China Wife (27 page)

The hall stretched out in front of her, opening into what she
decided was a dining room. As far as she could see, the dining room had a minimum of furniture and wide spaces between it.

‘Plenty of space for Mr Xu's wheelchair,' she told herself.

The shot that rang out was close. Janice froze. The policeman moved silently to her side, his machine pistol at the ready.

41

As the noise of the shot reverberated around the close confines of the apartment, Janice and the policeman waited nervously. A gabble of excited Mandarin eventually broke the silence. The harsh male voice was accusatory and the strident female voice defensive and truculent. They seemed to be very close to where Janice was hiding. Both listeners raised their weapons and directed then at the corner at the end of the hall.

The woman was obviously the PA and bodyguard, and, equally obviously, had fired the shot. But at whom, and who the surviving male was, it took Janice a moment or two to work out.

A short shriek bitten off into a groan rattled around the apartment as the arguing voices seemed to move away. Whoever had been shot was still alive and not being attended to.

Janice knew they couldn't wait. If they called for help, they would be in all manner of shit.

She waved the policeman back to guard the door. Something of the tone of the male voice and the fact that the man and woman had made no move to leave told Janice that it was Mr Shi, or someone else whom they didn't know about, who had been shot. Mr Xu was still alive and therefore the danger for Janice was still significant.

Apart from some valuable early Chinese paintings, the hall contained only what Janice assumed was a storage wardrobe for outdoor clothes. She was no connoisseur, so the beauty of
the paintings and the contrast they formed with the unpleasant character of their owner were lost on her.

She moved forward.

Pausing at the end of the hall, masked from view by moving along the right-hand wall but giving herself the best angle of vision, Janice stopped to listen. Allowing her breathing to settle and her heart rate to slow, she strained to hear voices. She could hear only one male voice.

This was what she had been expecting after what Linda had told her and what they had also learned from the receptionist for the apartment building. Mr Shi, for whatever reason, had not taken his own bodyguards; he had clearly not been expecting any problems with Xu. But these were only the principles; the possibility of there being another, or more, of Mr Xu's bodyguards still had to be considered. In addition, while the snatches of conversation had told her that it was the woman who had done the shooting, Janice had no way of knowing whether Xu himself was armed.

She had to go on.

Somewhere around to the right and out of sight, and as she imagined in a further room, she could hear the staccato exchanges of a heated argument again. Mr Xu did not appear to be a happy man. The woman was being surprisingly assertive.

Janice cautioned herself not to assume that, because they were arguing so violently, they would be off their guard.

A telephone rang.

Janice froze again, not knowing whether the telephone was in the same room as Mr Xu and his PA, or in the dining room out of her sight. She even didn't know whether it was a mobile.

It was answered by the female voice. The conversation was brief and Janice could hear the measured tones of the woman's voice as she reported its content. The voices faded away into the distance again.

Holding her breath, Janice once again followed her gun
around the corner and into the dining room. The longer she hung around, the more chance there was of her being detected. As she took in the wall displays of exquisite, ancient and clearly valuable pottery, she admonished herself; she didn't have time for sightseeing.

Holy shit!
(The idiom of her brief stay in Canada kept coming through at moments of stress!)

Propped against the wall next to the door to what she assumed was the kitchen and breathing raspingly and irregularly, a middle-aged Chinese man stared silently at her. Linda's husband, she assumed. She felt no sympathy for him. For Janice, he was as complicit in Alice's death as Xu.

She paused, her gun trained on the man.

Don't!
she thought, willing the man to stay silent.

A glance through the kitchen door told her that it was empty. To get to the lounge with the least chance of being seen, she was going to have to hug the wall and step over the injured man. She kept the gun pointing at Mr Shi's head as she passed over him.

This is for Alice
, she reminded herself again.

