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

by Paul French

  Werner turned his attention to the Italian Marine Guards who were reportedly at number 28 that night, and the marines who’d been seen at the bar next door on the previous evening. He’d heard that the squadron was about to be rotated out of Peking back to Italy, and on contacting Commandant Del Greco, commander of the guard at the Italian Legation, he learnt that he too was being transferred out. The commandant denied that any of his men had been away from their barracks on 6 January 1937. Nor could they have been on Chuanpan Hutong the following night—it was strictly out of bounds.

  Werner appealed to Consul Archer to ask the question through official channels. Surprisingly, Archer did, but Del Greco repeated his assertion that none of his men had been on Chuanpan Hutong. Werner suggested Archer have the rickshaw puller Sun Te-hsing taken to the Italian barracks to identify anyone he’d seen that night. And given Del Greco’s impending departure, perhaps an order should be issued for his detention? Archer prevaricated, letting crucial time pass, and before he replied to Werner, Del Greco and the marines left Peking for Italy.

  Werner knew that the commandant had been covering his hide. If he were to admit knowledge of his men’s presence in the off-limits Badlands, he too could be in trouble. So Werner went directly to the one Italian he knew for sure had been there that night, Dr Capuzzo. The doctor was a married man with a large family, but he was said to have been a regular along Chuanpan Hutong, a friend of Michael Consiglio as well as of Prentice. Capuzzo’s house, on Viale Italia, near the Italian Legation, was a ten-minute walk from Prentice’s flat.

  Werner called on the doctor at his surgery in the Italian hospital, close to the Grand Hôtel de Pékin on Morrison Street. Standing in the cramped waiting room, he acted like any other prospective patient waiting to see the doctor. He asked Capuzzo an innocuous question about an Italian family he had connections with. Would Dr Capuzzo know whether they were planning to return to Peking? Capuzzo replied that he thought not, then asked Werner for his name.

  On learning who his visitor was, he said at once, ‘When your daughter was killed I was in Hong Kong.’

  Not wishing to alert Capuzzo to his suspicions, Werner left. On his way out he questioned the gatekeeper at the hospital: Did he know if Signor Capuzzo had ever been to Hong Kong? The gatekeeper said that, as far as he was aware, the doctor had not left Peking for several years.

  Werner had the details of a number of Capuzzo’s associates, including a Greek businessman who supplied pharmaceuticals to Capuzzo and the Italian hospital, and had done so for years. This man, too, said that Capuzzo hadn’t left Peking for many years, something that was confirmed by other associates. Werner’s detectives quizzed all the foreign travel agencies in Peking, but none had a record of a Dr Capuzzo leaving Peking for Hong Kong at any time.

  Before Werner could approach the next man on his list, he was put in touch with the mysterious ‘Jack.’ Here Arthur Ringwalt and his voluminous files on American ne’er-do-wells in Peking had once again proved vital.

  Jack turned out to be an Italian-born naturalized American who’d taken the name Thomas Jack to hide his ancestry when he’d joined the U.S. Marines. He had enlisted as a local hire in Peking, in the same way Michael Consiglio had, and since his discharge had been hanging around the Legation Quarter working as a mechanic. Arthur Ringwalt had been told by one of his informants that ‘there is a marine who knows everything and is willing to talk.’ Rumours of a car mechanic being involved in the murder had also reached Werner’s Chinese detectives. Ringwalt hadn’t been given a name, but he believed the mechanic might be Jack, for whom he had a current address.

  When Werner went to see Jack, he thought that whatever the mechanic was calling himself, he couldn’t hide his ancestry; his English had a marked Italian accent. He was a short, squat, strong-looking man, and at first he was remarkably open with Werner. He had left his job at the Mina Motor Company, the Legation Quarter’s major car dealer, and had branched into the nightclub business. He showed Werner the plans for the new cabaret he was in the process of setting up.

  According to Ringwalt’s intelligence, Jack had recently got together enough of a stash to buy the Olympia Cabaret, the place that Joe Knauf had once managed and Prentice had frequented. Now Jack was expanding to a second joint, which was to include a large number of bedrooms upstairs, where the real business of the cabaret would no doubt take place.

