Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (9 page)

That night Colonel Han went home to sleep after nearly three days of nonstop work. Dennis returned to the Wagons Lits, where he spent a few hours in the hotel bar tapping into the old China hands’ rumour mill, and the nightly session of gossip and tip swapping among Peking’s foreign bright young things. He told Inspector Botham to do the same at the bar in the Hôtel du Nord. Dennis knew that the only subject on anyone’s lips would be Pamela Werner.

If there was anything useful to be learned about her or her father, the hotel bars were where tongues would loosen.

An Old China Hand

T
he inquest into the death of Pamela Werner began Monday morning at the British Legation, standard procedure in the questionable death of a British national.

The British had the largest of all the foreign legations, a spacious compound of twenty-two buildings, guarded by soldiers of the King’s Royal Surrey Regiment and by two oversize stone lions at the gates. Britain’s imperial power and prestige radiated not just over Chinese Peking but over the other legations in the Quarter too. The British Legation was the place where besieged foreigners had huddled for their last stand against the Boxers in 1900. The vengeful slaughter and looting of Peking by the foreign troops had begun later that year on the same site.

A cold, functional, unadorned room inside the main building had been set aside for the inquest, which was presided over by His Britannic Majesty’s consul, Nicholas Fitzmaurice, this morning acting as HBM’s coroner in Peking. Fitzmaurice, the man with whom Werner had clashed in the past, was a career diplomat, formerly the consul in Kashgar, in China’s restive far west region of Turkestan, before coming to Peking in 1933. He was the archetype of the humourless, formal British envoy, although his aides said he was shaken at what he had been told of Pamela’s injuries. Still, his British stiff upper lip was on display now.

The consul had the only comfortable chair in the room; everyone else was relegated to hard-backed wooden seats behind a row of black-suited legation flunkies. Han, dog-tired, attended as the investigating officer, Dennis as official British liaison to the Peking police, and Commissioner Thomas represented the Legation Quarter police. The public gallery was crowded with the gentlemen of the press—the English-language papers of the China coast, stringers for the
Times
of London, the
New York Times
and a host of other international papers looking for a story. Pamela’s death had run on front pages syndicated from Adelaide to Winnipeg—pretty European girls being murdered in the Orient was big news in the wider white world.

The proceedings that morning were perfunctory. Just a single witness was called—Pamela’s father, E. T. C. Werner, described by the press as ‘bent and white-haired,’ a man broken in his grief. Fitzmaurice saw Werner as a cantankerous irritant; the two had fallen out in Kashgar, when disputes had arisen over the expeditions of the archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein across Central Asia, and specifically his acquisition of many ancient scripts from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang. These had been taken to the British Museum, and the Chinese were not happy about it. Werner, who’d become involved in the matter as a noted scholar, thought Stein’s removal of the ancient documents was tantamount to looting, and he argued about it with Fitzmaurice, who backed Stein and the museum. Now the old man sat before him as the bereaved father of a murdered daughter. It was awkward.

Dr Cheng and the other doctors at the Peking Union Medical College had held back their findings while they continued to examine Pamela’s body for clues, the new scientific term being
forensics
. Han had encouraged them to keep the medical details out of the inquest, and therefore out of the newspapers. Right now, making the details public would only up the number of crank calls and do nothing to assist the investigation. Han already had a steady stream of lunatics claiming to have murdered Pamela; he didn’t need a line of heart thieves outside the door too.

And there was public security to think about. Organ theft was a delicate subject in China—rumours ran riot of unnatural medicines, strange rituals, triad ceremonies. All the more so when it was a young foreign girl. Peking was ever closer to tipping over into blind panic and chaos; Han didn’t want to give it a further push.

Formalities. All Fitzmaurice had to do was convene the inquest and call on Werner to positively identify his daughter. Because of her disfigured state, Werner did this through her clothing and her watch.

Pamela’s name was then entered into the record by Fitzmaurice’s clerk. When asked his daughter’s age, Werner gave it as nineteen years and eleven months. The press scribbled away—every newspaper thus far had got her age wrong.

With that, Werner sat down. Fitzmaurice declared the body to be that of Pamela Werner, British subject. He noted that Colonel Han of the Peking police was the investigating officer and adjourned the inquest, pending further medical testimony. Dennis’s presence was not formally noted. Fitzmaurice then asked Han when Pamela’s body might be released to her family for burial.

Han, standing before the bench with his hat in his hands, wearing his black dress uniform and leather boots for the occasion, said he would ensure the body was released the moment the doctors at the medical college had completed their work. Fitzmaurice nodded and banged his gavel.

The procedure had lasted barely twenty minutes. The crowd filed out of the cold room. More press were massed outside the front gate, milling between the acacia trees that lined British Road. Flashbulbs popped and Han repeated his customary ‘No comment.’ Werner slipped out a side door to avoid the scrum, a small courtesy arranged by Fitzmaurice. The press was left with no headline but W
ERNER
I
NQUEST
I
S
H
ELD
.

Han and Dennis headed back to Morrison Street. Dennis had arranged to meet Werner at Armour Factory Alley that afternoon, having decided against bringing him in to Morrison Street for questioning. It wouldn’t look good, and besides, Dennis wanted to see the house, Pamela’s room, get a feel for her and her father in their own environment. Both detectives had the sense that the Werner household had been far from normal.

Now they sat smoking in the incident room. Han’s officers had cleared some space, pushed back the regulation blackwood furniture, and pinned up the photographs taken at the crime scene. Black-and-white photographs with thick black arrows pointing to where the body had been found; close-up shots of Pamela’s wristwatch, her silk chemise, the bloodied skating-rink card, her shoes, the oil lantern that had been recovered nearby. Han kept the photos taken at the medical college in a bland manila envelope locked in his desk drawer. He had shown them to Dennis, of course, but they were too gruesome to be put on display, and the risk was too great that some constable looking for extra money at New Year would sell them to the press.

Han had been hearing gossip about Werner, and what he’d learnt he now told Dennis.

The servants’ talk was that Pamela’s father was a strange man, though a respected one. He paid fair; he didn’t mistreat his staff. He could speak more Chinese dialects than they could; he knew their culture, was a scholar. But with no mother’s influence, the daughter had been wild, and there was trouble at school. The old man couldn’t control her; he went off on long expeditions and left her alone with the servants. It wasn’t a harmonious household.

Her return home for the Christmas holidays had been a fraught time, according to the local gossip—the servants reported arguments, shouting, even a fight between Werner and one of Pamela’s suitors, on the street outside the courtyard. She’d been dating men, going out for tiffins, dinner, dancing, late nights. Werner had not been happy about her newly independent social life; he was old-school, saw it all as too modern. He’d been particularly concerned about one suitor, a half-Chinese, half-Portuguese man called, oddly, John O’Brian, who had become obsessed with Pamela in Tientsin and apparently proposed to her. This man was now living in Peking.

Pamela had rejected him, but the whole affair worried her father. Then he’d taken against a Chinese student who’d called for her several times. The gossip was that Werner told him to go away and stop bothering Pamela, and it had escalated into a fight out on Armour Factory Alley, a spectacle witnessed by the neighbours. Werner, in his seventies, had rapped the boy across the face with his cane, breaking his nose.

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.