Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (7 page)

Life on the north China salt flats suited Dennis just fine. His house was on well-to-do Hong Kong Road, and he also had a beach house in the seaside resort of Peitaiho. His son attended the Ecole Municipale Française and took riding lessons at the Tientsin stables with a White Russian who’d once taught the children of tsarist nobility. His wife oversaw the servants, and there was enough money left over for a stout Mongolian pony, Heathfield, which he entered at the Tientsin racecourse. The pony was a winner, making the front page of the
Peking and Tientsin Times
when it came in first at the Peking Maidens.

It was a life unimaginable in England on a policeman’s wage, and Dennis was a respected man in Tientsin. The police work was routine, but his position required him to attend civic functions and welcome the British ambassador when he came to town. Dennis was granted an automatic place among the worthies of British Tientsin. The city was better connected than it had been too, with tramp-steamer links along the China coast and a branch line of the Peking–Hankow railway.

There was the threat from the north to be monitored, of course, and the population was inevitably nervous. But the foreign concessions protected themselves with regiments of troops, which guaranteed some security from the rapacious warlords, the predatory Japanese, and the elusive and secretive White Lotus Society that terrorised the sorghum fields around the city. In fact Tientsin was a comparatively peaceable place, and it was only sometimes necessary to control the nightlife. It certainly wasn’t anything like Paddington on a wet Friday night at chucking-out time.

And then Dennis was called to the old Chinese capital to investigate a crime that had all Peking, and soon Tientsin, talking. It was the most savage murder of a foreigner in China in living memory. But the DCI arrived with his hands tied.

Late on the night before he left, he had been summoned by the British consul in Tientsin, the veteran China hand John Affleck, and told to confine his investigation to the Legation Quarter, by Foreign Office order.

There were to be no searches, no investigations outside the Quarter. Affleck was blunt—Dennis was to liaise with Colonel Han as he must, but he should be in closer contact with Commissioner Thomas and the legation staff. For a copper as independently minded as Dennis, this placed a severe limit on his ability to operate.

Dennis thought Affleck seemed unusually nervous during his visit, although the official line was clear as a bell—don’t mess with anything outside the Quarter. Moreover, the girl might have gone to school in Tientsin, but this case was nothing to do with that city. Dennis was on loan to Peking as a favour. He was to do his job and then get back here; this murder was not Tientsin’s problem.

Pamela

W
hen Pamela returned to Peking for the 1936 Christmas holidays, the telephone at Armour Factory Alley had rung constantly. Young men called to ask her to tiffins, dances, dinner parties, concerts. Retracing those final days, DCI Dennis and Colonel Han learnt that, in the main, her suitors came to pick her up at the house. They were often friends of the family, and when they weren’t, they met her father.

Politically, it had been a fraught Christmas and a tense New Year. All Peking had followed the incredible events surrounding what came to be known as the Sian Incident. On 12 December, Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped in Sian, a sprawling, ancient city at the start of the Silk Road. The kidnapper was a warlord and former dope addict called Chang Hsüeh-liang, also known as the Young Marshall, whose father, a former warlord, was the Old Marshall, better known as the infamous Tiger of Mukden, who’d been assassinated by the Japanese in the late 1920s.

The Young Marshall hoped to coerce Chiang into a united front with the Communists against the Japanese. For a fortnight during the standoff and the dead-of-night negotiations, the entire nation held its breath. Chiang was eventually released on Christmas Eve, to fireworks across the country. The action had its desired result—Chiang was forced to accept the formation of a united front—but the kidnapper paid a high price, remaining under house arrest for the next fifty-seven years.

Politically active foreigners like the Snows, Werner’s neighbours on Armour Factory Alley, followed every twist and turn of the drama to write about it. But Pamela seemed more interested in boys and dances than in world events. Tense faceoffs, encroaching Japanese, rogue warlords—she was keener to go ice-skating. And this Christmas there was a new skating rink, set up for foreigners by the French Legation. It was near the French Club, closer to home and less crowded than the frozen lakes in the shadows of the Forbidden City, or the Pei-ho Lake, or the YMCA rink on Hatamen Street. Pamela had been introduced to the new rink by family friends, and liked it so much she joined the club.

