Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (23 page)

This girl thought it was pretty clear what had happened at those ‘parties’ in the Badlands—the girls were forced to have sex with Prentice and his friends. And afterwards they remained silent because they knew Prentice would deny all of it. Everyone else involved would deny it too. Any accusations would only tarnish the girls’ own reputations. In an unforgiving society, it was they who would be blamed.

The White Russian girl couldn’t understand why Prentice and his gang hadn’t been arrested. Rumours about him had been rife ever since his wife had left him, taking their three children back to America. The dentist had lured some of his victims with promises of marriage—the White Russian had heard that one of them had committed suicide when she found out he was deceiving her.

Werner’s worst fears were beginning to crystallise. Following his meeting with the White Russian girl, he had his private detectives return to the Wagons Lits to seek out Chao Hsi-men, the hotel concierge who’d reported seeing Pamela at the reception desk on the afternoon of her murder. From Chao they got the name of the employee manning reception that day and tracked him down. With an offer of money, they got what they wanted, although the receptionist was too scared to go on the record.

A foreign man answering Prentice’s description had left a note to be collected by Pamela on Thursday 7 January. He had tipped heavily and told the receptionist to say nothing, should anyone ever ask about it. The receptionist knew a secret assignation between two foreigners when he saw one. Discretion about any affairs the guests might be conducting was expected from the hotel staff.

Pamela had come in on the afternoon of the same day and picked up the note, thanked him and left. The receptionist had no idea what it said—it was none of his business, just a quick bit of easy cash. He admitted he had kept out of the way when the police came asking questions, and said that his colleague Chao Hsi-men had known nothing of the note.

Werner and his detectives went back to Armour Factory Alley with descriptions of Pinfold, Knauf and Prentice. The police had never circulated any of the men’s descriptions, had never released them to the press. Nobody in the alleyway had been asked about them. The foreigners had mostly all left and closed up their houses, leaving them in the care of their Chinese staff. Pamela had been popular with the servants who worked in the courtyards along the street, and they were only too keen to help, now that they were being asked. They remembered seeing Pinfold lurking on Armour Factory Alley on 6 January. Werner’s street was narrow and close-knit, and a strange foreigner stood out.

Werner worked through the likely sequence of events. Pinfold, a procurer for Prentice, had been informed by Gorman that Pamela was back in Peking from Tientsin. Hanging around Armour Factory Alley, he had let Pamela know that a note from Prentice had been left for her at the Wagons Lits, and she should pick it up. There was to be a party, the details of which were in the note. Werner saw all the links, and thanks to the chance encounter with the White Russian girl, he now had a better idea of what Prentice’s scheme was.

The dentist and his gang identified likely young foreign girls, followed them, hounded them, invited them to suppers and parties that ended up in the Badlands. There they forced themselves upon the girls, afterwards insisting they remain silent, threatening them if they should not. The girls’ reputations were on the line. It was their word against everyone else’s, and they would be accusing men of good standing, professional men. Nobody would believe them.

This was the game. The men had done it before, and then they’d done it to his daughter. But it had somehow gone very wrong.

Chuanpan Hutong

T
he Badlands appeared untouched by the Japanese occupation. It was perhaps the one place in Peking where things were pretty much business as usual. In a city now filled to bursting with Japanese soldiers who’d been living for months in rough conditions in northern China, the services that the Badlands specialized in were in high demand.

The area was no longer a place where curious wealthy foreigners went ‘slumming it’ of a weekend, or where the occasional Chinese ventured to seek illicit pleasures. Now the former had fled and the latter stayed at home in fear. The Badlands had become the playground of the Japanese and the largely collaborationist Peking underworld.

Werner knew that the Chuanpan Hutong angle had gone nowhere in the police investigation. He’d heard from his agents that people had been warned at the time to keep quiet. He’d also confirmed the rumours that Dennis’s colleague Inspector Botham was a drunk, who after the night of the roust at number 27 had returned to the Olympia Cabaret and accepted more drinks from the manager, Joe Knauf. And Botham had used his position to spread gossip at the bars of the Legation Quarter. Threats, drunken rages—add these to the existing fear of authority and a desire to avoid being implicated or framed, and no wonder so many people had remained silent. DCI Dennis hadn’t known Peking well enough to push the matter of 27 Chuanpan Hutong. Pinfold, Knauf and Prentice were all connected as hunting friends, but not through Pamela—that connection had been just out of reach, since no one had been able to place her in the Badlands that night.

