China Wife (10 page)

David wasn't sure whether she believed him, or why she shouldn't have.

Out of the bath and in bed again, Susie at least seemed prepared to let the subject drop. But there was the second question she'd asked.

But who the shit is this Kim?
David thought.
Why throw his name at me?

He asked.

Susie pulled him on to her and found his mouth with hers. David pushed away.

‘You're an irritating bitch,' he said as he settled her head more comfortably on his chest. ‘So who is Joe Kim, then? Having started the conversation in your bath, we might as well finish it.'

Susie giggled. Her reversion to schoolgirl was one of the things that had delighted him on their holiday. Then she was serious again, almost.

‘Last briefing,' she said with a twinkle.

‘There's some sort of dog-eat-dog hassle going on among the people traffickers. Petrov could well have been a casualty of it. The police in Lincolnshire and West Midlands think that either someone is getting too greedy or someone is trying to take over the whole deal. We don't know.'

‘Someone? Didn't you mention the Chinese? They seem to be into everything these days.'

Susie rolled around the bed so that she was kneeling over Hutchinson. As she sunk down again on to his erection, she shook her head to signify the conversation really was over.

Not quite.

She said, ‘You need to look out for Joe Kim.'

David didn't have time to wonder what he was to look out for.

16

David Hutchinson's London flat was high up in a Barbican tower block. He loved the place; it had the ambience of the City of London, yet it also had a cosmopolitan atmosphere and was in proximity to everything that he enjoyed about London.

The telephone rang, interrupting his train of thought.

‘David Hutchinson.'

It was a call that he had been expecting.

Susie Peveral had continued her mixture of business and pleasure into the next day. It was Saturday. Much to David's amusement and initial irritation, she both celebrated his commission to investigate the growing involvement of criminal gangs in illegal immigration and briefed him on it as well.

By the time they made it to a late lunch at Susie's favourite Thai restaurant there wasn't much that David didn't know about trafficked farm labour, the black market in professional immigrants, women forced into the sex trade, and Susie's concerns about the emerging trade in individual Chinese women that seemed to contradict the usual stereotypes and generalisations.

He was aware that this last was something of a hobbyhorse for Susie; his sense that his UK investigations were a precursor to something more challenging grew with every conversation with her.

Early rising was something that fitted very easily into David's lifestyle.

He was heading for Cambridge and towards Peterborough
and the A15 before he was fully switched on to what was happening.

The call from Susie's contact in the Home Office was an opening into the world of suspected illegal immigration that he had been looking for but it didn't come in the form that he was anticipating. He was about to be thrust in at the deep end in a way that he was used to but which he hadn't expected in the present instance. A flavour of the real world was what the Home Office mandarin called it in the usual understated way of the career public servant.

Once past Peterborough, he went into sat nav control until he came to the rendezvous point at a Lincolnshire country pub. It was a tortuous route that he had to take but that was not the fault of the sat nav; it was simply a tortuous road. The pub was well chosen for its remoteness but nonetheless accessibility to the farming area that was being focused on.

The slightly anxious-looking superintendent was the only one in uniform. No introductions were made but it was clear that he had been invited to join a group of police and Border Agency staff.

‘OK,' said the superintendent, ‘we're being joined by an investigative journalist contracted to the Foreign Office.'

Wariness was a feeling that David was used to sensing in those he dealt with – it was in the nature of his work. The tone of the superintendent's voice suggested that she would have rather that he hadn't been there; she had plenty enough to worry about without passengers.

The briefing seemed to be standard. Raids on farms with large numbers of seasonal and itinerant workers were commonplace and they very often yielded a crop of illegals. The day's events weren't expected to be anything but routine.

The flat open Lincolnshire countryside didn't make surprise very easy, but equally it was a fairly straightforward exercise to block off the various roads around the farm in question.

The briefing point that registered most clearly with David
was virtually the last thing that the superintendent said.

‘Remember they're harvesting cauliflowers, so each one of them will have a very sharp knife!'

A veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other such places, he was used to such warnings; but the need for the superintendent to make it was what he registered. Routine the raid might be, but the unexpected was still to be anticipated.

They moved off. The roadblocks had been quietly put in place while the briefing was being carried out.

A second warning was issued once the area had been sealed.

