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

by Paul French

  Sun Te-hsing was then just nineteen years old. He was fitter and more persistent than most pullers in Peking, and he patiently waited outside number 28 until after midnight. Eventually he got his fare. A Russian woman he knew to be the madam of the brothel appeared at the doorway with a Chinese man and beckoned him over. The two white men then carried a foreign girl out through the door in the wall surrounding the building and into the street, supporting her under the arms—‘frog walking’ was how Sun described it. They put her in his rickshaw, where she didn’t move.

  The two men sat either side of her, cramped into the long seat. The girl was scantily clad, despite the cold night, wearing only a long blouse, a cardigan and a short skirt. Her face was partially covered with a white cloth. Sun assumed she was drunk. He was used to passengers from the Badlands being the worse for booze, sometimes semicomatose.

  Once running, of course, he wasn’t able to see her, and the men had pulled down the canvas overhang that offered passengers some protection from the cold and the rain. But Sun could hear the girl’s laboured breathing.

  He had also noticed that the hooks at the side of the girl’s skirt were torn, and the garment itself looked to have been ripped from the bottom almost to the top.

  Sun had been instructed by the brothel’s madam to take the men and the girl southeast along Chuanpan Hutong to the Wall Road and the small access point through the Tartar Wall known as the Stone Bridge. Sun wondered why they were going to such a remote location on such a cold and windy night, away from any houses or bars. But he pulled the trio to the southern edge of the Badlands as instructed, and was duly paid. He waited expectantly for a tip, but one of the men told him to clear off, and when the puller lingered a little longer in the desperate hope of some extra coppers, the shorter of the two men pulled out a knife and waved it at him.

  Sun needed no further hint and went swiftly on his way, heading back towards Hatamen Street. On his way home, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he stopped at the entrance to the French hospital on the edge of the Legation Quarter, near Morrison Street. There he chatted with the gatekeepers, telling them of his weird experience. When Werner’s agents later contacted the gatekeepers, they confirmed Sun’s story.

  Later that same morning, Sun noticed the blood on the cushions of his rickshaw and went to the canal by the Fox Tower to wash them out. He was worried: the white girl with the golden hair had been his last fare of the night, and the blood must have been hers. Then he had found himself grabbed by two constables and taken to the Morrison Street station, where he was questioned by one man only, Colonel Han Shih-ching.

  Colonel Han, Werner well knew, was the man who’d told DCI Dennis that the blood on the rickshaw cushions had come from an American marine. Han had claimed he’d checked the marine out and the story was solid, and so Sun had been released. Dennis subsequently had no cause to think of Sun Te-hsing again. And yet now Sun was saying there’d been no marine, no fight. He had told Colonel Han about the yellow-haired girl on Chuanpan Hutong; he had told him about the rickshaw ride to the Tartar Wall on the night of the Russian Christmas. Sun had just wanted to get out of Morrison Street and back to work.

  Werner showed Sun the clothes Pamela had been wearing the night she was murdered, the clothes she had been found in at the Fox Tower. Sun agreed they were similar to those worn by the yellow-haired girl who’d been put in his rickshaw on Chuanpan Hutong.

  Werner was left with much to think about. If Sun Te-hsing was telling the truth—and Werner could think of no reason why the man would lie, nor how he would otherwise be able to confirm so many details about that night—then Colonel Han had not only covered up vital evidence but had deliberately laid a false trail. He too had lied. Was this because Han, like DCI Dennis, had been officially directed how to proceed with the case? Had he been ordered to keep the investigation away from number 28? Or had the owners of the brothel paid him off, so as to minimize any disruption to business? Had Han perhaps been in their pay all along, in the way of these things? Wer-ner knew how the policing of Peking worked. For people who owned or ran brothels, it was nothing out of the ordinary to buy official protection. Plenty of policeman were on the take; they didn’t necessarily have to be wholly corrupt. It was even feasible that Han had believed the lie he was telling was a small one—it might have struck him as impossible that such a girl as Pamela could have been inside a Badlands brothel.

