Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (11 page)

They were working on a number of assumptions:

The killer or killers lived alone, or had access to a private place where they wouldn’t be disturbed by other residents or servants.

They had access to a car to move the body and someone to drive it. In order to avoid discovery, they would not have driven the dead body farther than was necessary.

They’d had a lot of cleaning up to do, and it was unlikely they’d have been able to remove all traces of blood from the room and their clothing.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there were Pamela’s internal organs.

Armour Factory Alley

D
CI Dennis went to Armour Factory Alley to interview Werner, accompanied by Inspector Botham and Sergeant Binetsky. It was a tricky situation.

Werner was a grieving father, and it seemed that foreign Peking felt his loss. It had certainly been stunned to read in the newspapers that wild dogs had mauled the body, statements which, while false, were taken as true. Had people known the full extent of Pamela’s mutilations, they would perhaps have been beyond shock and in sheer panic. But Dennis had only been in Peking for a matter of days, and already he was exceeding his strictly imposed Foreign Office limits by taking the investigation outside the confines of the Legation Quarter. His copper’s instincts left him no choice.

With no firm leads or suspects as yet, and with robbery ruled out, experience told Dennis that Werner was the prime suspect. London, Peking, it made little difference—few people were killed by someone they had no acquaintance with. Murder was personal. Nine times out of ten, people were killed by people they thought loved them—wives by husbands, children by parents, lovers by lovers. For now, Werner, whatever his former high office, whatever his age, was their prime suspect.

Dennis knew he had to be careful. Werner might be retired, but he remained well connected, right to the top of the British establishment in China. And that establishment was watching this case like a hawk; it still saw Britain as chief among the foreign powers in China, and it prized British prestige above all else. It would not want to see a former British consul put on trial for killing and butchering his daughter. The legation had begrudgingly accepted Dennis’s involvement in the case—they had little choice, given his qualifications—but it didn’t mean they liked it, and it didn’t mean they wouldn’t pull the old-pals act and try to influence him. He’d been waiting for their call since he’d arrived.

So a light touch was needed, at least initially. Dennis walked along Armour Factory Alley, getting a feel for the street. The older, less modernised houses had windows of thick translucent paper rather than glass. One or two new concrete buildings had appeared in recent years, with more solid masonry. Both ends of the alley led on to more alleys, forming a network that ran from the Peking Academy back to the fetid canal and the Fox Tower. Armour Factory Alley ran west into Soochow Hutong, which then continued to the Badlands, and through to the edge of the Legation Quarter.

Dennis hadn’t realized how close to Pamela’s home her body had been dumped, and how close that was to the Quarter, with the Badlands forming a no-man’s-land between the two areas.

He did know that Werner had been one of the first foreigners to move into Armour Factory Alley. The scholar had rented the whole courtyard house for himself, a space that perhaps four or five Chinese families might have occupied in these cramped times, as people flooded into the city from the surrounding countryside.

The three police officers were admitted by Yen Ping, the gatekeeper, and shown through the courtyard and into the house. That first look at a suspect’s home was important. Dennis saw traditional dark Chinese furniture, red-lacquered pillars, features of latticework and bamboo. It was gloomy inside, with few lights to illuminate the decor. There were objets d’art Werner had collected from his expeditions around China and Mongolia, but they were placed like exhibits in a museum, which only made the place seem even more austere. It felt like an old man’s house, not something a nineteen-year-old girl would enjoy. Or maybe home was home, and Pamela hadn’t noticed the atmosphere.

Dennis was shown through to Werner’s study, leaving Botham and Binetsky to wait outside. The room faced south for maximum sunlight and was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves thick with Chinese and English titles. Off to one side was Werner’s private library, where Dennis could see more shelves, more books.

The old man was slumped in a chair at his desk, which was made of heavy mahogany and teakwood. Its drawers must have been lined to preserve their contents: Dennis could smell camphorwood or sandalwood. He’d seen Werner’s photo in newspapers, and had once attended a lecture he’d given in Tientsin on Chinese myths. He’d also seen him on the beach at Peitaiho, sitting under a sunshade, reading a book. Perhaps he’d even seen Pamela there too—playing in the sand, riding the donkeys, swimming—without knowing who she was.

Dennis was aware that many people found Werner difficult to like, though they respected his learning and his years in China. He knew too that the old man was a committed atheist, which annoyed both the missionaries and the Sunday pious who saw church as duty. Werner certainly had his peculiarities—he was a virtual teetotaler in a community that drank regularly and in large quantities, and he was known for having eschewed company in all his postings, however remote, as well as in Peking and Tientsin. ‘The socially popular man is intellectually poor!’ Werner had once written.

So he wasn’t one of the clubbable, social Brits. Dennis was—he had to be, his job demanded it—but he drew no immediate conclusions about a man who wasn’t. In Tientsin he moved in higher social circles than he had in London. A Scotland Yard detective wasn’t everyone’s ideal Pall Mall club member, but out of the straitjacket of English class conventions, and with a higher rank, he’d found himself in the surroundings of the Tientsin Club. He’d had to visit a tailor to have a dinner jacket made. Fortunately his job gave him an excuse to skip church and the more boring committee meetings. But if Werner preferred not to retire to the club for rounds of whisky sodas, reheated gossip and a fortnight-old copy of the
Times
, well, that was hardly the hallmark of a murderer.

Dennis expressed his condolences to Werner. He intended a conversation rather than an interview. He was on Chinese soil, and without Han present he could not formally question, caution or charge anyone. But the old man was uncommunicative and, the DCI felt, somewhat dismissive. Why was Dennis in Peking? Surely the case was under the Chinese police and Colonel Han?

