Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (22 page)

The Rising Sun That Chills

A
nd then it was all over. Peking fell to the Japanese troops on 29 July. The Chinese portions of Tientsin succumbed a day later. All that month, as the summer heated up, Peking had grown edgier and edgier. It started to sweat. The ice-cold terror of winter had given way to a pervasive humid fear as the days grew longer and the city’s time grew shorter.

In June, bubonic plague had broken out in eastern China—a bad omen, and right on Peking’s doorstep. People ducked involuntarily at the sound of doors banging, a rickshaw tyre blowing out, a taxi backfiring. The sudden sharp screech of the ungreased wheels of the trolleybuses on Morrison Street sent shudders through people, where before it had gone barely noticed. What had once been just the frenetic cacophony of Peking life now rang alarm bells in the city’s subconscious. Were they here? Had they finally come? At times the tension of waiting seemed worse than the inevitable attack; at times it seemed it would never happen.

In early July the Japanese provocations at the Marco Polo Bridge intensified to firefights and skirmishes, and eventually the Japanese moved to open confrontation. When Peking finally fell, the city was declared the seat of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China—a collaborationist puppet institution that would have been laughable if it wasn’t so brutal.

The wait was over, and the ancient city was occupied. The lights of Peking went out, food queues lengthened, inflation spiralled, arrests and disappearances intensified. Day after day, the Japanese military poured into the city along Front Gate Avenue—tanks first, followed by infantry marching in columns of four. They took over the hotels, as well as large houses and courtyard residences abandoned by Peking’s intellectual class and foreigners, who had mostly fled. Outside the city, the Japanese policy of the ‘Three Alls’—kill all, burn all, destroy all—amounted to a scorched-earth policy for a hundred miles in all directions from Peking. To the victors the spoils.

Barbarism came to China with a vengeance, accompanied by the flag of the Land of the Rising Sun. Peking and Tientsin were just the start. In August the Japanese moved to swallow Shanghai, leaving the foreign sections of the city a solitary island surrounded by outright war. The heavily populated Chinese district of Chapei burned. Europeans in the International Settlement and Frenchtown took time out from their dinner parties at the Cathay Hotel on the Bund, or their whisky sodas at the American Club and aperitifs at the Cercle Sportif Français, to stand on balconies and pass round binoculars as the flames licked across the northern portions of the city.

The South Railway Station in Shanghai was destroyed, and a trainload of civilians seeking sanctuary in Hangchow was machine-gunned. Refugees flooded into Shanghai’s International Settlement as the Imperial Japanese Army swarmed up the Yangtze River.

In December it was Nanking’s turn. Chiang Kai-shek was forced to retreat inland to Hankow as the Japanese army descended on Nanking and indulged themselves in a six-week orgy of violence, unseen on such a scale in modern times. In what quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking, some three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped, tortured, mutilated or killed by an out-of-control Japanese military. By the end of 1937, it was clear that China was in a fight for its very survival.

Amid such unprecedented horror, the first anniversary of Pamela Werner’s murder passed unnoticed, and went unremarked upon in the Peking press. Who was left to remember her? Martial law was firmly in place by then. All the gates of the city, except Ch’ienmen, were closed. Sandbags were piled at the corners of every major thoroughfare, and Japanese machine guns watched over the Chinese populace. All but the most essential commerce was at a virtual standstill, and the crowds that had once thronged Jade Street, Lantern Street, Silver Street and Embroidery Street were now gone. Shops were shuttered, the curio market was closed, food was rationed.

Wealthy Pekingers had packed up and left. The weekend bungalows at Paomachang, where foreigners had once raced their stout Mongolian ponies, were now empty, as was the Pa Pao Shan golf course. Residents no longer weekended in the temples nestling among the Western Hills—all these places were off-limits by official order.

