Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (18 page)

The rumours buzzed all the more after Yeates disappeared, along with his wife and daughter Barbara, herself a prizewinning pupil at the school. People wondered why they had left so suddenly. John Woodall’s promotion to acting head and his subsequent move into the School House on Race Course Road had all happened so abruptly, and even though the newspapers fell into line and reported the official reason of Yeates’s ill health, the unseemly haste of events was suspicious to many. Tongues wagged, the speculation intensified. Some believed Yeates was guilty of Pamela’s murder, and that it was being covered up to save face.

At the end of March, Tientsin Grammar held its annual Speech Day and prize giving, a major event in the school calendar and one that was reported in the
Peking and Tientsin Times
:

Mr EC Peters—Chairman of the Committee of Management of Tientsin Grammar School—proposed three cheers for the recently departed Mr Yeates. . . . The response to Mr Peters’s call was vociferous and unanimous, attesting to the high esteem in which the pupils hold their past headmaster.

Perhaps this was the case, perhaps it wasn’t—the paper was still toeing the line. Pamela’s absence from the event wasn’t mentioned, nor was her murder. There were no condolences for her, no minute’s silence.

And in an issue of the school paper, the
Grammarian
, that was published shortly after Speech Day, the new headmaster, John Woodall, wrote an article called ‘Mr. Yeates—An Appreciation.’ Amidst the praise for his departed colleague was a sentence that was pointed out again and again in the drawing rooms and clubrooms of Tientsin:

In 1927 he became Headmaster, and for ten years he has held a position which, without exaggeration, must be one of the most difficult and trying ones in the educational world East of Suez, a world where truth is so easily twisted into scandal, where the interests of parents, boards of governors, staff and pupils so often seem to conflict, and where their divergences seem to be emphasized.

Where truth is so easily twisted into scandal.
John Woodall was well aware of the gossip about his predecessor, and Tientsin Grammar remained a school with secrets. It was gossip that never went away.

Meanwhile Dennis
had
been away, away from Peking for two crucial days, on a false scent.

Under Peking Earth

W
hile DCI Dennis was taking the train to Tientsin, Pamela’s body was being laid to rest in Peking. Some fifty people gathered at the open graveside in the British Cemetery, where the gravediggers had had to work hard to break the frozen ground. It was late afternoon, and the weak sun was already going down, accentuating the unremitting January cold that chilled the lungs of the mourners. Grey clouds swept across the sky; sunset would come before five o’clock, followed rapidly by the gloaming and then night.

Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

The British chaplain, the Reverend Griffiths, was presiding at the graveside but Werner wasn’t listening, although he remained with his head bowed during the proceedings. He’d rejected organized religion intellectually many decades before, but its formalities were ingrained. Griffiths was there so that form could be maintained. Pamela, too, had been without religion, despite the Franciscan sisters, the school assemblies with the Lord’s Prayer.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us . . .

If Werner had raised his head and looked to the west, he would have seen the Fox Tower looming not a quarter of a mile away. He had stood in this same spot in 1922 and watched as his beloved Gladys Nina’s coffin was lowered into the grave next to Pamela’s. His daughter had been barely five years old at that time, her blond hair in a pudding-bowl cut, a few of her milk teeth missing. She’d worn a new black overcoat with black woolen stockings as the mother she’d hardly known was buried. Now mother and daughter lay alongside each other.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God in his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .

Among the mourners at the cemetery were Ethel Gurevitch and her mother, and Lilian Marinovksi and a few other friends from Pamela’s Peking school days. The household servants from Armour Factory Alley were gathered to one side, where Pamela’s amah was sobbing. Commissioner Thomas was there to represent the Legation Quarter police, but it seemed nobody had made the journey from Tientsin.

There was a small delegation from the British Legation, but nobody senior, just enough for basic duty to be seen to be done. Botham and Binetsky had stayed away to continue with the investigation and the questioning, but Colonel Han was there. He hung back from the group clustered around the graveside, the remainder of which consisted mostly of friends and colleagues of Werner’s, come to lend support.

Why the senior staff at the legation had stayed away wasn’t clear: Was it because of the lingering problems of Werner’s long-ago-terminated diplomatic career, or because of the gossip that plagued the city? Werner had certainly heard the rumours:

The old man did it.

It’s his wife all over again.

Death hovers around him.

She was a strange one.

Who’s the man they’re holding?

Pamela always had a wild streak.

The Chinese say she was a fox spirit.

