Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (14 page)

In 1922, death by an overdose of Veronal set alarm bells ringing. A barbiturate, Veronal was an upper-class drug of choice and had been since it hit the market in 1903. It was medically prescribed for everything from toothache to insomnia, influenza to depression, but anyone who read the newspapers knew it was also a way for the better-off to end it all.

There had been a lot of precedents. In 1912, in a seedy room above Jimmy the Priest’s saloon in New York, playwright Eugene O’Neill, his marriage on the rocks, attempted suicide with cheap whisky and Veronal. A year later, a depressed Virginia Woolf also tried to kill herself with the drug, having been given it in a nursing home to help her sleep. In 1917 Stephanie ‘Baby’ Primrose and Catharine ‘Topsy’ Compton-Burnett, sisters of the popular novelist Ivy, died in a suicide pact after taking Veronal in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day. It was the celebrity drug for the new century.

But while Veronal was a popular choice, it could take more than twenty-four hours to die from an overdose. The Compton-Burnett sisters died because they locked themselves away; Virginia Woolf and Eugene O’Neill survived because people found them. Would not Werner, who claimed to be forever at his wife’s side in her last days, have noticed an overdose in the space of twenty-four hours?

People wondered. And they drew their own conclusions. For every suicide attempt with Veronal, there was another story of murder. DCI Dennis had known sensational cases of murder by Veronal while at Scotland Yard.

Werner had appeared to be the grieving husband as he stood by the graveside at Peking’s British Cemetery, where she was to be buried, so Werner said, ‘beneath the trees and flowers she loved so well.’ On that cold February day in 1922, the child Pamela stood beside her father, doubtless not quite understanding what was happening. Werner recited ‘To the Mothers,’ a poem by Marion Couthoy Smith, Gladys Nina’s favourite poet, who’d been popular during World War I:

Mothers of men, have you not known

That the soul of the child is not your own?

If God has sealed him for palm and cross,

To hold him close were your bitter loss.

And now, in yet another tragedy, Werner was preparing to bury Pamela, in the same cemetery, in the same grave. Dennis knew there could be no reinvestigation of Gladys Nina’s death, but the story gave him pause for thought.

Dennis couldn’t help thinking too of Pamela’s own tragic life—being given up for adoption and then so quickly losing her adoptive mother, followed soon after by her maternal grandmother. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Withers Ravenshaw, died at the family estate in Essex two years before Pamela was murdered, never having met his adopted granddaughter or seen his daughter’s faraway grave.

Among the photographs of Pamela that Dennis brought with him from Tientsin was one he’d found in the Tientsin Grammar School publication the
Grammarian.
A humorous piece had students submit pictures of themselves as young children, and there was Pamela, ‘P. W.,’ around the time of Gladys Nina’s death, looking happy enough outside the Werners’ home on San Tiao Hutong. It was the house where her adoptive mother had decided to end her life with an overdose, or so the official record read. Was it suicide or assisted suicide? So-called mercy killings were not unknown in the 1920s, but there was little public sympathy for them, whatever people might have thought in private. They were considered murder by the courts, and there was definitely no dispensation from the church.

One thing DCI Dennis did note was the $20,000 in silver dollars that Gladys Nina had left to Pamela, with Werner as guardian. On Pamela’s death, the money reverted to her father. It was a significant sum, one that went an especially long way in Peking. Dennis’s Scotland Yard training had been based on the theories of the legendary Sir Basil Thomson, a criminologist who for many years was head of the Criminal Investigation Department at the Yard. Thomson’s words were mantras for his men: ‘The search for the motive should be kept up incessantly, for no murder was ever committed without a motive, except one done by a maniac. There is always an underlying motive.’

Pamela’s father had motive. But the frenzied stabbing that had been inflicted on her body after death, the carving, the missing organs—that was the work of a maniac, surely. Was Werner a maniac? Dennis considered him odd—more than odd, he was so distant. But that didn’t make him a killer.

