Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (28 page)

Invitation to a Party

W
hen was the moment of realisation? When did the adventure and the flattery cease, the flirtation become something different? When did the night change from being an opportunity for a schoolgirl to make an entrée into a seemingly glamourous adult world, and instead turn nasty? At what point did Pamela become scared, knowing that terrible things were about to happen? When did she see the true nature of the men she was with? When had she clenched her fists with her thumbs inside, prepared to fight back? When had she screamed out? When was the moment she knew she was going to die?

Pamela hadn’t known she would be taken to a notorious brothel that evening. She thought she was going to a party, or a supper, and why not? It was a last chance for some Peking fun before leaving in a few weeks for England, where she would put the unsavoury events at Tientsin Grammar School behind her. She certainly hadn’t been aware that she would be in the company of men who were known to be violent, who preyed on young women and then forced themselves on them. Who would try to rape her in a squalid room in a Badlands whorehouse.

But that’s how Prentice and his gang worked. The pretty young white women they invited to their parties and suppers were just realising what life could offer them, but were still unaware of the dangers that lurked. They met in Prentice’s surgery, at the French Club skating rink, at Peking’s cinemas and department stores, in the tiffin salons and the polite bars of the Legation Quarter hotels. The men sent the girls secret notes, or they ‘accidentally’ bumped into them on the street and issued invitations to Prentice’s flat, the home of a professional man, a family man, safely in the heart of the Quarter.

Prentice had put it about that his family were in America for reasons to do with their health. No rumour had ever leaked out concerning the fears the U.S. authorities held for his daughter’s welfare, were she to stay in his presence. But the fact was that Edna Prentice had taken her three young children and left Peking, never to return. Divorce might have been impossible, but Edna made sure that her husband never had contact with his children again.

Prentice had forged a new life for himself in Peking, with two personas. Perhaps it was the life he had always wanted—on the one hand, he was a well-known professional within the upright and proper world of foreign Peking; on the other, a habitué of the Badlands, the host of parties where prostitutes were hired to dance naked for the lowlife of white Peking. But who else was going to these parties? Someone with enough influence to have the investigation into a murder closed down?

And then Prentice had decided to target Pamela. He would have heard she was back in Peking via Gorman or O’Brian, or perhaps others who’d met her over the Christmas holidays. The dentist probably met Pamela at the skating rink the evening before she died. She may also have skated with Thomas Jack—a witness claimed to have seen her skating with a short man that night. And of course Pamela had already met Prentice in his surgery; he was a charming man who lived opposite the rink, who had a family in Los Angeles that he often spoke about, a man of some means and standing in the community. A dapper dresser who knew George Gorman, and Ethel Gurevitch too—they had mutual friends. He had come over to say hello, perhaps to his friend Jack as well; it was nothing more than a pleasant coincidence.

He knew where she lived—he’d sent her father a receipt for her dental work the previous year, and anyway Werner was a well-known figure. He dispatched Pinfold to contact her on Armour Factory Alley the next day, to let her know there was to be a party that night. A note had been left for her at the Wagons Lits reception by way of formal invitation.

The idea of a Legation Quarter party would have appealed to Pamela. Her Christmas holidays had been fun after the confines of Tientsin Grammar School and the unpleasantness of Sydney Yeates. She’d been enjoying her last days in Peking, before the long voyage to England and a new start. Pamela wasn’t perfect; she was making the same mistakes many girls do when experimenting with their independence, their newfound power over men. Her tragedy was to encounter the wrong men, at just the wrong moment.

When Pamela left her house on Armour Factory Alley that afternoon, she was dressed in her tartan skirt that fell to just above her knees, silk stockings, an Aertex blouse, a cardigan and black shoes. Over these she put on her blue overcoat, belted at the waist. She had a handkerchief in her purse, some money, her new membership card for the French Club skating rink, and she wore, as she always did, her platinum watch with the diamond settings. Bought with her dead mother’s money, the watch reminded Pamela of her.

Lastly she tugged on a black beret and mittens before collecting her ice skates and cycling south out of Armour Factory Alley. She went along the Wall Road and into the Legation Quarter, as far as Canal Road and the Wagons Lits Hotel. This was Pamela’s Peking world; she knew it well and loved it.

Pamela was curious about Prentice’s party invitation. She was meeting Ethel at the Wagons Lits anyway; it would take only a minute to pick up the note. And so she did. On leaving the hotel, she stopped briefly to read the invitation on the steps of the building. The party was to be a small gathering for the Russian Christmas, and Prentice hoped she could attend. It would start around eight o’clock at his flat—3 Legation Street, just across from the skating rink.

Ethel arrived at the Wagons Lits just after five, as arranged. The two girls rode their bicycles a couple of streets away to the Gurevitches’ house on Hong Kong Bank Road, where they took tea with Ethel’s parents before going skating. Since Ethel was just fifteen, Pamela didn’t tell her about the invitation to the party, in case she might not understand.