The cemeteries of Peking, both Chinese and foreign, were all outside the city walls, established there by official order and following rules laid down in imperial times, which prevented burials within central Peking. They were places that superstitious Pekingers avoided; they were the habitats of fox spirits. During the height of the Boxer Rebellion, as the foreign population of the city cowered in the British Legation, fully expecting to be overrun and slaughtered, the Boxers had dug up the graves of the foreign dead, some of whom had lain there since the British Cemetery opened in 1861. They scattered the bones of the corpses around in full view, the desecration yet another horror to the besieged.

The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit.

Reverend Griffiths finished up, and the mourners moved hesitantly away, lingering only as long as seemed fitting. They went back to their waiting cars, then back to the city.

Werner was the last to leave, taking one final look at the grave of his wife and daughter. It had a simple headstone:

GLADYS NINA (RAVENSHAW) WERNER

1886–1922

PAMELA GLADYS CHALMERS WERNER

1917–1937

As he turned and walked away, men with spades began to fill in the grave with the hard and frozen Peking earth.

A Respectable Man of Influence

T
he pathology lab at the Peking Union Medical College came back with an inconclusive report. The bloodstains on Pinfold’s shoes, handkerchief and dagger sheath were most probably from an animal. They couldn’t match them to Pamela’s blood. The dagger itself was clean, and Pinfold’s room had yielded no more traces of blood. They’d tried everything they could, but the science was lacking.

Pinfold had finally admitted to having a second address, one whose locks matched the set of keys found in his possession. It was another lodging house, technically within the boundaries of the Legation Quarter. That put him under the protection of the Quarter, and meant that permission to search the premises had to be granted by authorities there, a procedure that delayed the police. Botham and Binetsky had finally gone to the lodging house, but found little in the room beyond a few clothes.

Han requested that the British Legation allow him to formally arrest Pinfold. Because of the confused and overlapping jurisdictions and agreements between the Chinese and the foreign powers, the colonel needed authorization before he could arrest a foreign resident. As Pinfold was suspected of being involved in the murder of a British subject, the correct procedure was to apply for permission from the British Legation, even though Pinfold was thought to be Canadian. But Consul Fitzmaurice refused, saying he didn’t think there was sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction. Han asked that he be allowed to arrest Pinfold in order to hold him while they gathered that evidence, but Fitzmaurice was adamant; it was a point of protocol. And so Pinfold walked.

He left Morrison Street police station in the early hours of Saturday 16 January. Nobody saw him leave. It was too early for the press, but he walked out the back door just in case anyone was out the front with a camera. His shoes, handkerchief and knife had been returned to him, and he disappeared into the morning rush of Morrison Street. The press never did manage to get a photo of him.

Han issued a press release saying that the suspect had been released due to lack of evidence, and made no further comment.

Half-truths, lies—Dennis knew they hadn’t got to the bottom of Pinfold and his secrets, but they had links. He was relieved when Han put out the order for Wentworth Prentice to be brought in for questioning.

Inevitably someone had talked. Someone at the medical college, or a constable privy to the enquiry, perhaps a British official who’d seen the details of the autopsy. Whatever the source, the Sunday newspa-pers had got hold of the fact that Pamela’s heart and organs had been removed.

The news of the stolen heart sent further waves of panic through Peking’s foreign community, which was still stunned by the murder. In a world where such a violent killing of an innocent girl was possible, where her body had been eviscerated, carved up and left for the
huang gou,
clearly nobody was safe and nothing sacred.

The superstitious took up the locals’ explanation of fox spirits, claiming that their heightened activity was a sign the world was out of kilter. Other sensationalist rumours had it that barbarous Chinese were cutting out foreign hearts for illicit medicinal purposes, or perhaps for use in obscure religious rites. Some residents of the Legation Quarter had no doubt read a few too many Fu Manchu novels late at night, or taken as fact ungrounded tabloid news reports of the return of the Boxers, but still, it made everyone shudder to think about what had happened to Pamela’s body.

Colonel Han tore strips off his men, lining them up in the yard behind the Morrison Street station, letting them freeze and shouting himself hoarse. But he knew that if the leak had come from one of his constables, the man would never come forward.

Werner called a press conference on Sunday afternoon outside the British Legation, annoying Fitzmaurice, who was left seething inside. The gentlemen, and a few ladies, of the press gathered obediently, notebooks at the ready, portraits of the grieving but stoic father already half written. Han, hearing of the conference, tapped one of his informants, a Chinese newspaperman on an English-language paper, and told him he wanted to know what Werner had to say, verbatim.

Werner knew how to give a speech. He stood erect and sombre in front of the journalists, who were shaking their hands to keep the blood circulating. Camera bulbs popped and sizzled. With his commanding eyes and a formal dark suit a few decades out of fashion, worn with a crisp white shirt and a black tie, Werner was every inch the former diplomat, the public orator. He was also the grieving father and the wronged man.

