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

by Paul French

  But lately the once-packed hotels and clubs had been a little somber, and sometimes they were half empty. In truth, the Wagons Lits and other night spots were out of date. Shanghai had better bars, had much better everything. Peking was a relic, a onetime capital that was now far too close to the Japanese war machine. The city, its foreigners and their clubs were victims of history and geography.

  These days, rickshaw pullers waited outside the exclusive Peking Club for well-heeled guests who never emerged, having never arrived. The diplomats and the old China hands stayed on, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that both the Nationalist republic and the Japanese would go away, but the legations operated with reduced staff. Those foreigners who could were getting out: businessmen sent their wives and children home, or to the relative calm of Tientsin or Shanghai. Wealthy Chinese had their families go south to Canton or the British colony of Hong Kong. Peking was already lost ground; it was just that the Japanese hadn’t got around to taking it yet.

  To make matters worse, rumour had it that Chiang Kai-shek was about to cut a deal with Tokyo. Chiang had fought a long and bitter internecine battle to become leader of the Kuomintang, and his position was still precarious; he had political challengers to stave off as well as the Japanese, the warlords and the Communists. Many people believed he would sacrifice Peking in order to save his own skin: if the Japanese were to stop at the Yangtze River and leave him everything south as far as Hong Kong, Chiang could live with that. Chiang was finished with the north, the Chinese whispered—for you never knew who was listening—he would sell out Peking, and the Japs would massacre them all.

  The city’s inhabitants felt betrayed, expendable. The mood on the streets, of both foreign and Chinese Peking—in the crowded hutong (alleyways), in the teeming markets where prices were rising and supplies of essentials were dwindling—was one of fear mixed with resignation. People said that when the final push to conquer China came, the Japanese would starve the city into submission. The end was coming; it was just a question of when. The traditional trade routes into Peking from China’s vast hinterlands were already being cut off. Chinese Peking was bursting with peasants who had crowded in from the surrounding provinces, fleeing the Japanese, the warlords, poverty and natural disasters. They wandered aimlessly, wondering what tomorrow would bring. They went to bed early in crammed houses to escape the dark and the biting cold, hoping to make it through another day.

  When the catastrophe did finally hit, China would be thrown into a struggle for its very survival, in what would be the opening act of World War II. For now foreign Peking was in an uneasy lull, on the edge of panic at times, although an alcohol-assisted denial and the strength of the silver dollar made life more bearable for many. An American or a European could still live like a king in this city, with a life of servants, golf, races, champagne-fuelled weekend retreats in the Western Hills. The storm might be coming, but the last foreigners in Peking had battened down the hatches very comfortably.

  The hunt for a young woman’s killer was about to consume, and in some ways define, the cold and final days of old Peking.

  The Body at the Fox Tower

  It was an old man named Chang Pao-chen who reported the body. One of the laobaixing—literally, the ‘old hundred names,’ the working people of Peking—Chang was now retired and lived in a hutong not far from the Fox Tower. On that cold morning of Friday 8 January, he was taking his prized songbird for a walk along the Tartar Wall.

  Caged songbirds were an ancient Peking tradition, and every morning old men like Chang could be seen carrying lacquered wooden cages draped with blue linen covers. All Pekingers, Chinese and foreign, recognized the distinctive sound of these swallows, which were let out of their cages with flutes attached to their tails to go whistling through the morning air, soaring across the Forbidden City and the Fox Tower before faithfully returning to their masters. Chang came to the Tartar Wall every day to smoke, drink tea and talk songbirds. The cold didn’t deter him, nor the strong, bone-chilling winds. He was a Pekinger born and bred.

  That morning, shortly after eight o’clock, he was following the Tartar Wall eastwards to the Fox Tower when he noticed two rickshaw pullers squatting below, pointing across the wasteland towards the rubbish-strewn moat at the base of the tower. The area was invariably quiet at that hour, and whatever was down there couldn’t be seen by the traffic using the City Road, which ran parallel to the wall from the Fox Tower down to the Ch’ienmen Gate.

