Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (30 page)

E. T. C. Werner remained in Armour Factory Alley until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which he was forced to move into the British Legation’s compound. He was now a refugee in the place he had first come to as a student interpreter, more than half a century earlier.

Then, in March 1943, all Allied nationals remaining in Peking were rounded up by the Japanese for internment, or, as the Japanese officials put it, ‘for their safety and comfort.’ But the internment camps were neither safe nor comfortable. Along with others, Werner was sent two hundred miles south to Shantung province, to what Tokyo called the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Centre.

He was just one of many foreigners required to assemble at Peking Central Railway Station with no more than a single suitcase. They were a ragtag bunch—British, American, Australian and other nationalities; they were schoolteachers, businesspeople, dope addicts rousted from their garrets. That day they all travelled third class, by order of the Japanese military.

As the foreigners were marched to the waiting train, the Chinese residents of Peking were made to line up and witness the reduced state of Western power and prestige in China. It was too much for some of the internees—one man dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot and was left where he lay. Werner, with his own weak heart, had to leave behind the things that had defined his life—his books, papers, antiques, family heirlooms and mementos. He had to cease his investigation into his daughter’s murder and was no longer able to make his pleas to the Foreign Office for the case to be reopened.

The Weihsien Civilian Assembly Centre was a former American Presbyterian mission. It was surrounded by sorghum fields and had an Edwardian-style church close to the huts, guard towers, machine-gun posts and electrified barbed wire. Two thousand foreign nationals were crammed inside with no plumbed toilets, so that a cesspool stench and swarms of flies pervaded. There were long queues for food, and when it rained the camp became a sea of mud, with walls collapsing and roofs leaking. There were pests aplenty, bedbugs and filth. The Shantung winter evenings were bitterly cold, the summer stiflingly humid.

Werner was allocated a bed in Block 47. His room—K—measured nine by twelve feet. Among the room’s inmates was a tempestuous American ex-marine given to violent rages, a junkie called Briggs who was forced to go cold turkey in the camp, and, for a while, a young boy from Tientsin who had attended the grammar school and had known Pamela.

Werner was excused from work due to his age. He was also issued a green badge that gave him priority in the food queues. Once he settled in he gave daily lectures as part of the camp’s activities program—‘Chinese History from a Sociologist’s Standpoint’ was a lecture that one inmate remembered attending.

The camp was very mixed company—American missionaries, former marines, teachers, a sprinkling of Peking’s underworld, now finally rounded up, and at least one former madam of a Badlands brothel, along with several of her daughters who’d worked as prostitutes in her establishment. There were several former managers of Badlands cabarets and nightclubs as well as several women who had been members of Shura’s dancing troupe. There were also a number of British policemen from Tientsin who had served under DCI Dennis, and members of the British Municipal Council in Tientsin who had convened to deal with the problem of Sydney Yeates.

Most people in Weihsien knew who Werner was, and they knew about Pamela. One man in particular certainly did—the camp dentist and fellow internee, Wentworth Baldwin Prentice.

Prentice was kept busy. Poor nutrition led to gum disease, and toothpaste for the inmates was dried cuttlefish ground into a powder. Fillings consisted of copper amalgam, although bad teeth were usually just pulled. Prentice spent hours pumping the treadle that powered his drill, or trying to disinfect his equipment.

It’s difficult to imagine just how hard it must have been for Werner to be locked up with the man he suspected of murdering his daughter. Some inmates later recalled him pointing at Prentice and calling out, ‘You killed her, I know you killed Pamela. You did it.’

At other times he seemed to point to people at random. Some feared for his sanity, but he was forgiven his odd behaviour. His advanced years and tragic past, combined with internment, explained his actions to most.

Prentice himself continued to say nothing at all about the murder. He had perhaps found religion. He certainly gave religious books to several young boys who visited his makeshift surgery. Was it a genuine conversion, or a case of any reading matter in a time of shortage? Or was it evidence of a guilty conscience?