Around the same time that Werner had run into the White Russian girl on the street, his agents managed to get in contact with Sun Te-hsing, the rickshaw puller who was seen washing blood from his cushions on the night of the murder. Sun claimed that he’d been shocked by the false detail given about him in the Chinese newspapers, and the false statements attributed to him. They reported that he’d been arrested, but he never had, just questioned. They reported that the blood on his cushions had come from a drunken American marine who’d been in a fight, and that this man was subsequently tracked down and had given confirmation—that was the first Sun had heard of the story.

At the time he was questioned, the rickshaw puller had told Colonel Han what happened that night, and then he’d been kicked out of the station and told to disappear. He’d never spoken out about the lies in the newspapers because he’d been scared. Like plenty of other Peking rickshaw pullers, he smoked a little opium to give him the strength to work, to keep out the cold, and he knew Han was actively looking for dopers. More than a few were ending up at the Tien Chiao execution grounds.

Sun Te-hsing had gone back to pulling his rickshaw. But now, with the Japanese occupation, times were even harder. Fares were scarce, inflation was rampant, and he was a poor man. Werner’s agents had told him they were looking for information about the murder, and Sun was prepared to talk for money—he would set the record straight. And so he told Werner what he’d apparently told Han the day after the murder.

He had been touting for business on the night of 7 January on Chuanpan Hutong. Everyone knew that number 27 was a dive bar, where fares staggered out regularly, and that number 28 was a busy brothel—you didn’t have to wait long there either. The Badlands had been busy that night, it was a foreign holiday.

Some time after ten o’clock, Sun had seen a car arrive from the direction of the Legation Quarter. It pulled up outside number 28, and four people got out. From the front seat, beside the Chinese chauffeur, came a short man. Sun couldn’t say who he was, but he did remember that the man had a particularly large nose, even for a foreigner. From the back seat came a man whom Sun identified from photographs as Prentice, then a younger half-European, half-Chinese man, and finally a white girl with yellow hair. They all entered number 28, through the small gateway that led into the courtyard. The girl was walking between the two white men, each of whom was supporting one of her arms.

The chauffeur turned the car around and drove back in the direction of the Legation Quarter. Sun was unable to identify the man, beyond his being Chinese and dressed in the typical black uniform and cap of all Peking’s chauffeurs. The car was also black, with a brown roof, but as to its make, Sun had no idea. He’d decided at the time that since the car hadn’t been told to wait, there was a good chance that one or more of the people who’d just entered number 28 would require his services to get home. So he squatted down on his haunches by the carbide lamp on his rickshaw and bided his time.

Sun Te-hsing was then just nineteen years old. He was fitter and more persistent than most pullers in Peking, and he patiently waited outside number 28 until after midnight. Eventually he got his fare. A Russian woman he knew to be the madam of the brothel appeared at the doorway with a Chinese man and beckoned him over. The two white men then carried a foreign girl out through the door in the wall surrounding the building and into the street, supporting her under the arms—‘frog walking’ was how Sun described it. They put her in his rickshaw, where she didn’t move.

The two men sat either side of her, cramped into the long seat. The girl was scantily clad, despite the cold night, wearing only a long blouse, a cardigan and a short skirt. Her face was partially covered with a white cloth. Sun assumed she was drunk. He was used to passengers from the Badlands being the worse for booze, sometimes semicomatose.

Once running, of course, he wasn’t able to see her, and the men had pulled down the canvas overhang that offered passengers some protection from the cold and the rain. But Sun could hear the girl’s laboured breathing.

He had also noticed that the hooks at the side of the girl’s skirt were torn, and the garment itself looked to have been ripped from the bottom almost to the top.

Sun had been instructed by the brothel’s madam to take the men and the girl southeast along Chuanpan Hutong to the Wall Road and the small access point through the Tartar Wall known as the Stone Bridge. Sun wondered why they were going to such a remote location on such a cold and windy night, away from any houses or bars. But he pulled the trio to the southern edge of the Badlands as instructed, and was duly paid. He waited expectantly for a tip, but one of the men told him to clear off, and when the puller lingered a little longer in the desperate hope of some extra coppers, the shorter of the two men pulled out a knife and waved it at him.

Sun needed no further hint and went swiftly on his way, heading back towards Hatamen Street. On his way home, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he stopped at the entrance to the French hospital on the edge of the Legation Quarter, near Morrison Street. There he chatted with the gatekeepers, telling them of his weird experience. When Werner’s agents later contacted the gatekeepers, they confirmed Sun’s story.

Later that same morning, Sun noticed the blood on the cushions of his rickshaw and went to the canal by the Fox Tower to wash them out. He was worried: the white girl with the golden hair had been his last fare of the night, and the blood must have been hers. Then he had found himself grabbed by two constables and taken to the Morrison Street station, where he was questioned by one man only, Colonel Han Shih-ching.

