Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (21 page)

The Snows’ address was hardly difficult to discover, especially given their social calendar and Tai Li’s reach. Anyone could quickly find out that Helen regularly walked or bicycled along the Tartar Wall to Armour Factory Alley. Like Pamela, she always took that route home from the Legation Quarter: it was unlit at night, but it avoided the confusing warren of
hutong
that formed the Badlands.

Helen Foster Snow dressed smartly—high heels, long skirts, fur stoles. Her style was radical politics with chic couture. Put Pamela in her glamour shot next to Helen, and in the dark, in a rush, they could be mistaken. Especially by an unknown assailant such as Helen was suggesting. The two women were about the same height and had the same colouring; both were fair-haired and slim. Helen wore her hair pulled tight to her head, sometimes parted to the side, sometimes down the centre—just like Pamela. They lived virtually next door, they both rode their bicycles around the area. The cover of night would easily remove the ten-year age difference between them.

Dennis didn’t know what to say to Helen. Sitting by her fire, he looked out at Armour Factory Alley, listening to the howling of the
huang gou
carried on the wind from the Fox Tower. He was amazed that Edgar had gone out and left his wife alone in this state. Dennis had always found Armour Factory Alley ghoulish at night, but this seemed to be the reason Edgar and Helen liked it. They knew it was supposed to be haunted by fox spirits living in the Fox Tower, but she was, she laughed, living ‘alone’ with fifteen servants, four of them tough men armed with swords.

‘Don’t you realise,’ Dennis asked her, ‘that the murderer has to be hiding somewhere, probably nearby?’

The DCI was at the end of his tether. He found himself slipping out of character. No longer the detached copper, he was taking the case too personally. Helen Snow’s brandy had left a bad taste in his mouth, or perhaps the virus he had was messing with his sense of taste. He needed rest; he needed to go home to Tientsin. He felt sick and useless.

‘There are no lights anywhere,’ he said to Helen. ‘Anything could happen way out here in the dark.’ He implored her to pack up, move out, get away from Armour Factory Alley. It was cursed. DCI Dennis sensed he was losing out to panic—he needed to get a grip. He was the one who ought to get out of Peking.

Brutal though Tai Li and the Blue Shirts were, their assassinations tended to be fast, decisive—a shot to the head, and then they moved on to their next enemy. Tai was fond of the term
liquidation
. His methods didn’t square with what had been done to Pamela. Anyway, Dennis was a realist—it would be impossible to ever confirm or rule out Tai’s involvement. Nobody—not Han, not his bosses at Ch’ienmen—would ever dare approach Tai about the matter.

However plausible Helen Snow’s theory about mistaken identity might be, it could never go anywhere. There were some questions that would just never get asked, some men in China so powerful they could get away with murder. Tai Li was one such. He was the dead end of all dead ends.

The Element of Fire

T
he Year of the Ox began at midnight on Wednesday 11 Febru-ary. Han and Dennis were at Morrison Street, where the station was like a ghost town. Even though both men were expecting it, they still jumped when the sound of a hundred thousand firecrackers burst over the city.

Peking had shut down a few days beforehand for the Spring Festival holiday, but the days leading up to that were a flurry of activity. Outside on Morrison Street the thoroughfare had been busier than ever, louder than usual, as rich Chinese piled their purchases into their chauffeured cars and stubborn foreigners braced themselves against the cold, holding their hats to their heads as they headed for tiffins at the Grand Hôtel de Pékin.

For commercial Peking, the end of the old lunar year and the start of the new was the time for settling accounts. Merchants and banks tallied up the year’s business on abacuses with flying fingers and sent their messengers scurrying around the city to collect outstanding bills. Chits that had been issued were redeemed, China’s unique credit system of trust and face invoked. Unless by special arrangement, no new accounts would be opened until the new year began. People hurried to make the last trading day for Peking’s markets—wheat and bean cake, flour, cotton, stocks and shares—which was on the Saturday, although the gold-bar market always stayed open.

The poor of the city and the newcomers from the countryside walked along Morrison Street gazing at the modern stores and the gleaming black cars. Rickshaw pullers did good business, swarming around anyone with a parcel. Bank messengers darted in and out of rickshaws, the sparking trolleybuses and the lines of cars. Here and there shopkeepers emerged with bags of cash, flanked by bodyguards who escorted them to the bank.

For several days Peking’s banks and countinghouses had extended their opening hours as queues formed to settle debts. China now had a paper currency, its own dollar, backed by the national bank in Shanghai, but jittery Peking didn’t trust it—in this city, cash might have been king, but silver was God.

As the New Year approached, all Han’s black-jacketed constables were out on street patrol, truncheons drawn, whistles blowing, to manage the crowds that gathered at the temple fairs and on the food streets, or to watch the impromptu performances of acrobats and opera singers. Crowds were good cover for pickpockets and other criminals, and plainclothes police were also on duty, mingling with the throng to watch for signs of trouble.

Patrols had been doubled at major intersections to prevent stampedes caused by delays and anger. Han predicted that marauding bandits would disrupt the roads and train lines out of the city. Thomas, Pearson and their small band of constables were also increasing the guards on the entrances and exits to the Legation Quarter. The Peking police bicycle squad was monitoring the temples and parks, while the thousand-strong Peace Preservation Brigade, volunteers with armbands, had been called out to assist the regular constables in patrolling the major commercial districts over the holidays. A celebrating crowd could easily turn into panic and frenzy, and this year the mood was heightened. Who knew what would be left to celebrate, next New Year? Peking was living while it could.

The receding Year of the Rat was characterized by opportunity and good prospects, but with the possibility of bleak years to follow. The incoming ox symbolized problems that appeared never-ending, and those years were times for discipline and sacrifice. The ox’s element was fire: ox and fire combined to make a beast motivated by combat.

