China Wife (18 page)

‘Couldn't believe it,' Walt Wood told the police. ‘Crouched under a tree were two Chinese women, girls, hugging each other. Petrified. The dog was barking at a large snake, making
runs at it, but it didn't move. I called the dog off.'

Walt could see that the snake would have long made its escape if the dog hadn't kept cutting off its retreat. He wasn't sure whether he knew what sort it was, probably a Tiger snake, but it wasn't an aggressive Taipan.

‘Since there's no mobile phone coverage out there I gathered the two girls up and took them back home,'

Their story had been soon told. They had been a part of another shipment of young women, this time from the UK, via Canada and the ocean cruiser to Queensland. Once the local policeman had got the hang of their Geordie accent, the whole story came out.

Four crew members and one other young woman were apparently still unaccounted for and there was not much hope for them.

Mr Luo expressed his regrets at the loss of life in a rather mechanistic way.

‘No doubt the Australian Police will learn more from the two young women when they have recovered.'

‘OK,' said Susie, recognising that the Chinese official wasn't really interested in the incident.

It wasn't her priority either and she didn't want to waste valuable time with Luo on an un-investigated incident.

‘We have still got two women here in Australia heading for or being taken somewhere, we presume up north, but we don't know where, or what the traffickers are planning to do with them when they get wherever it is.'

‘Ship them to China,' Julius Luo said.

‘Of course,' said Susie, ‘but how, where and why?'

‘The woman we arrested in Hong Kong, who was being met by a banker, came on a regular Qantas flight from Melbourne. She'd been given a drug that took several days to wear off and which left her with very little memory. The people accompanying her panicked, as did the airport police, so we ended up only with dead bodies. The banker is being tried for other
crimes and the judge has given us the chance to find out more by not allowing the trafficking offence to be brought to court for the moment.'

‘Are you saying that somehow, somewhere, the two women that the Australian Police are chasing are going to be flown to China on a scheduled flight?'

Susie knew of the Hong Kong incident but she was no less incredulous now even with the greater knowledge that she had.

‘It's the only information,' Mr Luo said, ‘that any of us has got.'

‘But why?' muttered Susie; as always it was the key unanswered question.

Somewhere in her brain she would have probably thought that she knew. What with China's careful control over its own citizens, women with Western passports, if they could have been manipulated to follow the wishes of the corrupt politicians, officials and businessmen, would have been immensely valuable.

But as the three of them drifted by common consent to the Parliament coffee shop, it was a question that remained unaddressed and unanswered.

Susie and David were, however, offered the resources of the Chinese Government in Hong Kong if she felt that a British presence there would help in bringing the trafficking issues to a head. With the sort of remit that she had, she felt that her involvement would be beneficial to the Chinese and the Australians as well as the British. As she was an acknowledged UK diplomat but not part of the Beijing Embassy, basing herself in Hong Kong was thought to be the best option. It also allowed the Chinese authorities to monitor her activities more easily. Mr Luo was careful not to impose any obvious restrictions on David Hutchinson, though Susie was well aware of the sort of oversight of foreign journalists that existed in China.

*

Back at the motel in Forrest the question left hanging at the Parliament building wasn't going to get an answer there either.

‘David!'

Susie's delight at the sight of the reclining bulk of David Hutchinson on the bed swept any thoughts of women trafficking, Chinese diplomats and the like straight out of her mind.

It had been mid-afternoon by the time Susie, Tristram Booth and Mr Luo had agreed on how to communicate with the Chinese authorities when she was in Hong Kong; notwithstanding the realities of the situation it was, Mr Luo stressed, to be strictly on an information only basis. Whereupon the diplomat had returned to his Embassy.

‘He's not telling us everything,' Susie had said.

‘Of course he's not, but neither are
we
telling
him
everything.'

Booth had been right, but Susie wasn't going to rise to his bait and tell him what she wasn't telling the Chinese; need to know, she told herself. Having their own agent in the party heading north, as the Australians were convinced Mr Kim had been ordered to do, was information that it was too dangerous to put into the hands of too many people.

It was two hours later when Susie had completed her shopping foray to the Canberra Centre and, with rising anticipation, returned to the motel.

Tossing her bags and baggage aside, Susie slid out of her coat and skirt and paraded herself in front of David with just enough challenge to get him excited and then slid herself on to the bed beside him, grasping at his erection as she allowed him the pull down her pants.

David didn't bother to remove her stockings and boots, and although shedding a few shirt buttons in his haste to match her nakedness, he didn't, at first, move close to her.

