Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (8 page)

Dennis had brought photographs from Tientsin. One showed Pamela in an end-of-term photograph, a relatively plain-looking girl with yellow-blond hair pulled tight to her head, parted from right to left and bunched about her ears in curled plaits. Her shapeless Tientsin Grammar smock and regulation blouse did nothing to enhance her appearance; neither did the thick school stockings and functional black shoes—her legs looked stocky, her ankles fat.

There were other photos of Pamela in the school hockey team, crouching down in the front row, and in the netball team, standing stiff and formal, still with those stocky legs. The photos were between a year and eighteen months old, and in them Pamela was sullen, rigid. She was looking away from the camera, uninterested, unsmiling.

Han, on the other hand, had discovered a very different Pamela. He’d been asking questions, reading accounts of the phone calls that had come into Morrison Street, the anonymous letters, the reports from his detectives. And he had a photograph of his own to show Dennis, one he’d had his detectives secure from the Werner household. Over the coming days, it was to appear on the front pages of Chinese and international newspapers under the simple heading M
ISS
P
AMELA
W
ERNER,
M
URDER
V
ICTIM
.

In this photograph, Pamela was less a girl and more a woman. It was a posed studio portrait, taken at Hartung’s, the best-known studio in Peking, and showed Pamela standing before an art-deco curtain, alongside a vase of flowers on a shelf draped with patterned Chinese silk. Her hair was fashionably slicked down, parted in the centre and curled under, à la Norma Shearer or Claudette Colbert. She was wearing a modern, stylishly tailored dress, only slightly lowered at the neck and suggesting a flat chest—in vogue in the 1930s Hollywood movies Pamela queued up to see at the cinemas around Dashala. The dress was pulled in tight at the waist to accentuate her gently curved hips. If her legs were still stocky, you couldn’t tell; they were hidden under the full-length dress. One small foot clad in a delicately embroidered shoe poked out below.

This time Pamela was looking straight into the lens of the camera, with a confidence the school photographs lacked. Her lips were painted, her eyebrows plucked; there was a little kohl under her eyes. She was emerging as a good-looking woman who commanded attention.

Han had sent his men to Hartung’s on Legation Street and learnt that the photo had been taken on Monday 4 January—three days before Pamela was killed. The people who knew Pamela in Tientsin were shocked by her glamorous portrait when they saw it in the papers, and those who knew her in Peking were surprised to see her looking so drab and plain in her Tientsin Grammar uniform. Han reviewed the case so far for Dennis: the horrific preliminary results of the autopsy, and the usual crank calls, false confessions and accusations, including the worthless drunk White Russian who was ratted out by his jealous wife.

Dennis was interested in the story of the rickshaw puller, Sun Te-hsing, who’d been seen washing his bloodstained cushion cover by the Fox Tower. Han told Dennis that the puller had picked up a late-night fare on the evening of Russian Christmas, a foreigner who’d been drinking in the Badlands and had got into a fight. He had bled on Sun’s covers, and the puller had to wash them; nobody would hire his rickshaw with a soiled cushion.

The puller had been scared during questioning, Han claimed. He was a nineteen-year-old peasant who’d come to the city with no other options than pulling a rickshaw. He and some sixty thousand other pullers working in the city managed half a million fares among them daily, through cold or heat, for mere pennies.

Han described the business for Dennis. A country bumpkin, unwise to the ways of the big city, was charged high rent for a rickshaw and so had little left over after a day’s work. Only the toughest made it through more than a few Peking winters plying the streets and alleyways. It was easy to imagine a puller growing desperate enough to grab a chance at a drunk foreigner’s wallet, but that didn’t make him a deranged killer who sliced open young white girls’ bodies. And anyway, this wasn’t a case of robbery. The watch would have been the first thing to go.

Han told Dennis he had sent his detectives to the Legation Quarter address the rickshaw puller had given. There they’d rousted a hungover American from his bed, a member of the Horse Marine Guards that protected the American Legation. He confirmed he’d been drinking and fighting at one of the bars on Chuanpan Hutong, where he got a busted nose for his trouble and a few cuts. He’d bled on the seat of the rickshaw on his way home. Han had seen the stains himself, and they were nothing like what would have come from Pamela’s wounds.

The lead had gone nowhere, Han told Dennis. They should forget about it.

The two detectives divided up the interviews according to their backgrounds. Han would interview Werner’s Chinese servants and also try to trace shopkeepers, rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, staff at the skating rink, neighbours, and anyone else who could shed light on Pamela’s last days. Dennis would talk to Pamela’s foreign friends, starting with Ethel Gurevitch, and try to work out her movements. The murder was barely two days ago; memories should still be fresh.

Han went to Werner’s house on Sunday morning, where he started with Ho Ying, the cook. On the day Pamela was killed, Ho Ying had prepared a lunch of macaroni for her and Werner. Around three that afternoon he went to the nearby market on Tung Tan Pailou Hutong to buy, among other things, the pork for the meatballs Pamela had requested, as well as some traditional Peking sweetmeats. Pamela loved sugary preserved fruits and the glutinous rice dumplings known as
hsiao chih
, and regularly asked him to buy them for her.

Everything was in accordance with what the cook had told one of Han’s constables on Friday. Pamela had said she’d be going out around four and would be back at seven thirty. Ho Ying had prepared the meatballs and rice, which she never ate, and the master had grown increasingly anxious when Pamela failed to return. Ho Ying, who went home at the end of the workday to his family a few
hutong
away, had stayed later than usual at the house that night. Eventually Werner asked him to enquire after Pamela at the skating rink, but it was closed. The Chinese workers who were sweeping the ice told him that two hundred skaters had used the rink that night, but they didn’t know Pamela. Ho Ying dashed back to Armour Factory Alley to give Werner the bad news, and then went home.

