Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (6 page)

Cheng was finding it hard to record his findings, so bizarre and impossible did they strike him as being. After removing the skin from Pamela’s chest and stomach, the killer had carved open her chest to expose her ribs. He had then broken all twelve of her ribs, six on either side. Each had been broken outwards, and then the killer had removed her heart, her bladder, her kidney and her liver.

To break a rib inward was not difficult. A blow to the side of the chest would achieve this, and people broke ribs all the time, falling, fighting or in accidents. But to snap something with the thickness and strength of a rib outwards, against the natural curve, was much more difficult and suggested the use of great force.

The medical men were disbelieving, despite the evidence before them. The motive for such an act was impossible to imagine, and none of them were willing to hazard a guess as to why this had been done. Not content with opening the rib cage, the mutilator had reached in and removed the organs. It seemed that Pamela had been killed by a madman.

The autopsy continued. Cheng noted that two clean incisions had been made through the diaphragm below the lungs and at the abdomen. He believed these had been done with either a surgeon’s scalpel or a professional amputation knife. They were not the hack job of an amateur. Pamela’s stomach had also been cut away, at the 0esophagus and the small intestine—it was inside her body but no longer attached to anything. The medical men now removed it for further examination.

Han had a question. Could dogs or animals have caused this internal damage? He was thinking of the reports of the
huang gou
skulking around the Fox Tower that morning, until chased off.

But Cheng thought not. The cuts in the diaphragm and abdominal cavity were the result of sharp instruments. They were too clean and neat to have been made by animals, and there were no signs of dog bites anywhere on the body. The
huang gou
were innocent.

Han considered the nature of Pamela’s injuries. In a sense it was a relief that the majority were postmortem; the idea of such atrocities being committed while the girl was still alive made them unthinkable. There were scratches on her lower arms that were premortem, perhaps signs of a struggle, though it appeared to have been brief. It seemed Pamela had been killed, bled and butchered in that order, but not all in one place.

When Han asked whether Pamela had been raped, Cheng couldn’t say, and although it was now past midnight, Aspland called out another colleague, Dr James Maxwell, the medical college’s professor of gynaecology and obstetrics. Maxwell had caused a storm several years earlier with a paper he wrote on the use of meat hooks by unqualified midwives in rural China, and the subsequent deaths of both mothers and babies.

Now he examined Pamela for signs of sexual activity or interference, and concluded that she’d had intercourse at some time in the recent past—she was not a virgin. But he was unable to say whether this was consensual or not, or whether it was pre- or postmortem. The science just wasn’t advanced enough. Pamela’s vagina had also been mutilated, but again Maxwell was unable to determine when this had taken place. Han asked him whether he thought this was the work of a sexual maniac; Maxwell thought it quite possibly was.

The final doctor to examine Pamela that night was Harry Van Dyke, a brilliant physician who’d been hired to establish the college’s pharmacology department. Van Dyke swiftly ruled out poisoning and could find no traces of chloroform; Pamela had not been drugged, and while she had been drinking alcohol, the level in her blood wasn’t high. Van Dyke also determined that at some point during the previous evening, Pamela had eaten Chinese food.

The autopsy completed, Cheng noted for the record that prior to her murder Pamela Werner had been ‘a healthy and normally developed woman of approximately 18–19 years of age.’ He noted her teeth as healthy, though two in the back had been removed professionally at some point, and there were recent chips to two of her front teeth, which he assumed had occurred in the struggle.

The men discussed what they knew and what they didn’t. Pamela’s injuries suggested rage, a frenzied madness, but also someone competent with a surgical knife and who had a basic knowledge of anatomy. Cheng thought that if the murderer was skilled, then the mutilations could have been done within half an hour; if less skilled, then two to three hours.

Han asked whether all this could have been done in the open, or whether the killer had required light and an indoor location. Cheng couldn’t be sure but thought some light would have been needed, even if the killer was skilled, although perhaps a butcher or a hunter might be capable in the dark.