It was a lot to think about as the men retired for the evening, leaving the Wagons Lits to the younger set of foreign Peking, who seemingly had fewer concerns and perhaps less to do the following day.

The music was starting to pick up the pace as cocktail hour moved into party time. There was a postdinner crowd that came here, and to the other hotels and bars in the Quarter, who enjoyed the edginess of life in a city on the brink. They were living like kings on their trust funds, way above anything they could afford back home. There were Germans who didn’t have to worry about Herr Hitler and his SS, Americans rich as Croesus thanks to the silver-backed dollar, all and sundry glad to be away from the Great Depression. This corner of the Far East was still a playground for a select few, for a little while longer anyway.

Into the Badlands

C
olonel Han was sticking with his trademark ‘No comment,’ but the journalists were fishing. The inquest had given them nothing either, and Han was forced to admit that the police had no clues. He did manage to keep Dennis, Botham and Binetsky out of the papers, evading questions about who was helping him with the investigation. The press declared him ‘reluctant to talk,’ and insinuated that the Peking police weren’t up to the job.

Han appealed for anyone with any knowledge to come forward, citing the reward being offered by the Legation Quarter police for information that led to the capture and conviction of the murderer or murderers. Notices in English to this effect were handed out to the press. The amount, $1,000 in Chinese dollars, was the equivalent of about $330 in American dollars, and to the vast majority of Chinese Peking it was a fortune. A typical family survived on less than $100 a year in American dollars.

But Werner attacked the handling of the reward. He argued that the leaflets should also be printed in Chinese, and that it should be possible to claim the money through a bank, under promise of protection and anonymity, so that local Chinese would not suspect a trap. The Chinese public had a general distrust of authority. Consul Fitzmau-rice refused point-blank, insisting that anyone, Chinese or foreign, must claim the reward from him personally.

Han had tracked down most of the men who had been reported as having known Pamela in Peking, and all of them had alibis—they had been out of town and had the hotel reservations and train tickets to prove it, or at home with parents and colleagues. Inspector Botham, on Dennis’s orders and with Han’s agreement, had questioned each of them and taken their statements. Han had then dispatched his men to double-check their stories. All of them checked out. All the men were horrified by Pamela’s murder.

Still, the picture of Pamela became clearer as a result. The men reported her as gay, fun. A girl who enjoyed going out for tiffins, to cafés, skating. A girl who liked dancing and laughing. She had been dating freely, and many of her dates found it hard to believe she was still at school. Pamela hadn’t mentioned it, and they had considered her a woman, not a schoolgirl.

The officers had ticked off the boyfriends from Werner’s list one by one, with two exceptions. They were unable to find the Chinese student who’d called for Pamela only to have his nose broken by her father for his pains. Werner had told the police that the student was from Mukden in the northeast, that his name was Han Shou-ching, and that he’d attended the Kao Tang Shih Fan College in Peking’s southern suburbs.

The police visited the college, but Han Shou-ching was no longer enrolled there—he had gone back to his father’s home in Mukden. They also looked for John O’Brian, the young man who’d become obsessed with Pamela in Tientsin and who was now thought to be in Peking, but with no luck. Another dead end.

Tuesday morning saw the revelation in the press of the involvement of DCI Dennis of Tientsin in Colonel Han’s murder investigation. The foreigners were happy. ‘Optimism prevails,’ wrote the Shanghai-based
North-China Daily News
, greeting the wires’ report that a British policeman—a ‘Scotland Yard man,’ no less—was on the case.

The journalists besieged Morrison Street but were forced to wait around on the steps to the station entrance. The pack of foreign newsmen attracted curious locals, and a large crowd soon swelled. Morrison Street was always crowded at the best of times. A broad, acacia-lined thoroughfare just to the north of the Legation Quarter, it was one of the few streets where foreigners and Chinese mingled. Fashionable Europeans and wealthy Chinese ladies browsed at the department stores and curio shops, bought sweet buns or cream cakes at the Russian bakery, went to the dry cleaners and the drugstores, while the less well-off local Chinese ambled along to the food stalls and hawkers in the nearby Dongan Market, or headed to the Lung-Fu Temple with its hundreds of stalls selling porcelain, jade, lacquerware and silks alongside toys, food, dogs and cats.

