China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  It wasn’t a hard task. The disparity between the heights of the two of them easily marked them out. Then they stopped walking and waited and, to her surprise yet again, Alan suddenly wasn’t there. The diminutive girl walked back to where Julie was standing and took her by the arm. Julie allowed herself to be led up to Mr Kim.

  ‘This her?’

  The question was addressed to the girl, who nodded. Mr Kim gestured Julie towards a gap between the stalls. Feeling compelled to follow where he indicated, she moved off warily. As she glanced back, the young Chinese woman had disappeared as readily as Alan had. Julie was left with Kim who looked at her with some distaste, in much the way that many Chinese men did womenfolk. It was something that she was not used to but which from Alan’s lunchtime briefing she knew she was going to have to learn to accept. Even in Australia among the Chinese community there were still plenty of men who saw women as lesser beings.

  The rest of Alan’s briefing had been much more interesting. And in retrospect she recognised that it had been predicated entirely on her being taken as fully Chinese. It wasn’t clear which organisation she was going to have to infiltrate, but equally that was largely because the Security Service didn’t really know. They only had whispers and rumours and a string of outcomes that they didn’t much like. Her training as an investigative officer was key but, like her skill at karate, that was taken for granted.

  This first meeting with Mr Kim provided nothing but another new mobile phone for Julie and an instruction to await a call. Whether the man remembered that Alan and the beautiful little Chinese girl had existed she had no way of telling; as yet, like Alan, she had found no way of reading him.

  When she next saw Alan it was much more carefully arranged; she, he told her, was very much on probation with Mr Kim and his friends.

  Their conversation was fractious.

  ‘They call her Lucy Liu after the Charlie’s Angels actress.’

  ‘Shit, Alan, never mind that! Why did you just disappear like that?’

  ‘I was only there to deliver you.’

  ‘Deliver me. I’m not a parcel, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘You are to Kim. Where he comes from women are treated as property. You’re only as good as what you can do for him.’

  ‘Which he obviously has yet to tell me.’

  ‘Stay with him – he will.’

  ‘So who is this Lucy Liu then, Alan?’

  ‘She’s a Singapore police lieutenant now on her way back home to resume her normal duties.’

  ‘And if he asks?’

  ‘He won’t; he’ll have forgotten her by the time you see him next.’

  14

  As an acknowledgement of, rather than as a thank you for, her successful delivery of the two Chinese ex-schoolgirls turned marriageable young women, Linda Shen was allowed to dally a couple of days in Hong Kong rather than continue on with them to Shanghai. It was the closest that her husband, Mr Shi, was ever likely to get to any sort of expression of appreciation towards his wife.

  ‘Up there!’

  Linda knew that the direction that she was giving to her minder was wrong. It was intended to be. The Hong Kong police’s approach to traffic discipline was rather more derived from its British antecedents than from its Chinese. The minder’s protest to Linda was cut short by the heavy intervention of a traffic police sergeant who regarded the man’s efforts to overawe him with his employer’s credentials as tantamount to bribery and arrested him. Linda’s protests were token, and, as a woman’s, ignored.

  With the car impounded, Linda Shen was forced to walk.

  ‘Yes!’

  Her delight, seen by several passers-by, was expressed in a wholly un-Chinese display of punching the air. Her son and her married bondage forgotten for a few brief hours, she set off for Kowloon and the Miramar Hotel. Locating a mass-transit railway station and squeezing into the chaos of the late-morning commuter traffic stirred memories that normally she would have tried to suppress. Her life of luxury and personal transport had insulated her from such experiences in Shanghai, but she was as exhilarated by them now as she would have once have been in Glasgow or London. And, if nothing else, the air in Hong Kong was purer.

  Born in Manchester, with a good tranche of A levels, she had been denied university by a cash-strapped father, who put all of his resources into educating his three sons. But her qualifications were enough for her to enter the only profession that her father would positively have opposed had she still been under his protection. Her quick passage through the Greater Manchester and Strathclyde police forces to the UK Border Agency had brought her maturity and independence. It had also brought her into contact with the seamier side of Chinese life in Britain and eventually to an uncomfortable journey that ended in Shanghai.

  They didn’t miss me.

  The first time that she had been able to snatch an opportunity to trawl the Internet she had found that her disappearance had raised very little interest and was soon forgotten. In the private confines of the Border Agency, there was concern but this was more about their own loss than her well-being. She was aware that the computer wizards that her husband employed had similarly checked to see whether her tracks had been covered. A very private man for a variety of necessary business reasons, Mr Shi didn’t want anything from his wife’s past to cause him any problems in the future.

  The old bastard knows full well where I came from and what I did.

  Linda had confided in a couple of other trophy wives that she was allowed to socialise with. They, too, like maybe half a dozen other women in China, were also bought wives with backgrounds and valuable passports – and babies used to shackle them to their husband’s interests.

  For special guests, the Miramar had an exclusive internet café with protected and probably the most secure Internet access in China. It didn’t take Linda long to check out her investments and to satisfy herself that they were both proving productive and were secure from the curious eyes of her husband and his hackers.

