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

by Paul French

  It seemed that Pamela’s father had a temper.

  Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner was born in 1864 aboard the passenger liner Black Swan when it was anchored at Port Chalmers, New Zealand. His Prussian father and English mother had added the name Chalmers to his birth certificate as a joke.

  Joseph and Harriet Werner were comfortably off, thanks to his father’s family trust fund, and Joseph had a wanderlust. He took his own family travelling far and wide, across South America, the United States and continental Europe. For a decade they were a well-heeled gypsy band, until Werner, his three older sisters and one older brother all came of school age. Eventually they settled in England, where Werner attended a respectable public school, Tonbridge. But the scholarly young Werner didn’t much care for this school, which put the physical before the intellectual and was Spartan rather than scholarly—a factory for the production of empire builders.

  Joseph’s early death in 1878, at the age of sixty-four, meant that when Werner finished his schooling he had to find a career. He passed the entrance exams for a Far Eastern cadetship with the Foreign Office and was sent to Peking as a student interpreter for two years, to get his Chinese up to scratch.

  Peking in the late 1880s was a very different place from the Peking of 1937. It was a city slowly recovering from multiple devastations, one of which was the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping rebels had been intent on overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing a theocracy in China. Their charismatic leader, Hung Hsiu-chüan, declared himself to be the half brother of Jesus Christ, and anointed himself the Heavenly King of the Taiping, ruler of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Rarely was a kingdom less aptly named—Hung’s rebellion lasted fifteen years, from 1850 to 1864, and left as many as fifteen million Chinese dead. There’d also been the Opium Wars, which ended in 1860 with the sacking and looting of Peking; and in the late 1870s, northern China was stricken by a great drought and famine.

  The foreign community of Peking at the time Werner first went there was small and tight-knit, with far fewer Europeans than in Shanghai or Tientsin—really only diplomats, the men of the foreign-run Chinese Customs Service and missionaries. In the late 1880s a trip outside the Legation Quarter by a foreigner would cause crowds to assemble, and cries of ‘Yang guizi’ (‘Foreign devil’). The Legation Quarter was also significantly smaller in area; not until after the Boxer Rebellion was it enlarged. There was Kierulff’s general store and the Swiss-run Chamot’s Hotel, and that was just about it. Peking was a remote, strange city, a hardship posting, but Werner knew immediately that he had arrived in the country he would devote his life to.

  He sucked up the sights and smells of Peking, the carts jostling around the crowded gates, the imperial inner city and the sprawling, teeming outer city that lay beyond the mighty walls. He loved the street hawkers, the stalls selling everything from dried fruits and iced sweets to baked yams and rice-stuffed lotus roots. He suffered the periodic blinding dust storms and the flooding when the rains came, the infernal summer heat and the bone-chilling winter cold.

  Once his two years as a student interpreter were up, Werner moved from posting to posting, steadily climbing the diplomatic ladder. He did a spell in the chancery at the Peking Legation, then a year in Canton, two in Tientsin, and another couple in Macao, before a furlough home to attend law school at London’s Middle Temple, where he qualified as a barrister. Back in China he was promoted through the minor treaty ports—Hangchow, Pagoda Anchorage, the steamy tropical island of Hainan, then a couple of years on the Gulf of Tonkin, in the remote Pakhoi. He was pushed up the ladder to officially open the new treaty port of Kongmoon—not much of a place—and this was followed by another year’s furlough in England. He was rewarded with an appointment as consul at the busy tea port of Kiukiang, where he served four years.

  During all this time Werner remained single. Then, at the age of forty-five, he met his future wife.

  Gladys Nina Ravenshaw was the twenty-three-year-old daughter of an old and wealthy English family. Born in Brighton in 1886, she was the second oldest of four girls. Her father, the blue-blooded Lieutenant Colonel Charles Withers Ravenshaw, was an old-school British Empire hero. He had been a member of the famed Indian Political Department, was in the British Army in India, and was a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, part of the forces that fought at Kandahar and occupied Kabul. He was also a former British ambassador to Nepal, a good sportsman and a crack shot. Werner admired him greatly, describing him as ‘the best sort of Englishman.’

