‘Or if someone else wants them to.’
The pause this time was precautionary. Flirtatious young men didn’t usually get stuck into the details of immigration policy and prevention tactics. And, of course, it was a sore point with Julie.
The renewal of her angst must have shown on her face.
‘Can you cope with yet more coffee? Or is there something else you have to do?’
Julie was grateful for Alan’s prompt move to change the subject and relieve her angry self-reproach. Taking the conversation as a part of a casual and friendly early-morning encounter she didn’t see the fleeting look of satisfaction that appeared and disappeared from his eyes.
‘Jones, Myers and Melbourne Central,’ she said. ‘Mainly looking. No money. I don’t have a job yet, although I’m working on it.’
He didn’t seem surprised.
‘I’ve only been here a few weeks. I’ve been settling in, finding my feet. Still, my first job interview’s tomorrow.’
Julie recognised that she was suddenly nervous. Why was he making her nervous?
‘Best of luck. That’s what Poms say, isn’t it?’
She nodded. But alarm bells were now ringing strongly in her head. Alan had given absolutely nothing of himself, yet he now knew everything about her current life. Suddenly, there seemed to be something unreal about him.
Artificial? she thought to herself.
If she had known more about Alan she would have realised that, although the situation was contrived, it was brilliantly done; she had told all before she had suspected anything.
She knew that she had to end the encounter.
She gathered her things and slipped her arms smoothly and sinuously into her padded anorak. Alan stood up with her. He held out his hand.
‘Please to have met you.’
Why was he? As she mechanically paid for her meal and moved into the icy blast of Spring Street, he didn’t follow her. He seemed to have paid in advance and slipped away into the side street before she had got her bearings among the tide of the still-hurrying office workers.
What was that all about?
Since she wasn’t going to be able to find any evidence that her flat had been entered and her belongs exhaustively searched, the idea that Alan had been set up to distract her attention was never going to enter her head.
Her aching ankles and her tight jeans might be going to limit her day’s window shopping, but she set off for Melbourne Central, and an array of shops that rivalled any that she had seen in Britain, in good spirits. She successfully replaced her mobile phone, happily passing her old one on for charity once the SIM card had been destroyed. She was now, electronically speaking, a new person.
5
Alice Hou never knew why she had been singled out for kidnap.
Her life in Brazil had been hardly ideal and she knew that girls like her could have a better life in North America. But she was equally aware of the horror stories of abuse and violence at the hands of people traffickers. However, confident in her ability to look after herself, such stories hadn’t put her off.
Ending up wet and uncomfortable after a remote river crossing into Canada, somewhere on the border of Michigan and Ontario, the horrors that she had endured weren’t those that she had been led to expect. How she got to such an isolated place within the generally crowded confines of the border area she had no clear memory of. Having arrived at her final destination after a journey up the length of America from Mexico, all she felt was relief and optimism.
But she soon found that the original stories of abuse and violence were true.
Settled in a low-paid job, she was forced to part with most of her earnings and live under the close supervision of the Chinese man who had in effect bought her from the traffickers. Unusually she was not subject to sexual violence, but was groomed both to improve her employment status and to fast-track for citizenship. The Chinese man who ruled her life knew all about value added and the returns that could accrue to himself if Alice could earn more. And her value as a Canadian citizen was even greater.
But in the specific world of women trafficking there were levels of sophistication and villainy that Alice was unaware of but which came to dominate her life. The modest returns and ongoing income that Alice’s gangmaster was earning from her were easily outbid. After only a few short months in her new life in Calgary she was sold on to a commodity supplier far more ruthless and internationally connected than the men who had got her into Canada.
Alice Hou wasn’t her given name; the belief of her earlier traffickers was that she would be less conspicuous and more easily assimilated with a Westernised name. The commodity supplier was unconcerned about any such subtleties. The clients he worked for were Chinese Chinese; they were equally uninterested in what anybody outside their peer group in China thought.
The Canadian immigration authorities knew full well that Chinese girls were being smuggled into the country, often from South America, but as fast as they closed down one entry route another was opened up. The US authorities stretched beyond limits by the human flow from Mexico were much too interested in the Hispanic horde descending on them to worry about the odd Chinese woman. It was this lack of attention to detail that first the ordinary trafficker and then the commodity supplier were able to take full advantage of.
And then, unwillingly, Alice was on the move again.
The packaging tape over Alice’s eyes and lower face was pulled tight and allowed her little facial movement. As she returned to consciousness she could taste the vomit in her mouth. She panicked. Struggling for breath and unable to do anything but keep swallowing back the burning bile that kept surging up, her whole body seemed to be on fire. She knew that, if the reflux got into her nose, she would die.
As she attempted to writhe into a more comfortable position, she began to understand that she was naked and the same tape that covered her face bound her wrists behind her back and her ankles. With something stuffed into her ears she could only feel through her skin as all her other senses had been neutralised.
