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

by Paul French

  Pamela was curious about Prentice’s party invitation. She was meeting Ethel at the Wagons Lits anyway; it would take only a minute to pick up the note. And so she did. On leaving the hotel, she stopped briefly to read the invitation on the steps of the building. The party was to be a small gathering for the Russian Christmas, and Prentice hoped she could attend. It would start around eight o’clock at his flat—3 Legation Street, just across from the skating rink.

  Ethel arrived at the Wagons Lits just after five, as arranged. The two girls rode their bicycles a couple of streets away to the Gurevitches’ house on Hong Kong Bank Road, where they took tea with Ethel’s parents before going skating. Since Ethel was just fifteen, Pamela didn’t tell her about the invitation to the party, in case she might not understand.

  After skating happily under the arc lights in the freezing air, the two girls gossiped with their mutual friend Lilian Marinovski, and at seven o’clock Pamela said she had to go. They assumed she meant home, but Pamela had other plans. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she was bored with being alone. She wanted more from life than school, homework, the dim lights of Armour Factory Alley and her elderly scholar father.

  ‘I’ve been alone all my life,’ she told her friends.

  First she met her old friend Han Shou-ching, whom she could see only clandestinely now, after her father’s robust treatment of him. He was about the same age as Pamela, a student like her, and they got on well, even though their backgrounds were so very different.

  He took her for a quick meal on nearby Tung Tan Pailou Hutong, a street Pamela knew well and where her cook regularly shopped. Afterwards Han cycled with her back to the French Club rink, where he left her.

  It was around eight o’clock. Time for the party.

  In Wentworth Prentice’s modern, roomy, high-ceilinged apartment on the main thoroughfare of the smart Legation Quarter, other friends were arriving. If the gathering consisted of Prentice’s usual associates, they would have included Thomas Jack, Pinfold, John O’Brian, and Yashka Oparina, the son of Madam Oparina.

  Perhaps, too, Peter Liang was there. Liang was an independently wealthy Westernised Chinese who owned a fleet of cars, but he spent most of his time in the bars and cabarets of the Badlands and was regularly seen with Prentice. There would have been other women present, no doubt, and most likely one of them was the notorious Miss Ryan, a secretary with a foreign trading firm in the Legation Quarter. Miss Ryan was reputed to be a nymphomaniac. Rumour had it that soon after Pamela’s murder, her fiancé broke off their engagement on the grounds that he believed her to be ‘connected with the murder at the Fox Tower.’

  But Pamela didn’t know any of these people’s backgrounds, or anything of the secret and sordid connections that bound them. She would have felt safe in the dentist’s prosperous apartment, and grown-up amid these partygoers.

  Drinks were poured, jazz records played, mild flirtations in-dulged in. In the warm and inviting living room, hints ensued, and then suggestions that the night was young; why not head out to a few nightspots, a cabaret, take in the Russian Christmas celebrations? Prentice had a car, a chauffeur, it was easy.

  And Pamela, ready for a night of fun with her new friends, who appeared so much more sophisticated and worldly than her boyfriend at Tientsin Grammar, decided to go along. John O’Brian was there, whom she knew, and other men were paying her attention. Perhaps Prentice promised to call her father and tell him she was at a gathering at his flat—it would be all right, the dentist would have assured her, he knew Werner, they’d been in contact before. It was all so flattering, exciting.

  But these people were not her friends. Pamela entered number 28 with three men, one of whom was certainly Prentice. The others were probably John O’Brian and Joe Knauf. Dr Capuzzo, it seems, was already in the brothel with the off-duty Italian marines.

  Pamela went inside with Prentice on one arm and Knauf on the other. She didn’t appear to be going against her will, but with the rickshaw puller the only witness, who could say what state she was in? Perhaps she didn’t know exactly where she was, but then again perhaps she did, and was thrilled by the decadence and furtiveness of slumming it in the Badlands.