The city was icy cold once again. Chinese New Year had come early, on 31 January, but firecrackers were banned; they sounded too much like gunshots. Out went the Year of the Ox and its great sacrifice, and in came the tiger, fearless, courageous, determined. China desperately needed the attributes of the tiger in 1938.

What was left of foreign Peking felt eerily empty. The wives and families of diplomats had been repatriated, along with the U.S. Marines who had guarded the American Legation. European and American government officials warned foreigners living outside the Legation Quarter that their safety could no longer be guaranteed, and urged them to move inside the Quarter. The few remaining foreigners who could still afford the inflationary prices moved into the Quarter’s hotels, which all overflowed but managed to continue to provide heating, food and hot water.

Poorer foreigners lived in canvas tents hastily erected on their legation’s grounds, where they ended up stewing through the summer and freezing in the winter. Some ignored the orders sent out by officials and hunkered down in their homes across Chinese Peking, hoping to ride out the storm. Some, like the White Russians and the Jewish refugees, had no choice—they had no papers and no legation, and most of them had no money.

But even with the departures, the overall population of Peking swelled. Tokyo’s Three Alls forced yet more peasants to seek sanctu-ary in the city. The number flooding in more than outweighed those leaving, and many of the newcomers were desperate and close to starving. Crime soared.

The Chinese rumour mill was taken up with new topics. It was said that the Imperial Halls were being refurbished and prepared for the return of the last emperor, Pu Yi. Communist agents were planning to blow up the Forbidden City. Chiang Kai-shek, still in Hankow, would either move the government to the fortress city of Chungking, at the head of the Yangtze, where he would fight to the death, or he would sue for peace with Tokyo and fold before spring ended.

Even the occupation of Peking could not shift Werner’s thoughts from the murder of his daughter. When Consul Fitzmaurice had slammed down his official gavel the previous June and declared the investigation closed, Werner was a broken man. His heart had been weakened, and his doctor ordered him to rest. With the diplomats, the police and the press all giving up on the case, he sank even lower into despondency.

The summer of 1937 had been Peking’s most humid in living memory, and to escape the terrible clammy damp—what the Chinese called
fu-tien
—Werner retreated to his beach house at Peitaiho. There he took the sea air and tried to restore his energy. He also took with him all the material he could gather on the case—newspaper articles, the records of the inquest, the autopsy report—along with the numerous letters sent him by sympathetic people. These he studied as closely as he had previously pored over his ancient Chinese scrolls.

Throughout the autumn and the start of winter that year, he appealed repeatedly to the British authorities in China—to the British legations in Peking and Shanghai—for his daughter’s case not to be abandoned. ‘I shall not let the matter rest as long as I have breath in my body,’ he wrote.

He also wrote letters to the newspapers—the
North-China Daily News
, the
Tientsin and Peking Times
, the
North China Star
. He self-published a pamphlet calling for the case to be reopened, starting with an open letter to Pamela’s murderer to come forward. He appealed to DCI Dennis in Tientsin, he appealed to the Chinese police at Ch’ienmen. He appealed from his heart, as a father:

The sight of my child’s kind little face, half cut away and bleeding, as her mutilated body lay on the ground that terrible morning, seemed to drag my eyes out of my head, and the shock has permanently injured my heart. During every minute of every day that vision has beat upon my brain.

All his letters were either ignored or turned down. By January 1938, he had accepted that his appeals were falling on deaf ears and stopped making them. Instead he took matters into his own hands.

Werner threw himself into what would become the single quest of his remaining life—a private investigation into the murder of his daughter. He was determined to see justice done for her, and stubbornly refused to walk away from the case. Over the years, many people had found Werner an odd man, and in his own words he stood ‘apart from the herd,’ but the very same characteristics that infuriated others—his steely determination to see things through to the end, his strength of will that refused to be diverted from a cause, his abundant intelligence—now drove him to learn the truth about Pamela’s murder.