Cars and trolleybuses competed with rickshaws, pedestrians and bicycles on Morrison Street. Traditionally dressed blue-gowned men wearing felt trilby hats squatted on the corners or stood around smoking in deep discussion. White-gowned amahs with foreign babies in their charge strolled for fresh air. East met West on this street, which was also home to the headquarters of the Salvation Army, whose uniformed members marched from one end to the other with drums and trombones, playing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’; bemused Chinese refused to be converted to anything.

When Han finally appeared, he stood at the top of the station steps in full police uniform, cap on, pistol holstered. Dennis stood slightly behind him, with no need to hide now, in his civilian suit. Protocol dictated that Han address the press—it was his case, his station. But he still had no details to give, no motive to suggest, no suspects to name, only a message he wished to convey to the victim’s grieving father.

‘I will do my best to bring Pamela’s murderers to justice,’ he told the assembled crowd.

That was all the papers got. Colonel Han was a man who never gave the press more than was necessary. He was not a glory hunter. And he did not want to set himself up for a fall. Dennis tended to agree; the less said, the better.

But it was almost a week since Pamela’s body had been found at the Fox Tower, and the journalists were starting to bay for blood. Flashbulbs popped as they threw questions. Han simply smiled, opened his arms to them, palms outward, showing that he had nothing to give but his humble apologies, and then the detectives disappeared back inside the station.

That evening, Dennis was at the Wagons Lits having a hot stew dinner after a day of getting nowhere. Werner’s movements on the night of the killing had all been verified. His servants, the Gurevitches, the desk sergeant at the legation police station, and the various gatemen at the locations he’d visited across the city all confirmed seeing him. Dennis didn’t buy Werner as the killer anyway—the attack was just too vicious, too manic. He knew in his guts that the old man wasn’t the murderer.

As Dennis was eating, the restaurant manager came to tell him he had a telephone call from an Inspector Botham. Dennis took it on the heavy Bakelite phone in the manager’s office.

Botham was excited. ‘They’ve got a foreigner with blood on his clothes,’ he told Dennis. ‘More blood in his lodgings. We’ve sealed the room, and he’s now at Morrison Street. He won’t talk.’

‘Do we know his name?’

‘He’s saying nothing, but Han says he knows him—name of Pinfold.’

‘I’m coming straight there.’ Dennis said, an emptiness in the pit of his stomach. They’d found blood.

Han’s rousting of every lodging house and boarding room in the Badlands had paid off. The man had been found in a dingy flophouse infested with rats, cockroaches and typhus, where rooms were rented by the hour, the day or the week—cash in advance, no questions asked. This was where poor white Peking lived alongside those Chinese who wanted to be anonymous, and it was as low as it got for a foreigner. The man lived in one small room with no toilet and one paper-covered window looking out onto a back courtyard strewn with rubbish.

Han had recovered items from the room. A pair of shoes with bloodstains on them, and—what had alarmed the White Russian landlady enough to call the police when she went in to check that her lodger hadn’t skipped on the rent—a dagger with bloodstains on the sheath and a torn handkerchief with yet more bloodstains. Han had taken them all, along with the man’s clothing, put them in brown paper bags, and sent them over to the Peking Union Medical College, where the pathologists were called out for another long night’s work. There was no doubt it was blood—but whose?

When the occupant of the room, Pinfold, was brought into Morrison Street, a young Chinese constable pulled Colonel Han aside. He recognised the foreigner. The constable had been on duty a couple of days after Pamela’s murder, protecting the crime scene at the foot of the Fox Tower as instructed. Among the curious locals who passed by was this man. The constable remembered him as one of only a few foreigners to linger. He had seemed agitated, scraping his feet on the ground as he stared at the spot where the body had lain, and was notably more down-at-heel than the average white man in Peking.