As to the process, Cheng believed that following death the chest was the first to be mutilated. This would have caused the loss of a massive amount of blood, and the killer or killers could not have avoided becoming soaked in it themselves. However, the blood had been drained from the abdomen before that was cut, accounting for the lack of blood in the abdominal cavity—Pamela had effectively been bled dry before having her internal organs removed. There was no evidence of clotting in the blood vessels, and this indicated to Cheng that the bloodletting had occurred soon after death rather than later—no more than five or six hours at the most.

Around dawn, the body was taken to the nearby mortuary. When Colonel Han left the medical college the press were waiting for him outside, mostly foreign journalists, stamping their feet in the cold. Han was in no mood to talk, and besides, he knew better than to reveal the details of what he’d just seen on the slab. His only statement was, ‘No comment.’

The early editions of Saturday’s China-coast papers all led with Pamela Werner’s murder. The Shanghai-based
China Press
ran the headline E
X–
B
RITISH
C
ONSUL’S
D
AUGHTER
D
ISCOVERED
D
EAD,
B
ADLY
M
ANGLED
. The reporters were scrabbling for facts, Han having told them nothing for now, and the story was riddled with inaccuracies. That didn’t stop it being repeated across all the newspapers in China and then across the world. Pamela was described as anywhere from fifteen to nineteen years old, and all the papers included the erroneous detail that wild dogs had savaged her body.

Much was made of her father’s career, and the fact that her body had been found at the Fox Tower, as close as 250 yards from her home as the crow flies, and right next to the foreign enclave of the Legation Quarter. Much, too, was made of the local superstition that the Fox Tower was haunted; fox spirits had made the front pages. Peking was reportedly mystified—that much, at least, was true. But it was widely presented as fact that Werner himself had discovered his daughter’s body—he had stumbled across her corpse while out looking for her and had had to throw stones at the
huang gou
to stop them tearing at her flesh.

Nobody at the medical college had talked to the press, who had not been informed of the details of the mutilation or the missing organs, but dark hints were made that this was an awful slaying in the extreme. The journalists relied on interviews with people at the scene. Colonel Han Shih-ching of the Peking police was listed as the investigating officer in charge; no mention was made of Scotland Yard’s involvement, no comment given from His Britannic Majesty’s British Consulate.

Across the Pacific, on the American continent, the
New York Times
reported, ‘Peking was shocked to learn that the body of a British girl had been found under the Tartar Wall, between Hatamen Gate and Fox Tower.’ That too was correct—Peking
was
shocked. You could feel the fear ripple across the city.

Even though Peking had been living with the threat of invasion for months now, even though everyone knew that when the Japanese arrived, they would be brutal, the city’s dread had just been ratcheted up a degree. The murdered body at the Fox Tower seemed to graphically symbolise the spiral into barbarism. This was not an assassination, not part of a political feud; it was the butchering of an innocent. The city’s terror was coalescing, and now there was a name to embody the horror that would befall them all—Pamela Werner.

The Investigation

D
uring that Friday night, two policemen from Tientsin, Inspector Botham and Sergeant Binetsky, had arrived to prepare the ground for their boss, Detective Chief Inspector Dennis, who was due in Peking later on Saturday. Botham set about arranging accommodation for Dennis at the Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits, and for himself and Sergeant Binetsky at the slightly less expensive Hôtel du Nord.

Meanwhile Sergeant Binetsky went to the Morrison Street police station, which had also had a busy night. The front desk had been dealing with crank callers and those deranged Pekingers who confessed to every murder in the city. One such call ran:

Desk sergeant:
‘What did you do?’

Caller:
‘I strangled her.’

Desk sergeant:
‘Why did you kill her?’

Caller:
‘She was a filthy Russian prostitute.’

Desk sergeant:
‘What did you do to the body?’

Caller:
‘I left it to the dogs.’

Desk sergeant:
‘What had she ever done to you?’

Caller:
‘She was a fox spirit and she possessed me.’

