China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  ‘Maybe that’s how things get done here!’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  As they waited for a tram, Alan was still with her. Julie found that she rather liked that and looked forward hopefully to the rest of the afternoon and onwards.

  7

  While Julie Kershawe could neither remember the names of the three young Chinese women that she had let into Britain, nor feel any contrition for her actions, Linda Shen was fully aware of the names of two of them, even if they were different from those Julie couldn’t have recalled. That there was a third she had no knowledge of. Uncooperative, resentful, this young woman had been introduced to the brutal sex trade of Warsaw and was the only one of the three who had initially truly disappeared from Britain.

  Equipped with their new names, ground through a harsh finishing school located in a remote Skye farmhouse, the two Hong Kong eighteen-year-olds were now accomplished and marriageable young women. Whether they were ready for a return to mainland China and their life there Linda neither knew nor particularly cared. Her job was to take them back and deliver them, and their recently acquired British passports, to the men who had been chosen for them.

  The fact that she had had an experience almost similar to theirs, except that she had escaped from a Manchester back-street and prospered by her own efforts, Linda kept stubbornly buried in her deep unconscious mind. Honest enough to recognise that, despite the deliberate cruelty of being separated from her child as an act of control, the life that she had been forced into, basically for access to her British passport and freedom of movement within the European Union, was infinitely preferable to that she had been snatched away from. With common sense as well as intelligence, she found that luxury and unlimited funds and an increasingly manageable relationship developing with Shi Xiulu, her enforced husband, were almost a fair exchange. Whether the two young women in her care would come to take a similar view, again, she neither knew nor cared.

  ‘You know what to do?’

  Linda’s minder did.

  Relations with the man had improved over the week that she had been in Britain. Forced into partnership and not too subtly reminded of his dependence on her husband she had come to a working arrangement with him. The minder accommodated his patroness with as much good grace as he could muster and she had used him to advantage. The trip to Skye was the only part of the week when the two of them had been thrown together so closely that she had had virtually no privacy. She had no quarrel with any of the arrangements that he made or the efficiency with which he had made them. She had become used to such service back home in China and, however much she disliked the man as an individual, she knew that she would be helpless and at risk without him. She also knew that her husband had no love for her; he merely wanted to secure an heir and the reach into the world outside China that was denied to him at the present time but not to her. That he had his heir pleased him; using the child to ensure his wife’s loyalty was common sense to Mr Shi.

  And all the time his wife’s activities were being monitored, even facilitated, by the UK authorities.

  The minder would remain in Britain. Another minder would meet her at Hong Kong, but this one she was familiar with and she knew his vulnerabilities. And on her own ground Linda had become very good at exploiting people’s vulnerabilities.

  The company of two young women on the way back to China would ease her journey but she still had to be on her guard with them.

  While the official policy of the Chinese Government was to invest wisely and profitably in countries like Britain, the legion of corrupt businessmen and officials who were siphoning off much of the profits produced were making investments of their own. Getting illicit money out of China was by no means easy; the pervading state security controls were steadily making electronic management of funds too cumbersome for safe use, so many innovative ways of laundering money were being developed.

  ‘Electronic means are suspect and must be used with care.’

  Mr Shi was used to parroting this to his wife as he explained his latest scheme to her. His sideline of selling his expertise in cheating the authorities to his associates and fellow corrupt businessmen had the prospect of being a huge earner even after expenses had been deducted. Based on a reversion to human rather than electronic activities, his schemes were labour intensive but generally reliant on wives with more freedom of movement than the Chinese Government was prepared to allow to the businessmen themselves. Wives were traditionally obedient and generally subservient to their husband’s interests, although Mr Shi was well aware that his own wife had a streak of independence in her that he was sensible enough to try to harness rather than suppress.

  Linda Shen’s role as a courier was becoming increasingly complex and her trips to Britain and the US more convoluted, as electronic means of money movement were augmented and partially replaced by this human activity.

  Linda hated the trips. They took her away from her son, the only thing in her life that mattered to her, but the rewards were beginning to build up. Her husband had hardly expected that the expertise that she was developing on his behalf wouldn’t be put to use on her own account. What he didn’t realise was that his pretty and, to him, seemingly scatty wife had as good a financial brain as he had, if not better. Untutored, she was taking time to understand what was possible for her and she was building funds in various locations in Britain. Neither greedy nor impatient, as was her husband, she knew that keeping below his radar was the key to success.

  As she shepherded the two young women on to the Qantas flight to Hong Kong and said a relieved farewell to her minder, what Linda didn’t know was that events in Canada and Australia were being shared around the world and the interest being taken by a range of police, immigration and intelligence services in the movement of intelligent and displaced Chinese women was intensifying.

  Storing the two new cherished British passports alongside her own in her copious designer handbag, she felt satisfied that she had fulfilled her husband’s plans, advanced her own and taken another small step towards safeguarding her child’s independent future.

