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

by Paul French

  Dennis was shown through to Werner’s study, leaving Botham and Binetsky to wait outside. The room faced south for maximum sunlight and was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves thick with Chinese and English titles. Off to one side was Werner’s private library, where Dennis could see more shelves, more books.

  The old man was slumped in a chair at his desk, which was made of heavy mahogany and teakwood. Its drawers must have been lined to preserve their contents: Dennis could smell camphorwood or sandalwood. He’d seen Werner’s photo in newspapers, and had once attended a lecture he’d given in Tientsin on Chinese myths. He’d also seen him on the beach at Peitaiho, sitting under a sunshade, reading a book. Perhaps he’d even seen Pamela there too—playing in the sand, riding the donkeys, swimming—without knowing who she was.

  Dennis was aware that many people found Werner difficult to like, though they respected his learning and his years in China. He knew too that the old man was a committed atheist, which annoyed both the missionaries and the Sunday pious who saw church as duty. Werner certainly had his peculiarities—he was a virtual teetotaler in a community that drank regularly and in large quantities, and he was known for having eschewed company in all his postings, however remote, as well as in Peking and Tientsin. ‘The socially popular man is intellectually poor!’ Werner had once written.

  So he wasn’t one of the clubbable, social Brits. Dennis was—he had to be, his job demanded it—but he drew no immediate conclusions about a man who wasn’t. In Tientsin he moved in higher social circles than he had in London. A Scotland Yard detective wasn’t everyone’s ideal Pall Mall club member, but out of the straitjacket of English class conventions, and with a higher rank, he’d found himself in the surroundings of the Tientsin Club. He’d had to visit a tailor to have a dinner jacket made. Fortunately his job gave him an excuse to skip church and the more boring committee meetings. But if Werner preferred not to retire to the club for rounds of whisky sodas, reheated gossip and a fortnight-old copy of the Times, well, that was hardly the hallmark of a murderer.

  Dennis expressed his condolences to Werner. He intended a conversation rather than an interview. He was on Chinese soil, and without Han present he could not formally question, caution or charge anyone. But the old man was uncommunicative and, the DCI felt, somewhat dismissive. Why was Dennis in Peking? Surely the case was under the Chinese police and Colonel Han?

  Dennis explained his involvement, saying that he and Han were working together. He didn’t mention that the British Legation did not trust the Chinese, or that they were pressing for a result. He didn’t mention the limits that had been placed on his involvement, or that he was stretching them already.

  Werner seemed to accept it all. He said little and hardly looked at Dennis, his eyes ranging instead along his bookshelves. What Dennis didn’t know was that Werner rarely looked directly at anyone he addressed, and when he did make eye contact with Dennis, the DCI couldn’t help feeling that instinctive tug that told him someone was looking down their nose at him. He shrugged it off. Werner had spent the best part of his life in the diplomatic service, where snobbery was an occupational hazard.

  Werner laid out his movements on Pamela’s final day with the dispassionate precision of the barrister he’d trained as. He had last seen his daughter in the afternoon, and when she did not return home he had gone to the Gurevitches’ house, then to Commissioner Thomas’s office to report her missing. He’d sent his cook to the skating rink, then he’d wandered the city looking for her.

  Dennis knew that Han had already pinned down the exact time Werner was at the Gurevitches’ and the time the note to Thomas had been recorded at the Legation Quarter police station, but that left a lot of time unaccounted for, the alleged searching time. Time enough for Werner to find Pamela, lose his temper, commit a murder and return home.

  Dennis asked Werner to list the route he’d taken once more, and noted it down:

  South to the Temple of Heaven and its adjacent park

  Through the Legation Quarter

  To the northern end of the city and the Lama Temple

  The Confucian Hall of Examinations

  The Mohammedan Mosque

  The Portuguese Church

  And then home. When Pamela still wasn’t back next morning and no word had come, he’d gone out looking again. This time:

  To the Hatamen Gate

  Back along the Tartar Wall

  Through the German Cemetery

  Then to the Fox Tower . . . and Pamela

  At this point Werner broke down.