  Gladys Nina’s childhood had been lived mostly outdoors, either in the picturesque Sussex village of Turners Hill or at one or another hill station in the Raj. She and her family followed her father through his various posts, in Rajputana, Secunderabad, Mewar on the Persian Gulf, Mysore, the hill district of Coorg, until he became the British Resident in Gwalior and then in Nepal. In 1906 he retired, and the family returned to Sussex.

  Gladys Nina was a girl of the British Empire. She was sporty; she loved tennis, ice-skating, golf and particularly horses—anything equestrian. She had raced across the South Downs of Sussex and played polo with the young blades of the British Army in India. She also played violin and piano, recited poetry and was good at languages. And while she had never been more than a perfunctory churchgoer, she developed a strong interest in Theosophy, the movement of Madame Blavatsky, which was something of a fashion at the time among upper-class English girls. Theosophy held that all religions contained a portion of the truth, quite a radical idea back then, and the Ravenshaw girls certainly knew it annoyed the old lieutenant colonel.

  Accomplished and attractive, Gladys Nina was known in the society columns as the last of the unmarried ‘pristine Ravenshaws.’ She had a well-proportioned face, lustrous hair, dark brown eyes, good skin and an elegant neck, and it’s hard to believe that she didn’t have other suitors chasing after her, young men her own age. Nevertheless she fell for Werner, who, though older, was deemed suitable marriage material by the Ravenshaws.

  The two had met at a Theosophy lecture in Aldeburgh; Werner had been in the genteel Suffolk seaside town to visit his now elderly mother. As he had to return to China to take up a posting as consul in the important treaty port of Foochow, he was forced to court Gladys Nina by mail. Eventually he proposed. She travelled to China, and the couple were married in Hong Kong’s cross-shaped St John’s Cathedral in December 1911. The newlyweds honeymooned in Macao before returning to Foochow, where Werner remained as consul until he retired in 1914.

  That they chose to stay on in China afterwards raised a few eyebrows. Retirement to a cosy fireplace on the English south coast was the usual route. Werner, his pension rendering him relatively wealthy in China at the time, rented a large four-storey house on Peking’s San Tiao Hutong, an ancient street of jade and antiques vendors near the Ch’ienmen Gate. Being central, it allowed Gladys Nina to easily explore the streets and familiarise herself with her new town.

  Childless, in 1919 Werner and Gladys Nina adopted Pamela from the Catholic-run orphanage at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, known also as the Portuguese Church or the South Church. Here the nuns took in the unwanted babies of Peking’s indigent foreigners, mostly White Russians. In those years of turmoil, as the White Russians fled the Bolshevik revolution, travelling across the steppes of Siberia and down into Harbin, Tientsin, Peking and Shanghai, the orphanages became crowded with discarded white babies. For the mothers, their money gone, their husbands and brothers still in Russia fighting in the White Army, babies were an encumbrance or a mortifying embarrassment.

  What was it about that one baby girl, among so many, that led the Werners to choose her?

  Perhaps Gladys Nina stared into her grey eyes and the decision was instant. Grey eyes, more so than other colours perhaps, seem somehow to look deep into you. Whatever the reason, the Werners took her home to San Tiao Hutong and named her Pamela—Greek for honey and all things sweet. They did not know her birth mo
ther, her birthday or her exact age, since the nuns had not known either. The date of birth listed on the passport issued to her by the British Legation was 7 February 1917.

  As she grew up, Pamela never kept her adoption a secret. When people commented on her distinctive grey eyes or questioned her about her heritage, she would say that she supposed her birth mother had been Russian, as grey eyes were most commonly found in Russians.

  In 1922 tragedy struck. Gladys Nina passed away at the age of just thirty-five, leaving five-year-old Pamela motherless and Werner a grieving widower.