‘There are three unidentified cars trapped in the area. We have to assume that they are there innocently in the first instance.'

Again, the tone of the warning from the man who appeared to be the senior plain-clothed officer suggested that, far from being innocent, the presence of the three cars was considered to be definitely suspicious.

He wondered what all that was about. He had no idea but he did have a sense that what he had heard at the briefing wasn't the whole story.

As they fanned out, David counted fifteen officers, although which were police and which were Border Agency staff he had no way of telling since to avoid alerting the farm workers they had abandoned their usual high-visibility jackets. None of the officers appeared to be armed. As they approached the working area, they could smell the damp sickly odour of the freshly cut cauliflowers as readily as they could see the array of machinery slowly advancing across the field. It was almost a scene out of science fiction. A phalanx of machinery was moving forward slowly and steadily, accompanied by the heavy growling roar of multiple engines. There were three distinct sets of machinery and centres of activity. The nearest was only a hundred feet or so away as the officers approached; the other two were further back down the field.

David had never come across the equipment being used
before, nor could he at first identify the roles of the groups of men who were working around it. It was only when they got right close up that they saw that the bulk of the men were topping and tailing the cauliflowers after they had been mechanically harvested and were feeding them on to a conveyer belt and into the packaging system. The reason for the warning about the sharp knives was all too apparent.

As the group of officers surrounded the vehicle train, the harvester halted and the driver emerged from the cabin looking puzzled rather than apprehensive. He knew immediately what was going on.

Back down the field, the other two harvesting units also stopped, maintained their formation and waited.

‘Everybody put down your knives!'

In gesture as well as words, the senior officer indicated what he wanted. The response was slow and tension rose. There were ten workers, not counting the tractor driver and the stacker who was loading the filled crates of cauliflower on to a flat-based trailer. The stacker turned out to be the only woman in the group, a Somali whose classic good looks seemed totally out of place in the muddy field.

Eventually, three workers thrust their long knives into the ground in front of them and stepped away from them. The others followed suit. It was a passage that instantly told the senior police officer that at least some of the workers spoke very little English.

An officer who had so far kept in the background stepped forward and spoke to the group of workers now gathered in front of the harvesting machine. The background of conversation among the workers had been enough for him to detect what language to speak. The question he asked was greeted with shaking heads.

None of the workers had any papers on them.

‘That's how it usually is,' remarked one of the officers to David.

The tractor driver gestured to the Somali woman.

‘She's the gangmaster,' the officer said.

It wasn't entirely unknown for the groups of labourers to be managed and found employment by a woman.

The Somali woman knew what was expected of her. Like most Somalis, she spoke reasonable English. Rummaging in a bag that she produced from the back of the part-loaded trailer, she handed the police officer a wedge of papers. Passed to a rather bored-looking middle-aged man who was clearly the senior officer from the UK Border Agency, everybody waited for the inspection to be carried out. Aided by a colleague the Border Agency officer went along the line of workers matching each up with a set of the papers from the package. He took his time.

Then, accompanied by one who was obviously a police officer, the Border Agency man repeated the exercise further down the field with the other two crews.

The driver of the first machinery chain began to show signs of impatience.

‘He obviously knows everything's in order,' David muttered.

Everything was.

Returning the papers to the Somali woman, the police and their fellow officers gathered in preparation for withdrawing. From their point of view, it had been a wasted effort; at least, so far it had.

With a spluttering thunder of noise that settled into a throbbing mechanical clatter, the machinery restarted and cauliflowers began to flow into the crates again ready for transport.

The Somali woman didn't immediately resume her activities; her place was taken by one of the labourers. It was clear that, despite being legitimately contracted to supply labour to the farm and having all the necessary paperwork, she was not happy. As the harvester moved forward and away from her, the senior police officer followed her gaze to the edge of the field.
A group of four men stood together silently watching what had taken place. They were clearly the occupants of the cars that had got trapped by the police roadblocks. Three men, also Somalis, left the group preparing the cauliflowers. The other workers, East Europeans, continued their topping and tailing at an increased tempo, but the tension was palpable.

‘It looks as if the cars certainly weren't there by chance then,' David said.

‘Rival gang,' the officer who had spoken to him earlier said.