  Dennis sat back. He reminded himself that Han had told him Yen Ping was adamant Werner could not have left the house in between these two searches without the gateman knowing.

  Now it was Werner who wanted details. He’d learnt nothing at the inquest. In terms as gentle as possible, Dennis described what had happened to Pamela, but it was impossible to spare the old man certain facts—the missing organs, the cutting and slashing. Werner broke down again, and looked all his seventy-two years and more. His reaction seemed real to Dennis, his grief genuine.

  When could he have her body for burial? Werner wanted to know.

  Soon, when the doctors had finished—it wouldn’t be long now. Dennis tried to comfort the old man.

  Then the DCI asked to see Pamela’s room. Werner instructed the amah to show him while he remained at his desk. Dennis was taken to a small bedroom adjacent to Werner’s own. After opening the door, the amah burst out crying and rushed off.

  Standing in Pamela’s room, Dennis could only think of the studio portrait she’d had taken just days earlier: the glamourous dress, the knowing look. Her bedroom struck him as a nunlike cubicle; there was a bed, a simple bureau, a desk and a chair. No frills of any kind. It was cold, bare, unlived in, not a young woman’s room.

  In her wardrobe he found the black evening dress she’d worn for the photo, and a couple of the Japanese-style silk kimonos that most foreign women kept to wear in Peking’s stiflingly humid summers, but the rest of her clothing was simple—skirts, blouses, cardigans.

  At that point, Werner entered the room. He looked around, seemed to sense the emptiness.

  ‘We were to return to England soon,’ he told Dennis. ‘Her furniture has gone ahead, along with some books, personal items and summer clothes.’

  Dennis nodded; an imminent move would explain the asceticism. But why go to England? he asked. Surely Pamela had the rest of the academic year to go, exams to take?

  ‘I would have thought you would have known?’ said Werner.

  Dennis looked at him questioningly.

  ‘She was unhappy at school in Tientsin,’ the old man explained; ‘she didn’t want to return. There’d been trouble at schools here before. Tientsin should have been better. England was the only place for her. Perhaps with her family she would have . . . settled. They were looking forward to meeting her.’

  Dennis took the opportunity to ask about the suitors, the men who’d been calling for Pamela over the holidays, taking her out. Werner, not bothered by the question, gave the names and addresses for most of them, who were old family friends by and large. Dennis mentioned the Chinese student and the incident that had ended in a broken nose. Werner admitted not liking the boy, who had briefly been one of his pupils, and moreover had a wife back in his hometown of Mukden in the northeast. Werner conceded that he might have overreacted, saying that the student and Pamela were just friends.

  Then he broke down again. Dennis had wanted to ask about the half-Chinese, half-Portuguese suitor called John O’Brian, who’d reportedly become infatuated with Pamela in Tientsin and followed her to Peking. But the old man was too distraught.

  Dennis called Botham and Binetsky into the room and told them to collect evidence. Werner was unable to watch as the two men started picking up his daughter’s scant belongings and putting them in their overcoat pockets—a jade comb, a hair clasp and her diary. Distraught, he left the room.

  Nobody had told Den
nis that Pamela was leaving school and returning to England. He needed to know more, but now was not the time to ask. The more he heard about Pamela, the less he knew, it seemed. A plain schoolgirl who nevertheless had the power to infatuate boys; a troublesome daughter who was seemingly popular socially—Pamela was more of a contradiction than ever. Dennis needed to bring her into clearer focus before he could ask the right questions.

  He headed back to the Wagons Lits, after telling Botham to get out that night and listen to what foreign Peking was saying about the Werners. Then he phoned Bill Greenslade and asked him to go over to Consul Affleck’s office, to find out why Pamela had been going to leave school, whether there’d been trouble at Tientsin Grammar too. Dennis wanted to find out what Werner had assumed he already knew.

