Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (26 page)

Shura advised Werner to look for two White Russian prostitutes called Marie and Peggy, who’d been working in number 28 around the time of Pamela’s murder. He also advised him to find a Badlands pimp called Saxsen, who wasted his evenings in the cafés and restaurants along Chuanpan, Soochow, and Hougou Hutong. Track down Saxsen, and most probably he’d find the two women, if they were still in Peking and still alive; but Shura warned Werner that they were veteran Badlands whores—their life expectancy was not to be envied.

Shura claimed that he’d spoken with Peggy shortly after Pamela’s murder. Peggy was one of the girls who’d been rousted in number 27 by Han and his men. She’d been taken to Morrison Street, stuck in a cell for the night, and questioned by Inspector Botham in the small hours. The British policeman was drunk and aggressive, Peggy said; he had groped her and leered at her. Scared, she had clammed up.

On her release she returned to number 28, where the brothel was shuttered and closed for business. But the girls were still inside; they were being detained there because Madam Leschinsky was worried they would talk about what they’d seen or heard. Peggy had since fled Peking, but to where Shura had no idea.

It was an unlikely alliance, to say the least—the upright former diplomat scholar Sinologist and the hermaphrodite White Russian nightlife habitué.

But through Shura’s network, Werner did find Saxsen. This man was something different altogether from anyone Werner had met. A near-destitute White Russian pimp and small-time heroin dealer with a criminal record that stretched back to tsarist Russia, he was well known to the Legation Quarter police. Saxsen supplied White Russian girls not just to number 28 but also to other brothels in the Badlands, and he handily lived next door, in a seedy lodging house at number 29. He sold dope as well as sex to keep his girls close by. He made sure they were hooked, and he made sure he was their exclusive supplier.

Saxsen spent his waking hours, which were almost exclusively at night, in the dive bars and seedy cafés of Chuanpan Hutong. His world was small and sordid. Through Shura he’d learned that Werner was offering rewards for witnesses to his daughter’s murder, and he arrived at Armour Factory Alley with Marie in tow, a ‘fairly good-looking, healthy-looking woman of about thirty years of age, who spoke English fluently,’ as Werner later described her.

Marie was willing to talk. She told Werner that she knew Prentice, that he had an extremely sadistic nature. She’d seen him flash his knife around in number 28 a bunch of times. The girls were afraid of him, and of his friend Knauf, who was also fond of flashing knives around—as he did regularly at a restaurant opposite number 28 called Fu Sheng, which was where the prostitutes met their pimps. Marie told Werner that Prentice often rented a room for his parties at number 28, always the downstairs bedroom, which was rarely used by the regular working girls, who stayed upstairs. The room was booked in advance and by phone. The going rate was twenty-five Chinese dollars, in cash.

Marie had been hired to dance naked at Prentice’s apartment for him and his friends: they paid, but they expected their pound of flesh. She named Pinfold, Knauf, John O’Brian and another man she knew only as Jack as regulars at Prentice’s flat, and frequently with him at number 28—these were the men referred to as Prentice’s ‘pals.’

Prentice, Marie said, was one of the men in that room at number 28 with Pamela on the night she died. Marie and Peggy had been working upstairs with the other girls, and the place was busy. A group of off-duty Italian Marine Guards were availing themselves of the services at Madam Leschinsky’s and also drinking next door at the Oparinas’ bar. Security had been tight—number 28 was officially out of bounds for foreign soldiers, so their presence there needed to be kept quiet.

From an upstairs window Marie had seen a car arrive. Three men and a girl got out, all of them foreign, and entered the courtyard. The car turned around and drove back in the direction of the Legation Quarter. A short time later Marie heard two screams from the floor below, followed by one very loud piercing scream, and then a ‘terrific thud’ that sounded like furniture being kicked over.

She had later talked about the incident with Peggy, who was working in the next bedroom. She too had heard the screams and thud, and had earlier seen Prentice arrive with Joe Knauf and a ‘half-caste’ man, who she thought called himself John O’Brian. Both girls knew and feared the men. Marie had also seen the doctor to the Italian Marine Guards, a man called Capuzzo, talking with Prentice in the courtyard just after the car arrived.

Marie now said to Werner, ‘Prentice killed her.’