  Chang drew closer, wary of the huang gou, but while the scabrous mutts had a fearsome reputation, the old man knew they rarely attacked humans. Like many a poor Pekinger, the dogs were hungry, homeless and desperate, as Tokyo increasingly choked off food supplies and commerce.

  Later, what Chang saw was disputed as the local rumour mill swung into action, exaggerating the scene with each telling and retelling. But there was no doubting that the woman he found at the base of the Fox Tower was dead, and not just any woman, but a foreigner. A laowai. Moreover she had been terribly mutilated. Even in the early-morning half-light Chang could see that the woman’s body had been badly beaten. He could see cut marks on her pale, bare legs; her face appeared to have been stabbed repeatedly.

  Old Chang was shocked, even though dead bodies in the open weren’t rare that winter. Poverty was one cause, but suicide had become almost an epidemic, with slashed wrists or opium the most common routes. Every daybreak the city sent out carts to collect frozen corpses.

  There’d also been a rise in politically motivated murders. The Kuomintang’s enforcers and secret police clashed with turncoat Chinese, those who believed that Tokyo would inevitably crush Nanking as well as Peking, and were keen to be in a position to profit early from the occupation. There were also shootouts between rival factions, and outrages committed by Japanese ronin and their Korean allies from the north.

  Old Chang hadn’t come across such a corpse personally. As a younger man he’d seen the city ravaged and looted by the foreign armies that had come to rout the Boxer rebels, and then, in the 1920s, he’d seen the heads of warlords’ victims on display. Now there was another war of sorts under way in Peking, between the Nationalists, the Communists and the Japanese agents—the papers were full of it every day. But a dead white woman, that was something else. Dead foreigners were altogether a rarer phenomenon.

  Old Chang remembered that on a cold winter’s night in 1935 a White Russian émigré had walked to the Fox Tower and taken from his threadbare coat an exquisite, ivory-handled cutthroat razor. He had rolled up his sleeves and slashed both his wrists, slumping to the ground by the tower wall as the life slowly drained out of him. He had been found in the morning by passing rickshaw pullers.

  Was this another suicide? It didn’t look like it, and whatever it was, it wasn’t good. With his caged songbird, old Chang ran back along the Tartar Wall to the nearest police box, as fast as his aged legs would carry him.

  The Police of Peking

  Outside the foreign-controlled Legation Quarter, law and order was maintained through a series of manned police boxes at major intersections. The system was modeled on the one used in Japan, which itself had been borrowed from the Prussians. The police boxes, marked with an X, were equipped with telephones. In theory this meant that an officer was never far away.

  On that cold January morning, the closest box to old Chang was near the Hatamen train station, about a quarter of a mile westward along the Tartar Wall. It was manned by young Corporal Kao Tao-hung, and an older veteran of the Peking force, Constable Hsu Teng-chen. They were nearing the end of their shift, and Constable Hsu was huddled by a charcoal brazier. When he saw the old man coming, he wondered what was about to disturb his morning, but he wasn’t overly concerned; he knew old Chang and regularly saw him out walking with his birds.

  But once a breathless Chang reported what he’d found, Constable Hsu donned his cap and greatcoat, got his bicycle and cycled quickly along the Tartar Wall to the Fox Tower. The two rickshaw pul
lers were still there, but as soon as they saw the police uniform they ran away, disappearing across the road and into the teeming alleys of the Tartar City.

  Hsu knew immediately that the situation was more than he could cope with. He rode back to the police box, meeting Corporal Kao halfway along the Tartar Wall. Kao told him to return to the tower and stand guard over the body, chasing off any scavenging huang gou. He was not to let anyone touch the girl. Kao then went back to the police box to telephone for help. There he also told a third officer, a young constable, to find some bamboo matting to secure the crime scene and prevent any evidence being obscured by the churning of the muddy ground. Then Corporal Kao hurried once more to the Fox Tower, where he noted down everything he could see for the record.

  Amid the horror of the scene—the mutilation, the torn clothing—Kao was intrigued for a moment by the woman’s wristwatch. It was clearly a luxury item, and yet it hadn’t been taken.

