Midnight in Peking by Paul French

Author:Paul French [French, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, History, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781101580387
Google: hRC897RFkYUC
Amazon: 0143121006
Goodreads: 13050383
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Closet investigations, secret meetings, people being bundled out of the city—it all seemed outlandish to Dennis. And despite the pact of silence in his office, the rumours and gossip inevitably increased. There was talk of widespread sexual activity among the older pupils at Tientsin Grammar, and indeed it did seem that there was a fast set at the school, and that Pamela was part of it. Yeates was declared to be a drunk as well as a bully; he’d had an affair with Pamela, had forced her to do things.

The rumour mill went even further: the autopsy had found that Pamela was pregnant, and the baby was Yeates’s; he had been seen in Peking on the night she was murdered. In fact he regularly slipped away from Tientsin to cavort in the Badlands. The studio portrait of Pamela appeared in the Tientsin newspapers and was passed from hand to hand for comment. Most were sympathetic to her—she was the innocent victim of a horrific crime that could have been perpetrated on any of them. Others were less so. They read the reports that Pamela was ‘not of a placid nature,’ that she’d been in trouble at other schools before Tientsin. They discovered she was older than she appeared, and was seeing a number of boys in Peking. They believed she had strung along the popular Mischa Horjelsky in Tientsin and had probably been living an immoral life.

The two schools of thought divided along the lines of the two Pamelas: Pamela as a good girl, a schoolgirl, a plain girl, and Pamela as a woman, too independent, out of control. In numerous comfortable sitting rooms across Tientsin’s British Concession, and in the soft leather chairs of the Tientsin Club at Gordon Hall, the question of the two Pamelas was a popular topic of conversation.

The rumours buzzed all the more after Yeates disappeared, along with his wife and daughter Barbara, herself a prizewinning pupil at the school. People wondered why they had left so suddenly. John Woodall’s promotion to acting head and his subsequent move into the School House on Race Course Road had all happened so abruptly, and even though the newspapers fell into line and reported the official reason of Yeates’s ill health, the unseemly haste of events was suspicious to many. Tongues wagged, the speculation intensified. Some believed Yeates was guilty of Pamela’s murder, and that it was being covered up to save face.

At the end of March, Tientsin Grammar held its annual Speech Day and prize giving, a major event in the school calendar and one that was reported in the Peking and Tientsin Times:

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