-published a pamphlet calling for the case to be reopened, starting with an open letter to Pamela’s murderer to come forward. He appealed to DCI Dennis in Tientsin, he appealed to the Chinese police at Ch’ienmen. He appealed from his heart, as a father:

  The sight of my child’s kind little face, half cut away and bleeding, as her mutilated body lay on the ground that terrible morning, seemed to drag my eyes out of my head, and the shock has permanently injured my heart. During every minute of every day that vision has beat upon my brain.

  All his letters were either ignored or turned down. By January 1938, he had accepted that his appeals were falling on deaf ears and stopped making them. Instead he took matters into his own hands.

  Werner threw himself into what would become the single quest of his remaining life—a private investigation into the murder of his daughter. He was determined to see justice done for her, and stubbornly refused to walk away from the case. Over the years, many people had found Werner an odd man, and in his own words he stood ‘apart from the herd,’ but the very same characteristics that infuriated others—his steely determination to see things through to the end, his strength of will that refused to be diverted from a cause, his abundant intelligence—now drove him to learn the truth about Pamela’s murder.

  He set out to dig through the dirt of the case himself, embarking on a journey that took him deep into the city’s underworld, all the way to its sordid, putrid bottom. Wealthy white Peking might have been vastly depleted in number, but the stateless White Russians had nowhere to go, and the criminal class did not want to leave—they believed they could survive and thrive, under Japanese rule. It was with these groups that Werner dealt. He paid informers: nightclub and dive-bar habitués, Russian women who’d worked the Badlands brothels frequented by the gang, people who knew Prentice, Pinfold and their ‘sex cult.’

  He also hired people to uncover facts, including Chinese ex-detectives—good men who were deemed politically unreliable by the Japanese and had been ousted from the Peking force. They tracked down Chinese witnesses scattered across northern China. He had his agents distribute leaflets across the city, in Chinese this time, appealing for witnesses and offering financial rewards. He took advantage of Peking’s collapsed economy. Unemployment had soared, food prices had quadrupled, the number of pawnshops had escalated. People were more and more desperate for money.

  He slowly emptied his bank account, but people talked. It might not just have been about the cold, hard cash; perhaps it was guilt, the burden of knowing too much and not speaking out. Werner dedica
ted five years to the task, and what he uncovered was ultimately far worse, far more evil, than anything Peking’s numerous armchair detectives could have imagined.

  Meanwhile, it was back to the start he had to go, however painful that might be, sifting through the half-truths and the lies to discover the daughter he thought he had known.

  Journey to the Underworld

  E. T. C. Werner, former consular judge, barrister-at-law of Middle Temple, knew that the key to the murder was the locus delicti, the scene of the crime, the killing floor that Dennis and Han had never found. The detectives were right in their assumptions, Werner believed, that if they could find the blood, they would find the killer.

  By the time Werner began his investigation, Colonel Han had been ordered by Peking police headquarters at Ch’ienmen not to talk about the case. The incident room at Morrison Street had long been dismantled, the crime-scene photos taken down and filed away. DCI Dennis, now back in Tientsin, had also been officially warned off any further communication with Werner. Enough muck had been raked for the taste of Consul Affleck at Gordon Hall.

  As for Consul Fitzmaurice, Werner’s old adversary, he had never returned to Peking from his summer leave in England, instead retiring at the age of fifty-six. The rumour was that London had little faith in their man and had sidelined him. A new consul, Allan Ar-cher, had been installed in September 1937.

  But while he had hit an official wall of silence and obfuscation from his compatriots, Werner did have some friends in the wider diplomatic corps—at the American and Japanese legations in Peking and at the French Legation in Shanghai. He found allies among former Peking policemen, who’d been in the force during the investigation and were now persona non grata with the Japanese occupiers. On the record and off, many people sought to help him. Some tipped him off anonymously.