  Then there was the meeting Werner had had with Han after the British Legation had ordered Dennis away from the case. It was the only meeting Werner had been able to secure with the colonel, and the old man now suspected that the British Legation had used their influence with Peking police headquarters to force Han to break contact with him as well. At that meeting, Werner made mention of a place on Chuanpan Hutong that he knew Pinfold frequented. Han was momentarily fazed, and Werner realized that the colonel must have thought he was referring to number 28. When Werner named the Oparinas’ bar at number 27, Han had visibly relaxed. It was a detail whose significance had not been apparent to Werner at the time. Now he was certain that 28 Chuanpan Hutong held the secret to that night’s events.

  In late September of 1938, Werner went back again to Consul Archer at the British Legation and presented Sun Te-hsing’s evidence. He was determined that this time the man should listen. And at first Archer did, conceding that this new evidence ‘impressed him as being true.’ Werner demanded that Archer contact the British ambassador and have the case reopened. Archer said he would see what he could do, and ushered Werner out of his office.

  The next day, a note was delivered to Werner’s house stating that the new testimony had been ‘ruled out on entirely insufficient grounds.’ Sun’s evidence, Archer now claimed, was ‘fantastic,’ ‘valueless’ and ‘cannot be true.’ He pointed out that the rickshaw puller was contradicting the evidence he’d given to Colonel Han in January, and that the man was an opium addict, and therefore by default a hopeless liar who would say anything to get another fix. Archer then repeated Consul Fitzmaurice’s earlier warning to Werner that he should leave the case alone.

  To Werner this was incredible. The ‘case,’ as these people called it, was his daughter, whose horrific slaughter no one seemed to think important enough to properly investigate. He returned to the British Legation with Sun Te-hsing, who repeated his story directly to Archer, but the consul would not budge an inch. He wasn’t going to do anything. He refused to discuss the matter of why Colonel Han had given DCI Dennis a false story about a brawling American marine, when Sun had told him something altogether different.

  Archer’s message was clear—the case was closed, Werner should drop it. It was equally clear that the consul did not consider a Chinese rickshaw puller to be a reliable witness. White face was at issue here, and Sun’s story was an embarrassment that Archer and the British establishment in China did not want.

  Werner did not yield to them. Other new witnesses came forward. A mechanic called Wang Shih-ming, who worked in a nearby auto-repair garage, contacted Werner’s agents after reading one of the leaflets. Wang had seen a lamplight by the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January, near where Pamela’s body had been found. Another man, an old Chinese coal merchant, also made contact to report seeing a lamplight at the same time. He had been going to Hatamen Street to sell his coal, and when he returned a few hours later, going back past the Fox Tower as dawn was breaking, the lamplight was gone. A third man, a White Russian called Kurochkin, told Werner that he too had seen the light by the Fox Tower when he’d driven home along the City Road.

  Neither the mechanic nor the coal merchant had come forward previously because they couldn’t read English, the only language the reward leaflets distributed by the police were printed in. The White Russian Kurochkin had left Peking on an extended business trip to Manchuria the day after Pamela’s murder, and he hadn’t heard of it until now.

  The presence of a lamplight by the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January answered a questio
n that, as far as Werner could tell, hadn’t really been asked before. When a lamp was found in a ditch at the base of the Fox Tower, after Pamela’s body was discovered, it was recorded as evidence, but nobody knew whether it was connected to the murder or had been left there previously. The evidence of the mechanic, the coal merchant and the White Russian motorist suggested the lamp had been left by the killers. Presumably, whoever had dumped Pamela’s body at the Fox Tower would have needed some sort of light.