None of the confessions, even the less outlandish ones, matched the crime, and they kept coming on Saturday morning. Once Han was called from his office to the front desk to confront a wild, ranting White Russian woman who was demanding that her husband be locked up and charged with the murder. The desk sergeant couldn’t understand her, and Han too had trouble making out her words through her thick accent. She wore heavy makeup, and spittle flew from her mouth as she shouted. Her good-for-nothing husband was a killer, she insisted; he was infatuated with
batonciks
, young blond prostitutes. He spent all his money on those ‘small buns’ in the bars and whorehouses of the Badlands. He was at home right now, still covered in blood. The police must do something.

They had raced round to the house and found the man hung over and with his old tsarist medals on display. He was as wild and ranting as his wife, and screamed all the more wildly when he saw her at the heels of the police, but he had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn’t seen the newspaper his wife had read that morning. He was bloody, but it was his own blood, he told the police, spilled courtesy of an American soldier’s fists and boots in a Russian bar, where the vodka had flowed a little too freely. Tempers had flared. Two other Russian men living in the same
hutong
verified that the man had been drunk and fighting, that this was nothing unusual, that his wife was a crazy harridan he’d have done better to have left in St Petersburg, that they were both a little unhinged after having to flee Russia with nothing and live destitute in a strange country.

A constable dispatched to the marines’ quarters at the American Legation returned with an alibi for the Russian. A burly marine admitted hitting the man for insulting his girl and the fighting honour of the Fourth Marines. He didn’t regret his actions, but he didn’t think the Russian, asshole though he was, deserved to face a murder charge.

Then there was the case of the scared and cowering rickshaw puller who’d been brought into Morrison Street on Friday, after being caught close to where Pamela’s body was found. The rickshaw puller, a country boy called Sun Te-hsing, had been washing out a bloodstained cushion cover from the seat of his rickshaw. When Han had got back to the station that day, he had the boy put in a cell while he examined the cover—it was bloody, but not bloody enough for the dead girl’s injuries, Han determined. After questioning the boy, he let him go. The rickshaw puller was sent on his way, back out onto the cold streets, and told to disappear.

Most of the calls coming through to the station, and most of the newspapermen crowding the lobby of Morrison Street, mentioned one man—Pamela’s father. And indeed, that was the procedure in a murder investigation—first look close: to the family, the husband, the wife. Murderers invariably knew their victims; randomness was rare. That was a detective’s mindset—think the unthinkable, and statistically you were likely to be closer to the truth.

After missing lunch, Colonel Han found himself standing on the platform of Peking Central Railway Station in the early afternoon chill, waiting for DCI Dennis. The station was European in style, on the southwestern edge of the Legation Quarter, close to Ch’ienmen Gate. It had a high, arched roof and a distinctive Western clock tower at one end of the platform.

Han had been pleased to find that no journalists were gathered round the ticket gate; it meant the press hadn’t got hold of the story that a British policeman was being brought in from Tientsin. The colonel was in two minds about Dennis’s involvement in the case. The detective was experienced and British, and both those things were called for in this instance. Better a detective than an embassy spy, or even worse, a dullard who just got in the way. But a part of Han resented the involvement of any foreigner in a Peking murder case—this wasn’t Shanghai or one of the other treaty ports, this was sovereign Chinese territory.

But he’d decided to be rational and accept that this was no ordinary Peking murder, if such a thing existed. A foreigner had been killed, and Dennis, or someone like him, was an inevitability.

Han expected the train to be late. The journey from Tientsin to Peking normally took two hours, but it had become dangerous, with bandits and saboteurs and roaming Japanese troops. Han shook himself to get his blood moving against the chill; it wouldn’t do to shiver in front of a Scotland Yard man.

To arrive in Peking, Han knew, was to be awed somewhat. The train, known as the International, came into the station under the walls of old Peking, virtually alongside the towering Ch’ienmen Gate. The tallest and most southerly of the city’s ancient gateways, it marked the entrance to the inner part of Peking, the old Imperial City. Occasionally camel trains setting out for Mongolia, the old tea-trade routes and the Silk Road still wandered past it.