Aware of Susie's inability to distinguish business from pleasure right up until he was inside her, he half expected some ardour-deadening comment about the kidnapped Chinese
women as she worked her body into a sweat gyrating beside him. Nothing came. She was just waiting for him to be ready and then to play his rising passion for all it was worth.

In the end, it was he who took the initiative, forcing her legs apart and then together as he entered. He was rough and impatient once the moment came for him and his thrusting produced a mixture of moans and cries of pain as he came to his climax.

When it was over, Susie locked her legs around his waist and refused to let him go until her orgasm came. Thrusting in her turn against his stomach, she felt his sweat trickle down into her soft areas. It was the final trigger.

David rolled on to his back. Eyes closed he let a wave of tiredness sweep over him.

Susie was filling the Jacuzzi.

Humming the traditional stripper music, Susie unzipped and studiedly removed her boots and slowly peeled off her stockings. Excited by her own actions, her body rocked again in an intense orgasm. Rousing himself from the bed, David picked her up and swung her round in one motion depositing her in the half-filled bath. Watching her with the leering look that weakened any resistance to his charms that she might ever have had, and judging his time, he climbed into the bath beside her.

‘Idiot,' she said as she clawed herself into his arms as the water in the Jacuzzi surged and bubbled around them.

Relaxed by the sex and the bath, they were ready for their evening.

‘King O'Malley's?'

Although the motel had a restaurant, neither would have thought to eat there.

David had been told about the famous Irish pub, but in response to Susie's question it was the only answer that he could give since it was also the only place he knew of.

‘Oh, I know a better place than that. When I was here
before I was taken to this place in O'Connor by a rugby-playing giant who worked in the Commercial Department. Apparently, it was a favourite watering hole for rugby players from the Wallabies downwards.'

‘Lead on. We'll get a taxi so we can freeze our gullets off by drinking as much Aussie beer as we can get down us.'

The restaurant lived up to Susie's billing. The seafood was good, the beer not to Susie's taste, but the wine suggested by a helpful barman, well aware of the problems of navigating an Australian wine list that didn't include any of the names that someone from Britain would recognise, was very well received.

‘Great place!'

David was content – full of the best things that Australian cuisine and vineyards could produce. When his mobile phone rang, he seemed not to want to recognise its tones.

‘David!'

Susie was never quite switched off. For her, the imperative of a mobile phone ringing was not to be ignored.

David listened. It was clear that that was all he was expected to do.

‘Well?'

After several minutes of silence and a few more mouthfuls of wine, Susie's curiosity got the better of her.

‘That was the police in Bendigo.'

Of course it was!
thought Susie irritably.

‘Ever heard of a place called Dubbo?'

She hadn't.

‘It seems that Mr Kim used his credit card at an ANZ bank in Dubbo.'

28

David's trip to Bendigo had proved successful once the police were satisfied about his interest. Detective Sergeant Chou Yun, having touched base with the British High Commission and the Australian Security Service, briefed him on what they knew about what Julie Li and Mr Kim had been doing in the Echuca area. It wasn't much.

DS Chou Yun had called back after their brief conversation with David the previous evening.

As she lay beside him, something in David's tone inhibited Susie from indulging her desire to get as much of her body as she could in contact with his.

‘So what happened when they left Echuca?'

Susie was concentrating. They were back in real time and the arrangements made with Julius Luo the previous day slipped to the back of her mind. DS Chou Yun was updating David more fully about events before Mr Kim had been detected in Dubbo.

Mindful again of the possibility of future prosecutions, the sergeant was careful about what she said.

‘We decided to let them go and to follow them.'

DS Chou Yun didn't actually say that the Bendigo police had been ordered to let them go.

‘Go where?'

‘Apparently it was to a meeting with some other Chinese types on the shores of Lake Mulwala.'

The sergeant didn't stop to explain where the lake was.

‘There was a big fracas involving maybe eight people including our Mr Kim. We think it might have related to the endless warfare between the Chinese gangs in Melbourne. What was left after the fighting was a burnt-out 4x4 rented by Julie Li, with a body in it.'

‘Could you tell whose body it was?'

‘We're satisfied that it was a man, so not Julie Li. That was a relief. As far as we could tell, the man was of typical height for a Chinese, so it wasn't Mr Kim.'

‘OK. So what has this to do with the women trafficking activity?'

‘Well, from the description given by the people arrested previously after the fighting in China Town in Melbourne, it was a very tall Chinese man who made off with one of the women who had been trafficked from Canada. We believe that Kim, and Julie Li, have this kidnapped woman with them.'