Clutching his stomach with blood seeping through his fingers, Mr Shi seemed to draw himself into himself. As she glanced back, his eyes flickered. She didn't have time to speculate on what might be going through his mind. He had neither moved nor made a sound throughout.

In front again was a wide opening into another sparsely furnished but luxurious lounge area. Janice relaxed a little. Neither of the two people she knew to be there were immediately in her vision. A warm draught, in contrast to the arctic feel of the rest of the rooms, attracted Janice's attention. As she was to discover, the glass doors on to the balcony were wide enough open for Mr Xu's wheelchair to pass easily to and fro.

The young woman's gasp as she stepped into Janice's line of fire was terminated by the same sharp cough of her weapon.

Shot through the heart, Janice didn't have time to watch the
woman collapse in an untidy heap in front of her. Sidestepping the body, she bounded fully into the lounge area, tracking her weapon on to a man whom she instantly assumed to be a second but otherwise silent bodyguard. She fired as she steadied herself.

The man's shriek and then strangled groan told Janice that she hadn't killed him. Staggering back towards the doorway that she subsequently found provided access to the more private parts of the apartment, he pulled sharply at his own weapon. Her second shot at close range was devastatingly successful in ending his resistance. The Glock pistol that he had almost succeeded in aiming at her pitched from his grasp and slithered along the carpet to come to rest against the wheel of Mr Xu's chair.

For the first time, Janice was aware of Mr Xu.

What Janice was not aware of were the movements and noises both from the hallway and from the back stairs that opened into the apartment, as Julie and Linda and the police reinforcements arrived.

Much to Janice's surprise, the expression on Mr Xu's face was a mixture of distaste for her and irritation that his disability wouldn't allow him to reach down and retrieve the bodyguard's weapon. Janice had no doubt that he would have used it had he been able to.

As the sounds of gunfire reverberated away, the quiet hiss of the air conditioning resumed its place as the dominant sound.

Janice surveyed the scene quickly. Out of her sight and hearing, the arriving police captain assessed the situation. From the hall he could see no more than Janice had been able to. Concerned not to exacerbate any situation, he restrained his men. A groan from Mr Shi concentrated attention. The policeman who had accompanied Janice gave his officer a whispered briefing.

The captain cautiously peered around the end of the hall wall and saw the blood-covered Mr Shi. Joined by Linda, he
was in time to witness the harsh, retching last breaths of the businessman.

Mr Xu's wheelchair was a lightweight model imported from Britain. As she continued to check out the apartment, the elderly Chinese man slowly but purposefully moved his chair across in front of the balcony entrance, but, as she quickly realised, also towards the opening into the dining room and entrance hall.

‘You're a cool customer,' Janice said in as pleasant and as neutral a voice she could manage. She knew that Xu would understand English.

But she was worried that her calm wasn't going to last. Surrounded by the signs of such luxury, something that she would never ever have the opportunity to enjoy, her anger at the brutally pointless death of Alice began to boil up inside her.

She moved to confront Mr Xu standing over him with her back to the very area that he had clearly been heading for.

‘You killed Alice Hou,' she said.

It was a cold statement.

Xu didn't quibble. The look of amused contempt that suffused his face was too much for Janice. Despite his vulnerability, Xu's arrogant disdain overrode any other feelings.

His eyes darted from Janice to behind her. He'd seen something else. But Janice was too focused on her sense of injustice to notice the change in Mr Xu's expression. All she saw, and thought she sensed, was the contempt for Alice, or at least for people like Alice. As she recognised later, Alice was little more than a photograph to Xu.

Still unnoticed by Janice, Xu looked behind her again and the smugness of his expression increased. He was clearly expecting the arriving police to protect him.

It was Xu's attempt to move forward again that finally forced Janice to concentrate all her attention on him. Then she realised what was in his mind.

‘Shitty little bastard!'

Janice's anger welled up, heightened by the recognition of the pathetic inadequacy of her Anglo-Canadian invective and by the total lack of reaction from Xu.

‘Janice!'