Again there was a weariness about the comment, an ‘I've seen it all before' weariness that suggested that warfare between labour gangs and gangmasters was pretty routine also.

By common consent, the group of law officers coalesced and moved towards the four men, forcing them eventually back to their cars.

‘Chinese,' said David.

‘Why am I not surprised?' he then muttered to himself.

Nothing was said but it was obvious to the men that they were expected to leave and with an escort to ensure that they did so. Whatever their suspicions about what the men might have been doing there, the police were taking no chances – even if they didn't have any reason to detain them.

As the police and Border Agency staff dispersed, David was invited to a debriefing with the senior officers at the local pub where they had first met. It was lunchtime; the meeting was likely to be social as well as business and David immediately planned to use the time to explore the background to the day's events in more detail to help build up the picture of the activities that he had been commissioned to investigate.

As it turned out, he was to be more than satisfied with what he was told.

As the police escort separated from the three suspect cars at the Lincolnshire border, two headed into the Midlands and the third headed to Stansted Airport with a single passenger. As he
checked in for a connecting flight for Australia, the immigration officers noted that Mr Joe Kim, Australian citizen according to his passport, six feet two inches tall, had formally left the UK.

17

‘I've never seen a Chinese man that big before,' David Hutchinson remarked to the police inspector whom he had sat next to at lunch.

The operation over, the police and Border Agency staff relaxed and introduced themselves. The superintendent had disappeared long since and the inspector in charge acted as host.

‘Joe Kim,' the senior Border Agency man said, ‘supposedly an Australian but with a tag on him both here and in Canada.'

‘Ah!'

No names among the possible suspects had been mentioned at the meeting that David had attended with Susie Peveral, but they had slipped out during their consequent, less formal encounters.

‘I've heard about a dirty big Chinese bloke.'

He didn't say that it was Susie who had mentioned Joe Kim.

‘Well,' said Mike Ferguson, the Border Agency team leader, ‘that one would sure as hell fit the description.'

They all laughed. But it wasn't funny. Joe Kim had a role in what was going on, as well as in, as they later found out, other trafficking activities, in Australia and possibly also Canada. He was known to the Australian authorities as a violent and unforgiving operator whom very few people seemed prepared to take issue with.

Inspector Dick Woodward, who was leading the police operation, had been pondering the presence of the man ever
since he had appeared. Memories eventually clicked into place.

‘Bloody hell!' he said. ‘Not again?'

He also knew who Kim was. The man was on the police radar, and not because of his unusual height. Inspector Woodward's exasperation at the Chinese man was mostly based on the much lengthier report he was now going to have to make so that police forces particularly in the Birmingham and Manchester areas were aware that someone on their watch list had been to Britain and gone again. Mr Kim was suspected of being some sort of fixer for the mainland Chinese gangs who were steadily emerging as the new force in both people trafficking, in all its forms, and other more traditional and longer-established criminal activities.

Inspector Woodward filled David in. Knowing why the journalist was there, and despite his desire to avoid getting too embroiled with him, he was ready enough to share what he knew. As a good policeman he was quick to point out that what he was telling David was only half the story. For a variety of reasons, even after the passage of time, the events were still fresh in his memory.

The Lincolnshire Police, he told him, had been taken by surprise by the ferocity of the attacks on the Romanian farm workers. Smith's Co-operative had generally been regarded as one of the more enlightened employers of immigrant labour. It soon transpired that that was the most likely root of the problems that had unfolded in 2008. It was seen as an easy target by gangs of all persuasions.

At first, the police had thought the attacks had a racial connotation, as the workers most heavily involved were Roma.

‘But we didn't hold that view for long,' said Inspector Woodward as he recognised that David's lunch-primed nods and grunts were encouragement. It was the sort of background that was very useful to David. ‘Not that you would have been going to get much confirmation from the Chinese lot; they were
unlikely to be too cooperative even if we had known who to talk to.'

Back in 2008, it seemed, the tall Chinese man had been as enigmatic a figure then as he still was now.

‘The common factor and key figure in all of this always does seem to be our Mr Kim, but he's about as elusive as the abominable snowman,' added an officer from the Border Agency. ‘Based on past experience, after a fracas like this he'll be on his way to Australia or Canada, or somewhere else by now.'