All of this seemed to fit with what Susie had told him after she had reviewed her high-level discussions with Julius Luo. Mr Luo was going to make arrangements to ease their path for a trip to China for Susie to act as a go-between for the Australians and the Chinese in Hong Kong and for David to go to Shanghai.

Mr Luo hadn't had to work too hard to get approval for David's trip.

Susie had rather unnecessarily explained the Chinese sensitivities to David. They were very resistant to the involvement of outsiders in their affairs. Relations with Australia were structured in a very ‘keep your distance' way, yet they knew that they needed to cooperate closely on the issues surrounding people trafficking. And they needed to be in contact with the other countries involved. But relations with Britain always posed special problems.

Hong Kong was China's window into the outside world. It was a kind of neutral ground. The Chinese wanted most of what had been going on in the British days to continue but
couldn't lose face by admitting that or implying that they weren't in control. The old Hong Kong lived on in many ways, quite a few of which were unofficial, and totally deniable. So a Brit who was ostensibly there as a representative of the Australians, and not the British, ticked all the right boxes.

As the conversation with the sergeant ended, David realised that he was alone in bed. He could hear Susie talking on her mobile in the bathroom.

When she returned, it was her turn to update David. She didn't say whom she had been talking to.

‘The Australians are going to let Kim and his companions – Julie Li and the two trafficked women – out of the country. Hong Kong is the most obvious place for them to go. The Chinese are going to let them into China, though the Embassy and the Australian Security Service sense that this is causing political difficulties. They believe that there's some unrelated political game going on inside the Chinese establishment. But it's important to them to be seen to be in line with the rest of the world on the issue of people trafficking. They are looking for some means of proving their transparency to the outside world.'

David had a nasty feeling.

‘That's why our Julius Luo wants you to go China and to Shanghai. But it was also why he needed to protect his back by getting top-line approval. That he now has.

‘They want you as an independent witness, or perhaps more as a means of sanitising what goes out to the rest of the world.'

‘No way!'

‘Yes, Her Majesty's Government demands it. Besides, it seems that you have a high reputation in China.'

‘Bullshit.'

Susie's giggle faded into the bedroom where she had unfinished business; there was no chance that David wouldn't do the investigation required of him!

29

The humidity of Shanghai was something that newcomers noticed but soon became used to. Equally, the high summer temperatures were noticed by those brought up in northern Europe but taken for granted by those of more southerly origins. The smog was irritating, but, for those with means, avoidable. The three young women seeking the synthetic climate of the Super Brand shopping mall in the Pudong district were among these last.

They were into shopping; it was something that the non-working wives of the new elite of Shanghai did. And these three, all of whom hadn't been living in the city for very long, had yet to become jaded by the idleness and pointlessness of hunting through racks of designer clothes that they didn't need to buy. It was an experience that had been beyond their wildest dreams until seemingly a few months before when they had all been whisked away from their dreary and soulless existences to be deposited in China, married and cast adrift as the wives of the new super-rich. If you had asked two at least of the three what they remembered of their lives before China, they would have been hard pressed to conjure up images of their South American childhoods. However terrifying and inexplicable had been their journey in time and place to the present, the memories had been erased with casual ease by the undemanding lives of luxury that they now were living. They were both newly made pregnant, and what futures they saw in front of them were becoming increasingly rose-tinted by the day. For
these two, boredom was an inconvenience that it was going to be easy to cope with. With good money spent for them, what would eventually be demanded of them, beyond procreation, they had yet to find out. But payback would inevitably be demanded.

For the third young woman, things were different.

She was not pregnant. Married to a successful businessman and intimate of a number of Communist Party officials and government ministers, she lived in even greater luxury than the other two, and had all that she might have ever wanted. But she had not been able to settle into the life forced on her in the same way as her two shopping partners had. In her private moments, she was still haunted by girlhood dreams of there being something more to her life, even if she still couldn't quite put her finger on what. Her new husband would have simply said that she was just that much more intelligent than her companions. But then he himself was that much more intelligent than his peers and for him there definitely was more to life than importing Western Chinese girls for breeding purposes in the face of an imagined dearth of suitable home-grown marriage partners. For him and his business partners, these new wives were a bridge to the West and a way to circumvent the increasingly severe restrictions being placed on him and his ilk. Business success brought ambitions that were anathema to the Communist leadership.

‘So when are you going to England?'

It was the younger of the more complacent two girls who asked the question. They were speaking Spanish. It was something that they always did; it was a small unconscious rebellion that allowed them a degree of privacy that wasn't normally available in their new lives. At home, they were required to speak English or, increasingly as their proficiency improved, Mandarin.