Next Han talked to the sixty-four-year-old gatekeeper, Yen Ping, who confirmed that Werner and Pamela had had lunch together at one o’clock that day, and at two o’clock Werner left for his regular afternoon walk. Pamela went out shortly after three, by which time Ho Ying had left for the market. Werner returned at five, later coming and going several times to look for his daughter. Yen Ping remained at the gate throughout that night; he was there from noon on Thursday until Friday morning, keeping watch for her. He saw her leave just after three o’clock, and then he never saw her again.

There was little more Han could do at the courtyard residence until he returned with Dennis to interview Werner, a prospect neither of them relished. The old man was still recovering from shock. His doctor had told Han that Werner’s heart had suffered a severe strain.

That morning it was Dennis who was hearing new information—at the Gurevitches’ house on Hong Kong Bank Road. Ethel had already given a statement to police, claiming she’d reached the Wagons Lits a little late, just after five, and Pamela had turned up a couple of minutes after that. Pamela had told Ethel she’d been there earlier, but as Ethel hadn’t arrived yet, she’d gone for a walk. The two girls then had tea with Ethel’s mother and father, after which they went skating. Pamela had ridden off on her bicycle; Ethel had stayed at the rink with Lilian Marinovski until it closed at eight.

What had they talked about over tea? Dennis learned for the first time about Pamela’s boyfriend in Tientsin. According to Ethel, Pamela was excited that he was coming to Peking for a few days, although she didn’t say what his name was. Ethel assumed he’d be staying at Armour Factory Alley. Next Dennis asked what Pamela had eaten while she was with Ethel—had she eaten any Chinese food? No, said Ethel, just a little bread and butter and a slice of cake with tea. Her mother confirmed this. Pamela had eaten and drunk very little, claiming she wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t say when she’d last eaten. Nor did Pamela have any Chinese food at the skating rink.

What about Pamela’s clothing? Dennis asked. What had she been wearing that afternoon? Ethel recounted the tartan skirt, the fashionable Aertex blouse, the woolen cardigan, along with a belted blue overcoat, mittens, beret and stockings. No, Ethel didn’t know the names of any of Pamela’s friends in Peking, except Lilian Marinovski, whom they’d met at the rink that night. Ethel told Dennis she thought Pamela had seemed different—more outgoing, grown-up. She had new friends and new pastimes. She was invited to parties and dances. She was interested in boys; she hadn’t been when Ethel had known her in Peking. At school she’d been quiet but occasionally rebellious; she’d got into trouble and been sent to Tientsin.

From the Gurevitches’ house, Dennis went across the Quarter to visit Lilian Marinovski, but this time learned nothing new. At eighteen, Lilian was closer to Pamela’s age and still a student in Peking. She had done most of the talking at the skating rink, and hadn’t asked Pamela many questions. Pamela hadn’t mentioned any boyfriends, but Lilian too thought she seemed more confident, more grown-up. It had been a chance encounter with a girl she vaguely knew, nothing more.

Han and Dennis met back at Morrison Street at lunchtime, where there was nothing to be had but bitter police-station tea and a tin of Hatamen cigarettes. Apart from the boyfriend, there was precious little new information—everyone questioned had confirmed the times and details they’d given the previous day. Dennis made a note to ask Werner when they interviewed him if he’d been expecting Pamela to bring anyone home in the next day or two. Then he telephoned the station in Tientsin and asked one of his detectives to find out who Pamela’s boyfriend was, and where he’d been between seven in the evening on 7 January and early the following morning.

‘Dig around a bit,’ he told the detective on the phone. ‘Find out who her friends were, what her teachers thought of her, what her behaviour was like.’ The boyfriend was the closest thing they had to a suspect, though there was no apparent motive, and they had no idea if he’d been in Peking at the time. Or even if he existed, and wasn’t just a youthful girl’s fantasy to impress her friends.

There was one hole in the story. Pamela had left Armour Factory Alley just after three and had met Ethel Gurevitch shortly after five. The Wagons Lits was little more than a twenty-minute ride from Pamela’s house, or half an hour maximum along the Tartar Wall, her preferred route to avoid the Badlands. That left an hour and a half unaccounted for that afternoon.

Han gave his men pictures of Pamela and sent them to fan out between the house in Armour Factory Alley and the Wagons Lits. Show the picture to everyone, he told them, every shopkeeper, café owner, market-stall trader; every hawker, hotel receptionist, gatekeeper. Someone must have seen her. And sure enough, someone had.

The break came quickly—Sunday evening. A concierge at the Wagons Lits had seen Pamela between three and four on the Thursday afternoon. One of Han’s uniformed constables phoned to say he’d found the man.

The detectives drove across the Legation Quarter to the hotel, where the constable was waiting in the lobby with the concierge. Han showed him the photograph of Pamela again, and he identified her as having come into the Wagons Lits on 7 January to enquire about taking a room there—he remembered that it was some time between three and four o’clock.

The concierge’s desk was about twenty feet from the main reception, and the girl had entered the lobby, gone to the reception desk and taken a leaflet on the rates. She had been alone. The concierge couldn’t remember exactly whom she’d spoken to on the desk, but he was sure it was Pamela—the blond hair, the grey eyes.

But why was she interested in a room at the Wagons Lits when she lived just a mile or so away? Was she planning a rendezvous with her boyfriend from Tientsin? Or had she argued with her father, and wanted to leave the house on Armour Factory Alley?

The detectives needed to talk to Werner in depth. That could wait until tomorrow, Monday, not just the start of a new week but also the day of the official inquest at the British Legation into the death of Pamela.