Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (15 page)

The landlady had confirmed that the dagger recovered was the man’s—she’d seen it in his room before. Han had him empty his pockets, which revealed a few Chinese coins, amounting to little more than next week’s rent, a pack of cheap cigarettes, and a matchbook from the Olympia Cabaret, a new joint in the Badlands owned by an overseas Chinese—Han would check it out later. Pinfold also had a second set of keys, which didn’t fit the lodging-house doors. He refused to say what lock those keys fitted.

Dennis wondered whether he had belongings somewhere else, away from the Badlands, stashed with a friend until he got back on his feet. The marginal and the transient sometimes did that.

Now the man looked calm, accepting cigarettes, smoking them down to the butt. Dennis guessed his age as about forty, the same as his own, and could tell that he’d once been strong, had probably served some time in someone’s army. He was now skinny, underfed; his dry, pallid skin was loose and pockmarked and he was out of shape, wheezing sometimes like an asthmatic. Maybe he was a doper or maybe he was just broke. His hair was short but cut badly—he’d probably done it himself to save the money—and it was greasy and in need of a wash. His teeth were in a bad way, tobacco-stained and rotten; his fingernails were chewed to the quick, his knuckles covered over with hard skin.

Whoever he was, he was down on his uppers, coughing up an unhealthy amount of brown phlegm into the spittoon.

So far, the man had refused to say his name, declined even to confirm with a nod that he was Pinfold. Dennis introduced himself and tried again, asking the man for his name, nationality, age and address, each time getting no response.

‘Can you tell us where you were on the night of 7 January?’ And when he still got no response, ‘The Russian Christmas? Why were you at the Fox Tower on 9 January?’

The man said nothing.

He didn’t ask why he was in an interview room at Morrison Street, he didn’t ask what this was all about. He didn’t demand to know why his shoes, knife and handkerchief had been confiscated, or whether he was being formally charged. He didn’t mention Pamela’s name, despite his being seen at the crime scene, despite her being front-page news. He refused to account for the bloodstains on his shoes, or why he had a bloodstained dagger in his room. He did not ask for any consular official, lawyer or anyone else to be contacted.

He did not squirm, he did not complain. He simply did not speak at all. Stalemate.

At length, Colonel Han had the man put in one of the ice-cold cells at Morrison Street. Let him spend the night with the dope dealers, addicts and petty thieves; see if that loosened his tongue.

The China coast newspapers reported an arrest, confirming that it was a European and not a Chinese but giving no name. It was Inspector Botham, the journalists claimed, who had made the arrest, but he was refusing to talk to them. Reuters reported the bloody shoes, the handkerchief, the dagger and sheath. Clearly they’d been given inside information.

Nothing had come through from the pathologists at the medical college yet, but back in the whitewashed interview room with Sun Yat-sen staring down, Dennis, Han and Botham resumed their former positions. Pinfold was looking older after a night in the cells. Grey stubble peeked through on his chin; there were dark sacks under his eyes. He might have been tired, but he still wasn’t talking; it would take more than one night to change his mind. Still, they ran through the questions again, patiently repeating the ones they’d asked the day before.

Nothing. The man barely acknowledged that the detectives were in the room with him. Dennis tried another tack. He showed Pinfold the day’s newspapers, with Pamela on the front page under the headline H
UMAN
M
UTILATOR OF
B
RITISH
G
IRL—
E
VIDENCE
I
NDICATES
F
IENDISH
I
NDOOR
C
RIME
.

Dennis thought he detected a flicker, a second glance before the man’s head sunk back down. The DCI laid out the details—the Fox Tower, the cuts, the mutilation, the missing organs, the sexual interference. Still nothing. They broke for lunch. Let him sweat.

That afternoon they received corroboration of his identity. The Canadians said they thought he was indeed named Pinfold, one of their nationals and a man of interest to them. According to the grapevine, he was a deserter from the Canadian Army; the consul was contacting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service in Ottawa for more details. Rumour had it that Pinfold had skipped his barracks in Canada for the United States, got himself a criminal record, maybe in Chicago, and then crossed the country to San Francisco and got a boat to China via Manila. A note in the Canadians’ file stated that he regularly attended public executions at Tien Chiao, something few foreigners did, considering it ghoulish.

The Canadians were liaising with the Americans to see if anything came up there or in American-run Manila, which had its own white criminal underworld with casinos, girls and dope. But it would take time.

One thing the Canadians threw in about Pinfold struck the detectives. He was usually seen down around Chuanpan Hutong, and particularly at a White Russian dive bar along that street. It was a place with no name, at number 27, run by a couple called Oparina. There was a brothel next door at number 28.

Chuanpan Hutong—the main drag of the Badlands, east of the Legation Quarter, west of Armour Factory Alley—was right between where Pamela was last seen alive and her stated destination of home. Everyone said she always avoided the Badlands by using the Wall Road, a path that ran sometimes along the bottom of the Tartar Wall and sometimes along the top of it, and which was inaccessible to motor vehicles, available only to pedestrians, bicycles and rickshaws. Her father, too, had insisted that Pamela didn’t know the many twisting
hutong
in the Badlands and she feared getting lost in them, but no witnesses had come forward to confirm that was her route on the night she was murdered. The police had assumed she’d taken the Wall Road, as was her habit.