  He began to dedicate all his books to his dead wife, and mostly avoided the social life of the Legation Quarter in favour of scholarly work. If he was considered reclusive, it was because he preferred his study and library, considered one of the best in Peking. He built a name for himself as a China hand and writer, and was a gifted linguist. On top of the several Chinese dialects he spoke, he was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. He was given a position with the Chinese Historiographical Bureau and was considered a Friend of China by the academic establishment at Peking University.

  As for Pamela, Gladys Nina had left her $20,000 in silver dollars, which she had been able to access on her eighteenth birthday. That made her a rich young woman.

  It accounted for the platinum and diamond watch—a treat to herself from the exclusive Sennet Frères jewelers on Legation Street. Platinum was then the choice of society ladies. Wallis Simpson, making headlines as the Duchess of Windsor, declared, ‘After seven p.m. all you can wear is platinum,’ and prices soared as the metal became fashionable.

  The watch had cost $450 in silver dollars, and Ethel Gurevitch told DCI Dennis she didn’t know anyone else with one like it, not even close.

  Pamela’s inheritance was no secret.

  When a police officer from Tientsin’s Victoria Road station visited the house of Pamela’s boyfriend and informed him of her death, the boy was at first disbelieving and then distraught.

  Superintendent Bill Greenslade, Dennis’s deputy, had later gone to fully interview the good-looking Mischa Horjelsky—sports star and head prefect of the Upper Sixth—and thought the boy was genuine. He had an alibi, one that was backed by his family—a good family—and their servants. He’d been at home in Tientsin all the time Pamela was in Peking.

  Mischa had no idea who could be responsible for Pamela’s murder. He had been planning to travel to Peking that week, he said, to spend a few days with her and meet her father.

  Tientsin was in shock at the news. Werner was well known to many people in the city, and Pamela was known as a quiet student in her mid-teens.

  Now Dennis and Han had two questions that needed answering.

  First: Where was the murder scene?

  The autopsy had confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that this wasn’t the Fox Tower. Han detailed all available men to search out hotels and lodging houses in the Tartar City and the Badlands, anywhere people rented rooms, and collate the names of all guests for the evening of 7 January and the following morning. They were to ask about any rooms found with blood in them, or whose sheets had disappeared, or where two people had checked in and only one checked out.

  Pamela’s photograph was to be shown to all doormen, night watchmen, gatekeepers, concierges, receptionists and porters who’d been on duty that Thursday night and Friday morning—and if they were currently off duty, the officer was to have them come in or go to see them. Don’t miss anyone, Han told his men, Chinese or foreign, from the Grand Hôtel de Pékin to the worst flea-bitten flophouse in the Badlands. The Grand Hôtel de Pékin, although it was patronized exclusively by foreigners, was situated just outside the Legation Quarter, and so technically Han’s territory.

  The policemen were ordered to check every bar, nightclub, restaurant—somewhere that evening, Pamela had eaten Chinese food. The men started in the eastern district and then fanned out.

  More constables were sent to check anywhere that was secluded and quiet at night—temples, parks, warehouses, right along the desolate Tartar Wall. Every place within the radius of each police box, starting from the Fox Tower and moving out, was to be searched.

  As Han’s authority didn’t extend to the protected island of the Legation Quarter, Dennis requested the right to conduct house-to-house searches there, but the Administrative Commission of the Diplomatic Quarter, backed by the British Legation and Consul Fitzmaurice, refused. What was DCI Dennis insinuating? A search of Chinese Peking would be sufficient.

  The second question concerned transportation.

  Dennis and Han were assuming the killer had used a car. He could have pulled up on City Road, which passed by the Fox Tower, dragged the body down to the ditch and then driven off. There were over two thousand private cars registered in Peking in 1937, and they all needed to be checked, along with the city’s fleet of taxis. Han was aware that the registration of cars was haphazard at best, but still, the checks had to be done. Traffic police were told to stop all cars with non-Peking licence plates and check them as well.