When Dennis’s train, only slightly behind schedule, pulled into the Water Gate platform and disgorged its passengers, Han realised he had no idea what DCI Dennis looked like, apart from foreign. He was one among many—most of the passengers appeared to be foreigners, at least in the first-class carriages at the front of the train.

Then he saw him. He would have known the man was a policeman regardless of race or nationality. It was Dennis’s bearing: erect, purposeful, exuding authority even in civilian clothes—a dark, worsted double-breasted suit, starched white collar, black tie and coat, ubiquitous fedora. Shoes so polished you could almost see your face in them. It helped that Dennis was tall, standing a good few inches above anyone around him, Chinese or foreign. At six feet himself, Han nonetheless pushed his shoulders back involuntarily.

The DCI, familiar with the uniform of the Peking police, strode towards Han, and the two men appraised each other. Han was powerfully built, with close-cropped hair, angular cheekbones, and a longer chin and a sharper, more highly bridged nose than many Chinese. Dennis, while taller than Han, was somewhat gangly beneath his winter coat, but he had enough brawn to deal with anyone troublesome. He had slightly outsize features—a thick brow, long nose, large hands, large ears. Everything about him stamped him as a man of authority.

‘DCI Dennis?’

‘Colonel Han.’

‘I have a car. Shall we?’

‘Indeed.’

They walked through the ticket barrier, where the railway functionary was smart enough to know when not to demand a man’s ticket, and strode out under the archway at the entrance, across to a parking area occupied by a few cars and a host of rickshaws. Dennis had only a small suitcase. Han’s driver, a young constable, jumped out of the police Chevrolet and opened the back door for the men.

‘To your hotel?’ Han asked.

‘Straight to work, I think.’

On the way to Morrison Street, Han briefed the British officer on the results of the autopsy, admitting to Dennis what he would later admit to journalists: he had as yet found no important clues. The two men agreed that in the absence of such they should follow procedure and reconstruct the victim’s last days: start with the last known sighting of Pamela and work back carefully but swiftly. Murder investigations had to move fast, or they ground to a shuddering halt. Trails ran cold, witnesses disappeared, the killer escaped.

And then of course there was Han’s twenty-day limit, not to mention the number of anonymous tip-offs and crank calls already received, which proved that the Peking rumour mill had swung into action. That morning, after a few hours’ sleep on the foldout cot he kept in his office, Han had recalled all available constables for duty, cancelled leave across the board and issued instructions for everyone to take to the streets and look. Look for what? Look for blood. Find the blood, and they’d find the killer
.

So commenced the formal investigation into the murder of Pamela Werner.

Detective Chief Inspector Richard Harry Dennis—Dick to the boys—was just shy of forty, a butcher’s son from West Ham on the fringes of London’s East End. His mother was reputedly from a well-to-do family, one of the stodgily respectable lower middle class of the Edwardian decade. As a young man, Dick Dennis found the world plunged into World War I. He rushed to join up. He was fit, smart, and somewhere along the way he had picked up good French, so he signed up with the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and flew over the battlefields of France. He was shot down in 1917, invalided out and sent home, his war over.

In 1920, perhaps missing the action, the discipline, the uniform, he joined the Metropolitan Police, where he rose to the rank of detective sergeant, stationed at Paddington on the edge of the West End, and then at Scotland Yard. He married, and a son—Richard junior—soon followed. But the marriage collapsed. Dennis married again in 1930, this time mildly scandalously, to his son’s nanny, an East End woman named Virginia whom he always called Violet. Richard junior thought she was his birth mother.

Dennis liked police work, but he didn’t much like struggling in London with a wife and child on a copper’s lowly wage. With a reference from no less than Lord Trenchard, marshall of the RAF and commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, he took the job of chief inspector of police with the British Municipal Council in Tientsin, arriving to take up his duties in July 1934 with the new rank of DCI. It was a step up in rank and an even bigger step up in pay and conditions, from grimy West London to a sizeable house in Tientsin’s British Concession and a force of men working under him.