But what if she hadn’t taken her usual route after all? What if she had cut straight across the Badlands to get home, along Chuanpan Hutong, busy with the wild Russian Christmas? If she had, then she would have passed right by number 27, right by the Oparinas’ joint.

They needed to recanvass—place Pinfold on Chuanpan Hutong, place Pamela passing by, see whether it was possible for the two to have crossed paths—and then get the pathology results on the shoes, handkerchief and knife.

That was what Dennis called a case, if he could find a motive.

That Thursday night, the police of Morrison Street rousted 27 Chuanpan Hutong. Colonel Han led the charge, with twenty constables alongside him. Dennis kept out of it, retreating to the Wagons Lits. A Badlands bar was a little too public, and any involvement by him was bound to get back to the legation in Peking and to his bosses in Tientsin. That would be followed by a reprimand, or even a recall, for taking the investigation outside the Quarter.

But no one had mentioned anything about Inspector Botham’s remit, so Dennis told him to go along for the ride and observe what he could. If there was any flak later, Dennis would take it as his superior officer.

On the west side of Chuanpan Hutong were the bars and brothels, and on the east side cheap Chinese eateries and late-night cafés. You could buy chunks of mutton on wooden skewers, called
chuanr
, as well as
bing
—wheat cakes fried in oil seasoned with spring onions—and
jian bing
, rolled pancakes with an egg cracked onto the batter. The indigenous street food of Peking was cheap, filling and popular with both the Chinese and the foreigners.

The eateries catered to the working girls on breaks, giving them a place to rendezvous with their pimps or meet up with clients outside the brothels for off-the-books negotiations. The Badlands had no streetlights, but major haunts like the White Palace Dance Hall had lightbulbs strung up outside, while red lanterns advertising bars and restaurants glowed right along the
hutong
. Rickshaw pullers walked up and down in the cold, looking for fares.

While this was technically Chinese Peking, foreigners were in the majority: a mix of criminal elements, dopers, drinkers and whoremongers, along with a few groups of curious, better-heeled foreigners slumming it. The area was the domain of White Russian and Korean prostitutes, with just a few Chinese among them. The main Chinese action went on elsewhere, mainly on the western side of the Legation Quarter.

Most of the brothels sat behind courtyard walls, hastily plastered, and impossible to see past. The entry gates were manned by a mix-ture of White Russian heavies and tough-looking Chinese men. The latter were usually from Shantung, in the northeast, and were the biggest and toughest China had to offer. Neither group was to be messed with. The dive bars were open to anyone who fancied their chances. Here peroxide-blond White Russians past their prime raised their sketched-on eyebrows and offered ‘business’ to the semicomatose, the paralytic, the close to broke.

Twenty-seven Chuanpan Hutong was nothing out of the ordinary. It consisted of one big room with a chest-high bar, wooden chairs and rickety tables. It was thick with cigarette smoke; the drinking was serious but not top quality—cheap Crimean wine and Georgian brandy. The bar was manned by the Oparinas and took cash only, no chits, no credit: don’t insult by asking. There were a few smaller side rooms for card games, where there was more smoke, more drink. Some prostitutes on the wrong side of desperate hung around looking for business, but not on the premises. The brothel next door was closed and in darkness when the police arrived, but there were plenty of other places for girls to take clients.

It was no secret that the Oparinas’ joint was also a front for prostitution, opium and heroin, and probably other shady deals, including arms for the warlords and gangsters. But as it was frequented exclusively by white foreigners who weren’t being targeted by General Sung’s political council in its anti-dope campaign, it hadn’t been raided before.

Still, the Shantung bouncers on the door of number 27 knew better than to get in Han’s way; this was his patch. Han ran a classic roust—gramophone off, lights on, everyone told to stay in their seats, several larger constables on the door to prevent anyone leaving. There was no back exit, just a high wall topped with broken glass that separated the lowlife of the Badlands from the high life of the Legation Quarter.

The policemen checked everyone in the bar, questioned them, showed them a photo of Pamela. Those out on the town for an experience were quickly let go, and a group of off-duty Italian Marine Guards were sent on their inebriated way to their legation. The hard-core drinkers were kept back, along with the Oparinas.

Nobody had seen Pamela, but plenty of regulars knew Pinfold. It seemed he wasn’t a man people felt honour-bound to keep quiet about. The Oparinas admitted he was a regular patron. Others said he was a tout, pimping girls to off-duty soldiers along Chuanpan Hutong. But no one could remember whether he was in the joint on Russian Christmas, Thursday 7 January. It had been a busy night, a drunken night.

As for Pamela, there was no shortage of blondes, bottle and natural, in the Badlands, but none of them were English and none of them respectable. The Badlands was White Russian territory, not a place where prim and proper girls ventured unaccompanied.

The constables pulled in some of the girls, brought up a wagon and had them taken to Morrison Street for questioning. Botham wanted to check out the brothel next door, but the Oparinas told him the place had closed down, the owners gone.