  Han also sent men to scour the city’s flea markets, junk shops and any other places the killer might have disposed of those items of Pamela’s still unaccounted for—her ice skates and bicycle, her mittens and coat and beret.

  It was not possible to search every room in every house in Peking, and a search of the Legation Quarter had been officially ruled out. But somewhere in the city was a room with a lot of blood, and Han and Dennis were betting that the killers would not have transported the body far—they felt sure that the murder had happened in the Tartar City.

  They were working on a number of assumptions:

  The killer or killers lived alone, or had access to a private place where they wouldn’t be disturbed by other residents or servants.

  They had access to a car to move the body and someone to drive it. In order to avoid discovery, they would not have driven the dead body farther than was necessary.

  They’d had a lot of cleaning up to do, and it was unlikely they’d have been able to remove all traces of blood from the room and their clothing.

  Meanwhile, somewhere out there were Pamela’s internal organs.

  Armour Factory Alley

  DCI Dennis went to Armour Factory Alley to interview Werner, accompanied by Inspector Botham and Sergeant Binetsky. It was a tricky situation.

  Werner was a grieving father, and it seemed that foreign Peking felt his loss. It had certainly been stunned to read in the newspapers that wild dogs had mauled the body, statements which, while false, were taken as true. Had people known the full extent of Pamela’s mutilations, they would perhaps have been beyond shock and in sheer panic. But Dennis had only been in Peking for a matter of days, and already he was exceeding his strictly imposed Foreign Office limits by taking the investigation outside the confines of the Legation Quarter. His copper’s instincts left him no choice.

  With no firm leads or suspects as yet, and with robbery ruled out, experience told Dennis that Werner was the prime suspect. London, Peking, it made little difference—few people were killed by someone they had no acquaintance with. Murder was personal. Nine times out of ten, people were killed by people they thought loved them—wives by husbands, children by parents, lovers by lovers. For now, Werner, whatever his former high office, whatever his age, was their prime suspect.

  Dennis knew he had to be careful. Werner might be retired, but he remained well connected, right to the top of the British establishment in China. And that establishment was watching this case like a hawk; it still saw Britain as chief among the foreign powers in China, and it prized British prestige above all else. It would not want to see a former British consul put on trial for killing and butchering his daughter. The legation had begrudgingly accepted Dennis’s involvement in the case—they had little choice, given his qualifications—but it didn’t mean they liked it, and it didn’t mean they wouldn’t pull the old-pals act and try to influence him. He’d been waiting for their call since he
’d arrived.

  So a light touch was needed, at least initially. Dennis walked along Armour Factory Alley, getting a feel for the street. The older, less modernised houses had windows of thick translucent paper rather than glass. One or two new concrete buildings had appeared in recent years, with more solid masonry. Both ends of the alley led on to more alleys, forming a network that ran from the Peking Academy back to the fetid canal and the Fox Tower. Armour Factory Alley ran west into Soochow Hutong, which then continued to the Badlands, and through to the edge of the Legation Quarter.

  Dennis hadn’t realized how close to Pamela’s home her body had been dumped, and how close that was to the Quarter, with the Badlands forming a no-man’s-land between the two areas.

  He did know that Werner had been one of the first foreigners to move into Armour Factory Alley. The scholar had rented the whole courtyard house for himself, a space that perhaps four or five Chinese families might have occupied in these cramped times, as people flooded into the city from the surrounding countryside.

  The three police officers were admitted by Yen Ping, the gatekeeper, and shown through the courtyard and into the house. That first look at a suspect’s home was important. Dennis saw traditional dark Chinese furniture, red-lacquered pillars, features of latticework and bamboo. It was gloomy inside, with few lights to illuminate the decor. There were objets d’art Werner had collected from his expeditions around China and Mongolia, but they were placed like exhibits in a museum, which only made the place seem even more austere. It felt like an old man’s house, not something a nineteen-year-old girl would enjoy. Or maybe home was home, and Pamela hadn’t noticed the atmosphere.