Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (24 page)

The presence of a lamplight by the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January answered a question that, as far as Werner could tell, hadn’t really been asked before. When a lamp was found in a ditch at the base of the Fox Tower, after Pamela’s body was discovered, it was recorded as evidence, but nobody knew whether it was connected to the murder or had been left there previously. The evidence of the mechanic, the coal merchant and the White Russian motorist suggested the lamp had been left by the killers. Presumably, whoever had dumped Pamela’s body at the Fox Tower would have needed some sort of light.

And so once more Werner returned to the British Legation, to appeal yet again to Consul Archer. He prepared himself to restate all the additional testimony that he, Werner, with his own resources, had accumulated that the police investigation had not—Ethel Gurevitch’s new story; the note left at the Wagons Lits for Pamela; the witnesses to Pinfold being on Armour Factory Alley on 6 January; the note from Prentice to Werner regarding dental treatment for Pamela, which linked the dentist directly to his daughter and caught him out in the lie he’d told about never having met her. Then there was the matter of Gorman being with Pamela at the skating rink, having previously made improper advances to her; the impossibility of Prentice being at the cinema on the night of the murder; Sun Te-hsing’s strange trip to the Stone Bridge with a comatose girl matching Pamela’s description; and now the lamplight seen by three separate men at the Fox Tower in the early hours of 8 January.

Surely, Werner believed, all this was enough to reopen the case. At the very least it warranted investigation of 28 Chuanpan Hutong. The brothel had in fact never been part of the police enquiry.

And most important of all, it appeared that Colonel Han had deliberately meddled with the evidence of the case, had fabricated the rickshaw puller’s testimony. Whatever his reasons for acting this way, the fact was that the real evidence remained uninvestigated.

This time Archer refused to even see him. The British establishment was showing Werner its collective back in no uncertain terms—he was no longer welcome at his own country’s legation.

But Werner persisted. Through the long-serving Chief Chen at Ch’ienmen headquarters, head of police for all Peking, Werner arranged for the lamp found at the Fox Tower to be tested for fingerprints. He was surprised that this hadn’t been done before, and now the results came back negative. Too many people had handled the lamp, and all the prints on it were smudged. It seemed that Sergeant Binetsky had not secured the evidence properly, thereby corrupting it beyond recovery.

More remarkably, Werner discovered from the records that none of the items recovered at the murder scene had been tested for fingerprints—not Pamela’s clothing, not her shoes, her belt, her diary, nor her membership card for the French Club skating rink. He was simply dumbfounded at this. He requested that all the items be tested now, but the results were the same—all had been contaminated, all had been handled by too many people. No definite prints could be obtained.

Werner remembered the day he’d been interviewed at Armour Factory Alley by DCI Dennis. Botham and Binestky had walked around the house picking up Pamela’s personal belongings and placing them haphazardly in their overcoat pockets, never even providing an official receipt for what they had taken. That the evidence had then been useless surprised him not a jot. The attitude of the police towards Pamela’s belongings had been slapdash at best. Werner had had to repeatedly request Morrison Street to return Pamela’s belongings, including her valuable platinum and diamond wristwatch, which he wanted as a memento of his daughter. The silver casket that had been taken from her room was returned broken.

Werner now attempted to go over the British consul’s head. He had come to despise fifty-year-old Allan Archer, whom he saw as incompetent. Archer had entered the diplomatic service through the back door, having failed his entrance exams in 1911 and using his connections to get a posting. He had no formal training in the law, yet he was allowed to sit in judgement over others.

Earlier in 1938, the British crown advocate, the United Kingdom’s highest legal representative in China, had visited Peking, and Werner had attempted to see him. Archer blocked the meeting. As Werner was now barred from the legation compound, he appealed directly to the new British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, temporarily based in Shanghai since the fall of Nanking, prompting Archer himself to write to Clark Kerr:

This particular line of enquiry, as Mr. Werner well knows, was fully investigated by British and Chinese police officials at the time the crime was committed, but unfortunately without any result at all. . . . the fullest investigations have been made into all the other lines of enquiry without the authorities being able to put their hands on the criminals—all possible lines of enquiry have now been exhausted without any success and every possible avenue explored.