After skating happily under the arc lights in the freezing air, the two girls gossiped with their mutual friend Lilian Marinovski, and at seven o’clock Pamela said she had to go. They assumed she meant home, but Pamela had other plans. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she was bored with being alone. She wanted more from life than school, homework, the dim lights of Armour Factory Alley and her elderly scholar father.

‘I’ve been alone all my life,’ she told her friends.

First she met her old friend Han Shou-ching, whom she could see only clandestinely now, after her father’s robust treatment of him. He was about the same age as Pamela, a student like her, and they got on well, even though their backgrounds were so very different.

He took her for a quick meal on nearby Tung Tan Pailou Hutong, a street Pamela knew well and where her cook regularly shopped. Afterwards Han cycled with her back to the French Club rink, where he left her.

It was around eight o’clock. Time for the party.

In Wentworth Prentice’s modern, roomy, high-ceilinged apartment on the main thoroughfare of the smart Legation Quarter, other friends were arriving. If the gathering consisted of Prentice’s usual associates, they would have included Thomas Jack, Pinfold, John O’Brian, and Yashka Oparina, the son of Madam Oparina.

Perhaps, too, Peter Liang was there. Liang was an independently wealthy Westernised Chinese who owned a fleet of cars, but he spent most of his time in the bars and cabarets of the Badlands and was regularly seen with Prentice. There would have been other women present, no doubt, and most likely one of them was the notorious Miss Ryan, a secretary with a foreign trading firm in the Legation Quarter. Miss Ryan was reputed to be a nymphomaniac. Rumour had it that soon after Pamela’s murder, her fiancé broke off their engagement on the grounds that he believed her to be ‘connected with the murder at the Fox Tower.’

But Pamela didn’t know any of these people’s backgrounds, or anything of the secret and sordid connections that bound them. She would have felt safe in the dentist’s prosperous apartment, and grown-up amid these partygoers.

Drinks were poured, jazz records played, mild flirtations in-dulged in. In the warm and inviting living room, hints ensued, and then suggestions that the night was young; why not head out to a few nightspots, a cabaret, take in the Russian Christmas celebrations? Prentice had a car, a chauffeur, it was easy.

And Pamela, ready for a night of fun with her new friends, who appeared so much more sophisticated and worldly than her boyfriend at Tientsin Grammar, decided to go along. John O’Brian was there, whom she knew, and other men were paying her attention. Perhaps Prentice promised to call her father and tell him she was at a gathering at his flat—it would be all right, the dentist would have assured her, he knew Werner, they’d been in contact before. It was all so flattering, exciting.

But these people were not her friends. Pamela entered number 28 with three men, one of whom was certainly Prentice. The others were probably John O’Brian and Joe Knauf. Dr Capuzzo, it seems, was already in the brothel with the off-duty Italian marines.

Pamela went inside with Prentice on one arm and Knauf on the other. She didn’t appear to be going against her will, but with the rickshaw puller the only witness, who could say what state she was in? Perhaps she didn’t know exactly where she was, but then again perhaps she did, and was thrilled by the decadence and furtiveness of slumming it in the Badlands.

Once through the narrow gateway into the courtyard, the group entered a side door on the right, which led to the bathroom and bedroom that Werner later saw. It was a distance of only five or six steps—he had measured it to prove that it was possible to get into the room without being seen from the courtyard.

Surely at this point Pamela must have realised there was no party, no cabaret, no Russian Christmas celebration. The room was grim—a dirty floor, a bare harsh lightbulb, sparse furnishings. There were no decorations, nothing to indicate that anyone lived here, but there was a large bed. This bedroom was a place of work.

The mood changed. If Pamela had thought that others from the flat were following behind them, she now knew she was alone with these men, who then tried to force themselves on her.

Did they laugh as they did so? Taunt her, tell her to stop flirting with them? They had done this before, had arranged this sort of scenario many times. Perhaps they told Pamela she should just accept her fate, enjoy it. Perhaps she threatened to report them, but that would have only made them laugh more. Who would she tell, anyway? And who would believe that well-known professional white men, including a dentist, a doctor at the Italian Legation, and a former suitor of hers, had taken her to a White Russian brothel in the Badlands and forced her to have sex with them?

They would all deny it, and if trapped, they would say she offered herself. At worst their reputations would be slightly tarnished, while Pamela’s would be destroyed. The Chinese police wouldn’t care—this was the Badlands, and bad things happened here.

But Pamela refused to give in. She had an independent streak that now flared up. That would have been the point at which things got decidedly nastier. The shouting started, the yelling. And then the abuse turned to physical violence.

The men cornered her in the room. They yanked at her tartan skirt, ripping it open at the eyelets on the side, right down to the hem. They ripped open her blouse. Her silk stockings got snagged on furniture corners as she tried to edge round the room away from the men. She clenched her fists with her thumbs balled inside to hit them, force them away from her. Impossible to imagine how desperate she must have felt in that bedroom with only one way out, through the bathroom and into the courtyard. And then the gate to the street, where between her and freedom were two or three more large men.

She screamed, a sound that was heard throughout the bedrooms of number 28, heard by the prostitutes Marie and Peggy, who were there that night. She screamed again.