  Once through the narrow gateway into the courtyard, the group entered a side door on the right, which led to the bathroom and bedroom that Werner later saw. It was a distance of only five or six steps—he had measured it to prove that it was possible to get into the room without being seen from the courtyard.

  Surely at this point Pamela must have realised there was no party, no cabaret, no Russian Christmas celebration. The room was grim—a dirty floor, a bare harsh lightbulb, sparse furnishings. There were no decorations, nothing to indicate that anyone lived here, but there was a large bed. This bedroom was a place of work.

  The mood changed. If Pamela had thought that others from the flat were following behind them, she now knew she was alone with these men, who then tried to force themselves on her.

  Did they laugh as they did so? Taunt her, tell her to stop flirting with them? They had done this before, had arranged this sort of scenario many times. Perhaps they told Pamela she should just accept her fate, enjoy it. Perhaps she threatened to report them, but that would have only made them laugh more. Who would she tell, anyway? And who would believe that well-known professional white men, including a dentist, a doctor at the Italian Legation, and a former suitor of hers, had taken her to a White Russian brothel in the Badlands and forced her to have sex with them?

  They would all deny it, and if trapped, they would say she offered herself. At worst their reputations would be slightly tarnished, while Pamela’s would be destroyed. The Chinese police wouldn’t care—this was the Badlands, and bad things happened here.

  But Pamela refused to give in. She had an independent streak that now flared up. That would have been the point at which things got decidedly nastier. The shouting started, the yelling. And then the abuse turned to physical violence.

  The men cornered her in the room. They yanked at her tartan skirt, ripping it open at the eyelets on the side, right down to the hem. They ripped open her blouse. Her silk stockings got snagged on furniture corners as she tried to edge round the room away from the men. She clenched her fists with her thumbs balled inside to hit them, force them away from her. Impossible to imagine how desperate she must have felt in that bedroom with only one way out, through the bathroom and into the courtyard. And then the gate to the street, where between her and freedom were two or three more large men.

  She screamed, a sound that was heard throughout the bedrooms of number 28, heard by the prostitutes Marie and Peggy, who were there that night. She screamed again.

  Perhaps her resistance, her refusal to submit as other girls had done before her, angered the men. They were used to having their way. Or perhaps they panicked, and just wanted to shut her up. They grabbed her arms, scratching her as she tried to break free—the premortem scratches on her lower arms identified in the autopsy. That might have also been the point at which they thrust at her with their hunting knives, stabbing her in the face, eliciting the long, piercing final scream heard both within and outside number 28.

  Then, to silence her, one of the men hit her hard on the head, just above her right eye. Perhaps with the leg of a chair, which had broken off as a result of the struggle; the autopsy had determined that the fatal blow had come from a wooden instrument of some sort. The blow was so strong it split her skull, causing severe haemorrhaging. Blood poured inside her cranium, drowning her brain. Within two to three minutes Pamela was dead, on the floor of a dirty bedroom in a Badlands whorehouse, a place she should never have been in.

  Killing Pamela hadn’t been part of the men’s plan for the night. The shouting and screaming and smashing of furniture brought Madam Leschinsky and the brothel’s security man, Liu Pao-chung, running. Madam Leschinsky took control, perhaps with help from her partner Michael Consiglio. She told the men to get the body out of her brothel and away from Chuanpan
Hutong. She told her security man to confine the other girls to their rooms, and to keep the customers there too—the off-duty Italian marines. Dr Capuzzo was on hand to ensure they maintained their silence, in return for not being reported in an off-limits brothel.

  Faced with Pamela’s dead and bloody body, the men realised they needed to cover up their crime. They considered what to do, and took the decision to mutilate the corpse. They would slash it and stab it and then carve it up beyond recognition. They would dismember it and dump the parts outside the Legation Quarter, shifting any suspicion away from themselves and making the body impossible to identify. It would be seen as the work of a fiendish maniac, most probably Chinese.

  Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio would never talk, and they’d make sure their girls didn’t either. Dr Capuzzo would ensure that gossip didn’t filter out from the Italian marines in the brothel that night. As for the Chinese, one foreigner looked the same as another, and anyway, no Chinese willingly got involved in laowai business. Do it right, and the men would be in the clear.

  They set to work. They were hunters; they had large, sharp knives that they often carried with them, and they had carved up animal corpses before. The first thing to do was cut the throat and drain the body of blood. They were in luck, because adjoining the bedroom was a bathroom. Dennis had been right in thinking that if he could find the blood, he would find the killers—except that Pamela’s blood could never be found, because most of it went down the drain of the bath at number 28.

  The bloodletting done, Pamela’s body was carried to the courtyard door. One of the brothel’s oil lamps was taken for light, and perhaps some additional knives from Chen Ching-chun’s kitchen in the basement. Prentice went to the phone, called Pinfold, told him what had happened and that he needed to meet them.

  Which of them was it who suggested the Fox Tower as a suitable place to carve up the body? Werner always believed it was Pinfold, who, as the bodyguard of a Chinese warlord, had once regularly patrolled the area. He would have known the legends about fox spirits, he would have known the tower was deserted at night. He certainly knew there were no streetlights there, and that the base of the tower was pitch-black. It was not patrolled by police—in fact, it was the only watchtower in Peking not to be guarded at night—and the nearest manned police box was nearly half a mile away at Hatamen Gate. Moreover it was in Chinese police territory, outside the Legation Quarter. It was the perfect location.

  At the door of number 28, Madam Leschinsky called over the only waiting rickshaw puller, Sun Te-hsing. It was a dark night, after midnight, and cold, with a chill wind. Pamela was carried to the rickshaw and propped between Prentice and Knauf, her clothes draped back on and a cloth over her head hiding the damage.

  The laboured breathing Sun thought he’d heard would have been caused by the movement of air in Pamela’s lungs and throat as her body jolted during the jerky rickshaw ride: Werner had consulted a pathologist about this matter. Given what happened next, Werner could be forgiven for hoping that the end for Pamela had indeed come in that sordid room at number 28.

  Sun took his passengers along Chuanpan Hutong to the Wall Road. He went a short distance along that to the small stone bridge that formed a narrow gap in the Tartar Wall and provided access to the Fox Tower, and its desolate grounds on the other side.

  When Sun had left, warded off by Knauf’s blade, the men carried Pamela across the bridge to the base of the tower. Joined now by Pinfold, they proceeded to mutilate the corpse. They worked by lamplight, the same lamplight seen by the mechanic Wang Shih-ming, the old coal merchant, and the motorist Kurochkin in the early hours of that Friday.

  The men cut open Pamela’s sternum, cracking the ribs outwards. They worked with their hunter’s knowledge of anatomy and at least two different types of knife. There was a control to their work now, after the frenzy of the initial postmortem beating, stabbing and slashing, the repeated blows to the left eye, temples, crown and chin; the wounds about the face and the mutilation of the vagina. By the time Pamela’s body was clinically carved up, it was no more to these men than the carcass of an animal killed in the forest for sport.

  With the chest cut open and the ribs broken back, they had access to the body cavity. They removed the heart and other organs. They detached the stomach at the oesophagus and the small intestine. If the large gash across her throat was an attempt to cut the head off, then they were unsuccessful. Nor were they able to successfully detach her right arm.

  Perhaps it was at this point that the men were interrupted. Perhaps someone heedless of fox spirits had strayed too close, disturbing the gruesome scene. Or perhaps the men were startled by the headlights of the nighttime motorist Kurochkin, coming along the City Road and around the corner of the Fox Tower, above the slope where the carving was taking place. They would not have expected a car at that time of night, and it may not have been apparent to them that they were unobservable down at the base of the tower. Or perhaps they had simply grown exhausted.

  Whatever the reason, when they departed the scene, they were careless. They left things behind—the lamp, Pamela’s skating rink card, her expensive watch. If these last two items hadn’t been found, and if the dismemberment had been completed, identifying the corpse would have been considerably harder.