Sitting in the Morrison Street station, Han and Dennis were thinking not of oxen or rats but foxes, not of fire but blood. Where was Pamela’s blood? It was a question they’d never been able to answer. Those photographs, looked at a thousand times, had given up nothing.

Pamela herself had been born in the Year of the Sheep, the most feminine of symbols. People born in those years were considered to be readily overwhelmed by emotions, negativity and gloom; they had a tendency to be hopelessly romantic, were easily manipulated and needed to be cared for. The sheep was a little self-centred but had a kind heart. Pamela Werner had been more like a lamb to the slaughter.

Exploding fireworks were lighting up the sky across the city and over the Fox Tower. Firecrackers sounded along Armour Factory Alley, rockets were launched from the top of the Tartar Wall. Crowds surged through Soochow Hutong, where sweetmeat hawkers were doing a roaring trade. The Legation Quarter was alive with parties; the bars at the Wagons Lits, the Hôtel du Nord and the Grand Hôtel de Pékin were all packed, maybe for the last time. Champagne, whisky and gin flowed like rivers among the incessant chatter and gossip: the Durham Light Infantry had arrived in Shanghai to bolster defences, it was said, and more American marines were coming. Peking’s Hopei-Chahar Political Council was impotent now, and General Sung was expected to flee at any minute.

In the Badlands, too, the bars were having their best night of the year, or at least since the Russian Christmas. The Kavkaz, the Olympia Cabaret, the White Palace Dance Hall, and all the other dive bars and seedy cabarets were packed. The Korean-run, Japanese-supplied dope dens were booming, despite the crackdown and the executions. The junction of the Chuanpan and Hougou
hutong
thronged with pimps and heroin dealers.

At 27 Chuanpan Hutong, the Oparinas passed drinks across the bar at a furious rate to the transient, the displaced and the stateless, who were drinking Armenian brandy and cheap Ukrainian wine to try to forget where they were and why they were there. Next door at number 28, the brothel had reopened and the girls were busier than ever. All across the Badlands, drunken bravado, émigré despair and homesickness was boosting the coffers in the bars. The whole place was spiralling out of control. It had always been morally bankrupt, ever corrupting, but now it was succumbing to Bacchus, one last fling before the lights went out, for that was surely coming soon.

On Armour Factory Alley, which for once was not deserted at night—fox spirits shy away from loud bangs—children were running up and down as firecrackers bounced off the walls, ricocheting like rifle shots, welcoming in the good spirits and scaring away the bad. But one house remained in darkness.

And out past Armour Factory Alley, beyond the Legation Quarter and the end of the Tartar Wall, the British Cemetery was as quiet as its graves. By one of them—a grave that held two bodies, beloved wife, beloved daughter, together in death six feet under the recently churned earth—an old man was standing, looking down, remembering.

Back at Morrison Street, the two detectives sat welcoming in the Year of the Ox, the year of fire. Somewhere out there in the crush was a man or men with blood on their hands, killers who needed bringing to justice.

It seemed that all accounts had been settled across Peking except one.

A few days later, Detective Chief Inspector Dennis returned to Tientsin permanently. He left the way he’d arrived, by train, from Peking Central Railway Station. As the train pulled out, he looked to the left and saw the Fox Tower looming over the Tartar City. He was leaving behind the fox spirits, the dead, the bereaved and the killers. DCI Dennis never returned to Peking. Colonel Han was assigned other cases, other duties, and life in the city moved shakily on.

Not until late June was the final session of the inquest held. Once more E. T. C. Werner sat in the British Legation while Consul Fitzmaurice presided as coroner. There were decidedly fewer journalists than for the previous session back in January. Not only was Pamela no longer front-page news, but the case, with nothing new to report on it, had been virtually absent from the papers for months.

These days it was the ever-tightening Japanese encirclement of Peking that grabbed the headlines. Or, from the wider world that June, the wedding of the abdicated Duke of Windsor and his former Shanghai-flapper divorcée, Wallis Simpson: theirs was still the celebrity story of the decade so far. The aviatrix Amelia Earhart was capturing hearts and headlines with her solo flight around the globe; two hundred thousand people had walked across San Francisco’s new Golden Gate Bridge; Hitler’s
Hindenburg
airship, the pride of the Nazis, had gone down in flames in seconds. And all the while the Great Depression and the Japanese rolled relentlessly on.

Just a few stringers were in court now, hoping for a couple of lines worthy of their pay cheque. It was Saturday 26 June, and spring had given way to summer and the rainy season. This year had been the rainiest in recent years, and the windows of the legation were curtained with raindrops now, rather than snow. Once the rain departed, the serious humidity of the blistering hot months would kick in.

Foreign Peking had continued to dwindle in number. On Armour Factory Alley, where the courtyard cherry trees had finished providing their annual spring carpet of fallen blossoms and their wonderful perfume, many of Werner’s neighbours were gone. Edgar and Helen Snow had returned to the Communist-held cave city of Yan’an. Werner himself stayed stubbornly on, but remained mostly indoors and was rarely seen.

The third and final session of Pamela’s inquest was brief. Colonel Han, having nothing new to report and being busy with his other cases, sent a deputy. No new witnesses were called, no new evidence was submitted, and Fitzmaurice was quick to declare his decision.

‘The evidence is inconclusive as regards the identity of the murderer,’ he announced. ‘Verdict: Murder by a person or persons unknown.’

Werner appealed to Fitzmaurice for the investigation to be continued, but the consul was curt. The case was not to be an ongoing one.

Fitzmaurice left China the following week for his traditional extended summer holiday in England, while Werner remained at Armour Factory Alley alone.