Inspector Woodward sketched out the situation. Supplying seasonal labour, no questions asked, over the years had become big business even after the horrific events of Morecambe Bay. The regulation that followed that incident allowed the authorities to keep better track of where the largely itinerant immigrant communities were, gave them some hold on working conditions, but didn't prove very helpful in preventing abuses. It hadn't taken long for the criminal gangs already involved to refine their activities and to then use the regulation as a cover for the things that they had always done. Needless to say, the Chinese element in the supply of labour had remained, but the police and Border Agency sensed that they had upped their game. The whole activity had become much more sophisticated and was centred much less on isolated local gangs.

‘Where there's a lucrative operation going on with very little hands-on oversight, there's always going to be competition for the rewards. And the poor powerless immigrants are the cannon fodder for the battles that develop, especially in large multi-crop areas like here in Lincolnshire.'

The inspector reminisced about a particularly bad incident in 2008. It was cauliflowers again which had been at the centre of the eruption, On one of the Smith's Co-operative's farms, like the one that they had just been investigating, the cauliflower fields were so large that they could accommodate
four machinery trains. And, in line with their liberal policies, Smith's had recruited two labour gangs from two registered organisations. The one that employed the Roma workers they had used many times. The second crew were also East Europeans but the gangmaster worked for an organisation that had been registered only for a few months but which was offering very competitive rates.

‘The Smith's people were cautious,' the inspector recalled. ‘Experience told them that they should have established the group's track record before they did a deal. But money talks.

‘Trouble started even before the gangs arrived at the farm, it seems. Working to the same start time, the mini-vans of the two groups arrived at the access road together. The van of the new group had a reinforced bumper and tried to shunt the other van carrying the Roma workers off the road. A third mini-van was idling about a hundred yards behind the first two.'

Eventually arriving at the farm's machinery area ready to start harvesting, the driver of the Roma vehicle had confronted the other driver. It was something of a mismatch to start with, because the Roma crew were supported by three large and tough-looking men who had arrived earlier at the farm and who turned out to be the minders for the Roma gangmaster.

‘The long-standing gangmaster, it seems,' continued the inspector, ‘was expecting trouble, as the other group had tried to muscle in on the work crews at another of Smith's Cooperative's farms a few miles away. Armed with baseball bats, the thugs quickly beat the driver of the second mini-van to his knees and left him bleeding heavily from a serious head wound. Deterred by the violence of the assault on their driver, the other East European workers, from Ukraine apparently, held back.

‘They of course, knew about the third mini-van and a group of their own minders following behind.' The inspector shook his head in disbelief at the memory.

‘The farm manager, seeing what was developing, had already called the police and I and my team of ten men in riot gear sped over there.'

The inspector continued his story, much of which he had gathered from witness statements from the farm managers given at the time. The odds were now decisively against the Roma gang's minders. Armed in their turn with baseball bats and iron bars, the Ukrainian thugs weighed in immediately the third mini-van had come to a halt. Again, none of the Roma or Ukrainian workers made any attempt to join the fight. By now one of the Roma minders lay in a crumpled heap beside the first damaged mini-van. He wasn't moving. One of the Ukrainian minders was on his knees a few feet away, his head almost unrecognisable behind the mess of blood and pulp that was his face. Elsewhere in the yard the other two Roma minders were being beaten down by their attackers.

Finally, the farm managers intervened. An explosion of noise overtook the shouts, groans and curses that were accompanying the fighting. The farm manager and his assistant cocked their shotguns ready to fire another volley into the air.

As the groups were forced to separate and an uneasy quiet took over, the wails of the emergency vehicle sirens began to fill the gap as the riot police and ambulances got closer.

The minders instinctively began to shuffle towards their gang's mini-vans.

‘I wouldn't,' yelled the farm manager, uncertain of course whether the minders were carrying weapons in their vans.

Then, for a few brief moments, farce took over.

Suddenly a dark-blue 5-series BMW shot into the farmyard, braked furiously when confronted with a mass of bodies and vehicles, and then slithered to a screeching halt in one of the barns that opened on to the yard. The grinding clunk indicated that the BMW hadn't been unscathed by its unexpected and enforced trip into the Smith's Co-operative machinery yard.
The car reversed out of the barn and positioned itself ready to leave.