  An hour’s social browsing, lunch and then a more serious search for any references to the missing schoolgirls that she had chaperoned again led to dead ends. The Chinese and British police could find no trace of them after they were formally admitted to the UK. But it was only when they had disappeared that they had actually started looking. And it was now two years later.

  At least, nothing will get back to him.

  Linda never ever thought of her husband by his name; ‘him’ or the ‘old bastard’ were her normal forms of reference.

  She probably cared no more about the two women than her husband did – she knew that they had not been physically harmed; that was enough. Her interest lay only with her son. She made it her business to know as much as possible about her husband’s activities, not just to profit where she could, but to anticipate any threats to him that might affect her and her child. She knew that she could not escape for many years but she was equally sure that in the end she would be able to and was determined to be prepared. Nothing that she did for her husband during these years was going to cause any repercussions for her if she could avoid it.

  Her flow of thoughts were suddenly interrupted.

  ‘Julie Kershawe! Jesus, what happened to her?’

  Her newspaper searching had exposed the story of Julie’s precipitate departure from the Border Agency and the suspicions that surrounded it. Julie had been her superior briefly in Edinburgh and she had had great respect for her.

  Linda couldn’t believe what she was reading.

  The reported story had been carefully edited. Since the newspaper was silent about the involvement of Tariq al Hussaini, both she and other readers of the articles had only a limited and sanitised view of events.

  From her own dealings with Julie, Linda could not accept the idea that her boss had been involved in some kind of treachery as the media was implying. Used as she was becoming to the convoluted and devious machinations of her husband and his business partners, her instinct was to
assume that there was much more to the story than was being published and it wouldn’t necessarily reflect badly on Julie.

  15

  How the Singaporean police lieutenant had charmed her way into the confidence of the notoriously misogynistic Kim Lee Sung, Julie Kershawe – now Julie Li, using her mother’s maiden name – never found out. Equally, how Alan became involved as a clandestine procurer of criminal Chinese women she also never found out. But what she was told was that she was now a fugitive from UK justice. An investigation into Tariq al Hussaini’s activities in the UK had purported to implicate her as a participant in an immigration fraud. The Australian Federal Police were hunting for her, albeit in a rather sedate and unhurried way.

  ‘Usual thing,’ Alan had said, ‘keep the cover story as close to reality as possible.’

  Even if the reality was also invented, thought Julie, now totally convinced that her retreat to Australia was set up as much to provide her with a cover story as it was to expose Tariq.

  ‘So now Mr Kim thinks that he has a hold over me?’

  ‘He certainly does – we’ve made sure of that – and he will make that plain to you pretty damn quick, I don’t doubt. Through his supposed corrupt contacts with the Federal Police we will be feeding enough information to him so that he knows that a police search is closing in on you. Lucy Liu sold him the idea that you were both tough physically but also very good at managing relations with the various authorities you used to have to deal with. She also fed him the thought that he needs someone like you around to help him handle the girls that he is trafficking. A bit of sophistication, she called it, but I doubt she said that to Kim! But be on your guard – he’s a devious and sadistic bastard and a classic out-and-out bully.’

  ‘And an out-and-out coward?’ pondered Julie.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

  It was their last set-up meeting. Alan simply faded into the background to watch. Mr Kim’s true character wasn’t the only thing that Julie couldn’t now count on. She was on her own. Of course, she had been told all the usual spy stuff about the authorities denying her existence if she was caught – but this wasn’t deepest Cold War Russia; it was suburban Australia. Not quite her own backyard but as near as. How substantial this denial would be she never had to find out.

  Julie didn’t feel that she was going to miss Alan – he might have a pretty face but he was far too cold a fish for her. Her instinct was to relish a new challenge, even if there were rather more unknowns than she had been used to dealing with.

  Except I don’t really know where this people trafficking thing is likely to take me.

  Nor did she. Kim had set up another meeting with her in the Treasury Gardens, at a place that could be observed from all directions. Trust wasn’t one of the man’s strong points. She had a couple of days to prepare herself and to think out how she might develop her relationship with him. Lacking the beauty and allure of the Singapore police lieutenant but unaware as yet of what qualities she was supposed to have in the eyes of Mr Kim and his employers, there was little she could do beyond clearing her mind of her previous existence and rehearsing her Mandarin in front of her bedroom mirror.

  But, if Julie Li (Kershawe) couldn’t count on Kim Lee Sung’s character, there were those like David Hutchinson who were beginning both to figure out and understand the character of the man that he came to know of as Joe Kim.

  Susie Peveral made it very clear to David that further briefing on the illegal immigration traffic would be given on a strictly personal and private basis.

  David was more amused than alarmed.

  How the shit had he got into this situation? The first time he’d seen this delectable woman in her true colours after university, she was up against some crappy stage furniture in that storeroom at the O2 Arena. Then it was her with her expensive designer jeans around her ankles and him with his cheap ones around his,

  They had just arrived at the block of flats in Islington where Susie lived. Nothing was now further from David’s mind than the ravenous young civil servant paying for her entry to a concert by her supposed favourite pop star by offering him gratuitous sex.