As well as skating, there’d been a whirl of parties and dances and the Western New Year. And Peking was also getting ready for its own major annual event, the lunar Chinese New Year. Nineteen thirty-seven would see the arrival of the Year of the Ox, the year of the element of fire, and traditional red-paper and fish-skin lanterns were already being hung in preparation for the celebrations. Many people had noted, as 1936 made way for 1937, that the partying was a little more frenzied than in previous years, as if the revelers sensed the end of something, and the coming of a kind of madness.

On the final afternoon of her life, after her father had gone out for his walk and she had finished writing her letters, Pamela donned her heavy overcoat and woolen mittens and pushed her straw-fair hair up into a beret. She took her ice skates and her bicycle and told Ho Ying, the household’s cook, who’d known her since she was a baby, that she’d be back by seven thirty. She said she would like meatballs and rice for dinner, and Ho Ying said he’d be sure to go to the nearby Tung Tan Pailou Hutong and see the butcher. Pamela left through the courtyard’s moon gate and cycled off along Armour Factory Alley to meet a friend for tea.

Ethel Gurevitch was from a White Russian family who’d been living in Peking for five years. At fifteen, she was younger than Pamela, but the two had gone to the same school, until Werner enrolled his daughter at Tientsin Grammar. The girls had run into each other the day before at the skating rink, where they caught up on news about school, their lives and mutual friends, agreeing to meet again the following afternoon.

They arranged to meet outside the Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits at five o’clock. Ethel arrived a couple of minutes past the hour, and Pamela turned up a few minutes later. They walked their bicycles round the corner to the Gurevitch family home on Hong Kong Bank Road, where they had tea and gossiped with Ethel’s mother, who also knew Pamela. Around six o’clock the girls headed over to the rink.

They skated together for an hour or so, wrapped up warmly under the bright arc lights the club had set up. A mutual friend, Lilian Marinovski, another White Russian girl who’d been at school with Pamela, was there too. At seven o’clock Pamela said she had to go home. She told Ethel and Lilian she’d promised her father she would be back by half past seven, and she knew he would worry if she was late. He was a worrier, a rather traditional father.

It had long been dark by seven, and it was freezing, with a bone-chilling wind through the blacked-out streets at the edge of the Quarter. The girls stood around the coal braziers that had been set up by the rink.

‘But aren’t you afraid to ride home alone?’ Ethel asked Pamela, while Lilian wanted to know if she was scared of the dark. They both lived nearby, within the Quarter, and were staying out later than normal on account of it being Russian Christmas, but Pamela would have to ride a mile or so outside the Quarter to Armour Factory Alley, skirting the notorious Badlands by riding along the Tartar Wall. Then she’d be pedaling through the Tartar City in the dark, down unlit
hutong
, with not even moonlight to help. From the Tartar City, looking back into the Legation Quarter, the only landmarks at night were the spindly spires of St Michael’s Church, the lights in the upper windows of the Wagons Lits and the Hôtel du Nord, and the black frame of the radio tower at the American Legation.

Pamela made what would later be considered an odd reply, one that was endlessly reported and mulled over. ‘I’ve been alone all my life,’ she told her friends. ‘I am afraid of nothing—
nothing!
And besides, Peking is the safest city in the world.’

With that, she left her two friends to retrieve her bicycle. It was the last they saw of her, waving as she disappeared into that bitter January night.

Peking was populous, but it was not a nighttime city to rival Shanghai. It was more conservative, reserved. Apart from the Badlands.

Lying in a narrow strip between the Legation Quarter and the Tartar City, the Badlands was a network of twisting
hutong
devoted to sin and vice. This part of Peking was sleepy and calm during daylight hours, but at night it grew raucous with those seeking illicit pleasures. Anything was available in the Badlands, at a price.