  Cocktail Hour at the Wagons Lits

  Dennis had arranged to meet Commissioner Thomas after dark at the Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits, for a quiet chat before the place got busy. The bar of the Wagons Lits was still a centre of foreign gossip and intrigue, despite being increasingly taken over by the Japanese. The newcomers swaggered about, got belligerent, threw their weight around—it would all be theirs soon enough.

  Elsewhere in Peking, Japanese soldiers were strutting around and treating the city as their own; their armoured cars were already on the streets. Tokyo claimed it was simply regular troop rotations, but nobody believed that. Stay long enough at the bar, and you’d hear the more drunken, but perhaps honest, opinion: the Japs would clean house in China; they were the only Orientals who understood discipline and efficiency. They’d given the Ruskies a bloody nose in 1905 and checked the tsar’s expansion. It might be brutal, but in the long run the Japanese would be the best thing that could happen to China, and they’d clear out the Communists too. Or rather, they were the best thing that could happen from the point of view of London or Paris and their trading interests.

  Commissioner Thomas had already given Dennis the official biography of E. T. C. Werner, the one the British Legation would stick to come hell or high water. Whatever the internal feuds, the grudges, the hidden skeletons, Pamela’s murder had brought the diplomatic shutters down.

  Thomas warned Dennis that the legation would not be helpful; indeed, they would be quite the opposite. National prestige came first. Dennis knew the mind-set—the Duke of Wellington’s ‘That which we require now is not to lose the enjoyment of what we have got.’ Meaning, What we have, we hold on to, and don’t think a dead girl or two is going to change that. Reputation and face had to be upheld, come what may, even the slashing and dumping of an English subject barely a mile from the British Legation.

  And indeed the legation had not been helpful. Dennis had asked them for any information they had on Werner and got in return a one-sheet résumé stating his date of birth, the bare bones of his career in China, a retirement date, and little else—a bland Who’s Who entry, and a scant one at that. At least Dennis received something—Han had been getting the runaround from the legation, with nobody bothering to return his calls.

  But Thomas, it seemed, was willing to talk—off the record. The commissioner had probably known Werner longer than anyone else in Peking. Thomas was a Peking veteran, but Werner had arrived some fifteen years before him and was now just about the oldest of the old China hands.

  Dennis and Thomas found a table out of sight to all but the white-suited, silent-slippered Chinese waiters who brought whisky sodas and replaced the big brass ashtrays on stands next to each man. The spittoons on the floor, though unused by foreigners, were standard Peking fixtures. The ladies and bright young things among the palm fronds were drinking the Wagons Lits’ signature champagne cocktails, or gin rickeys and sherry flips; there was a background noise of ice on metal from the cocktail shakers behind the bar. A string quartet played light, faintly recognizable mood music—the greatest hits of 1935 had eventually made it to Peking. The city tried, but it couldn’t help being behind London, Paris and New York.

  Dennis and Thomas stuck to whisky. Thomas wasn’t usually a prodigious imbiber, but tonight he was knocking them back. He was still shocked by what he’d seen at the Fox Tower; Pamela’s corpse was seared in his memory. Dennis too was having a few, although he was more used to corpses and had developed a stronger stomach. When he showed Thomas the autopsy report, the commissioner skimmed it, threw back his whisky and ordered two more—large ones.

  Now Dennis casually asked Thomas if he knew anything about Pamela being unhappy at Tientsin Grammar. The commissioner had no idea. That was more Dennis’s bailiwick than his, Thomas said; if anyone should know, he should.

  That was the second time today Dennis had been told he should know something he didn’t. It made him a little uneasy. He had learned nothing new from reading Pamela’s diary. There were tales of summer picnics, gossip about tiffins and dances—the usual frivolities of a young woman, it seemed to him. The entries were lighthearted rather than deeply confessional, and there were gaps between them. The diary hadn’t yielded any suspects.