At that she was ordered to shut up by Saxsen, who told Werner she’d given him enough to get paid. And Marie, completely under the control of her pimp, who was himself perhaps afraid of being implicated in Pamela’s murder, obeyed. She would say no more, and despite Werner’s pleas, the two of them left the house.

A few weeks later, when Werner was able to see Shura again, he begged the Russian to appeal to Marie to talk to him once more, this time without Saxsen. But things had changed quickly in those weeks, and Shura now claimed that Marie was a hopeless case. She was a heroin addict like all Saxsen’s girls, and Shura had seen her slumped in dive bars with her eyes rolling and her head lolling from side to side, too doped up to work anymore. Saxsen had dumped her.

Werner suggested Marie be taken somewhere to cure her of her addiction. Shura believed that without the drug she would be insane in a day and dead within a week. Werner said he was willing to ap-peal to her family for help, if he could find them. Shura informed him bluntly that Marie’s father was in Peking, but he was a hopeless drunk. It was he who’d sold her into prostitution in the first place, and he’d done so in return for a share of the profits she brought Saxsen. Those profits had dried up now—her father certainly would not help her.

Werner went searching for Marie himself, through the bars and brothels of the Badlands, but she seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

That left Peggy. Werner had heard she was still in northern China somewhere, and he sent his agents to look for her. They found her in Harbin, a city full of Russian émigrés in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. She agreed to talk, but off the record. She refused to make an affidavit—she was too fearful of revenge, and she had been treated roughly by a drunk Inspector Botham at Morrison Street on the night of the roust. But she confirmed the presence of Prentice, O’Brian, Leschinsky, Consiglio, the Italian doctor Capuzzo and the Italian Marine Guards at number 28 on the night in question. She told Werner’s agents that Capuzzo and Prentice were old friends, and they’d been at number 28 together on several occasions.

Peggy too was sinking into a pit of heroin addiction. She was broke and living in appalling conditions in freezing-cold Harbin. No longer able to work, she could not pay her dealers. Werner considered bringing her to Peking for treatment, but before he could arrange it, she disappeared again, this time for good.

Werner seethed. If the detectives had handled the questioning of the prostitutes better at the time, they would have been able to place Pamela in Chuanpan Hutong, and they would have had a link to Prentice, and to John O’Brian, whom Werner had met and disliked. O’Brian had been one of Pamela’s most persistent suitors, and it now transpired that he was also one of Prentice’s pals. If Pamela had been invited to a party O’Brian was attending, she would not have suspected anything was amiss.

Werner could only wonder how long the gang had been targeting his daughter, and how many men had been involved. It sickened him to think about it. O’Brian, Gorman, Pinfold, Prentice—all of them were connected to Pamela in different ways, and all of them had been at number 28 on that unthinkable night in January 1937.

The Hunters

I
n that summer of 1939, Werner had also realised he had no choice but to visit 28 Chuanpan Hutong himself, now that he was sure it was the
locus delicti
. He owed it to his daughter to follow the path of her last journey.

He went first to number 27, intending to talk to the Oparinas. He had no doubt they knew exactly what had happened in the premises next door. Werner knew little about the couple except that they were White Russians. Madam Oparina had reputedly been widowed five times over, and had financially benefited from the death of each husband, raising not a few eyebrows over the years. Her son Yashka had been a hunting and drinking pal of Prentice’s. And then of course there was the story about Madam Oparina once running a brothel with Joe Knauf, until the two had fallen out.

But when Werner got to the dive bar, he found it shuttered and the Oparinas gone, apparently to Shanghai. Werner was stymied.

Then he recalled a vital piece of information that Shura had given him: that there was only one room inside the compound of number 28 that could have been used for the party with Pamela. It was on the ground floor, on the southern side of the compound, along the wall that adjoined Chuanpan Hutong. This room had a bed in it and was attached to a bathroom. Werner hadn’t known of the room previously. He’d heard that the ground floor contained just the reception and a dining room, and that all the bedrooms were upstairs.

He decided to see for himself. He expected the place to be shut and locked up, and that anyone not known or not clearly there on ‘business’ would be refused admission. He had passed by before at night and noted tough-looking Chinese bouncers on the door. Now he managed to gain access to the roof of a grocery store opposite number 28. The buildings along the
hutong
were only two storeys high at most, but from the roof he could see over the wall of number 28 and ascertain the layout of the brothel.