  What happened to Pamela’s heart, bladder, kidneys and liver? Perhaps for once the rumours had come close to the truth; perhaps the organs had been eaten by the huang gou. Or perhaps they had been thrown into the fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armour Factory Alley.

  The men left swiftly, back across the stone bridge to the Wall Road, and from there into the Legation Quarter, to 3 Legation Street. Once they were in Prentice’s apartment, they cleaned the blood off themselves. Aware that they could have left traces, the dentist had the whole place painted the following week, just to be on the safe side. Pamela’s bicycle and ice skates, left there earlier that Thursday night, were quickly disposed of, perhaps at one of Peking’s numerous flea markets, or dumped in the canal by the Fox Tower.

  As it turned out, the men had more than a week in which to do all this before the police eventually came knocking at Prentice’s door. The details taken care of, the men had nothing to do but wait. They waited knowing that Madam Leschinsky, Michael Consiglio and their working girls would keep their silence, that Capuzzo would ensure the Italian marines never talked, that the bathroom at number 28 had been thoroughly cleaned and any gruesome remains disposed of before the whole place was shuttered and closed down. They waited, knowing that the madam and her husband had left town and the prostitutes had scattered across China, with threats to keep their mouths shut.

  Pamela meanwhile had remained on the freezing ground at the Fox Tower, her head to the west and her feet to the east, her watch stopped at a couple of minutes after midnight.

  The Wound That Wouldn’t Heal

  Neither the outbreak of World War II nor the long years of its duration deterred Werner from sending the evidence he obtained from his investigation to the British authorities. He continued to send this not only to the Foreign Office in Whitehall and to Archer and Clark Kerr in China but to the British foreign secretary, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, better known as Viscount Halifax. He also copied in the parliamentary undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Ivor Miles Windsor-Clive, the second Earl of Plymouth.

  As for the Chinese authorities, no semblance of an independent police force remained in Peking. Chief Chen had been removed from Ch’ienmen and a puppet Chinese mayor and chief of police installed, a man who studiously ignored Werner’s entreaties.

  Some of the letters that Werner sent to the Foreign Office appear not to have been received, victims of the disruption of wartime postal services. But finally, in January 1943, someone in Whitehall read one of Werner’s reports, and in a file memo noted:

  If British administration of justice in China is to recover its good name, a case of this heinous nature cannot be
merely pigeon-holed, “dropped” and forgotten. In any event, full unexpurgated detail must be made public in due course.

  But being pigeonholed and forgotten was exactly the fate of Werner’s evidence. It was shelved deep in the vaults of the Foreign Office, among countless other documents arriving in war-torn and blitzed London. Nobody ever contacted Werner about his correspondence. The case of the murder of his only daughter was never reopened.

  And so she slipped from history. Foreign Peking was by now scattered to the four winds, fled to the far corners of the globe, as China and Japan locked horns and the whole world descended into a conflict that swallowed up the people who’d known Pamela.

  Pamela’s Tientsin boyfriend, Mischa Horjelsky, joined the U.S. Air Force and flew raids over occupied Europe until he was killed in action. His plane was shot down in the massive raids in the summer of 1943 that targeted the Nazi-held Ploesti oil fields in Romania.

  Han Shou-ching, with whom Pamela had eaten her last meal, returned to his father’s home in Mukden to join the Chinese resistance forces. He was captured by the dreaded Kempeitai in 1940 and executed.

  In Tientsin many people continued to believe that Pamela’s murderer was Sydney Yeates. When the headmaster and his family were bundled out of China, they hadn’t even waited for the next boat to London, but rather sailed for Kobe and then San Francisco, after which they travelled overland to New York. From there they sailed to England. They arrived in Plymouth in March, with no home and no job for Yeates to go to. He never taught again, keeping a low profile as the headmaster’s secretary at the City of Oxford Boys School, where he remained until his death in 1955 at the age of sixty-one.