Jesus, she thought, something of her lost Catholic upbringing beginning to emerge. Help me, save me!
Her writhing and the crawling feeling on her skin continued. Forcing herself to be still, she realised that the crawling feeling was something moving beside her.
Then everything settled down and the only sensation that she was aware of was a swaying motion that suggested that she was in something that was moving.
In common with many immigrants, both legal and otherwise, Alice was better educated and much more intelligent than her short career as a Canadian waitress would have suggested. Had she known, it was these particular characteristics that had attracted the commodity supplier and led to her present situation. The fact that she had a rarity value as a virgin wasn’t something in the coming days and weeks that occurred to her.
What the hell’s happening to me?
She would have said it out loud had she been able.
Having at last mastered her breathing and her stomach, she cautiously moved the only part of her body that she could. As she probed sideways with her bound legs, her heel touched upon something hard but with a textured surface.
God, that feels like hair, she thought.
Whatever she was touching moved away and the calf of her leg in its turn touched upon something warm, firm but soft. She felt it move against her.
It’s someone else!
It was another thought that would have been articulated had her mouth been fully available to her.
What hit her on the back of the head she had no idea. Stunned, she instinctively straightened herself up and drifted into semi-consciousness. The same warm, firm but soft feeling of something moving against her was lost to her as her senses momentarily switched off. The back-heeled kick that had rattled her brain was equally instinctive.
It was only when the Canadian authorities became aware of the disappearance of four Chinese women, all of whom were overqualified waitr
esses, that more than the usual alarm bells began to ring and the various sections of officialdom began to wind themselves into action. Investigation of the immigration status of the women, Alice Hou, Janice Liang, April Cheng and Patience Zhang, rapidly revealed both the unlikely synthetic nature of their names but also the apparent replication in exact detail of their entry into Canada. At least, that was true of three of them. How Janice Liang got into the country was shrouded in more than the usual mystery. But since she had disappeared any consideration of this was deferred until she had been located.
As the police probed more deeply the shape of the people trafficking organisation that had apparently brought them to Alberta at last began to emerge, along with the apparent dissimilarity of the four women from the generality of single Chinese women who sought a new life in Canada. It also emerged that these dissimilarities had made it much easier for the four women to acquire citizenship. That the four were Canadian citizens made the search for them more intense, if increasingly fruitless, and led the police and senior immigration officials to postulate that the citizenship issue was somehow significant.
‘I think I’d put money on it that they’ve been kidnapped for a very specific purpose.’
The senior investigating officer from the Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been around long enough to see the obvious patterns in the information that he was receiving and the behaviour that it was characterising.
‘I’d also put money on our never finding out!’
It wasn’t that he was naturally pessimistic; it was more that, as they trawled more and more into the depths of Chinese female immigration, they found that such disappearances, although extremely rare and one-off, had occurred before. Bodies were never found and there was never anything to suggest that the women had been spirited away into the wilder areas of Canada where bodies had a better chance of never being found. The senior officer’s instinct was not challenged. But Interpol was informed.
It was an unusually warm late-May Sunday afternoon. For the inhabitants of Victoria Island and for the streams of visitors attracted from the oppressive atmosphere of Vancouver, seeing how the other half lived was a regular pastime.
Big houses, private jetties and sometimes very big ocean-going cruisers were very much the grist to this sightseeing group’s mill. But only the adventurous or the insatiably curious would have taken the trouble to get close to the jetty where the biggest of all the cruisers was moored.
‘So what d’you reckon that’s worth?’
The two minimally clad students were adventurous. They had chosen the spot overlooking the boathouse and jetty more for is seclusion and its suntrap potential than to be able to gape at hardware that they would never in their wildest dreams be able to afford. The two girls watched the luxury vessel glide alongside the jetty. It was obviously too big to get into the boathouse.
‘My dad says seagoing cruisers belonging to Russian oligarchs can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.’
Since neither girl really had much of a clue about such things the conversation lapsed.
‘I wonder what they’ve got in there?’
A large flat crate was being carefully manoeuvred along the jetty and then was lifted by a small mobile crane on to the afterdeck of the cruiser. What happened once it had been taken on board the girls couldn’t at first see, but as the vessel immediately put to sea they saw that it had been moved inside the superstructure.
‘Must be valuable. They wouldn’t be that careful if were just a load of provisions for the voyage.’
Dozing in the warmth of the sun, the two girls had soon forgotten both the cruiser and its seemingly precious cargo. The idea that they had just acquired some information that would be valuable to the police, not only in Canada but also in Australia and China, needless to say, never occurred to them.
European Times
UK Edition – Thursday, 27 May 2010
SUSPICIOUS BODY IN THE SEA
Dorset Police confirms that the body found in the sea off the Jurassic Coast near Bridport was that of an East European man with connections with organised crime, in particular with people trafficking. The identity of the man was known but has not been released by the police.