  He moved on to the gossip that was circulating about Werner, and here Thomas was much more forthcoming. Not surprisingly, the old scholar’s unofficial biography—the one based partly on fact, partly on interpretation, and sprinkled liberally with innuendo and a little backstabbing—was very different from that supplied by the legation. Stories of his past were resurfacing and doing the rounds once more, by way of anonymous calls to Morrison Street, notes left with the desk sergeant and talk in the hotels and bars. It seemed Peking had something to get off its chest regarding E. T. C. Werner. He was a man everyone had a story about.

  Not everyone saw him as a harmless elderly former diplomat, a scholar or a grieving father. To some he was a man of violent mood swings, an odd character who alienated people, and who’d given them cause to gossip for decades. A highly intelligent man, to be sure, but one considered by some, at the highest levels of the British government in China, to be seriously unstable and unfit for duty. A vain man of strange and radical ideas, a man they officially wanted to be rid of but who had fought back and made enemies. A man who was possibly capable of murder and who may just have committed murder before.

  The social set of foreign Peking had a mantra they repeated to visitors over cocktails at the Wagons Lits, in the members’ enclosure at the Peking Race Club, on long weekends in the temperate Western Hills: ‘We don’t worry much about pasts in Peking.’ But in reality pasts were everything. The city’s gossip rested fundamentally on people’s histories—why they were in Peking, where they’d come from, what they were hiding from. For nobody’s closet was skeleton-free, and digging out those skeletons was the social sport of foreign Peking.

  Werner’s diplomatic career in China had seen him rise quickly, only to fall dramatically. He had been dogged from early on by an unpopularity he could not shake, and did not try to. A few old China hands still recalled him famously taking his riding crop to a group of monks in Peking’s Lama Temple, after an argument over his camera. That had been back in 1888, when Werner was just twenty-four and working in the British Legation.

  The story was written up by Werner’s companion that day, a sensationalist London hack called Henry Normann who worked on the Pall Mall Gazette. Normann had made Werner appear to be a furious brawler, and the British public got a good read over their kippers.

  Had Werner acted violently? Perhaps, but the Lama Temple was still considered a dangerous place for foreigners fifty years later, in the 1930s, and the monks regularly extorted money from visitors.

  More than any burst of anger nearly half a century before, it was Werner’s inability to coexist with the small foreign communities of his postings that had condemned him in the eyes of the gossips and the old China hands. In Macao he’d been reprimanded by no less a personage than Sir Claude MacDonald—the uptight British ambassador to Peking during the time of the Boxers—for his failure to ‘mix,’ and for apparently insulting the Portuguese chief justice in Macao in some way, one that was never quite stated
. Werner had been forced to apologise but had reputedly not done so with grace. He gained a reputation for being ‘abrupt’—a damning indictment in expat English society.

  Some said it was his posting to remote Pagoda Anchorage, upstream from Foochow, that seriously unhinged Werner. Here he was virtually alone, with no foreign community to speak of. The consul’s office and residence were nothing more than a cramped houseboat, and the nearest town of any size was miles away. It was a tense place. Chinese merchants, angered by what they saw as unfair treatment, had boycotted British goods, and there was little to see beyond the dubious sights of the Plum Garden Prison and the Mercy Hospital.

  Sequestered on a houseboat no bigger than a canal barge, Werner spent his time learning obscure Chinese dialects and poring over ancient texts, while the few other foreigners living in the area went hunting, danced and got royally drunk. The place had a reputation for undoing men: Werner’s predecessor had succumbed to his loneliness and begun imagining diabolical plots against him by his Chinese servants. He had to be sent back home to England, to a padded cell in an asylum. The rumour mill said Werner had lost his mind in Pagoda Anchorage too, had got into fights with the handful of other foreigners there. Once again Sir Claude MacDonald had to step in and sort out the mess. Within the Foreign Office, the word was that Werner was trouble.

  As punishment, even more obscure postings followed—Kiungchow on Hainan Island, where only an irregular steamer from Hong Kong visited; Pakhoi, from where not much apart from sugar, aniseed and dried fish was shipped to Macao; and Kongmoon, which was as lonely as Pagoda Anchorage. Werner suffered them all, keeping himself to himself, studying his little-known dialects and the local superstitions and traditions.