Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (4 page)

Aside from his scholarly work, Werner’s main concern in life was Pamela, and he doted on her. People who knew Pamela always commented on her independence; how she was able to take care of herself when her father left on long research trips, her excellent Chinese language skills, the fact that she seemingly had no really close friends. In a tight-knit, often socially incestuous small foreign community, Pamela’s independent, self-contained character marked her as somewhat different from the run-of-the-mill foreign girl in Peking. She had been an orphan, abandoned at birth by an unknown mother and adopted by Werner and his English wife, Gladys Nina, who were childless. Before Pamela could get to know her adoptive mother, Gladys Nina died, and Werner had raised his daughter alone.

While Pamela had grown up outside the Legation Quarter, first in a house on San Tiao Hutong in the Ch’ienmen district and then on Armour Factory Alley, she enjoyed the Quarter’s skating rinks and hotel tea dances. She went to see Hollywood movies at the cinemas on Morrison Street and around Dashala Street, an area known as ‘Peking’s Broadway,’ and listened to big-band music broadcast on a Shanghai radio station. But she also spoke fluent Mandarin, and moved more comfortably and more frequently in Chinese society than did most of her white contemporaries. She regularly visited the teeming food market of Soochow Hutong and ate at the cheap Chinese restaurants patronised by Chinese university students near her home.

Pamela had become that rare thing among the city’s foreign community—a white girl who enjoyed both the European lifestyle of the Quarter and the life of Chinese Peking. Her ease in conversing and her interest in China’s culture, no doubt fuelled by her father’s work, meant that she tended to roam widely across Peking on her bicycle, exploring parts of the city other foreign girls never ventured into. When younger she had been known to disappear for hours, arriving home out of breath but just in time for her tea. Like her father, Pamela appeared to be largely content with her own company. When he disappeared into the remote hinterlands on expeditions and research trips, she amused herself. The household servants looked after her, although they couldn’t discipline her, and with her mother dead and her father away for long stretches, Pamela was forced to be decidedly more independent of mind and spirit than most of her contemporaries.

Still, hers was a privileged life, of school, of tiffins—light snacks—with other foreigners at one or another of the grand hotels in the Quarter, and long summers picnicking in the Western Hills outside Peking. The worst weeks of the city’s heat and dust were spent on the beaches of Peitaiho, a seaside resort where Werner kept a cottage. There the pitch-black nights were lit by fireflies and lanterns on the porches; the days were consumed by languorous swims in the salty Yellow Sea and donkey rides along the beach.

Much as he loved her, Werner had his difficulties with Pamela. She’d been a problem at her first school, the Convent of the White Franciscans, where she was rebellious, answered back and infuriated the teachers. Then she’d gone to the French School, where she was asked to leave, after which she was refused admittance to the American School. Though troubled, Pamela was intelligent. She took exams for a scholarship to the Peking Methodist School and won a place, but there too her behaviour was rebellious, and again her father was asked to remove her.

Finally, in 1934, unable to control his daughter and at his wits’ end, Werner sent her off to board at a grammar school in Tientsin. It was run on strict English public school lines and was known for its discipline. Those who knew Pamela gave her some latitude. After all, she was an only child with no mother and an elderly father who left her alone in Peking for long periods while he went off on expeditions, looking for the lost burial tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia or pursuing rare artefacts in the wilds of Muslim western China. It was hardly surprising that she was a little wild.

Pamela was fifteen when she was sent to Tientsin, a city nothing like Peking. Since the 1870s it had been a treaty port, where foreigners controlled their own concessions and lived outside Chinese law, policing and judging themselves. There were four major concessions, British, French, Italian and Japanese. Without doubt the British dominated, with their trademark Bund along the Hai River and the British Municipal Council, but Japan was taking an increasingly uppity second place in the power rankings.

Nevertheless it no doubt felt a little provincial to Pamela after Peking. The city had its share of history and tradition, but it wasn’t imperial Peking. For a long time Tientsin had been compared unfavourably to the other great treaty port of the China coast—Shanghai. However, by the start of the twentieth century Tientsin was growing prosperous, trading everything from coal to camel hair, Mongolian cashmere to Tibetan mohair. Tientsin was now northern China’s richest port, with a population of over a million people. Now there were theatres and cinemas, good restaurants, an ice-cream parlour, a German café, and a branch of the Laidlaw & Co. department store on Victoria Road. There were even nightclubs featuring White Russian singers, occasionally patronised by northern warlords come to town for the bright lights. Tientsin also had its share of vice—brothels, bars and opium dens—but it still couldn’t quite hold a candle to louche Shanghai.

The students at Tientsin Grammar were British, American, White Russian, stateless Jewish refugees, wealthy Chinese and Indians, and many other nationalities—some twenty-nine in total when Pamela was there. With its stone walls, highly polished floors and English uniforms with a Union Jack, it was the most traditional of traditional English schools, transplanted to the East. Its students were, by and large, the pampered children of the privileged.

The girls wore the drab ‘gymnasium costume’ of England, adorned only by their house badges; the boys wore caps, ties and blazers; and they all studied the English curriculum. The entire student body assembled in the wood-panelled auditorium every morning, boys to the left, girls to the right, before the headmaster, who stood on the stage in don’s robes over tweeds. A ritual morning greeting was followed by a hymn, perhaps ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away,’ and then a rendition of ‘God Save the King.’