He set out to dig through the dirt of the case himself, embarking on a journey that took him deep into the city’s underworld, all the way to its sordid, putrid bottom. Wealthy white Peking might have been vastly depleted in number, but the stateless White Russians had nowhere to go, and the criminal class did not want to leave—they believed they could survive and thrive, under Japanese rule. It was with these groups that Werner dealt. He paid informers: nightclub and dive-bar habitués, Russian women who’d worked the Badlands brothels frequented by the gang, people who knew Prentice, Pinfold and their ‘sex cult.’

He also hired people to uncover facts, including Chinese ex-detectives—good men who were deemed politically unreliable by the Japanese and had been ousted from the Peking force. They tracked down Chinese witnesses scattered across northern China. He had his agents distribute leaflets across the city, in Chinese this time, appealing for witnesses and offering financial rewards. He took advantage of Peking’s collapsed economy. Unemployment had soared, food prices had quadrupled, the number of pawnshops had escalated. People were more and more desperate for money.

He slowly emptied his bank account, but people talked. It might not just have been about the cold, hard cash; perhaps it was guilt, the burden of knowing too much and not speaking out. Werner dedicated five years to the task, and what he uncovered was ultimately far worse, far more evil, than anything Peking’s numerous armchair detectives could have imagined.

Meanwhile, it was back to the start he had to go, however painful that might be, sifting through the half-truths and the lies to discover the daughter he thought he had known.

Journey to the Underworld

E
. T. C. Werner, former consular judge, barrister-at-law of Middle Temple, knew that the key to the murder was the
locus delicti
, the scene of the crime, the killing floor that Dennis and Han had never found. The detectives were right in their assumptions, Werner believed, that if they could find the blood, they would find the killer.

By the time Werner began his investigation, Colonel Han had been ordered by Peking police headquarters at Ch’ienmen not to talk about the case. The incident room at Morrison Street had long been dismantled, the crime-scene photos taken down and filed away. DCI Dennis, now back in Tientsin, had also been officially warned off any further communication with Werner. Enough muck had been raked for the taste of Consul Affleck at Gordon Hall.

As for Consul Fitzmaurice, Werner’s old adversary, he had never returned to Peking from his summer leave in England, instead retiring at the age of fifty-six. The rumour was that London had little faith in their man and had sidelined him. A new consul, Allan Ar-cher, had been installed in September 1937.

But while he had hit an official wall of silence and obfuscation from his compatriots, Werner did have some friends in the wider diplomatic corps—at the American and Japanese legations in Peking and at the French Legation in Shanghai. He found allies among former Peking policemen, who’d been in the force during the investigation and were now persona non grata with the Japanese occupiers. On the record and off, many people sought to help him. Some tipped him off anonymously.

Others made suggestions. They told him to talk to the Gurevitch girl again, Pamela’s skating companion on the night of her murder. They told him to find Sun Te-hsing, the rickshaw puller who’d been arrested soon after the murder. Both these people knew more than they’d said. And most particularly, they told him to focus on Wentworth Prentice and his associates. The dentist was at the heart of it, the central cog. His nudist colony in the hills, closed down by the Japanese in the summer of 1937, had been guarded by known Badlands thugs. And the parties he held in his flat were reportedly debauched.

Werner’s informers told him that shortly after the murder, Prentice had sent his trusted friend and fellow American Joe Knauf to Tientsin, to secure a reliable lawyer to represent him in case he was arrested. At the same time Pinfold, who had been lying low in the Badlands, had been overheard asking his associates whether the police ‘had got the American yet?’ The dentist was a man with secrets. And, as Werner already knew, he was a man who had lied outright to the police.

If Detective Chief Inspector Dennis had not been barred from talking to Werner, he too would have learnt of the lie. Werner had proof of it, handwritten evidence in the form of a professional note he had received. It was dated 1 December 1936.

This is to confirm my statement that the sum of (Dollars Fifty) $50, will not be exceeded for the whole course of treatment for Pamela. This, of course, refers to the regulation of the upper left cuspid, and to no other teeth that may need treatment at a later date.