  But when it came to Pamela’s murder, he was less open. He claimed to have heard of it only through the newspapers, and said it must have been committed by some low-class Chinese such as a rickshaw puller. He laughed off the suggestion that Prentice might have been involved. He rejected the notion that Knauf was a man of violent tendencies, despite the police records to the contrary.

  Werner pushed him. It was impossible for the murder to be the work of a simple rickshaw puller acting alone, he insisted, and moreover a car and foreign men had been seen that night. Jack claimed he’d been to number 28 only once, about a year before the murder, but Werner noted his agitation at the mention of a car being seen there.

  Asked if he knew Capuzzo, Jack said he’d often been hunting with him and Knauf, but with that he seemed to think he had said too much, and he hustled Werner out of the flat and slammed the door. If Jack was the marine reported to ‘know everything’ and be ‘willing to talk,’ he had since changed his mind.

  Next Werner tracked down Joe Knauf. He had been putting off meeting him due to his reputation for being easily angered and swift to resort to violence. It was said that Knauf wouldn’t hesitate to throw his fists or pull his knife out. Werner might have been a determined man but he was also in his mid-seventies, and wary. He had been fairly sure that neither Prentice, a well-known dentist, nor Capuzzo, a physician attached to the Italian Legation, would be physically violent with him, but Knauf was another matter entirely.

  Arthur Ringwalt had a large file on Joe Knauf, which included details of the threatening behaviour he’d shown customers in the Olympia Cabaret. The Americans had kept a watch on the Olympia while Knauf was managing it, suspecting him of pimping, selling heroin and dealing in illegal arms and ammunition. There were also reports of his being completely naked in the courtyard of his lodging house, apparently drunk or drugged. The Chinese owners of the building were fearful of him, aware that he’d been kicked out of several other lodging houses, after which he had violently assaulted the landlords.

  When Werner went to the run-down house on the edge of the Legation Quarter where Knauf lived, he had just returned from his summer residence in Peitaiho, where he’d been assembling his investigation notes. The train back to Peking was horrendously overcrowded and slow-moving, as were all the trains under the Japanese occupation. He had called at the lodging house earlier in the day and been told by the gateman that Knauf was out. Werner left his calling card, saying he’d come back later.

  He returned around five thirty, when it was still light after a sweltering, humid day. The old man with his weak heart was feeling nervous.

  As Werner approached the building, he saw Knauf looking out at him through a long tear in the traditional paper windows. Werner later wrote of this moment:

  My first impression was that I was looking at an animal instead of a human being. He has a long face, very large eyes, a pronounced Roman nose (as noticed by the rickshaw coolie on the night of the murder), and a body (only partly covered by a kimono as is his custom) evidently thickly covered with dark hair.

  Knauf sent down his houseboy to show Werner to his rooms. Walking through the maze of corridors, Werner noticed that the other people in the building, both Chinese and foreigners, were displaying odd behaviour. As they went into rooms they would unlock the doors and then swiftly lock them behind them. And when leaving they would close the doors just as quickly and hurriedly lock them again. He didn’t know whether this was because the place was a centre of heroin dealing, as Ringwalt had suggested, and security was tight, or whether prostitutes were kept there, perhaps against their will,
allowed out only at night, escorted by their pimps.

  Knauf’s rooms were almost identical to those of Pinfold and of every other cheap, run-down boardinghouse frequented by Peking’s underworld—cramped, with sparse, worn furnishings, stifling in the summer heat. The man was seemingly a transient, having no more possessions than could be put into one suitcase in a hurry.

  At first he was hostile to Werner, demanding to know who he was, although he must surely have known from the card left with the gateman. And he’d been expecting Werner, watching for him at the window. He assumed the old man had come to accuse him of Pamela’s murder; the underworld grapevine was well aware of Werner’s investigation. He adopted a loud and aggressive tone, and had to be reassured that Werner had come to seek information, not to point the finger.

