Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (12 page)

Cocktail Hour at the Wagons Lits

D
ennis had arranged to meet Commissioner Thomas after dark at the Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits, for a quiet chat before the place got busy. The bar of the Wagons Lits was still a centre of foreign gossip and intrigue, despite being increasingly taken over by the Japanese. The newcomers swaggered about, got belligerent, threw their weight around—it would all be theirs soon enough.

Elsewhere in Peking, Japanese soldiers were strutting around and treating the city as their own; their armoured cars were already on the streets. Tokyo claimed it was simply regular troop rotations, but nobody believed that. Stay long enough at the bar, and you’d hear the more drunken, but perhaps honest, opinion: the Japs would clean house in China; they were the only Orientals who understood discipline and efficiency. They’d given the Ruskies a bloody nose in 1905 and checked the tsar’s expansion. It might be brutal, but in the long run the Japanese would be the best thing that could happen to China, and they’d clear out the Communists too. Or rather, they were the best thing that could happen from the point of view of London or Paris and their trading interests.

Commissioner Thomas had already given Dennis the official biography of E. T. C. Werner, the one the British Legation would stick to come hell or high water. Whatever the internal feuds, the grudges, the hidden skeletons, Pamela’s murder had brought the diplomatic shutters down.

Thomas warned Dennis that the legation would not be helpful; indeed, they would be quite the opposite. National prestige came first. Dennis knew the mind-set—the Duke of Wellington’s ‘That which we require now is not to lose the enjoyment of what we have got.’ Meaning, What we have, we hold on to, and don’t think a dead girl or two is going to change that. Reputation and face had to be upheld, come what may, even the slashing and dumping of an English subject barely a mile from the British Legation.

And indeed the legation had not been helpful. Dennis had asked them for any information they had on Werner and got in return a one-sheet résumé stating his date of birth, the bare bones of his career in China, a retirement date, and little else—a bland
Who’s Who
entry, and a scant one at that. At least Dennis received something—Han had been getting the runaround from the legation, with nobody bothering to return his calls.

But Thomas, it seemed, was willing to talk—off the record. The commissioner had probably known Werner longer than anyone else in Peking. Thomas was a Peking veteran, but Werner had arrived some fifteen years before him and was now just about the oldest of the old China hands.

Dennis and Thomas found a table out of sight to all but the white-suited, silent-slippered Chinese waiters who brought whisky sodas and replaced the big brass ashtrays on stands next to each man. The spittoons on the floor, though unused by foreigners, were standard Peking fixtures. The ladies and bright young things among the palm fronds were drinking the Wagons Lits’ signature champagne cocktails, or gin rickeys and sherry flips; there was a background noise of ice on metal from the cocktail shakers behind the bar. A string quartet played light, faintly recognizable mood music—the greatest hits of 1935 had eventually made it to Peking. The city tried, but it couldn’t help being behind London, Paris and New York.

Dennis and Thomas stuck to whisky. Thomas wasn’t usually a prodigious imbiber, but tonight he was knocking them back. He was still shocked by what he’d seen at the Fox Tower; Pamela’s corpse was seared in his memory. Dennis too was having a few, although he was more used to corpses and had developed a stronger stomach. When he showed Thomas the autopsy report, the commissioner skimmed it, threw back his whisky and ordered two more—large ones.

Now Dennis casually asked Thomas if he knew anything about Pamela being unhappy at Tientsin Grammar. The commissioner had no idea. That was more Dennis’s bailiwick than his, Thomas said; if anyone should know, he should.

That was the second time today Dennis had been told he should know something he didn’t. It made him a little uneasy. He had learned nothing new from reading Pamela’s diary. There were tales of summer picnics, gossip about tiffins and dances—the usual frivolities of a young woman, it seemed to him. The entries were lighthearted rather than deeply confessional, and there were gaps between them. The diary hadn’t yielded any suspects.

He moved on to the gossip that was circulating about Werner, and here Thomas was much more forthcoming. Not surprisingly, the old scholar’s unofficial biography—the one based partly on fact, partly on interpretation, and sprinkled liberally with innuendo and a little backstabbing—was very different from that supplied by the legation. Stories of his past were resurfacing and doing the rounds once more, by way of anonymous calls to Morrison Street, notes left with the desk sergeant and talk in the hotels and bars. It seemed Peking had something to get off its chest regarding E. T. C. Werner. He was a man everyone had a story about.

Not everyone saw him as a harmless elderly former diplomat, a scholar or a grieving father. To some he was a man of violent mood swings, an odd character who alienated people, and who’d given them cause to gossip for decades. A highly intelligent man, to be sure, but one considered by some, at the highest levels of the British government in China, to be seriously unstable and unfit for duty. A vain man of strange and radical ideas, a man they officially wanted to be rid of but who had fought back and made enemies. A man who was possibly capable of murder and who may just have committed murder before.

The social set of foreign Peking had a mantra they repeated to visitors over cocktails at the Wagons Lits, in the members’ enclosure at the Peking Race Club, on long weekends in the temperate Western Hills: ‘We don’t worry much about pasts in Peking.’ But in reality pasts were everything. The city’s gossip rested fundamentally on people’s histories—why they were in Peking, where they’d come from, what they were hiding from. For nobody’s closet was skeleton-free, and digging out those skeletons was the social sport of foreign Peking.