The exact cause of death has yet to be determined. A postmortem is being carried out in Dorchester but the police confirm that they are instigating a murder enquiry.
Dorset Police declined to confirm or deny speculation that the man was connected with a series of increasingly violent clashes between rival gangs of suppliers of illegal farm labour. East European and Chinese gangs have been involved in a number of incidents reported to the Lincolnshire and West Midlands police forces.
The UK Human Trafficking Centre, in a report to the Home Office leaked to the press, have identified an increasing trend for the trafficking gangs to be controlled not only from East Europe but also now from mainland China. Greater Manchester Police in a separate report to the Home Office has also reported an increase in inter-gang violence between the traditional Chinese gangs most usually centred on Liverpool and a loose confederation of much better organised and resourced groups. The new gangs were beginning to not only expand into protection and the sex trade but were targeting the trafficking of both legal and illegal immigrant labour. The Manchester conclusion confirmed the Trafficking Centre’s analysis.
‘The thing that distinguishes these new gangs,’ said the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, ‘is their active opposition to drug trafficking in the areas that they are seeking to dominate.’
None of the police forces involved in the people trafficking or drugs trade were prepared to comment on the significance of this unusual feature.
The body in the sea in Dorset was said to be of a powerfully built man showing no signs of drug or any other abuse.
‘Definitely not one to meet in a dark alleyway,’ was the comment of the police sergeant who first secured the body from the sea.
The discovery of the body has been reported to Interpol and Dorset Police say that it will be forwarding details of the man to its colleagues in Eastern Europe directly, as a part of the established cooperation on people trafficking.
6
Melbourne trams were one of Julie’s delights. The sleek, articulated modernity of the trams appealed to her as more European than British and different from anything that she was familiar with.
Than Australian! Julie corrected herself.
It was one of many things that Julie found that she was admonishing herself for. But as hard as she tried she found it very difficult to distinguish an Australian persona for herself from a British one. It was a common problem for newcomers and soluble only with time.
Trundling down St Kilda Road sedately and unhurriedly, she took time to rehearse her story for the interview. Her confidence in herself renewed, she knew that her reasons for upping sticks and coming to Australia made sense to her but she acknowledged that to a potential employer her behaviour might have seemed ill considered, even fickle.
The tram stopped and Julie scurried across in front of the halted traffic to the pavement. Since she had never had a car in Britain and her resources didn’t stretch to one in Australia, she found, as a non-driver, the multi-streams of traffic down streets like St Kilda Road a little intimidating. With the trams running down the middles of the streets she could understand why the traffic needed to stop, but there was nonetheless something counter-intuitive to her way of thinking for the arrangement of traffic to be as it was.
Her watch told her that she didn’t have too much time to dwell on the vagaries and benefits of trams versus traffic and the other oddities of driving in Melbourne.
She could see where she was heading. The curved glass-fronted face of the building where her interview was to take place towered above the other buildings in its immediate vicinity. All she needed to do was negotiate a couple more road crossings and she would be there. This she quickly did.
Used to wearing the characterless black business sui
t uniform of a woman civil servant, Julie was determined as a part of her new Australian personality to be more adventurous in what she wore. The light seemed to her to be brighter and the women that she had seen seemed to wear more colourful, if still restrained, clothing that combined fashion with comfort. Within her reasonably extensive wardrobe she decided to follow their lead.
They’ll have to take me as they find me! she had thought to herself as she had appraised herself in the mirror before setting out.
Julie wasn’t unaware that there was a serious risk in her attitude, but she was instinctively adopting her father’s ‘start as you mean to go on’ approach that had usually worked for her. And, if she didn’t get this job, she could read beyond the employment agency’s professional optimism to know that there were other opportunities out there.
At least my ankles don’t hurt any more. All that walking seems to have cured the problem.
It was only when she got back to her apartment the previous day that she had made this discovery, and now on the Tuesday she happily pulled on the same boots but now with the only miniskirt that she possessed. She had scarcely ever worn it before – since Tariq had always let his Muslim upbringing show through and criticised her for its immodesty. It was another conscious decision to be more true to herself. Never a feminine, girly girl she nonetheless was fashion conscious in her own way and felt good about what she was wearing even before she drew some admiring looks on the tram. Her black leather jacket, that signalled the tight figure underneath it, did nothing to discourage the looks of approval either. Her short black hair was blown askew by the gusting wind, but with her usual understated make-up it gave her a confident enough look that reflected how she both felt about herself now and about her prospects at the interview.
In the sterile glass splendour of the office building that she was entering she was quick to notice that the same purposeful activity in terms of comings and goings was apparent that she had noticed in Spring Street and the surrounding area. She liked the sense of urgency about getting on with life and getting things done that was usually well hidden in Britain. Melbourne, she knew, was the thriving business capital of Australia, but she hadn’t expected to see its manifestations so obviously displayed.
China Wife Page 3