Clark Kerr, only recently installed in the job and previously unaware of either Werner or the murder of his daughter, backed his man in Peking. And then, in a move suggested by Archer, Clark Kerr offered Werner an inducement to cease his investigation of the case—a prestigious Sinology professorship in London. Werner could return home and sink into quiet academic obscurity.

Outraged, Werner wrote back to Clark Kerr: ‘Very flattering, but—nothing doing! Shirking or slinking away is not my idea of how to solve the mystery of the brutal murder of a weak child.’

Putting his anger aside, he appealed repeatedly to the ambassador for help, but Clark Kerr insisted that any decision regarding further action was to be taken by Archer, whose ‘exhausted lines of enquiry’ and ‘fullest investigation’ Werner had proved to be anything but.

Eventually, in December 1938 Werner wrote to the Foreign Office in London, enclosing a copy of a report of his investigations, a second copy of which he sent to Ambassador Clark Kerr. Receipt of his report by the Foreign Office was acknowledged in February 1939, and a memo to that effect placed on file. The memo noted:

It is not necessary to read through all the enclosures in Mr. Werner’s letter; it is sufficient to glance at his conclusions on pp. 27/28 and his renewed attack on Messers. Fitzmaurice & Archer on pp. 33/35.

The information in Werner’s report represented some eighteen months’ work, by him and the people he’d paid to assist him. Now it was being dismissed virtually unread, except for those portions the Foreign Office considered to be direct attacks upon them and their officials.

Still Werner did not let up. He paid his two remaining Chinese agents to stake out 28 Chuanpan Hutong, instructing them to approach the staff discreetly and offer money for information. He found out plenty—details that DCI Dennis had never known, and that Han, if he’d known, had never revealed.

The madam of number 28 in January 1937 had been a fat half-Korean, half–White Russian woman called Madam Leschinsky, who lived with—and was possibly married to—a man called Michael Consiglio. This man, an ex–U.S. Marine of Italian and Filipino heritage, had served in Peking and Tientsin before leaving the army to become a full-time brothel manager with Leschinsky.

Werner still had friends at the American Legation, and they searched their files for Consiglio. According to the records, he held neither a Filipino nor an American passport. He was a local hire, having joined the marines in China and served only in China. This was not an uncommon practice for the U.S. Army in China, and as the Philippines were under American control, Consiglio’s Filipino heritage was enough for him to join up.

The third secretary at the American Legation, the veteran China hand Arthur Ringwalt, had kept a file on Consiglio since his discharge from the marines. As the operator of a brothel, he was a ‘person of interest,’ and was described by Ringwalt as being ‘of a most ferocious and cruel countenance.’ Consiglio had not served with distinction in the marines. He had in fact been thrown out.

Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio had closed down the brothel the day after Pamela’s murder. They sold their informal lease on the place soon after—for $4,000 in silver dollars less than they’d paid for it, a brothel that was reputedly earning them $100 in silver dollars a day in profit—and fled to Tientsin. From there they went to Shanghai and the anonymity of the city’s Frenchtown, allegedly using hastily gained provisional Chinese passports.

Werner hadn’t been able to find out who owned the building at number 28, but it seemed that whoever it was had encouraged Leschinsky and Consiglio to make haste out of Peking, and away from northern China altogether. He heard that the pair had been paid $1,000 in silver dollars by the owners to assist their escape. All the working girls who’d been at the brothel at the time had since been cleared out too, and who knew where they’d gone? Everyone had been told to keep their mouths shut if anyone asked about the place, and especially if anyone asked about the night of 7 January 1937. Most of the Chinese staff were also said to have moved on, or had fled Peking following the Japanese occupation.