There was curiosity behind the question but no envy. With the hormonal distortions of pregnancy the young woman was
finding it hard to see past the current pleasures of her existence. Travelling abroad was the last thing that she would have wanted to do.

‘Next week, I think.'

The discontented woman answered a little nervously partly because her Spanish was rudimentary and partly because of their location. The central thoroughfare of the shopping mall was crowded with lunchtime shoppers escaping the rigours of being a part of the world's fastest-growing financial power-house. The group was forced together and into the hearing range of the ever-watchful group of bodyguards who accompanied them everywhere. Mindful of their different, Western, concepts of freedom, the husbands of the three women provided this protection an on almost round-the-clock basis.

The pregnant women saw nothing unusual in this. Security was everywhere in China; violence was endemic in the countries that they had originated from. However, it was the constant presence of these bodyguards, loyal only to her husband, that fed the third young woman's feeling of dissatisfaction. That, and the growing anxiety that she wasn't going to be able to carry out the tasks that her husband was sending her to Europe to undertake.

Rose Zhu – her husband, Hu Ziyang, actively encouraged her to use the Western form of her name – had come to China like the other two women effectively as a package, in her case bought and paid for by Mr Hu. It was a transaction that involved her in uncertainties and terrors that she had been less able to rid her mind of than the other two; she was owned, whatever status was being accorded to her by Mr Hu. He, being a good judge of character, had far more confidence in her than she had in herself. Like Mr Shi, Mr Hu was slowly beginning to understand and exploit the capabilities of these new wives.

And knowing from her childhood and her early adult life that nothing was for nothing, she had waited to find out what
the price was going to be for the life of married luxury that she had so unexpectedly been introduced to.

‘I have to wait for someone at Hong Kong to accompany me to Britain,' she said when they were again able to put distance between them and the minders.

Just one bodyguard for another
, she thought.

But she was wrong.

The woman who met her at the pre-arranged time in the coffee shop of the Hong Kong International Airport was indeed accompanied by a minder, but the man had clearly been told to keep his distance. The minder wouldn't be accompanying Rose; his role was to see that she and her new companion definitely boarded the aircraft to London.

‘I'm Linda.'

Linda Shen had been well briefed by her husband and had a sense that Rose Zhu was also something of a free spirit like herself. Not that Mr Shi had described Rose in anything like these terms; it was Linda's own interpretation that was confirmed almost immediately when she and Rose readily got on comfortable terms with each other. At no time did she share anything of her own background with Rose. Linda recognised very quickly that her husband had subconsciously rather than consciously moved on in his relationship with her and was acknowledging her skills and experience, and his trust, by asking her to undertake a totally different role with Rose Zhu. She was not going to jeopardise this new relationship and the benefits for her and her son that she thought she could derive from it.

‘I don't trust Mr Hu,' was probably the most important part of Mr Shi's message to his wife.

Mr Hu was a fellow businessman and a customer for one of Mr Shi's latest schemes to circumvent the Chinese Government's financial controls. Linda had met him and had recognised that he was intellectually more in her class than her husband's. She had no doubt that Mr Hu would be able to
double-cross Mr Shi if he put his mind to it, but in response to her husband's more open approach to her and her role, she had decided that Mr Hu wasn't going to be allowed to get away with anything. So when she met up with Rose Zhu she was on her guard.

Rose herself had been every bit as carefully briefed as Linda had.

‘You have two things to do,' her husband told her.

Hu Ziyang was superficially a rather jovial man whose solid stoutness and pleasant social manner belied his sharpness of brain that was both revered and feared. Capable of both ruthlessness and cruelty, he had bought Rose purely for the access she provided to the UK. A marked man in the eyes of some factions of the Communist Party, he was unable to travel freely out of the country. A shrewd judge of character, he had investigated several of the Western women available and had chosen Rose because of her intelligence and her thoughtfulness. He had no doubts about her capability to carry out his plans or of his own ability to ensure that she didn't escape from his grasp when in Europe. And, although he had no idea that the person designated to accompany his wife by Mr Shi was his own wife, virtually all the contacts that she would otherwise make in Europe would be through extended family members.

One of the things that Rose had to do was sell some rough-cut diamonds to a dealer in Antwerp.