Sincerely yours,

WB Prentice

Prentice had been Pamela’s dentist. In the treatment to which his note referred, he had simply straightened her upper left canine tooth slightly, a procedure which wouldn’t necessarily have been noticed as recent by the doctors who performed the autopsy. And in fact they had missed it entirely. But more important, Prentice had denied repeatedly to the police that he’d ever even seen Pamela. Why was that?

Werner went to see Ethel Gurevitch, who he knew was also one of Prentice’s patients. She was still living with her family on Hong Kong Bank Road. Being stateless and without passports, only their useless tsarist documents, they had nowhere to go.

Ethel was frightened. The year since Pamela’s death had weighed heavily on her, and she was extremely nervous talking to Werner. He pressed her about the evenings on which the girls had been at the skating rink, and eventually Ethel revealed that she’d seen Pamela speaking with a certain man that first night, Wednesday 6 January. But she either could not or would not name him. Ethel and her friend Lilian Marinovski had said nothing about this to the police. They were afraid of getting into trouble, Ethel told Werner; they didn’t want to be involved in a murder case.

Werner thought the man had to be Prentice, and that Ethel was clearly afraid of him. He couldn’t help noting that the dentist’s flat was almost directly opposite the skating rink, and within a stone’s throw of the Badlands.

But while Ethel wouldn’t give Werner Prentice’s name, she did give him another one. When she’d run into Pamela that Wednesday night, Pamela was in the company of the Gorman family, whose teenage children she knew. She had been to their house for tea, then gone skating with the family.

George Gorman—the pro-Tokyo hack who’d now ingratiated himself completely with the occupying power and was editing the Japanese-controlled
Peking Chronicle
for them, daily spouting their propaganda; who’d always been a gun for hire; who’d attacked the police investigation for alluding to Prentice and his group; who’d accused Dennis and Han of targeting upstanding members of Peking’s foreign community, namely Wentworth Prentice and Joe Knauf—had backed up the dentist’s alibi on the evening of Pamela’s murder, stating that he was at a cinema.

Werner hadn’t known that his daughter had gone skating with the Gormans that final week. George Gorman and Prentice were close friends. Gorman had been part of the nudist colony, had reportedly also attended Prentice’s ‘nude dances,’ along with Pinfold and Knauf. Werner had never given any thought to the man until he saw his newspaper articles during the investigation, but he had come across the name again recently.

After the case had been closed, Werner had had to appeal repeatedly to the police to have Pamela’s belongings returned to him—her clothes and personal items, along with the things Inspector Botham and Sergeant Binetsky had taken from her room. Eventually a policeman delivered them, wrapped in brown paper tied with greasy string. Her clothes were still bloodstained, although the blood had turned a dark brown, like dried gravy. In one parcel were Pamela’s silk chemise, her torn tartan skirt, woolen cardigan, shoes, navy blue over-coat and belt. Another package contained her platinum wristwatch, the small silver casket from her bedroom, a jade comb, a hair clasp and her diary. Werner reread the diary.

And there it was, in an entry for the summer of 1936, the year before she died. Pamela had gone on a picnic with a group of families to Patachu, an ancient temple a dozen or so miles outside Peking, and a favourite escape from the sweltering city. In the Western Hills conventions were relaxed somewhat—cool white linen replaced formal wear.

Werner had as usual been wrapped up in his research and writing, so Pamela had accepted an invitation and gone along unaccompanied. George Gorman, a married man and the father of two children, had ‘made love’ to her, she wrote—meaning that he had flirted with her, perhaps propositioned her. Pamela’s diary recorded that she had rebuffed him, and had laughed at the silliness of it all.