Classes started at 8:50, broke for lunch at noon, then resumed at 2:00, ending at 4:00. The school fees were eighty silver dollars a month, 50 percent more if the pupil lived outside the British Municipal Area of Tientsin, and an additional eighty-five dollars a month for boarders like Pamela. Tientsin Grammar was a little slice of England in warlord-wracked, Japanese-threatened northern China. Pamela and her classmates studied for the gruelling Cambridge matriculation exams; there was a lot of Latin. There was also a drill instructor and constant sports—hockey and netball for the girls; cricket, football and swimming for the boys.

Most of the students were day pupils from Tientsin; Pamela was one of only a half-dozen or so boarders. She lived at the School House, a sombre Gothic-style building that doubled as the home of the headmaster, who traditionally took in boarders to supplement his income. Students rose at seven, breakfasted at seven forty-five, left for school at eight thirty. After school there was high tea at five, then prep, reading and hobbies at five thirty. Bedtime was between seven and nine, depending on age.

It was a set routine with little to break it. Cocoa and biscuits were served at bedtime; guests could be invited to tea on Wednesdays and also visit on weekends, subject to approval. Pamela’s new friends in Tientsin were unaware she had been thrown out of schools in Peking. They knew her as a plain, quiet girl and a keen sportswoman, and assumed she was boarding because her father, whom everyone had heard of, travelled a lot for his work.

And it was true that Pamela had been turning over a new leaf, trying to behave and stay out of trouble, but her life was not all cocoa at bedtime. There was a boyfriend. Michael ‘Mischa’ Horjelsky was Polish-Jewish, Tientsin Grammar’s star athlete, a good-looking swimmer with a body that would have set the girls of the Upper Sixth on fire. Mischa had thick dark hair and a charming smile. He was cheeky and funny and a good scholar.

For Pamela he was a catch. Line up the boys of her year, and anyone would have tipped Mischa as the matinée idol, the one to have girls swooning in the aisles. And he doted on her—the two were inseparable, said some who knew them, and were rarely seen apart during the school day.

In early 1937, Mischa was planning to visit Peking for a few days. Mischa lived with his family in Tientsin, while Pamela had gone to stay at her father’s on Armour Factory Alley when term finished. Mischa’s visit to Peking was to be the first time Pamela brought him home to meet her father, but tragedy was to strike before that could happen.

‘Pamela!’
At the base of the Fox Tower, Commissioner Thomas moved quickly to where Werner lay on the cold ground.

The two men had known each other for many years, both veterans of Peking. Thomas effectively ran the Legation Quarter on a day-to-day basis, holding down the offices of Commissioner of the Legation Quarter Police and Secretary of the Administrative Commission of the Peking Diplomatic Quarter. He was more or less a mayor, chief of police and administrator, all rolled into one.

Thomas had seen Werner’s note only shortly before being called by Han to the Fox Tower. He’d thought nothing more of it, assuming it was a mystery probably already solved even as he read the note. But now both he and Colonel Han were aware that the horrifically mutilated dead girl lying before them was Pamela Werner.

Crime scenes can quickly become circuses, and this one was no exception. Colonel Han was swift to bring in extra constables to rope off the entire area at the base of the Fox Tower and push the onlookers farther out of range. The officers then canvassed the area, and in the ditch some distance away found an oil lamp, which was entered into the record as possible evidence. Han had ordered still more straw matting to be placed over the body to prevent gawking, but he was not going to remove the corpse until he’d made a thorough examination of the scene.

That was becoming difficult. Word had spread like wildfire that a dead white girl had been found at the Fox Tower, a place known for its bad spirits and sorcery. Curious locals continued to arrive, along with the press, both Chinese and foreign, tipped off perhaps by a constable looking to supplement his pay packet. The Reuters pressman had a camera; there was a local stringer for the Shanghai-based
North-China Daily News
, and also reporters from the
Peking and Tientsin Times
, the most widely read paper north of Shanghai, and its rival, the
North China Star
. Han ordered them to stay back from the body while his own photographer from Morrison Street documented the crime scene.

Two young constables had meanwhile accompanied Werner back to his house on Armour Factory Alley. Han and Thomas now had to make sure that the dead girl was indeed his daughter—they needed a formal identification, and that, ideally, should come from a family member. Werner had seemed certain, but he was in a state, and many foreign women had fair hair, not least the legion of Russian women, the most likely foreigners to be found dead in the city. They needed confirmation. If the corpse was Pamela, then a British subject had been murdered on Chinese territory, and the daughter of a former British consul, no less.

Thomas suggested calling Constable Pearson at the British Legation, who knew Pamela personally. Pearson was sent for, and he got to the crime scene at 2:15 p.m., but was unable to make a definite identification, such was the degree of facial mutilation.

Then Han had an idea. He sent a constable to Werner’s residence to bring back Yen Ping, the gateman. The old man, when he arrived, reported that Pamela had still not returned home. Werner himself hadn’t spoken a word since coming back, and he was now resting in a state of shock, with pains in his chest. A doctor had been called to examine his heart.