Dennis explained his involvement, saying that he and Han were working together. He didn’t mention that the British Legation did not trust the Chinese, or that they were pressing for a result. He didn’t mention the limits that had been placed on his involvement, or that he was stretching them already.

Werner seemed to accept it all. He said little and hardly looked at Dennis, his eyes ranging instead along his bookshelves. What Dennis didn’t know was that Werner rarely looked directly at anyone he addressed, and when he did make eye contact with Dennis, the DCI couldn’t help feeling that instinctive tug that told him someone was looking down their nose at him. He shrugged it off. Werner had spent the best part of his life in the diplomatic service, where snobbery was an occupational hazard.

Werner laid out his movements on Pamela’s final day with the dispassionate precision of the barrister he’d trained as. He had last seen his daughter in the afternoon, and when she did not return home he had gone to the Gurevitches’ house, then to Commissioner Thomas’s office to report her missing. He’d sent his cook to the skating rink, then he’d wandered the city looking for her.

Dennis knew that Han had already pinned down the exact time Werner was at the Gurevitches’ and the time the note to Thomas had been recorded at the Legation Quarter police station, but that left a lot of time unaccounted for, the alleged searching time. Time enough for Werner to find Pamela, lose his temper, commit a murder and return home.

Dennis asked Werner to list the route he’d taken once more, and noted it down:

South to the Temple of Heaven and its adjacent park

Through the Legation Quarter

To the northern end of the city and the Lama Temple

The Confucian Hall of Examinations

The Mohammedan Mosque

The Portuguese Church

And then home. When Pamela still wasn’t back next morning and no word had come, he’d gone out looking again. This time:

To the Hatamen Gate

Back along the Tartar Wall

Through the German Cemetery

Then to the Fox Tower . . . and Pamela

At this point Werner broke down.

Dennis sat back. He reminded himself that Han had told him Yen Ping was adamant Werner could not have left the house in between these two searches without the gateman knowing.

Now it was Werner who wanted details. He’d learnt nothing at the inquest. In terms as gentle as possible, Dennis described what had happened to Pamela, but it was impossible to spare the old man certain facts—the missing organs, the cutting and slashing. Werner broke down again, and looked all his seventy-two years and more. His reaction seemed real to Dennis, his grief genuine.

When could he have her body for burial? Werner wanted to know.

Soon, when the doctors had finished—it wouldn’t be long now. Dennis tried to comfort the old man.

Then the DCI asked to see Pamela’s room. Werner instructed the amah to show him while he remained at his desk. Dennis was taken to a small bedroom adjacent to Werner’s own. After opening the door, the amah burst out crying and rushed off.

Standing in Pamela’s room, Dennis could only think of the studio portrait she’d had taken just days earlier: the glamourous dress, the knowing look. Her bedroom struck him as a nunlike cubicle; there was a bed, a simple bureau, a desk and a chair. No frills of any kind. It was cold, bare, unlived in, not a young woman’s room.

In her wardrobe he found the black evening dress she’d worn for the photo, and a couple of the Japanese-style silk kimonos that most foreign women kept to wear in Peking’s stiflingly humid summers, but the rest of her clothing was simple—skirts, blouses, cardigans.

At that point, Werner entered the room. He looked around, seemed to sense the emptiness.

‘We were to return to England soon,’ he told Dennis. ‘Her furniture has gone ahead, along with some books, personal items and summer clothes.’

Dennis nodded; an imminent move would explain the asceticism. But why go to England? he asked. Surely Pamela had the rest of the academic year to go, exams to take?

‘I would have thought you would have known?’ said Werner.

Dennis looked at him questioningly.

‘She was unhappy at school in Tientsin,’ the old man explained; ‘she didn’t want to return. There’d been trouble at schools here before. Tientsin should have been better. England was the only place for her. Perhaps with her family she would have . . . settled. They were looking forward to meeting her.’

Dennis took the opportunity to ask about the suitors, the men who’d been calling for Pamela over the holidays, taking her out. Werner, not bothered by the question, gave the names and addresses for most of them, who were old family friends by and large. Dennis mentioned the Chinese student and the incident that had ended in a broken nose. Werner admitted not liking the boy, who had briefly been one of his pupils, and moreover had a wife back in his hometown of Mukden in the northeast. Werner conceded that he might have overreacted, saying that the student and Pamela were just friends.

Then he broke down again. Dennis had wanted to ask about the half-Chinese, half-Portuguese suitor called John O’Brian, who’d reportedly become infatuated with Pamela in Tientsin and followed her to Peking. But the old man was too distraught.

Dennis called Botham and Binetsky into the room and told them to collect evidence. Werner was unable to watch as the two men started picking up his daughter’s scant belongings and putting them in their overcoat pockets—a jade comb, a hair clasp and her diary. Distraught, he left the room.

Nobody had told Dennis that Pamela was leaving school and returning to England. He needed to know more, but now was not the time to ask. The more he heard about Pamela, the less he knew, it seemed. A plain schoolgirl who nevertheless had the power to infatuate boys; a troublesome daughter who was seemingly popular socially—Pamela was more of a contradiction than ever. Dennis needed to bring her into clearer focus before he could ask the right questions.

He headed back to the Wagons Lits, after telling Botham to get out that night and listen to what foreign Peking was saying about the Werners. Then he phoned Bill Greenslade and asked him to go over to Consul Affleck’s office, to find out why Pamela had been going to leave school, whether there’d been trouble at Tientsin Grammar too. Dennis wanted to find out what Werner had assumed he already knew.