The U.S. authorities were certainly never persuaded of Prentice’s moral standing. In August 1942, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence agency, had opened a file on Prentice to investigate his possible collaboration with the Japanese in Peking. But they never managed to gather any firm evidence. Once again, Prentice had got away with it.

And then, in August 1945, Weihsien was liberated by American forces as the Japanese scuttled out of China in defeat. The internees emerged malnourished and downtrodden. Imprisonment had broken many of the once wealthy and socially important inmates, those who had either been unable to leave China due to their official position or who had simply refused to read the writing on the wall of the Japanese invasion. Ripped from their lives, their grand houses and their elevated status in Peking and Tientsin, they had never adjusted to living in cramped barracks, using fetid toilets, queuing for meagre food rations, and clothing themselves in virtual rags. Many of the older prisoners had succumbed to disease, or simply given up and died.

But not Werner. Despite being in his eighties, he walked out of the camp and took the train home to Peking. He moved back into his old house on Armour Factory Alley, where his loyal staff had stayed on in order to stop squatters taking possession.

He found himself in a China that was irrevocably changed but still fighting a civil war. The Japanese were out of the picture, but the Nationalists and the Communists remained enemies. Peking had forgotten Pamela; the British Legation had forgotten Werner. He made several further enquiries to the Foreign Office and the legation, but they too were ignored. Werner’s findings were a potential embarrassment to the British diplomats and officials in China, who’d worked so strenuously to close down his daughter’s case and to discredit him. It was a pursuit into which they’d put far more effort than they ever did into solving the crime.

And then he stopped contacting them. Had his tenacity to see Pamela’s killers brought to justice finally been exhausted? Or was it because of the death of Prentice, the man Werner believed most directly responsible for his daughter’s death?

Prentice too had returned to Peking after Weihsien, and he died at his flat on Legation Street in July 1947, aged fifty-four. His relatively young age was perhaps Werner’s one consolation.

Throughout the years of civil war, Werner stayed stubbornly on in Peking as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army began its prolonged retreat. Eventually it crumbled, and the remnants of its forces fled with their generalissimo to the island of Taiwan. In January 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s forces claimed Peking for the Communists, and in October Werner became a resident of the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China. The new regime soon shuttered the brothels and opium dens and gambling joints of the Badlands for good.

By January 1951 Werner was one of just seventy British subjects left in the city, and by October the number had dwindled to thirty. An obstinate, independent man, Werner could find no accommodation with China’s Communist rulers, and he finally decided to leave.

He returned to an England he hardly recognised, having not been back there since 1917. He had no family left—his closest relative, his sister Alice, had died in 1935. E. T. C. Werner eventually passed away on 7 February 1954 and was buried at Ramsgate in Kent. It seems that nobody who’d known him was left alive to attend the short service.

He had lived eighty-nine years. He had seen China as a dynasty with an emperor, as a republic with a generalissimo, and finally as a people’s republic with a dictator. On 16 February the
Times
of London ran a lengthy and detailed obituary of his life, noting his long diplomatic career, his prolific contribution to the West’s understanding of China, and his marriage to Gladys Nina Ravenshaw. Its final comment noted that ‘their adopted daughter Pamela was murdered at the age of 20 in Peking.’

Pamela Werner’s body now lies somewhere deep under modern Beijing’s Second Ring Road, in what was once the British Cemetery. For these past seventy-odd years she has been what she claimed to have always been—alone.

The Fox Tower still looms over Armour Factory Alley, and over what is left of the messy rookery of
hutong
that were the Peking Badlands. It looms over the ancient Tartar Wall, where Pamela was found that freezing morning in January 1937. Only very elderly Pekingers call it the Fox Tower now; only the very old talk of fox spirits. Few, if any, are left who remember the day that the mutilated body of a foreign girl was found at its base.

Chinese mythology has it that when a fox spirit departs this world, its image flickers briefly before disappearing. The spirit’s influence is rendered benign, and the world of mortals can finally begin the process of healing. Scars fade and disappear, blemishes and stains gradually recede, until no trace of them is left and life can return to normality. But this is merely illusion, for in reality everything has changed and nothing remains as it was before.