  Things had very much moved on.

  What David didn’t know until very recently was that after the incident at the O2 Arena Susie had become about as obsessed as a woman of her self-contained character was ever likely to be with her former college acquaintance and had developed a yearning for the fierce straightforward sex that they had indulged in. She had wanted more. The work that she was doing on the international movements of illegal workers across and around the world and the opinion of her Permanent Secretary that a deniable independent investigation by a nongovernmental resource might be the best approach gave her her opportunity.

  Given her knowledge of David, it didn’t take Susie long to devise a project that would be attractive to him. It was the knowledge of what she was planning that added to Susie’s excitement and to the success of their ramble around the West Country. His holiday heart-searching only added to her anticipation of both a successful working relationship and a satisfying sexual one. The selling point she had made to herself was very much in terms of time spent in bed with him.

  And success in her project wouldn’t do her career prospects any harm either.

  Everything went exactly as she had planned it; things usually did for Susie Peveral.

  ‘Help yourself to a drink. I’ll have a sweet Martini.’

  Susie immediately disappeared into the nether regions of her flat.

  Left to fend for himself, David renewed his acquaintance with Susie’s apartment. It was tasteful, austere and minimalist. He rather liked that. But it seemed to offer no indication of Susie’s personality. That didn’t surprise him either.

  ‘Jesus, it’s so organised and sterile, it’s hard to believe that she actually lives here.’

  But he knew that that was Susie Peveral. Personal photographs would be hidden somewhere in a leather-bound album; her idea of decoration was enigmatic unframed oil paintings by obscure British artists and grotesque Japanese porcelain figures.

  David shed his coat and hung it in the open-fronted hall cupboard. Her supply of drinks in the corner bar was expensive and extensive. Having helped himself to a generous portion of a single malt whisky that he knew to be rather rare and poured her an equally generous Martini, he sat down and waited. Familiar with the habits of a range of passing girlfriends of a variety of nationalities, he didn’t bother to wonder where she had gone after she’d steered him into the light, bright and white lounge area. Women always wanted to attend to their make-up or change their shoes or something; it seemed like a virility point to David.

  He hadn’t really noticed what she was wearing at the briefing; only that, when she came to join him again, she’d changed. David took her slender, gym-honed body for granted and what she had changed into was expensive, simple and very effective.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Susie took the Martini from him and, with the guileless guile that he now knew to be typical of her, sat opposite him to display herself to maximum effect. Nothing was further from the image of a highly regarded and competent Assistant Secretary in the Foreign Office that he could imagine.

  Susie was pretty but not beautiful. Her face had character and was always made up in an understated way. Her unremarkable middling-brown hair was always neat but natural looking.

  ‘You’re looking good!’

  She smirked at the compliment; David hadn’t offered her many.

  By comparison with her managed looks, David’s suntanned, open and friendly face immediately stirred Susie’s emotions and brought colour to her cheeks. It was the admission of the final surrender to her more basic instincts over her usually controlled feelings that induced the blush. She wanted David and she wanted him with a steadily mounting urgency that she struggled to overcome. A keen observer by profession, he was used to seeing and translating emotions into words and actual pictures, so her obvious stimulation in
his presence didn’t go unnoticed.

  She sat opposite him in a finishing-school pose, her slender elegant legs pulled together and turned half sideways. She sat back on the settee, her back straight; her ample firm beasts stood out but were not pushed out; in everything she did she moved easily and unhurriedly. She sipped her drink and pulled at her tartan miniskirt in an ineffectual effort to make it cover her knees. Both actions seemed to be instinctive rather than intentional.

  God, does she never not want sex? Damn her, she knows she’s going to get it.

  The half-suppressed chuckle that went with this thought raised an eyebrow in Susie but nothing more.

  ‘So, are you happy with what you’re being asked to do?’

  Susie wanted to get the business side of their relationship out of the way before the prospect of having David in her bed overwhelmed her.

  ‘The study? Oh, yes!’

  He had taken his jacket off and lounged back in the armchair that he had chosen to avoid being brought too quickly into body contact with her. Susie moistened her lips, aware of his equally well-honed figure as he relaxed his position. He wasn’t quite six feet but his body was well proportioned and lean. Front on to her she tried hard not to stare at his lower body. She was beginning to feel warm.

  Then it happened.

  Susie stood up and in a quick movement dropped her miniskirt to her ankles and stepped out of it. When he realised that one of the things that Susie had been doing when she went to her bedroom to change out of her business clothes was remove her underwear, David’s restraint broke down. Getting out of his trousers was a far less elegant exercise than her skirt dropping, but it soon got them on to equal terms.

  The horny bitch must have planned the whole thing in advance!

  Of course she had.

  Susie backed towards the wall of the room. David knew that a repeat of the O2 Arena storeroom was required of him.

  As she felt him thrust inside her, Susie lost complete control for the first time since that memorable day and mewed and moaned as she had at the Dome. The feeling of helplessness and surrender that came over her lasted until she felt David withdraw and then the feeling of power and control slowly crept back. But it was a feeling hedged around by a warm glow of satisfaction.