Why sell a highly profitable business at a loss and skip town if you were innocent of any crime? And why, if not to prevent the building at number 28 being revealed as a crime scene and therefore closed for longer, had the mysterious owners paid off Leschinsky and Consiglio? Werner was becoming more and more convinced that the owners had also been paying protection money to the Peking police, perhaps to Colonel Han directly. That was why Han had avoided rousting the place, and why he had been so nervous when Werner mentioned it.

But Leschinsky and Consiglio and the owners would have known that no amount of protection money would help them once the daughter of a former British consul was murdered on the premises. They had no option but to shut up shop until things cooled.

Now number 28 was back in business, under new management. It had a new madam, new girls, new clients. The latter were overwhelmingly Japanese these days, but the Badlands was adaptable. If the occupiers wanted sake instead of wine, no problem, and the White Russian prostitutes learned to switch from asking ‘Business?’ to ‘Want to play?’ Different words, same game, although things were much tougher now—there was more competition.

The Japanese had set up more than two thousand new businesses in Peking since occupying the city, of which five hundred were brothels and a thousand were dope dens. Number 28 was hanging on as a curiosity. It was one of the last White Russian whorehouses in the Badlands, as most Russian refugees packed their bags and sought greater protection in the foreign-controlled concessions of Shanghai and Tientsin, which hadn’t succumbed to the invaders. The remain-ing white working girls were a novel attraction for the Imperial Japanese Army.

It took Werner a long time to track down the new operator of number 28. She turned out to be a veteran White Russian madam from Tientsin, who had run very profitable brothels on the British Concession’s Bruce Road for years, close to the American barracks. She was now calling herself Brana Shazker and was staying at the Hôtel de la Paix, commonly known as the Telegraph Hotel, an otherwise fairly respectable establishment in a traditional courtyard on Da Yuan Fu Hutong, just behind the Grand Hôtel de Pékin. Shazker was apparently making even more money from number 28 than Leschinsky and Consiglio had, as the Japanese soldiers queued to try the Russian girls.

Werner left a note for Madam Shazker in March 1939, saying he wanted to talk to her about a matter of business. When he met her at the Hôtel de la Paix, she was all smiles, until she realised who Werner was and what he wanted. Then she flew into a rage and began screaming and yelling. She had not been on Chuanpan Hutong that night, she said. She hadn’t even been in Peking—she was in Tientsin managing her brothel on Bruce Road at the time, and she could prove it. She had bought the lease on the brothel at number 28 fair and square from the owners, and she knew nothing at all about anything that might have happened there in January 1937.

Madam Shazker threw Werner out of her hotel room and refused point-blank to meet or communicate with him in the future.

Werner was left more convinced than ever that number 28 was the place he sought. There were other ways to get to it. Among his friends in Peking was a certain Mr Dolbetchef, head of a White Russian group in the city that hated the Soviet Union and issued a steady stream of anti-Stalin propaganda. Dolbetchef’s group was one of several organised White Russian outfits dedicated to bringing down Stalin and the Bolsheviks, and all of them had some support among the White Russians in China. They were also spied upon by Stalin’s secret police and by Tai Li’s Blue Shirts. As a result they were all paranoid, and spent most of their time trying to discredit each other’s groups as the rightful leaders of the Russian anti-Communist movement in China.

Dolbetchef’s group was highly compromised in the eyes of some, since it operated with encouragement from the Japanese authorities, receiving their protection and possibly their funding. Still, Dolbetchef had deep connections in the White Russian community and he told Werner that a woman who made donations to his cause was now the madam of 28 Chuanpan Hutong, which she ran for Brana Shazker.

Her name was Rosie Gerbert, and Dolbetchef had learned about her new job from a Russian Jew called Kan who had lodgings on Yang I Hutong in the Tartar City. Many semi-destitute White Russians and Jewish refugees lived in run-down boardinghouses there. Dolbetchef introduced Werner to Kan, who claimed to have had dealings with Gerbert when she was running a brothel in Newchwang, a small treaty port on the Gulf of Pechili, northeast of Peking.