‘He will be expecting you. He will have had emailed photos of the diamonds. All he will need to do is inspect them, verify them and then give you a receipt. The price and means of payment are already agreed ‘

Linda only found out about this first part of Rose's tasks on the flight to London. Having no confidence in the security of emailing from the aircraft she decided not to report this unforeseen aspect of the trip to her husband. If he was going to trust her, he would have to trust her.

The diamond exchange was easily enough accomplished.

Neither woman had ever been to Antwerp but the trip opened up possibilities in Linda's mind.

As she waited for Rose to complete her transaction in the sort of street-side café that she had never come across before, Linda had what she later described to herself as a crisis of conscience.

‘What am I doing here?' she silently asked the world around her. ‘I'm actively helping him to make yet more illegal money! Why don't I just go round the corner to the nearest police station and hand myself in and tell them everything?'

Perhaps for the first time Linda realised just how far-fetched the story that she would have to tell would be. Kidnapped in Britain. Shipped to Canada and across the Pacific Ocean to Australia partly in a box? No Belgian policeman would understand her English probably, let alone give credit to her story. She'd have to wait until she was in England; her former Border Agency colleagues would certainly understand her story.

‘But would they believe it? Why didn't I try to escape? Surely the life of luxury and my acceptance of it would throw doubt on my credibility?'

For Linda, denying her the opportunity to take her son when she went on her trips was the key issue. But would the British authorities see it as such a powerful control weapon? Surely, they would simply apply to the Chinese authorities for protection for the child. However, Linda knew how it would be.

‘They'd always decide in favour of a man!'

Her son belonged to her husband in Chinese eyes; she was nothing.

As she drained her coffee cup, Linda was aware of another feeling. It didn't replace the pain that thinking about her son always brought to her but it was powerful.

‘Actually, I'm enjoying this!'

It was a thought that she was conscious had been there for some time; certainly she was aware of the feeling of satisfaction
after she had brought the two schoolgirls back to China. Her dealings with the villainous Mr Kim and the gang leaders in England had been successful, despite her being a despised woman; that had made her feel good, too.

Her thoughts didn't get any further. Rose had re-joined her. But once started she knew that somewhere in her brain this feeling of value and achievement would mature. She was going to have a hard time rationalising it against the sordid reality of what she had been forced into.

‘But,' her Border Agency mind assured her, ‘you haven't yet done anything that a judge would accept as proven as unlawful in the UK.'

Mr Hu had shown Rose two photographs. One looked like a college reunion; three rather disordered rows of smiling men all grinning broadly. Some were sporting baseball caps – a thing that Mr Hu hated – others were bare headed. As her husband ran his finger over the photograph, Rose had a feeling that the capped and un-capped young men were deliberately arranged in particular groups. She couldn't imagine why they should have been.

The second photograph was a panoramic wildlife scene taken in Africa. A pride of lions lounged in the obvious heat of the day next to a group of zebra. Some of the zebra were feeding; some were clearly alert, head up and on guard.

‘You will arrive on 27 August,' Hu said. ‘It's important that you hand these two photographs to my cousin at the Allied China Bank in London Wall that day.'

The Bank's address was written on the envelope containing the photographs.

‘What could be easier?'

Rose was chilled by the tone in which her husband asked the question. There was somehow a threat in the innocent query that terrified her.

She didn't tell Linda any of this when they arrived at
Heathrow from Antwerp; only that she had a meeting at the bank in question.

For Mr Hu, the trip to Antwerp was a way to realise the value of some diamonds that he had been given while his companies were building a major infrastructure project in Zambia. The fact the donor was now sitting uncomfortably in a Zambian jail didn't seem to bother him.

And it was a way to preserve the profits from his business activities. A realist, Mr Hu, like Mr Shi and many of their business colleagues, anticipated that one day the Communist regime would be swept away, hopefully peacefully, and he would be able to enjoy his capitalist wealth in his own country.

With the outflow of private capital from the People's Republic actively discouraged when the sources of the capital were perhaps not as transparent as the Chinese Government would have wished, access to electronic banking was fundamental. And with the photographs that Rose was carrying having the capability to be read in conjunction with a particular date in numerical terms, Mr Hu's nephew had all the information that was necessary to make transfers to the various offshore bank accounts far from China that he had set up for the head of his family.

Rose Zhu, of course – as she and Linda Shen emerged from the Heathrow immigration queue – had no idea about the transfers that she was initiating. Linda nodded towards Rose as the latter passed seamlessly into the hands of the inevitable minder and then set off to the brief meeting with her husband's nephew, following which she embarked on an expensive but totally innocent shopping trip. The most injurious accusation that could have been levelled against Hu was of an extravagant indulgence of his new and very pretty wife.