THE WRITING OF
MIDNIGHT IN PEKING

I
first read of Pamela Werner in a biography of the American journalist Edgar Snow, whose best-selling
Red Star Over China
introduced Mao Tse-tung to the world in the late 1930s. A footnote made reference to Edgar’s wife Helen feeling nervous after Pamela’s mutilated body was found not far from the Snows’ house in Peking. Helen Foster Snow frequently bicycled home that way at night herself. The footnote also mentioned fox spirits, a ‘love cult,’ the fact that Pamela’s father had once been a British consul in China, and that the murder was never solved.

I put the book down and fell asleep, and in the morning the first thing that came into my mind was the murder of Pamela Werner. When something casually read remains in the front of your brain the morning afterwards, it’s usually the sign of a great tale.

Unable to get the story out of my head, I began tracking down newspapers from the time, in archives in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and London. I learned that the investigation had been jointly handled by the Peking police and a British detective working in China, a unique occurrence and a potentially fascinating collaboration between a senior Chinese and a European detective. Some papers tantalisingly hinted at official interference in the investigation by the British Legation—a desperate attempt to save face by His Majesty’s government in the Far East. The reports of Pamela’s autopsy confirmed that this was a particularly nasty murder, one that had set both the Chinese and foreign rumour mills of Peking working overtime, and sparked paroxysms of fear in a city already jittery about an attack by the surrounding Japanese. Pamela’s was one murder that seemed to presage thousands; an outrage in a city braced for much worse to follow.

All the details around the murder case were intriguing: an eccentric father with a colourful past, fox spirits running riot at night in the old Tartar City of Peking, the suggestion of illicit sex, a whiff of opium, whispers of scandal, a previously rarely mentioned underclass of criminal and corrupt foreigners in the city, the purposeful obfuscation by pompous British diplomats and the terrible lack of final justice in the case. All taking place against a backdrop of a doomed China slipping inexorably into wholesale war, which was followed by the drawing tight of the bamboo curtain under Mao. Pamela Werner had been forgotten by everyone a long time ago, it seemed.

It was when I came across a photo of her, on a cold morning in the British Library’s newspaper archives in north London, that I knew her story had to be told. I started writing. And then, by chance, while tying up the loose ends of some research in Britain’s National Archive at Kew, I stumbled across an uncatalogued file in one of several dozen boxes of random correspondence sent from Peking during the years 1941–45. The letters in the file had been recorded, acknowledged, filed and forgotten. There were some 150 pages of close type, with handwriting added by the author in the margins.

It took a while to work out what it all was: the details of the private investigation E. T. C. Werner had conducted after the official one was halted. Peking was by then occupied by the Japanese, yet Werner’s search uncovered more than the detectives had found; it answered questions that they had been unable to, settling nagging doubts and bringing more to light than the official inquest ever did. It took these lost letters of Werner’s to bring Pamela’s murder into focus for me.

In the course of writing this book I travelled to the foreign treaty ports where Werner once served; to the backstreets of Shanghai’s Frenchtown, where so many of the accused and guilty fled; and to Tianjin (Tientsin), where Pamela had gone to boarding school and where other scandals dwelt. Naturally I spent time in Beijing attempting to penetrate the increasingly glitzy and modern exterior of the Chinese capital, looking for traces of that prewar, prerevolutionary city—the former Legation Quarter, the once infamous Badlands, the
hutong
of the old Tartar City and the Fox Tower. Remarkably, most of the key locations in Pamela’s life and story remain, despite the massive disruption and construction in Beijing in the past three decades. I made contact with the few remaining people around the world who remembered Pamela. I rechecked every false scent and misguided trail, every officious injunction from the British authorities.

I came to agree with Werner’s conclusion, and I reconstructed the events of his daughter’s final night, in the chapter ‘Invitation to a Party,’ using his findings. From the start, I thought it important that Pamela Werner not be forgotten, and that some sort of justice, however belated, be awarded her.

—PAUL FRENCH, SHANGHAI, 2011