  And so once more Werner returned to the British Legation, to appeal yet again to Consul Archer. He prepared himself to restate all the additional testimony that he, Werner, with his own resources, had accumulated that the police investigation had not—Ethel Gurevitch’s new story; the note left at the Wagons Lits for Pamela; the witnesses to Pinfold being on Armour Factory Alley on 6 January; the note from Prentice to Werner regarding dental treatment for Pamela, which linked the dentist directly to his daughter and caught him out in the lie he’d told about never having met her. Then there was the matter of Gorman being with Pamela at the skating rink, having previously made improper advances to her; the impossibility of Prentice being at the cinema on the night of the murder; Sun Te-hsing’s strange trip to the Stone Bridge with a comatose girl matching Pamela’s description; and now the lamplight seen by three separate men at the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January.

  Surely, Werner believed, all this was enough to reopen the case. At the very least it warranted investigation of 28 Chuanpan Hutong. The brothel had in fact never been part of the police enquiry.

  And most important of all, it appeared that Colonel Han had deliberately meddled with the evidence of the case, had fabricated the rickshaw puller’s testimony. Whatever his reasons for acting this way, the fact was that the real evidence remained uninvestigated.

  This time Archer refused to even see him. The British establishment was showing Werner its collective back in no uncertain terms—he was no longer welcome at his own country’s legation.

  But Werner persisted. Through the long-serving Chief Chen at Ch’ienmen headquarters, head of police for all Peking, Werner arranged for the lamp found at the Fox Tower to be tested for fingerprints. He was surprised that this hadn’t been done before, and now the results came back negative. Too many people had handled the lamp, and all the prints on it were smudged. It seemed that Sergeant Binetsky had not secured the evidence properly, thereby corrupting it beyond recovery.

  More remarkably, Werner discovered from the records that none of the items recovered at the murder scene had been tested for fingerprints—not Pamela’s clothing, not her shoes, her belt, her diary, nor her membership card for the French Club skating rink. He was simply dumbfounded at this. He requested that all the items be tested now, but the results were the same—all had been contaminated, all had been handled by too many people. No definite prints could be obtained.

  Werner remembered the day he’d been interviewed at Armour Factory Alley by DCI Dennis. Botham and Binestky had walked around the house picking up Pamela’s personal belongings and placing them haphazardly in their overcoat pockets, never even providing an official receipt for what they had taken. That the evidence had then been useless surprised him not a jot. The attitude of the police towards Pamela’s belongings had been slapdash at best. Werner had had to repeatedly request Morrison Street to return Pamela’s belongings, including her valuable platinum and diamond wristwatch, which he wanted as a memento of his daughter. The silver casket that had been taken from her room was returned broken.

  Werner now attempted to go over the British consul’s head. He had come to despise fifty-year-old Allan Archer, whom he saw as incompetent. Archer had entered the diplomatic service through the back door, having failed his entrance exams in 1911 and using his connections to get a posting. He had no formal training in the law, yet he was allowed to sit in judgement over others.

  Earlier in 1938, the British crown advocate, the United Kingdom’s highest legal representative in China, had visited Peking, and Werner had attempted to see him. Archer blocked the meeting. As Werner was now barred from the legation compound, he appealed directly to the new British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, temporarily based in Shanghai since the fall of Nanking, prompting Archer himself to write to Clark Kerr:

  This particular line of enquiry, as Mr. Werner well knows, was fully investigated by British and Chinese police officials at the time the crime was committed, but unfortunately without any result at all. . . . the fullest investigations have been made into all the other lines of enquiry without the authorities being able to put their hands on the criminals—all possible lines of enquiry have now been exhausted without any success and every possible avenue explored.

  Clark Kerr, only recently installed in the job and previously unaware of either Werner or the murder of his daughter, backed his man in Peking. And then, in a move suggested by Archer, Clark Kerr offered Werner an inducement to cease his investigation of the case—a prestigious Sinology professorship in London. Werner could return home and sink into quiet academic obscurity.