It had been known until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 as the Glacis, a military term meaning a piece of land kept open to provide a buffer zone, where attackers would be forced to expose themselves. Back then it was a no-man’s-land between Chinese and foreign Peking, a place where European troops were put through their drills and privileged foreigners exercised their horses. Since then the Glacis had become developed, and the polo fields swallowed up. Yet it retained its no-man’s-land feel, neither completely Chinese nor completely foreign, although technically it was under the jurisdiction of the Peking police.

Into this vacuum moved the dive bars, brothels and nightclubs, the gambling and drug dens, most of them run by stateless White Russians or, increasingly, Koreans acting as fronts for the Japanese. Effectively beyond the law, it had become the playground of the foreign underworld of Peking. The stiff-backed authorities of the Legation Quarter ignored the sin on their doorstep, and the Peking police turned up only to receive their ‘gifts’ from the various criminal elements.

By the 1930s part of the old Mongol Market had also been absorbed into the district, which was now commonly known as the Badlands. Along with low-life Chinese and foreigners, it drew curious visitors, and also played host to the U.S. Marines and the British, French and Italian soldiers who guarded the nearby legations. Its rookeries of vice catered for all tastes, no matter how exotic or depraved.

The Badlands felt impermanent, hastily thrown together, with buildings that had been knocked up from rough wood or cheap brick, then slathered inside with plaster to make them appear more robust than they were. Inferior lodging houses clustered on the fringes, with rooms to rent for incognito assignations. There was rotgut and hooch in the flophouses for the destitute, which were home to Peking’s foreign driftwood—men and women who’d come about as far as possible to escape something they mostly kept to themselves. On the streets were Chinese beggars with suppurating sores, missing limbs, milky eyes, and goiters protruding from their necks. White Russian down-and-outs with straggly beards and frayed tsarist uniforms wandered aimlessly. The Badlands’ flourishing trade in flesh, narcotics, and sleaze, wrapped up in desperate poverty, was the end of the road for many.

The Badlands’ northern border was Soochow Hutong. By day this was a busy food market of butchers, sweetmeat vendors and purveyors of fruit and vegetables. At night it became a cluster of street restaurants, whose deliverymen ran meals to nearby bars and brothels. The heart of the Badlands was Chuanpan Hutong, a winding street of jerry-built structures, fetid and dank lodging houses for the transient, and all-night restaurants where pimps met their girls. Those too old, ugly or strung out to work in the brothels walked the street, touting for business. The presence of red lanterns and bouncers outside a joint indicated a late-night bar with a tacky cabaret show, or a protected brothel overseen by a fearsome madam who’d accommodate any request—white girls, Chinese girls, Chinese boys. The Olympia Cabaret was a popular spot, as were the Manhattan nightclub, the Alcazar, the Olympic Theatre and the Roma, White Russian–run Kavkaz and the Korean-run White Palace Dance Hall.

About halfway along its length, Chuanpan Hutong formed a junction with Hougou Hutong, which ran down to the Tartar Wall. The wall formed a natural southern border of the Badlands, extending all the way to the Tartar City and the Fox Tower. On Hougou Hutong, street sellers sold opium, heroin, along with the works to inject it, and cheaply printed pornography of pubescent Chinese and White Russian Carole Lombard lookalikes.

The only piece of goodness in the area was the church of the China Inland Mission. Converts were few and far between, but unwanted babies were daily arrivals. The Protestant missionaries had dubbed their church the Island of Hope.

The ‘better’ class of foreigners thought the Badlands typified Chinese depravity; the Chinese thought it symbolic of barbarian foreign ways. Both mostly pretended it didn’t exist. They were fooling themselves.

From the moment Colonel Han and DCI Dennis began talking about Pamela, during that short car ride from the train station to Morrison Street, it was clear they were talking about two different Pamelas. Both men realized that they knew far less about her than they’d thought.

Dennis knew her father by reputation, as a former diplomat and Sinologist. He also knew that Werner had a holiday home at Peitaiho, as did the DCI himself. And while his son attended the rival Ecole Municipale Française, Dennis was aware of the status of Tientsin Grammar, and he assumed that Pamela was a typical student—polite, well mannered, somewhat standoffish, as the school tended to think rather highly of itself. Pamela was probably mostly interested in sports and studying.