  8

  ‘Good heavens!’

  David Hutchinson’s surprise was almost comic. The email on his Black-Berry was totally unexpected.

  ‘What?’

  Susie Peveral and David Hutchinson had settled like a couple of companionable old-age pensioners on a seafront bench at Seaton in Devon. It was an idyllic setting. The gentle swell hissed and swished only a few feet away from them; excited small children and dogs formed the backdrop. A peace so different from their normal lives re-established itself after the traumas of seeing the body in the sea off the Dorset coast.

  Neither Susie nor David was prone to too much self-analysis but both were struggling to understand why the sight of what, for David at least, was sadly just one more body was having such a depressing effect.

  Seeing the report in the paper had also been a bit of a shock to David – partly because he hadn’t expected to see someone he had known, however fleetingly, and he had photographed, in the media as a murder victim, and partly because the photo commission that he had undertaken, which included the dead man, had not been one that he had relished and he had done only as a favour to someone whom he now regarded as rather less than a friend.

  He knew he was jaded and he guessed from the various comments and hints from Susie that she also felt herself to be, too. Their decision to take off into the West Country without their usual working paraphernalia was something of a recognition of this.

  ‘Ever been on a tram?’

  ‘Only in San Francisco.’

  The double-decked trams of Seaton were a novelty to Susie. With a burst of schoolgirl enthusiasm she scurried up to the top deck and to the front of the tram and subsided into a seat with a sigh both of depth and of contentment.

  ‘Well,’ said Hutchinson as they rattled away into the countryside, ‘we did plan to get away from it all and do something different.’

  ‘I
’m not sure that spotting a body in the sea was exactly getting away from it all!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You knew the dead guy, though?’ Susie asked.

  Now that the conversation had got started, she was keen to know more of David’s involvement with the dead man.

  ‘Hardly knew him; I was asked to take a photo of this bunch of businessmen at a lunch. For some Middle East trade magazine, I was told. The dead man was one of the guests. The Chronicle must have got access to the magazine.’

  ‘Copyright fee?’ Susie grinned.

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘So why were you so surprised when you saw the guy’s face in the paper?’

  Hutchinson pondered on how much to tell Susie or whether in fact to just close the conversation down and not tell her anything at all. Killing off the conversation didn’t seem too friendly, and talking about it, he thought, might perhaps exorcise his discomfort over the assignment.

  ‘They were a mixed bunch, Chinese certainly; one at least could have been Middle Eastern; but the rest, it was hard to tell. They were all very wary of each other. No sort of social context to the gathering. The point is, some underling took down the names as I organised them for the shot. The name that the underling gave this bloke was not Middle Eastern; I’m sure it was Russian, East European – I don’t know, it was very different.’

  ‘The police said he was identified by documents in his pockets.’

  ‘OK,’ said David, ‘so that’s incontrovertible proof?’

  ‘Why are you so edgy about this?’

  ‘The bloke who asked me to take the photos got me into an East European night club – don’t ask where – and I got some shots of under-age girls being groomed for prostitution and made a lot of money. It was a bit dodgy … no, no, it was hellishly dodgy. But I owed this bloke. So I took his group photo. It was a clunking good payday, too, but the sod was using the whole thing as a lever in the internecine warfare that seems to be endemic among these East European criminals. Not my finest hour and something that has made me think a lot about what the hell I’m doing with my life.’

  The underlying thought at the back of David Hutchinson’s mind surfaced at last.

  ‘OK, David’ – she was thoughtful – ‘so you’re not happy with what you do any more; what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I just wonder whether there was something … some injustice … I could right some wrong, do a book … I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want to write about and photograph dead bodies, sick children, ravaged villages any more.’

  The tram was passing through the sort of countryside that was familiar to David from childhood. For Susie, who had spent her whole life within the broad confines of Greater London, the lushness was unfamiliar and very welcome.

  After the burst of intense conversation they lapsed into silence once more and took in the further views around them. But it wasn’t quite the same relaxed, untroubled silence as before.

  David Hutchinson felt disturbed. Susie’s reaction passed him by but she seemed almost pleased that he was apparently ready for some new and different challenge.

  The rest of the day passed.

  The mood was better in the evening. David had made enquiries at the guesthouse about the whereabouts of a good country pub. For someone with a vast wealth of experience in living and eating in a staggering range of countries and places, the English country pub had become something of a Holy Grail for him. A major part of their trip was about sampling traditional English pubs.

  ‘Great idea’ was Susie’s response to David’s suggestion for their evening.

  Branscombe had been suggested.

  The meal was every bit as good as the guesthouse owner had predicted. The conversation drifted, as neither wanted to revert to the discussions about the dead body in the sea. And inevitably, as they drifted, they took in childhood, school, university and their upbringing in general. Both were cautious, even coy, at first until they realised that the lessons of their childhood were the same for both of them, despite their vastly differing backgrounds.