He told them that, as far as he knew, the police had made no progress. Suspects had been questioned, but all had been released. Why was this? Were the police incompetent? He hinted that permission to make a formal arrest of a suspect was being refused by the British Legation, and that he, Werner, was being frozen out of the investigation, even suspected himself. Pamela was now buried, but still the full report of her autopsy remained secret, and the inquest had yet to be reconvened to hear the medical evidence.

Werner told the press that he had heard the armchair gossip; he knew the finger of guilt had been pointed at him. He knew too that the hurtful accusations about the death of his poor wife were abroad once more, and that journalists had been looking into his past. He got worked up, he got angry. He was indignant.

And now, he said, unhelpful rumours about Pamela’s missing organs and the mutilation of her body were rife. He breathed deeply before continuing. He did not believe the killer of his daughter was Chinese. He’d heard the talk of triads, shamans, thieves seeking human organs for medicine, ritual killings, but it was all nonsense. And the idea that fox spirits had killed Pamela was beneath contempt. Werner, the author of the highly regarded
Dictionary of Chinese Mythology
and the frequently reprinted
Myths and Legends of China
, stated forthrightly
,
‘Not in sociology, myths and legends nor in art, science or philosophy, has a kinship with the appropriation of human hearts been apparent in this country.’

All this gossip, Werner now told the crowd, was just a distraction. The killer was among Peking’s foreign community, and someone knew him; they knew what he’d done but were shielding him, for what purpose Werner could not imagine. He told the gathering that he believed the police were close, that there were men within the foreign community who knew more than they’d come forward to tell.

Then Werner really rattled the cage. Since the offer of a reward from the Legation Police had not worked, he was upping the amount with his own money. The reward would now be worth $5,000 in gold dollars—a currency not commonly used but often held as savings. This was in fact Werner’s life savings, and was more than what 99 percent of Peking would make in three lifetimes of toil. The press lapped it up.

DCI Dennis returned to Peking on Sunday evening, and on Monday morning found himself summoned to the British Legation first thing. They didn’t issue an order as such, more a polite request: ‘In view of circumstances and information reaching the public we . . .’ He decided to see what they had to say—the call had been long expected anyway.

The British Legation was technically a consulate now, rather than an embassy, and had been ever since His Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen had followed Chiang Kai-shek’s government to Nanking. Peking had been reduced to a diplomatic backwater, but Dennis knew the diplomatic corps, and he knew that the staff here, for all their diminished status, would be no less pompous, self-righteous and generally full of themselves. Above all, they were clannish.

The entrance to the legation, where Werner had addressed the press the previous day, was fronted with two stone lions. Once past the guards, Dennis was shown inside to a small library with deep chairs, a bit like a London gentlemen’s club but with a pathetic fire in the grate offering little in the way of warmth. Bookshelves lined the walls, except for above the fireplace. Here there was a patch of slightly discoloured wallpaper where the portrait of Edward VIII had hung. It seemed that a portrait of the new king, George VI, who’d held the throne since the abdication of his brother in December, had yet to make it to Peking.

Two functionaries were sent in to greet Dennis. They were effusive with thanks for his coming, but he felt their inevitable condescension just below the surface. Consul Fitzmaurice followed them in, surrounded by his advisers, and bluntly laid out his orders. Dennis was to cease all contact with Werner, since the old man had suffered enough. The legation had already requested that the Chinese police do likewise, and at Ch’ienmen headquarters Chief Chen, chief of the Peking police and Han’s superior officer, was cooperating.

The Chuanpan Hutong raid had been a mistake, Dennis was told. One of his officers had been in attendance, and that went specifically against the instructions given to the DCI. Dennis had exceeded his remit.

‘Remember,’ Fitzmaurice said, ‘you have no powers of arrest here—liaise with Commissioner Thomas before taking any actions in conjunction with Han.’

The British Legation, Dennis was made aware, had theories of its own about the case, and the DCI was overlooking the obvious—the Chinese. The city was full to bursting with immigrants—country boys with no money and little hope, propelled by the regular torments of flood, drought, crop failure and the cancer of poverty, as well as the marauding Japanese. Dennis needed to realise that Peking was a sexual as a well as a political powder keg. Sixty-four percent of the population was male, most of them young, many of them refugees from the countryside. They were probably sexually frustrated, unable to secure wives or afford prostitutes. They were uneducated, uncontrollable, un-Christian, not always capable of self-restraint. Outbursts of maniacal sexual assaults were to be expected in this atmosphere, from such people. Dennis should push Han to look at these men, not go down cul-de-sacs, pursue dead ends.

End of lecture. The DCI was summarily dismissed.