As the cacophony of official noise erupted into the farmyard in the form of two police vans, a police Land-Rover and two ambulances, it was clear that the BMW had been already in the farm lane and had been flushed into the yard by the following police vehicles. It was abundantly clear that the driver of the car was now very anxious to leave the scene. The Land-Rover parked in front of the gate precluded this option.

The injured were despatched to hospital where they were met by more police officers who would keep a bedside vigil. The remaining participants, workers, minders and the car driver, were formed into groups and placed under precautionary guard.

‘The guy in the back of the car refused to get out,' said Inspector Woodward, ‘but since we had a death on our hands we weren't in the mood to argue so we let him stay there.'

Eventually, detectives and other police specialists arrived and the riot police returned to their base. Satisfied on the farm manager's assurance that the actual Roma and Ukrainian workers had had no part in the mayhem, they were despatched to the fields and the day's work belatedly commenced.

It took several hours to sort out what had happened and take a preliminary view on why it had.

‘Eventually we got round to the guy in the car. He was not best pleased at having been kept hanging around but it was obvious that he was holding himself in since all he wanted was to get away and avoid too many questions; provoking the police wasn't going to help that.'

The inspector seemed amused by the man's predicament.

‘Joe Kim,' he said. Inspector Woodward again provided a link and continuity for David.

It was clear that the inspector, having told his tale, was keen to get back on the job. But David was still unsure of
the significance of Joe Kim in this and the earlier incident and how it linked to the Chinese criminal groups that they were all convinced were involved in the people trafficking that stood behind the whole immigrant labour scene. Although a picture was building.

As they were leaving the pub, he held back the inspector and asked him the question directly.

‘But how does Kim fit in? Why would he get involved on the ground like that?'

The inspector seemed unwilling to divulge anything further.

‘As you know, there's a lot of Home Office pressure on the police and Borders people and a lot of information feeding in from the mainstream intelligence organisations. And this is where we think this guy Kim fits. He's probably a lot more than just an enforcer and messenger.'

The lunch wasn't quite the end of things. The telephone calls that had both got David involved in the Lincolnshire Police action and had resulted in the superintendent being nominated to oversee the day's activities had also resulted in him being deposited back at her office for a debriefing. A conversation took place just between the two of them. Although David struggled to understand the significance of some of what he was told, it nonetheless closed off some of the events that he had become aware of.

‘This, as you probably know,' the superintendent said, ‘hasn't been the only confrontation between the gangs.'

David thought he was going to be told about 2008 again, but he was wrong, for what the superintendent then went on to say was probably just as valuable as anything else that he had garnered from the first part of his day.

‘The more recent incident,' she said, ‘was different. And explains why we might have seemed to have been rather heavy-handed today. As you saw, Kim wasn't the only Chinese man to come here. There have been more and other visits. The gang we suspect he is working for here is trying to muscle in on the
Somali gang, though I have to say that that gangmaster is worth ten of them.'

The superintendent gave an apologetic grin; the Somali woman had obviously impressed her.

‘In any event, another Chinese fixer came to talk to the Somali gangmaster about ten days ago. It was all very low key; the gangmaster is very good at leaning in the wind. This guy did whatever business he had to do with the gangmaster, whether successfully or not we have no idea, but whatever the outcome, she and he finished off their meeting with a bout of vigorous sex in one of the barns at the farm.'

David immediately felt himself to be utterly lost. He had no idea where this latest narrative fitted into the picture that he was trying to build.

‘Later enter, you might say, the other suitor for the Somali gangmaster's favours, both business and sexual. Mr Petrov, head of a Ukrainian criminal syndicate, was in town to try and secure a foothold in the local labour supply market before the Chinese got it all sewn up. Shades of a Whitehall bedroom farce, Petrov and the Somali woman also had sex in the barn!'

‘I can't believe I'm hearing this!' David said.

‘Oh, it gets better still,' the superintendent said, with another grin.

‘Descriptions are a bit vague but more Chinese arrived, one of whom was very tall, and finding Petrov they attacked him and his sole bodyguard and apparently killed him. It was all a bit of a mess, but they gathered up all the evidence, clothes, belongings and whatever and spirited the body away. Which of the Chinese actually killed Petrov and what happened to his minder we really don't know.'