Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (5 page)

Han showed the gateman the silk chemise found under the corpse, but Yen Ping was unable to identify it as Pamela’s. So Han showed him the body. Like everyone who saw it, he reacted with shock. No, he said, he could not identify the face, but the hair was unmistakable. Moreover one eye was less damaged than the other, and Yen Ping recognized the unusual greyness of the iris.

Constable Pearson, who was still there, confirmed that Pamela indeed had rare grey eyes, and he also recognized the expensive diamond-set watch, as did Yen Ping.

It was enough. The corpse at the Fox Tower was officially recorded as Pamela Werner, British subject, resident of Peking, daughter of E. T. C. Werner, the former British consul at Foochow, now retired.

Winter nights in Peking draw in fast and early, and it was already getting dark. Han sent for a coffin and gathered up the evidence: Pamela’s loose clothing, including her tartan skirt, which had fallen off as the body was lifted, her belted overcoat, a pair of torn silk stockings, a comb, her shoes, a handkerchief, the bloodied card for the French Club skating rink, and the wristwatch. When the coffin arrived, four constables carefully placed Pamela’s body inside. A sheet was found to cover her below the waist.

It had once been Chinese tradition, and the law, that a murdered body should not be moved until the murderer was caught. But the Peking police force now prided itself on its contemporary practices, taught in the modern police academy. Han placed the recovered items inside the coffin and put the lid on it. The constables then carried it to a small, deserted temple inside the Fox Tower until an ambulance arrived. From there the body was taken to the Peking Union Medical College for the autopsy.

Wild Dogs and Diplomats

I
t was Commissioner Thomas who grasped the ramifications of the murder first. Thomas had joined the British diplomatic service in Peking in 1898, aged just nineteen, then resigned due to ill health a few years later. But he’d stayed on in China, finding a job with the administrative commission and building a reputation as an efficient, skilled hard bargainer, a trait perhaps gained from his father, a canny Shrewsbury cattle dealer. Thomas knew well that Werner was seen as a friend of China by the Chinese government, and the pressure would be on the Peking Detective Bureau to solve this murder quickly.

When a foreigner died under suspicious circumstances in Peking, it was standard procedure for the appropriate legation to be invited to nominate an envoy to monitor the investigation. The envoy had no rights as such; he couldn’t arrest anyone, nor could he question suspects without permission from the Chinese police. His role was purely that of an observer, a go-between.

Thomas knew that this was an investigation for which the British would want to appoint an envoy, and that it would be someone from the legation staff. As Pamela was the daughter of a high-ranking foreigner, the case would be high profile. Things would be further complicated by the fact that the British consul had a dislike for Werner; the two had fallen out some years ago during the course of their work.

For Han, though, the idea of an envoy from the British Legation was problematic. An envoy would interfere, he protested to Thomas while both men were still at the crime scene. And this was no casual back-alley stabbing, no mugging gone wrong or heart attack in a bar; this was something horrific, unfathomable. Domestic arguments that turned tragically violent, disputes over money or women or both that flared into murderous rages—these were bad enough, but the killing of a young English girl at a time of tension in the city was alarming to the authorities.

Thomas, aware they had to act quickly, suggested a compromise. Han should outflank the British Legation by nominating an envoy himself, someone the British could not object to. The commissioner knew there was no one attached to the legation who was senior enough, or experienced enough, for something like this anyway. Nor, given the magnitude of the crime, could it be anyone from the Legation Quarter police.

Thomas thought the legation might want to bring in someone from Shanghai, where law and order in the British-dominated International Settlement was run by the tough and experienced chief commissioner Major Frederick Gerrard, a Highland Scot who’d served with the Indian army and the British police in India before a stint as deputy commissioner of police in Basrah, Mesopotamia. Thomas knew Gerrard was good, a copper’s copper, but thought that in these darkening days he’d have one foot in the police and the other in British Intelligence and Special Branch in Shanghai. He’d also have his hands full battling the city’s rival gangs, who were fighting for control of lucrative narcotics and prostitution rackets with Chicago-style shootouts on the streets. Recently there’d been a rash of kidnappings of prominent Shanghai citizens, and more than enough trouble with an increasingly belligerent Japanese community. Gerrard had plenty of murders on his own patch and would be loath to spare any of his men, let alone himself.