  Outraged, Werner wrote back to Clark Kerr: ‘Very flattering, but—nothing doing! Shirking or slinking away is not my idea of how to solve the mystery of the brutal murder of a weak child.’

  Putting his anger aside, he appealed repeatedly to the ambassador for help, but Clark Kerr insisted that any decision regarding further action was to be taken by Archer, whose ‘exhausted lines of enquiry’ and ‘fullest investigation’ Werner had proved to be anything but.

  Eventually, in December 1938 Werner wrote to the Foreign Office in London, enclosing a copy of a report of his investigations, a second copy of which he sent to Ambassador Clark Kerr. Receipt of his report by the Foreign Office was acknowledged in February 1939, and a memo to that effect placed on file. The memo noted:

  It is not necessary to read through all the enclosures in Mr. Werner’s letter; it is sufficient to glance at his conclusions on pp. 27/28 and his renewed attack on Messers. Fitzmaurice & Archer on pp. 33/35.

  The information in Werner’s report represented some eighteen months’ work, by him and the people he’d paid to assist him. Now it was being dismissed virtually unread, except for those portions the Foreign Office considered to be direct attacks upon them and their officials.

  Still Werner did not let up. He paid his two remaining Chinese agents to stake out 28 Chuanpan Hutong, instructing them to approach the staff discreetly and offer money for information. He found out plenty—details that DCI Dennis had never known, and that Han, if he’d known, had never revealed.

  The madam of number 28 in January 1937 had been a fat half-Korean, half–White Russian woman called Madam Leschinsky, who lived with—and was possibly married to—a man called Michael Consiglio. This man, an ex–U.S. Marine of Italian and Filipino heritage, had served in Peking and Tientsin before leaving the army to become a full-time brothel manager with Leschinsky.

  Werner still had friends at the American Legation, and they searched their files for Consiglio. According to the records, he held neither a Filipino nor an American passport. He was a local hire, having joined the marines in China and served only in China. This was not an uncommon practice for the U.S. Army in China, and as the Philippines were under American control, Consiglio’s Filipino heritage was enough for him to join up.

  The third secretary at the American Legation, the veteran China hand Arthur Ringwalt, had kept a file on Consiglio since his discharge from the marines. As the operator of a brothel, he was a ‘person of interest,’ and was described by Ringwalt as being ‘of a most ferocious and cruel countenance.’ Consiglio had not served with distinction in the marines. He had in fact been thrown out.

  Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio had closed down the brothel the day after Pamela’s murder. They sold their informal lease on the place soon after—for $4,000 in silver dollars less than they’d paid for it, a brothel that was reputedly earning them $100 in silver dollars a day in profit—and fled t
o Tientsin. From there they went to Shanghai and the anonymity of the city’s Frenchtown, allegedly using hastily gained provisional Chinese passports.

  Werner hadn’t been able to find out who owned the building at number 28, but it seemed that whoever it was had encouraged Leschinsky and Consiglio to make haste out of Peking, and away from northern China altogether. He heard that the pair had been paid $1,000 in silver dollars by the owners to assist their escape. All the working girls who’d been at the brothel at the time had since been cleared out too, and who knew where they’d gone? Everyone had been told to keep their mouths shut if anyone asked about the place, and especially if anyone asked about the night of 7 January 1937. Most of the Chinese staff were also said to have moved on, or had fled Peking following the Japanese occupation.

  Why sell a highly profitable business at a loss and skip town if you were innocent of any crime? And why, if not to prevent the building at number 28 being revealed as a crime scene and therefore closed for longer, had the mysterious owners paid off Leschinsky and Consiglio? Werner was becoming more and more convinced that the owners had also been paying protection money to the Peking police, perhaps to Colonel Han directly. That was why Han had avoided rousting the place, and why he had been so nervous when Werner mentioned it.

  But Leschinsky and Consiglio and the owners would have known that no amount of protection money would help them once the daughter of a former British consul was murdered on the premises. They had no option but to shut up shop until things cooled.