Once down from the roof, he crossed the road and was surprised to find the street door of number 28 ajar, and no security men present. He went in. Some Chinese servants in the central courtyard asked him what he wanted. Werner ignored them and stepped sharply to the right, walking the few steps to the bedroom that Shura had told him about. An old Russian man stood at the entrance but did not bar Werner’s way.

The doorway opened on to a bathroom with a full-size bathtub against one wall and a hand basin on another. Past this anteroom was the bedroom, largish, with a big double bed in the centre. There was also a wardrobe, dressing table and some chairs. Werner noted that the legs on one of the chairs looked to have been broken and then repaired with metal braces.

Back out in the courtyard, he looked around, again ignoring the old Russian and the Chinese servants. Another Chinese man stood leaning on the staircase by the kitchen entrance, watching. Werner approached him, hoping he might be the cook that neither his agents nor the Japanese Kempeitai nor the Chinese Cheng Chi Tui had been able to find.

‘Is there anyone here named Chen, Chen Ching-chun?’ he asked the man.

‘Yes, I am he.’

Werner couldn’t believe his luck. He invited the cook to come to Armour Factory Alley, but at that moment Brana Shazker, the new madam of number 28, came down the stairs from the bedrooms above and began to shout and scream at them both. The cook disappeared to his basement kitchen, and Werner was hustled out of the courtyard and onto the street, where the gate was slammed shut and bolted behind him.

For weeks afterward, Werner’s agents went regularly to number 28 to try to persuade Chen to talk with Werner, but they could never gain access to the place, or reach the cook. Eventually they learnt that he’d been fired and smuggled out of Peking by Madam Shazker.

Apart from the name of the man who’d struck the fatal blow to his daughter—either Prentice, Knauf, O’Brian or Capuzzo—Werner thought he had almost everything now. There was just one other minor detail that had been constantly worrying him: according to the autopsy, Pamela’s last meal had been Chinese food. He knew she hadn’t eaten Chinese food at the Gurevitches’ or at the skating rink, and it seemed unlikely that she’d done so at Prentice’s flat or at Chuanpan Hutong. He finally solved that nagging mystery.

After a long search, Werner’s detectives had found several former classmates of the married student Han Shou-ching, whose nose Werner had broken with his cane. The students remembered Han Shou-ching and Pamela being friends, nothing more. He’d been deeply upset by her murder and had told the students that the day before, he had met her by chance outside the American drugstore on Hatamen Street. Pamela felt bad about her father lashing out at him, and he suggested they have dinner the following evening.

And indeed the proprietor of the drugstore, when Werner’s agents followed the story up, remembered Pamela talking with a Chinese youth outside the shop on 6 January.

The following night, Han Shou-ching met her at the skating rink and they went to a Chinese restaurant on Tung Tan Pailou Hutong, on the edge of the Legation Quarter. The restaurant was popular with the students at Han’s college and not far from Armour Factory Alley. They cycled there, had a quick meal, and then he accompanied Pamela back to the skating rink, just five minutes or so by bike. He knew she lived in the other direction, but assumed she was meeting up with her skating friends again.

So there Werner had it. Pamela’s last meal had been eaten just minutes from her home. She would have gotten back to the rink on Legation Street around eight p.m.

He wrote again to the Foreign Office, detailing his visit to the brothel along with the other new evidence, including his own hand-drawn map of the layout of number 28, and a map detailing Chuanpan Hutong and its proximity to the Fox Tower. He sent copies to Consul Archer and Ambassador Clark Kerr.

In his letter he quoted an old Chinese proverb, ‘
Shui lo shih chu
’
—
As the water recedes, the rock appears.

At the Foreign Office, the note attached to Werner’s latest letter read simply: ‘Murder of Pamela Werner. Mr. Werner continues progressive investigation. Further results obtained.’

What Werner wanted now was a confession. As the long and humid summer of 1939 became a blustery and rainy autumn, Werner received an anonymous letter at Armour Factory Alley. The writer of the letter stated that they had heard Pinfold declare on 8 January 1937, ‘Prentice killed her.’ But Werner wanted to know for sure. He wanted to talk to all the men who’d been in the room at number 28 that night with his daughter—Prentice, Knauf, O’Brian, Pinfold and Capuzzo.