Fortunately, Thomas told Han, he knew of a police officer with the perfect background for the investigation—Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, chief of police, British Concession, Tientsin. DCI Dennis was a most capable man, experienced and independently minded. He had trained at Scotland Yard.

The legation couldn’t easily argue against the qualifications of a senior ex–Scotland Yard detective. Moreover, since Dennis was with the British Concession authorities in Tientsin, he didn’t technically work for the British government. The legation might apply pressure, but Dennis would be able to resist it. He was a seasoned policeman of the old school, the sort who wanted to get at the truth, and he’d been trained by the best.

In other words, Thomas managed to convey to Han, Dennis wasn’t a diplomat, he wasn’t part of the old boys’ network, he wasn’t political. He was a copper, pure and simple.

Colonel Han agreed, and left Thomas to call the British consul in Tientsin to formally request that DCI Dennis be temporarily assigned to Peking.

Later that evening, Han made his way through the
hutong
behind the Morrison Street station to the Peking Union Medical College, a short distance away. This college was Peking’s most advanced centre of medicine. Established with the help of missionaries in 1906 and now funded by the American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and his foundation, it had always mixed Western doctors with Chinese, sending bright young Chinese to be trained in the United States and recruiting American and European experts to work at the college, going so far as to build a series of Western-style houses for the foreign personnel. By Peking standards the college was modern, clean and efficient. There was no medical facility like it in China, outside of Shanghai.

Han entered the mazelike complex, which was laid out in traditional Peking style but with newer Western buildings on all sides. The place could have been in New York or Boston, four or five floors high and purely functional, until you looked up and saw that the architects had incorporated Chinese flourishes—green saddleback roofs and traditional floating swallowtail eaves. What Han wasn’t to know was that these adornments had been added after a suggestion by one of the members of the committee that established the college, a man who was an expert on Chinese architecture and who believed deeply in preserving Peking’s traditional skyline—E. T. C. Werner.

The complex was silent at night. The gatemen were warming themselves around a charcoal brazier in a hut at the entrance. Han made his way to the pathology department, where he was met by Dr Wang, the medical superintendent. This was good—Han knew that Wang always worked with Cheng Hsiang-hu, chief professor of pathology and a man Han admired. Cheng was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and very experienced.

Superintendent Wang escorted Han to the autopsy room, where the contrast with the outside world was stark. There were spotless white tiles, gleaming stainless steel, bottles of chemicals on shelves, a tray of scalpels catching the light, along with other medical instruments Han didn’t know the name of.

Professor Cheng nodded acknowledgement to Han as he washed his hands. Wang stood ready with a clipboard and pen to record the details. Attendants wheeled in Pamela’s body on a trolley and lifted it onto the autopsy table, which was slightly angled and had gutters to catch any blood. The smell of antiseptic and cleanliness gave way to the smell of the dead and damaged—the familiar metallic tang of dried blood that caught in the back of the throat was mixed with a smell not unlike that of the fried pork in the Soochow Hutong market. Chinese or foreign, the odour of the dead was the same.

Pamela’s body had been undressed and washed but was still an unsightly mass of cuts, slashes and bruises. Her sternum was still the same gaping hole Han had seen at the Fox Tower. In fact, with most of the blood and mud cleaned away, he could see just how many stab marks there were—they seemed numerous to him. The naked body was strangely wide where it had been cut open across the chest. Han found it hard to picture Pamela’s face—he had yet to see a photograph of her—but under the intensely bright lights, he could now see that she was freckled. He noticed too her small hands, clenched rigidly tight, her thumbs locked inside her fists, trapped there by rigor mortis.