Werner’s diplomatic career in China had seen him rise quickly, only to fall dramatically. He had been dogged from early on by an unpopularity he could not shake, and did not try to. A few old China hands still recalled him famously taking his riding crop to a group of monks in Peking’s Lama Temple, after an argument over his camera. That had been back in 1888, when Werner was just twenty-four and working in the British Legation.

The story was written up by Werner’s companion that day, a sensationalist London hack called Henry Normann who worked on the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Normann had made Werner appear to be a furious brawler, and the British public got a good read over their kippers.

Had Werner acted violently? Perhaps, but the Lama Temple was still considered a dangerous place for foreigners fifty years later, in the 1930s, and the monks regularly extorted money from visitors.

More than any burst of anger nearly half a century before, it was Werner’s inability to coexist with the small foreign communities of his postings that had condemned him in the eyes of the gossips and the old China hands. In Macao he’d been reprimanded by no less a personage than Sir Claude MacDonald—the uptight British ambassador to Peking during the time of the Boxers—for his failure to ‘mix,’ and for apparently insulting the Portuguese chief justice in Macao in some way, one that was never quite stated. Werner had been forced to apologise but had reputedly not done so with grace. He gained a reputation for being ‘abrupt’—a damning indictment in expat English society.

Some said it was his posting to remote Pagoda Anchorage, upstream from Foochow, that seriously unhinged Werner. Here he was virtually alone, with no foreign community to speak of. The consul’s office and residence were nothing more than a cramped houseboat, and the nearest town of any size was miles away. It was a tense place. Chinese merchants, angered by what they saw as unfair treatment, had boycotted British goods, and there was little to see beyond the dubious sights of the Plum Garden Prison and the Mercy Hospital.

Sequestered on a houseboat no bigger than a canal barge, Werner spent his time learning obscure Chinese dialects and poring over ancient texts, while the few other foreigners living in the area went hunting, danced and got royally drunk. The place had a reputation for undoing men: Werner’s predecessor had succumbed to his loneliness and begun imagining diabolical plots against him by his Chinese servants. He had to be sent back home to England, to a padded cell in an asylum. The rumour mill said Werner had lost his mind in Pagoda Anchorage too, had got into fights with the handful of other foreigners there. Once again Sir Claude MacDonald had to step in and sort out the mess. Within the Foreign Office, the word was that Werner was trouble.

As punishment, even more obscure postings followed—Kiungchow on Hainan Island, where only an irregular steamer from Hong Kong visited; Pakhoi, from where not much apart from sugar, aniseed and dried fish was shipped to Macao; and Kongmoon, which was as lonely as Pagoda Anchorage. Werner suffered them all, keeping himself to himself, studying his little-known dialects and the local superstitions and traditions.

And then came Kiukiang, a posting that led to a national scandal. When a Chinese man was killed on the Kiukiang Bund in 1909, the Chinese accused an Englishman called Mears, who just happened to be the head of the British police in the treaty port. Werner, as consul and judge, held a hearing in camera, calling only one witness, a British doctor, and declared Mears innocent.

The Chinese protested. Was this British justice? It smacked of a cover-up. There was a boycott of British goods. The other foreigners in Kiukiang, mostly merchants who needed to remain on good terms with the Chinese, thought Werner was arrogant to have provoked local anger in this way, and the vocal business community demanded his sacking. Not that Werner could have won, whatever he’d chosen to do. Had he offered up Mears for jail, British face would have been lost.

George Morrison, otherwise known as ‘Morrison of Peking’—who was also a vicious little gossip—wrote to his
Times
of London editor in 1910:

Unfortunately we have a very inferior Consul at Kiukiang, an eccentric named E.T.C. Werner, a man not on speaking terms with the majority of the community. When I was last in Kiukiang the British Commissioner of Customs feelingly complained to me that though stationed in the same port with this poisonous Consul he received no extra pay for so being. Werner has largely contributed to the trouble and will have to go home.

The case went higher, to Sir John Jordan, His Majesty’s ambassador envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to China, a tough and proud Ulsterman who wanted no troublesome consuls on his watch. And from there it went to the British Parliament in London. It became a national embarrassment. The maintenance of British prestige meant that Werner was given a pass in public, but behind the scenes it was asked whether he was fit for duty.

His final posting was Foochow, where in a defiant and typically British stand he was simultaneously promoted and given a warning: Here you are, but now hear this—no more trouble.

These were chaotic times across China. The last of the imperial dynasties, the Qing, had been tossed out and a presidential republic ushered in. The ailing and impotent Qing government had become too corrupt and too weak to resist the increasingly rapacious territorial and preferential-trading demands of the European great powers. By 1911 the Chinese army had had enough, and in October that year it revolted. Chaos ensued until Dr Sun Yat-sen returned to China from exile in the United States. He pulled together the fractious opposition, and in February 1912 proclaimed the formation of the Republic of China, becoming its first president.