  Knauf’s story was the same as the other men’s, and Werner was beginning to smell collusion. Knauf had not known Pamela and had only ever been to number 28 once, a full year before her murder. He denied being a regular there. He only knew of her killing what he’d read in the newspapers. Yes, he had often gone hunting with O’Brian, Capuzzo and Thomas Jack. He also admitted to a close friendship with Prentice, which had come about through hunting, through the Western Hills nudist group, and in and around the Badlands.

  Knauf sought to defend his own reputation. The problems with the Legation Quarter police and the American Legation had been misunderstandings, arising from unavoidable circumstances at the Olympia Cabaret. Knauf was a member of the community; he had umpired games for American boys at a local sports club before the Japanese occupation. (This much was true: Ringwalt had told Werner about it, and had also told him that Knauf was thrown out of the sports club for shouting at the boys and striking a couple of them in a fit of temper.)

  Werner challenged him. Why had he gone to Tientsin shortly after the murder? he asked. Was it to procure a lawyer for Prentice in case he was charged?

  Not at all, Knauf maintained. He had gone to secure a lawyer to help him recover some money that Prentice owed him.

  Werner wasn’t buying it—a lawyer to act against Prentice, his good pal?

  He continued to dig. He asked Knauf flat out if he was a pimp, and Knauf, far from denying it, defended prostitution, saying that without it the girls would starve. Knauf maintained he only facili-tated prostitution, and he didn’t use the girls personally, keeping himself to ‘one little Korean girl.’

  Knauf also fished for information about Werner’s investigation, saying unprompted, ‘If the murder was committed in Prentice’s flat, the Legation Quarter police would certainly have seen the car and have known about it.’

  ‘Not on a night like that,’ Werner replied.

  Werner hadn’t told Knauf of his suspicions about Prentice, and he assumed that Knauf was either trying to protect the dentist or put Werner off the scent.

  Then Werner asked if he knew where Madam Oparina could be found, and Knauf’s attitude changed. He turned suddenly pale and became hostile once more. Perhaps he assumed it was Madam Oparina who’d mentioned his name to Werner. For whatever reason, he claimed he didn’t know the owner of 27 Chuanpan Hutong.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Werner said; ‘you and she ran a bawdy house together, and you had a row with her.’

  At this point Knauf exploded and began shouting threats. He called his houseboy and ordered him to show Werner out, telling the boy to make sure the gateman didn’t let him back in. And that was that with Joe Knauf.

  The last member of Prentice’s ring to have been identified at number 28 that night was John O’Brian, the half-Chinese, half-Portuguese youth who had become infatuated with Pamela in Tientsin. Werner’s detectives had heard that O’Brian was another person who’d held a passkey to Prentice’s flat on Legation Street, and that he too had regularly attended parties there. But they’d had no luck seeking him out. His last known address was a single room in an ex–German Army barracks building at 6 Legation Street, almost next door to Prentice’s apartment building. Shortly after 7 January, O’Brian had left for Shanghai, with a loan, according to Werner’s sources, from his protector. Werner could only assume that Prentice had been making sure O’Brian was nowhere around to be questioned.

  What a disgusting gang they made. A predatory group who not only went hunting together in the Western Hills but also targeted human prey in Peking. They pursued, caught and then gutted their kill.

  Together they had hunted Pamela, trapping her in the brothel on Chuanpan Hutong, and together they had killed her.

  A fox spirit’s most common disguise is to manifest itself as a beautiful woman. A woman with the power to beguile men, capture their hearts, tempt them and lead them astray—away from their wives, their families, their businesses. The fox-woman promises loyalty, swears to be faithful, but will always betray, and leave without warning. Cunning princesses, courtesans, hostesses, the most infamous of Peking’s sing-song girls—such women are said to have a touch of the fox in their composition, in their very nature, to perhaps be fox spirits. They can only be overcome by a stronger spirit.