There was a second pathology expert at the autopsy, Dr William Graham Aspland, a senior consultant who had formally ordered the postmortem and appointed Cheng as Pamela’s chief pathologist. Both men wore green gowns with Western suits, shirts and ties underneath. Like Han, they thought this was one of the worst cases of mutilation they’d ever seen, and that was saying something. Cheng conducted postmortems almost daily, and Aspland, an English physician who specialized in opium addiction, had cleaned the dead from the battlefields of France and Belgium during World War I.

It was now past ten p.m., but Han had asked for the autopsy to be done this evening so that the investigation could get under way. Tradition decreed that he had twenty days to solve the case—after that it got much, much harder, as detectives got reassigned and the bosses at police headquarters lost interest. Aspland had agreed to the late-night procedure and called in Cheng immediately.

They began. First they weighed the corpse—nine stone, four pounds—and measured her—five foot, five inches. Distinguishing marks? None, though Cheng noted her uncommon grey eyes and long eyelashes. The estimated time of death was somewhere between ten p.m. and two a.m. the previous night, but Cheng could be no more precise than that. The specific cause of death was several blows with a blunt instrument to the area around the right eye, which had split the skull and caused massive haemorrhaging in the brain. Death would have taken perhaps two to three minutes from the first blow. Most of the horrific wounds had been inflicted postmortem.

Superintendent Wang’s account for the night showed that Pamela had to have been standing and facing her attacker when she was hit, suggesting that she knew him. The fatal blows were delivered from a short distance away and were extremely powerful; Pamela and her killer had been up close to each other, probably in a confined space. He had most likely been taller than she: the blows had been struck down on her skull, cracking it like an egg. The flow of blood from the wound had no doubt blinded her, causing her to sink to the floor and die where she lay. In all probability, Pamela’s killer had looked her in the eye as he’d ended her life.

Cheng catalogued all the injuries for the record. Han confirmed with the doctors that the blood loss caused by them would have been significant, and because there’d been little blood at the Fox Tower, this substantiated his suspicion that Pamela had been killed elsewhere. Somewhere, there had to be a lot more blood.

The knife used to slash the body after death had a blade approximately four inches long, Cheng estimated, possibly with a double edge. The throat had also been cut postmortem; the windpipe was completely severed. The slash and stab marks appeared random and were of different lengths and depths—Cheng described them for the record as ‘frenzied.’ Han noted that although Pamela’s tartan skirt and Aertex blouse had been ripped, there were no slash marks on her clothing: she had been stripped before being repeatedly stabbed.

Pamela’s right arm was also nearly severed from her body, the muscles cut clean through. Cheng speculated that two different, very sharp blades had been used for this. The humerus—the long bone running from the shoulder to the elbow—had been fractured in two places by blows from a blunt and heavy instrument that Cheng couldn’t identify. The lack of extensive haemorrhaging in the tissue around the wound led him to believe that the attempt to sever the arm was also made postmortem. Aspland concurred.

All four men looked at each other with one thought—the murderer or murderers had tried to dissect the body, to dismember it before disposing of it. The cuts to the shoulder could not have been made with an ordinary knife, by someone hacking at the flesh and muscle; some sort of specialist cutting tool must have been used.

Next Cheng moved to Pamela’s chest, which had been opened almost from her throat to her pelvic bone, the entire length sliced and pulled apart. Cheng noted, ‘The general nature of the cutting suggested that the flesh had been taken away in a single piece.’ A large piece of skin was missing, including part of Pamela’s breasts.

Han remembered the woolen cardigan the girl had been wearing at the Fox Tower. It had been bloody, but not that bloody—he thought this meant that the killer had undressed and then partially re-dressed his victim after her massive blood loss, leaving off her undergarments and stockings and loosely pulling back on her torn skirt, blouse and cardigan. He was positive now that the Fox Tower was not where Pamela had been murdered and butchered; the kill site was somewhere else, somewhere they didn’t know about yet.