  But he knew better than to disturb a murder scene any more than was necessary, and this clearly wasn’t a simple robbery. Moreover this was no ordinary person; it was a laowai, which meant trouble, and a lot of paperwork. There would be pressure from above for results—failing to solve the crime would mean a massive loss of face before the foreigners.

  Corporal Kao’s request for assistance had been referred to the detective section of the Peking Bureau of Public Safety, South East Section, on Morrison Street. There Colonel Han Shih-ching was coming to the end of a long night shift and awaiting his replacement. Han was an experienced detective who’d trained at Peking’s police academy, and who now commanded a sizeable portion of the city’s ten thousand constables. He was not only the chief of the Morrison Street Detective Bureau, but also chief of police for the South East Section (First District) of Peking, and he’d had a busy night.

  General Sung’s political council had ordered a crackdown on Japanese and Korean dope peddling, with an instant death penalty for dealers and either execution or life imprisonment for addicts. Han and his plainclothesmen had been out all night busting drug dens across the Tartar City and the Badlands. More than twenty dealers and addicts had been taken to the execution grounds on the edge of the city to be publicly shot alongside a burning pile of seized opium, in order to be made an example of.

  After his hard night, Colonel Han was sipping cups of tea and smoking his strong local Hatamen brand cigarettes as he caught up on administrative matters. As of February, the Peking Bureau of Public Safety was to become the Peking Police Bureau, by official Nanking order. It was a simple enough name change, but it generated mountains of paperwork.

  From time to time Han got up and wandered round the station, stretching his legs and seeing if any further word had come through about the night’s catch of addicts and dealers. Since there’d been an outcry over the executions of Chinese, the word was that General Sung would carry on executing the Korean thugs, probably expel the Japanese ronin from the city so as not to antagonise Tokyo, and commute all sentences for the Chinese addicts to life imprisonment.

  On one of his leg-stretching rounds, Han stopped to chat with the desk sergeant about the deteriorating political situation. It was all anyone talked about now. What would Chiang Kai-shek do about the increasingly belligerent Japanese? How would General Sung protect the city? What of all these assassinations and agents provocateurs? The Japanese tiger was waiting to pounce. Or perhaps the Japanese were more like hyenas: ‘dwarf bandits’ was the local slang for them.

  Han was back in his office once more when the desk sergeant brought in Corporal Kao to present the case of the dead girl at the Fox Tower, a laowai with terrible injuries. As the senior detective at the station closest to the Legation Quarter, Han had dealt with dead foreigners before—brawling marines from the legation guards who’d ended up with a knife in their guts, or penniless White Russians who’d frozen to death in an alleyway, having nowhere to go. Foreign Peking had been a safe place in the 1920s, but with the influx of the White Russians—well, things had deteriorated. Their skin-and-bone corpses, often dressed in nothing but rags and with not much to distinguish them from the impoverished rickshaw pullers, were sent to the now overcrowded Russian cemetery.

  Han assumed this girl was another poor Russian, who had perhaps been cast out and decided that death was preferable to the shame of selling her body. Still, any dead foreigner was a difficult case. White skin meant questions—questions that would be asked by powerful people, and asked repeatedly until answers were provided. The Fox Tower was outside the Legation Quarter, but only just, and the body would need identifying as soon as possible. Sometimes relations between the Chinese police and the Legation Quarter police were fractious, but Han was a courteous man who did things by the book. Covering your back was an art you needed to master to survive in turbulent times.

  Han ordered young Corporal Kao to take all the available men in the station back to the crime scene, and then he telephoned Commissioner W. P. Thomas of the Legation Quarter Administration and told him there was a dead foreigner at the base of the Fox Tower. It was outside legation territory, but perhaps the commissioner would like to attend and help identify the body? As a courtesy among officials? Thomas agreed to meet at the tower, bringing some of his men.