  Invitation to a Party

  When was the moment of realisation? When did the adventure and the flattery cease, the flirtation become something different? When did the night change from being an opportunity for a schoolgirl to make an entrée into a seemingly glamourous adult world, and instead turn nasty? At what point did Pamela become scared, knowing that terrible things were about to happen? When did she see the true nature of the men she was with? When had she clenched her fists with her thumbs inside, prepared to fight back? When had she screamed out? When was the moment she knew she was going to die?

  Pamela hadn’t known she would be taken to a notorious brothel that evening. She thought she was going to a party, or a supper, and why not? It was a last chance for some Peking fun before leaving in a few weeks for England, where she would put the unsavoury events at Tientsin Grammar School behind her. She certainly hadn’t been aware that she would be in the company of men who were known to be violent, who preyed on young women and then forced themselves on them. Who would try to rape her in a squalid room in a Badlands whorehouse.

  But that’s how Prentice and his gang worked. The pretty young white women they invited to their parties and suppers were just realising what life could offer them, but were still unaware of the dangers that lurked. They met in Prentice’s surgery, at the French Club skating rink, at Peking’s cinemas and department stores, in the tiffin salons and the polite bars of the Legation Quarter hotels. The men sent the girls secret notes, or they ‘accidentally’ bumped into them on the street and issued invitations to Prentice’s flat, the home of a professional man, a family man, safely in the heart of the Quarter.

  Prentice had put it about that his family were in America for reasons to do with their health. No rumour had ever leaked out concerning the fears the U.S. authorities held for his daughter’s welfare, were she to stay in his presence. But the fact was that Edna Prentice had taken her three young children and left Peking, never to return. Divorce might have been impossible, but Edna made sure that her husband never had contact with his children again.

  Prentice had forged a new life for himself in Peking, with two personas. Perhaps it was the life he had always wanted—on the one hand, he was a well-known professional within the upright and proper world of foreign Peking; on the other, a habitué of the Badlands, the host of parties where prostitutes were hired to dance naked for the lowlife of white Peking. But who else was going to these parties? Someone with enough influence to have the investigation into a murder closed down?

  And then Prentice had decided to target Pamela. He would have heard she was back in Peking via Gorman or O’Brian, or perhaps others who’d met her over the Christmas holidays. The dentist probably met Pamela at the skating rink the evening before she died. She may also have skated with Thomas Jack—a witness claimed to have seen her skating with a short man that night. And of course Pamela had already met Prentice in his surgery; he was a charming m
an who lived opposite the rink, who had a family in Los Angeles that he often spoke about, a man of some means and standing in the community. A dapper dresser who knew George Gorman, and Ethel Gurevitch too—they had mutual friends. He had come over to say hello, perhaps to his friend Jack as well; it was nothing more than a pleasant coincidence.

  He knew where she lived—he’d sent her father a receipt for her dental work the previous year, and anyway Werner was a well-known figure. He dispatched Pinfold to contact her on Armour Factory Alley the next day, to let her know there was to be a party that night. A note had been left for her at the Wagons Lits reception by way of formal invitation.

  The idea of a Legation Quarter party would have appealed to Pamela. Her Christmas holidays had been fun after the confines of Tientsin Grammar School and the unpleasantness of Sydney Yeates. She’d been enjoying her last days in Peking, before the long voyage to England and a new start. Pamela wasn’t perfect; she was making the same mistakes many girls do when experimenting with their independence, their newfound power over men. Her tragedy was to encounter the wrong men, at just the wrong moment.

  When Pamela left her house on Armour Factory Alley that afternoon, she was dressed in her tartan skirt that fell to just above her knees, silk stockings, an Aertex blouse, a cardigan and black shoes. Over these she put on her blue overcoat, belted at the waist. She had a handkerchief in her purse, some money, her new membership card for the French Club skating rink, and she wore, as she always did, her platinum watch with the diamond settings. Bought with her dead mother’s money, the watch reminded Pamela of her.

  Lastly she tugged on a black beret and mittens before collecting her ice skates and cycling south out of Armour Factory Alley. She went along the Wall Road and into the Legation Quarter, as far as Canal Road and the Wagons Lits Hotel. This was Pamela’s Peking world; she knew it well and loved it.