They were a mixed group, from professionals to the destitute, from ostensibly upstanding members of Peking’s foreign community to those with lengthy criminal records. They lived in well-appointed apartment buildings or in cheap flophouses; they were American, British, Canadian, Italian. What they had in common was their membership in a gang. They were habitués of the Badlands and, in particular, 28 Chuanpan Hutong.

Werner sought out Pinfold first, but it appeared that the Canadian ex-mercenary had fled Peking shortly after the police released him in January 1937. His whereabouts were unknown. Werner’s agents heard that Pinfold had been living in Prentice’s flat around the time of the murder, but the two had fallen out after a ferocious argument. The word was that Prentice had paid for Pinfold to get out of Peking and never return.

Prentice himself had refused to discuss the murder or its investigation with anyone since being questioned by the police. In the midst of a whirlwind of half-truths and gossip and speculation, the dentist remained tight-lipped. By March 1937, the talk about him had reached the point where a group of fellow professionals asked him to attend a dinner ‘to lay his cards on the table,’ as it was described to Werner—to account for himself and the rumours surrounding him. Prentice promised to attend but never showed up.

Shortly after Prentice was questioned by Han and Dennis, an American vice-consul in Tientsin who’d heard the whisperings about the dentist’s involvement in Pamela’s murder requested a meeting with him. Prentice refused to discuss the case at any length with the man.

With Peking’s foreign community being the goldfish bowl it was, Werner had inevitably seen Prentice occasionally on the street, but oddly enough the two had never formally met, even though both were long-term residents of the city, and Prentice had treated Pamela. After her death, any chance encounters between the two men were marked by Prentice’s efforts to ingratiate himself. Werner recalled the dentist’s ‘cringing politeness and exaggerated attempts to express sympathy to me.’

But now Werner had decided to confront Prentice head-on, and he went to his flat on Legation Street.

In this smart, modern building, far from the transient lodgings that most of his associates inhabited, Prentice was still comfortably off; that much was obvious. He was still dressing well, still looking healthy, despite the deprivations of life in occupied Peking. Arthur Ringwalt at the American Legation had intimated to Werner that the Americans were concerned about Prentice’s close relationship to certain Japanese officials. There was a suspicion that he might be receiving access to food supplies, and preferential currency transactions, in return for his support for the occupation. He was, in other words, a collaborator.

Werner knew that when DCI Dennis and Commissioner Thomas had gone to Prentice’s flat to bring him in for questioning, Dennis had noted the smell of fresh paint. And here was another thing that had never been followed up on. Nobody had asked the landlord why an entire flat had been repainted in midwinter, when the open windows required to ventilate the fumes would have reduced the place to an icebox. Nobody had sought out the workmen who did the painting to ask what they had painted over.

Prentice talked to Werner in the courtyard of his building, where he expressed sympathy for the loss of Pamela. But wasn’t her case closed now? He admitted to having visited 28 Chuanpan Hutong, but only once, and claimed it was a full year before the murder. And yes, he and Joe Knauf had regularly gone hunting together, along with the man known only as Jack. Sometimes they’d been joined by Yashka Oparina, John O’Brian and Dr Capuzzo. Where was the harm in that?

Prentice refused to discuss his now-defunct Western Hills nudist colony, or any so-called nude dances. But he did confirm he’d given some of his pals passkeys to his flat, in case they needed somewhere to stay in difficult times. What were pals for, after all? He then ended the conversation and retreated inside to his flat.

Neither Sun the rickshaw puller nor Marie the prostitute had been able to identify the make and model of the car they saw pull up that night outside number 28, but Sun had sketched the car for Werner, and both his and Marie’s description matched the vehicle Prentice had owned at the time: a Ford Black and Tan, with a black body and a tan roof. It was a common enough foreign import in China, but cars in general were not that common.

Werner went looking for Prentice’s car, only to find that it had been sold to an unidentified buyer shortly after the murder. He tried to track down the buyer, but too much time had elapsed. Under the occupation, all private cars had been ordered off the road so as to reserve petrol for the Japanese military, a few police cars and diplomatic vehicles. The rest had been sold, mothballed or confiscated, and invariably they’d been repainted and had their plates changed. The Ford proved impossible to trace, as did the Chinese chauffeur who’d been seen driving it. He was another of China’s lost millions, people who’d vanished in the wake of the Japanese invasion.