The interview room at Morrison Street where Pinfold was questioned had a hard brick floor and a marble-topped table with the ubiquitous stained white-enamel spittoon underneath. Han and Dennis sat on one side of the table, Pinfold on the other, both policemen and suspect alike on stiff-backed chairs that weren’t meant to be comfortable. Botham stood by the door.

A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling on an electric cord, and the temperature in the room was kept low to ensure that the suspect stayed awake. The window was set high so that nobody could see outside, and from the courtyard only the shouts and jeers of the constables changing shifts could be heard. The whitewashed walls were bare but for a large portrait of Dr Sun Yat-sen above Han’s head.

This was Han’s station, Han’s suspect and Han’s interview. Strictly speaking, Dennis was not supposed to be involved—he was supposed to confine himself to the Legation Quarter—but Han let him take the lead. There were no lawyers, no reading of rights, no recording equipment. The interview was not conducted under oath.

Dennis sat surreptitiously casting glances at the man, noting that he looked unfazed, used to the environment. You didn’t spend fifteen years in Scotland Yard without knowing whether or not a man had seen the inside of a police station before, and this man clearly had.

Before they’d entered the interview room, Han had given Dennis the background—the lodging house, the destitute state of the man’s room, the landlady’s suspicions. He said he believed the man was called Pinfold, but he’d never spoken to him before. He thought he was Canadian, maybe British, possibly American.

Dennis learnt that the man had arrived in Peking in the late 1920s, in better shape back then and with a job. He’d worked as a bodyguard for one of the many warlords who’d based themselves in Peking during that time of chaos, when allegiances and territory changed hands between men with private armies, before Chiang Kai-shek pacified the northern warlords and before the Japanese arrived to finish off the last few stubborn holdouts in Manchuria.

The warlord Pinfold worked for had a large courtyard residence on the edge of what was then the open ground of the Glacis, before it was built over as the Badlands. His property extended almost to the Tartar Wall, and he came under Han’s jurisdiction. A lot of the northern warlords liked to hire foreign bodyguards because they didn’t have ties to any clan, and so tended to stay loyal as long as they were paid. They usually had soldiering experience, and they added a little glamour and status to a warlord’s retinue. These mercenaries were mostly White Russians, ex-tsarist cavalry officers with nowhere else to go, and no skills to sell except their ability to fight. But there were a few other rogue foreigners mixed in, and this Pinfold was one of them. Han had seen him many times, up on the Tartar Wall guarding the warlord’s property.

Then that warlord had gone. Han didn’t remember how—whether he’d been assassinated, or there’d been a coup, or whether he’d given up the renegade life and taken his troops and his allegiance to Chiang and the Kuomintang. Maybe he’d just retired, and was now safely in Shanghai with his mistresses and his opium pipe and a large bank account. Since then Pinfold had hung around the Badlands, but what exactly he did wasn’t clear. What did any of the foreign driftwood in the Badlands do? Work as muscle for the dive bars or brothels, manage the casinos or cabarets, a little pimping, gun running? Sell a little dope to the marines and other foreigners?

Han had put in requests for any details on Pinfold to the Canadian, American and British legations, but he wasn’t hopeful. Men like Pinfold didn’t leave trails or register their presence.

Pinfold’s lodgings had yielded nothing to identify him, no passport, no bankbook, no papers. The officers had turned the room over, but the man had few possessions beyond the suit he was wearing. There were a couple of soiled shirts, some underwear, a heavy winter overcoat, and a battered old suitcase, which was empty. The only shoes he owned were the blood-spattered pair Han had confiscated, which had been replaced by some Chinese straw and cloth slippers a couple of sizes too small.

Apart from clothing, his sole belongings were a cheap, cracked wristwatch and a paltry amount in Chinese dollars—no wallet. The furniture and objects in the room—a bed, a small table and chair, a wardrobe, a chamber pot and a scorch-marked copper ashtray—were the property of the White Russian landlord. There were no photographs of loved ones, no letters from family, no mementos or knickknacks, none of the ordinary acquisitions of life.