Colonel Han, Werner well knew, was the man who’d told DCI Dennis that the blood on the rickshaw cushions had come from an American marine. Han had claimed he’d checked the marine out and the story was solid, and so Sun had been released. Dennis subsequently had no cause to think of Sun Te-hsing again. And yet now Sun was saying there’d been no marine, no fight. He had told Colonel Han about the yellow-haired girl on Chuanpan Hutong; he had told him about the rickshaw ride to the Tartar Wall on the night of the Russian Christmas. Sun had just wanted to get out of Morrison Street and back to work.

Werner showed Sun the clothes Pamela had been wearing the night she was murdered, the clothes she had been found in at the Fox Tower. Sun agreed they were similar to those worn by the yellow-haired girl who’d been put in his rickshaw on Chuanpan Hutong.

Werner was left with much to think about. If Sun Te-hsing was telling the truth—and Werner could think of no reason why the man would lie, nor how he would otherwise be able to confirm so many details about that night—then Colonel Han had not only covered up vital evidence but had deliberately laid a false trail. He too had lied. Was this because Han, like DCI Dennis, had been officially directed how to proceed with the case? Had he been ordered to keep the investigation away from number 28? Or had the owners of the brothel paid him off, so as to minimize any disruption to business? Had Han perhaps been in their pay all along, in the way of these things? Wer-ner knew how the policing of Peking worked. For people who owned or ran brothels, it was nothing out of the ordinary to buy official protection. Plenty of policeman were on the take; they didn’t necessarily have to be wholly corrupt. It was even feasible that Han had believed the lie he was telling was a small one—it might have struck him as impossible that such a girl as Pamela could have been inside a Badlands brothel.

Then there was the meeting Werner had had with Han after the British Legation had ordered Dennis away from the case. It was the only meeting Werner had been able to secure with the colonel, and the old man now suspected that the British Legation had used their influence with Peking police headquarters to force Han to break contact with him as well. At that meeting, Werner made mention of a place on Chuanpan Hutong that he knew Pinfold frequented. Han was momentarily fazed, and Werner realized that the colonel must have thought he was referring to number 28. When Werner named the Oparinas’ bar at number 27, Han had visibly relaxed. It was a detail whose significance had not been apparent to Werner at the time. Now he was certain that 28 Chuanpan Hutong held the secret to that night’s events.

In late September of 1938, Werner went back again to Consul Archer at the British Legation and presented Sun Te-hsing’s evidence. He was determined that this time the man should listen. And at first Archer did, conceding that this new evidence ‘impressed him as being true.’ Werner demanded that Archer contact the British ambassador and have the case reopened. Archer said he would see what he could do, and ushered Werner out of his office.

The next day, a note was delivered to Werner’s house stating that the new testimony had been ‘ruled out on entirely insufficient grounds.’ Sun’s evidence, Archer now claimed, was ‘fantastic,’ ‘valueless’ and ‘cannot be true.’ He pointed out that the rickshaw puller was contradicting the evidence he’d given to Colonel Han in January, and that the man was an opium addict, and therefore by default a hopeless liar who would say anything to get another fix. Archer then repeated Consul Fitzmaurice’s earlier warning to Werner that he should leave the case alone.

To Werner this was incredible. The ‘case,’ as these people called it, was his daughter, whose horrific slaughter no one seemed to think important enough to properly investigate. He returned to the British Legation with Sun Te-hsing, who repeated his story directly to Archer, but the consul would not budge an inch. He wasn’t going to do anything. He refused to discuss the matter of why Colonel Han had given DCI Dennis a false story about a brawling American marine, when Sun had told him something altogether different.

Archer’s message was clear—the case was closed, Werner should drop it. It was equally clear that the consul did not consider a Chinese rickshaw puller to be a reliable witness. White face was at issue here, and Sun’s story was an embarrassment that Archer and the British establishment in China did not want.

Werner did not yield to them. Other new witnesses came forward. A mechanic called Wang Shih-ming, who worked in a nearby auto-repair garage, contacted Werner’s agents after reading one of the leaflets. Wang had seen a lamplight by the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January, near where Pamela’s body had been found. Another man, an old Chinese coal merchant, also made contact to report seeing a lamplight at the same time. He had been going to Hatamen Street to sell his coal, and when he returned a few hours later, going back past the Fox Tower as dawn was breaking, the lamplight was gone. A third man, a White Russian called Kurochkin, told Werner that he too had seen the light by the Fox Tower when he’d driven home along the City Road.

Neither the mechanic nor the coal merchant had come forward previously because they couldn’t read English, the only language the reward leaflets distributed by the police were printed in. The White Russian Kurochkin had left Peking on an extended business trip to Manchuria the day after Pamela’s murder, and he hadn’t heard of it until now.