Not having been able to discuss the case with Dennis, Werner had no way of knowing what the DCI had made of this entry. He didn’t even know whether Dennis was aware of George Gorman’s friendship with Prentice at the time he’d read it. And if Dennis hadn’t been aware of that, it was possible he’d interpreted the episode as nothing more than a harmless flirtation with a family friend who’d let the wine and heat go to his head and then acted indiscreetly. Or maybe Dennis had thought it was a case of a young woman reading the signals wrong. But now it meant everything—it linked Gorman to Pamela, and Gorman was linked to Prentice.

Werner came to the conclusion that Gorman had held a grudge against his daughter after her rejection of him that summer day in the Western Hills. What she had taken as a tipsy but innocent flirtation, he had meant seriously. He had identified her as a target for Prentice and his pals, put Pamela in Prentice’s mind. The trip to the skating rink that fateful week proved that he knew she was back in Peking.

Werner went back over the long newspaper piece in which Gorman had defended Prentice, and then he trawled through copies of the Peking papers for 7 January 1937. At the two cinemas that showed foreign films, at Dashala and at Ch’ienmen, there had been no screenings that night after five thirty. Prentice claimed he’d gone to an eight o’clock screening on Morrison Street, but that was an impossibility. Gorman had lied for Prentice.

Perhaps George Gorman had told Prentice he’d be at the skating rink with Pamela on the Wednesday night, and Prentice had gone there too. Or maybe he’d been watching the arc-lit rink from his flat opposite. At any rate, it seemed he had approached Pamela there.

Werner went to the British Legation with his evidence. He appealed to the new consul, Allan Archer, to instruct the police that anything Gorman had said or written in defence of Prentice was irrelevant and out of order, but Archer refused, telling Werner curtly, ‘You are on the wrong track.’

But Werner knew he wasn’t on the wrong track. Before Prentice had been first questioned, Dennis had been ordered to stay away from Werner, and so the detectives had failed to connect Prentice to Pamela. They didn’t know about Gorman, about the summer picnic the previous year, or that he’d been at the skating rink the night before Pamela was murdered. DCI Dennis hadn’t known the cinema times in Peking, and clearly he hadn’t checked.

Werner now knew his daughter had sat in Prentice’s dental chair just a few months after Gorman’s clumsy advance to her in the Western Hills, and both men had lied about their connection to her.

And then, a chance encounter. In September 1938 Werner was walking along Eight Treasures Alley near Ch’ienmen when he passed a foreign girl walking with a European man. He turned the corner onto Jiao Min Hutong and heard his name being called. Turning, he saw that the girl, alone now, was running towards him.

‘Are you Mr Werner?’ she asked when she reached him.

She was White Russian but spoke flawless English. She told Werner that she’d come looking for him once before, on Armour Factory Alley, but he’d been away at Peitaiho. Now she was engaged, and was leaving Peking the next day to get married in Tientsin. Her fiancé was waiting around the corner, and she had only a few moments before she must return to him. She’d told him that Werner was an old teacher of hers, and she wanted to say hello. But in fact there was something she wanted to tell Werner, if he would assure her it would remain anonymous.

Hurriedly she explained that she’d lived in Tientsin for seventeen years and had known his daughter a little. She’d been a couple of years behind her at Tientsin Grammar School and, like everyone, had been shocked to hear of her death. Six months before the murder, the girl had had an appointment at Wentworth Prentice’s dental surgery, and was surprised when he charged her next to nothing for the treatment. He had then behaved in an improper manner towards her, begging her to ‘make a date’ with him, adding that he would take her to supper and ‘make it worth her while.’ She had been scared and rebuffed him. A few weeks later he’d seen her walking along Legation Street, and had tried to get her to stop and talk to him, jumping out of his rickshaw and running after her.

She knew of other girls, English and Russian, who’d been approached by Prentice, invited to ‘parties’ with him and his pals. Some had accepted, and they were taken to a place in the Badlands, on Chuanpan Hutong, but none of them would ever speak about what happened there, and most had now left China.