  Colonel Han ground out his cigarette, put on his greatcoat, cap and gloves, and set off on the short walk to the Tower. He headed across Chang’an Avenue and through the imposing stone gates that marked the northern boundary of the Legation Quarter—these were in the style of a European castle but were manned by Chinese soldiers. He crossed the quarter to the Tartar Wall on the southern side, feeling like he was in foreign territory, and continued east. Where the ancient wall skirted the notorious Badlands it was poorly tended, but the sections that ran by the Quarter were in better condition, accessible from wide, street-level ramps and affording a good view across the low-level city.

  Han passed through the wall at a small stone bridge and walked on to the Fox Tower. By the time he reached it a sizeable crowd of Chinese onlookers had gathered; the news had spread among the surrounding hutong as the city came to life. It didn’t take much to get curious Pekingers to stop and watch something on the street, and a dead body certainly counted as a reason.

  Corporal Kao and the men from Morrison Street had formed a ring around the corpse to stop the sticky-beaks getting too close. Some curious locals, taking up the traditional Peking pastime of poking fun at officialdom, jeered the police and had to be chased off.

  Shortly afterwards, Commissioner Thomas and his Legation Quarter policemen arrived. Corporal Kao removed the straw matting used to keep the body from prying eyes, and Han and Thomas bent down to examine it.

  The girl was lying by the ditch with her head to the west and her feet to the east, partially clothed in a tartan skirt and a bloodied woolen cardigan. Her shoes, into one of which a handkerchief had been stuffed, were lying some distance away.

  Han pulled the skirt down to cover the girl’s bare thighs. It was hard to tell from the features of her brutally stabbed and beaten face whether she was foreign or Chinese; instead, her fair hair and white skin identified her race. The two men lifted the body slightly, and Thomas pulled out a silk chemise from where it had been shoved beneath her. They could see that the girl had been cut and slashed everywhere. The knife cuts were deep, and Han and Thomas wondered whether some of the other marks were from huang gou tearing at her flesh during the night.

  Colonel Han opened the cardigan and removed a piece of a woven cotton Aertex blouse to examine the cuts on the chest. As he did, both he and Thomas jumped to their feet in shock. The entire sternum of the corpse had been cut open and all the ribs broken, exposing the interior body cavity. The smell it gave off was strong, but the corpse was strangely bloodless. Nor was there blood on the ground, which was hard from the night’s frost; the blood had to have drained away somewhere.

  Both men had seen plenty of dead and mutilated bodies. Both had seen action in various wars—Han with the warlords
of northern China and Thomas as a young student interpreter with the British Legation during the Boxers’ murderous siege in 1900. But now they looked at each other with a realization too horrible to utter. Her heart was missing; it had been ripped out through her broken rib cage.

  Han replaced the cotton material, covered the body again with the straw matting, and ordered his men to move the crowd farther back. This was not a sight for the public.

  Next Han removed the expensive wristwatch: platinum with diamond settings. So this wasn’t just another poor White Russian—but who was she? There were no other belongings, no purse; but, lying a short distance from the body, the men found a blood-spattered membership card for the French Club ice-skating rink. Han had it photographed before picking it up and slipping it into a manila envelope to enter as evidence.

  Just then an elderly white man pushed his way through the crowd. He was wearing dark glasses, which he pulled off as he elbowed his way to the front. A crazed look came over his face and he screamed a single word, ‘Pamela!’ Then he put his hand to his mouth and cried out, before collapsing in a heap on the ground.

  At three o’clock the afternoon before, E. T. C. Werner had headed out for one of his walks across the city. He loved to stretch his legs after a morning spent on historical research and his routine correspondence.

  His daughter was sitting at a desk by a window, writing letters. She told him she was going out shortly to meet an old school friend; they were taking tea together and then going ice-skating. She would be back home by seven thirty and would have dinner with her father as usual.

  Werner returned from his walk before dark and finished some scholarly work. At seven thirty Pamela hadn’t returned, but for a while he didn’t worry. She was with friends, she knew Peking, and anyway the skating rink was barely a mile away, in the safety of the Legation Quarter. But when she still wasn’t back an hour later, he started to fret. Why had she not telephoned to say she would be late?