  ‘Overbearing fathers with no more ambition than our following in their footsteps come what may.’

  Susie’s summary seemed to David to exactly fit his situation.

  It was a warm evening and the food had been good. The strictly limited amount of wine drunk had also been good. The single malt was for later back at the guesthouse. Both were now fully relaxed again and savouring the sort of peacefulness that they had hoped for.

  ‘I reckon,’ Susie finally said, ‘there’s a story somewhere in both our backgrounds. Maybe more so in yours since a poor little rich girl in token revolt isn’t as good a tale as a poor little poor guy totally breaking free of his background.’

  David’s chuckle said that he agreed and that he was in no way put out by the characterisation.

  Back at the guesthouse David produced the bottle of single malt whisky. The guesthouse terrace overlooked the sea; it was an obvious place for a nightcap.

  It was then that the insistent vibration of David’s Black-Berry in his jacket pocket caught his attention.

  ‘What?’ Susie repeated as David read the email.

  Later, David realised that she knew what the email was going to say.

  ‘Susie, your secretary is inviting me to a meeting with you!’

  9

  Hong Kong Airport was new, vast and luxurious and its shops and services were definitely beyond the means of all but a few Chinese, although in the new China this number was increasing rapidly. The international terminal was the last word in spaciousness, in layout and facilities, and in its scope for people-watching.

  Everything was clean, even excessively so, well tended and customer-friendly in a way that virtually no other airport terminal in the world seemed to be. It seemed that all the lessons from around the world had been learned. The air conditioning was arctic cold; movement along its great thoroughfares was easy via a travolator or for those with time and curiosity by walking. The travolator, the moving walkway so beloved of European airport designers, was a novelty that attracted interest among even the most seasoned travellers as it made its arrow-straight way along the whole length of the upper gallery of the terminal. Brightly lit with an arched ceiling, the moving walkway seemed to define the pace of the terminal in sedate contrast to the usual frenetic activity in such places. Even the politely tooting passenger buggies seemed to move more slowly than at Heathrow or Schiphol.

  Passengers of the small variety found the travolator an instant source of entertainment. Very few people among the Chinese passengers actually walked; it was if they were determined to get their money’s worth.

  Transiting flights to London and Australia didn’t spend much time in Hong Kong. It was often little more that a refuelling stop, but passengers were disgorged into the terminal and gravitated almost automatically to the merchandising area. The plaza of shops seemed to encircle and enclose the idling passengers; those who had seen it all before gravitated further into the coffee lounge area. Whether this was less luxurious by design, in order to focus passengers’ attention on the high-end shops, it would have been hard to say. A snapshot of the whole area on any day would probably have demonstrated that the luxury goods shops won out every time.

  ‘You know what?’

  The strident female American voice commanded attention even from those not within her general orbit.

  ‘You know what? Nothing seems to have a price tag. How are we supposed to know what things cost?’

  There was agreement, disdain and amusement at the woman’s ignorance about the culture of the top end of the luxury goods market among the more knowledgeable listeners. The likes of Gucci and Prada didn’t as a matter of course attach gaudy labels to their sales items; a discreet enquiry was the norm. The oft-quoted dictum ‘If you need to know the price, you can’t afford it’ generally prevailed.

  In any case, it was clear, even to the casual observer, that everybody was looking and
nobody buying. So a more relevant question might have been, ‘Who buys this stuff anyway?’

  It was a question that might have occurred to a pair of idling suited men who seemed to be interested more in who went into the Gucci shop rather than who might be buying something there. It was an interest that began to sharpen after a flight from London had arrived and discharged its payload while the Qantas staff refuelled it.

  A Chinese man in a suit that could probably have bought the two watching men a whole wardrobe of clothes each arrived briskly at the Gucci shop, and the men went visibly on to the alert.

  The muttered exchange between them accompanied by some brief but sage nodding of heads clearly indicated that the man was expected. More discreet muttering into lapel microphones ensued.

  The sauntering transit passengers and the scurrying crew-change staff seemed oblivious both to the well-dressed man and his watchers and, as they spilled over into the aisles leading into and out of the plaza area, to the uniformed police officers as well. Police officers were rather more in evidence in many parts of China than was common in the UK or Australia, so people, locals and visitors, largely took no notice of them.

  And as the watchers watched, in the coffee lounge above, they themselves were being watched.

  The two plain-clothes police officers stiffened as an obviously holidaying couple of either American or Antipodean origins, their loud and colourful shirts and baggy shorts not only inappropriate in the chill of the terminal building but also at odds with even the increasingly relaxed norms of Chinese society, seemed to get into a tangle of gyrating bodies. The two officers then relaxed. The pantomime of the cold contemptuous look of the expensively sartorial Chinese man and the looks of near outrage from the visitors signalled very clearly the ‘get out of my way’ message that had been transmitted.