It was a command that she didn't hear.

In one swift movement she grasped the wheelchair, swung it round and propelled it out on to the balcony.

The startled grunt that the old man emitted sounded like the beginnings of the death throes of the family pig, a memory that instantly surged up from Janice's childhood.

‘Stop!'

It was another command that Janice didn't hear. The strident order in Chinese from the police captain and in English from Julie Li simply didn't penetrate Janice's consciousness.

Quickly drawing herself back, she propelled the wheelchair at the balcony railing with all the force she could muster. Mr Xu pitched forward but was trapped by the wrought ironwork until Janice could reposition her hold and force the flimsy chair up and over the rail. Overbalanced by Mr Xu's weight which was now being unsupported in space, the wheelchair was torn from Janice's grasp.

The only noise at first was the collective gasp as Mr Xu ceased to be visible, then a babble of unintelligible questions, accusations and remonstrations took over.

Two hours later, in the office of her superior, Janice was contrite but not regretful. And to her astonishment she was neither discharged nor demoted nor even reprimanded.

Untroubled by grief at the loss of her husband, and planning her return to the UK with her son, Linda Shen could have told Janice that somewhere lost in the tortuous minds of the top echelons of the Communist system the fact that Mr Xu was dead was appreciated as a problem that no longer had to be solved. With the command of the media, with ranks closed around the remaining officials and politicians, irrespective of
innocence or hidden guilt, the only public admissions that followed from the events surrounding the Hu Hengsen wedding and its aftermath, were of the existence of modest corruption and of the total success in suppressing it.

Janice Liang, Julie Li and Linda Shen were each in their different ways incredulous but each set about picking up the threads of their lives.

People's National Daily
Shanghai English-language Edition –
Friday, 19 November 2010
END OF PEOPLE TRAFFICKING INTO CHINA

The Chief of Shanghai Police announced the deaths of Xu Xichen and Shi Xiulu, two successful prominent local businessmen who had betrayed the ideals and honest endeavours of the Chinese People. The Chief of Police gave no details of how the two men met their deaths.

Following the arrest of several other prominent local Shanghai businessmen and the mayhem at the intended wedding of Hu Hengsen, the police are satisfied that the illegal trafficking of young women into China to provide trophy wives for these greedy parasites has been ended. It is believed that no more than twelve of these young women were introduced into China and married to corrupt businessmen with the intention of using their dual nationality to allow them to circumvent the PRC's regulations on the export of private capital.

Cooperation with the British City of London Police has determined that sums of money running into many millions of US dollars have been spirited out of the PRC and hidden in offshore accounts in various parts of the world. The Head of Major Fraud at the Ministry of Finance has been removed from his post for failing to adequately police the activities of these corrupt businessmen. The police in Beijing and Hong Kong continue to seek out and arrest corrupt officials and politicians.

The
People's National
understands that a number of the trophy wives have been arrested and will be deported to their countries of origin. These deportations are being confused by the fact that several of these wives have had children while resident in China who are Chinese citizens and who are being claimed by the families of the fathers. In several cases, the country of origin of these women is unclear as the women were trafficked twice to get them into China.

The Foreign Ministry has expressed its appreciation to a Western journalist who was witness to many of the events involved in the closing-down of the trafficking activity. The
People's National
understands that a report by this journalist will be submitted to the United Nations Committee on Human Trafficking.

42

‘What the shit was that all about?'

Back in Canberra, back in the same motel room, back in the same hot tub, David Hutchinson's frustration, irritation and intense feeling of having been cynically and ruthlessly used boiled over. He was relaxed for the first time since leaving the UK and free to give rein to his more private thoughts and feelings.

‘David, it's over. You did the job. You got paid. Now we're going home.'

Susie Peveral was just glad that they had got out of China unscathed, which in her case meant that her reputation and career were untarnished, if not actually enhanced.

‘Shit, Susie – people died!'

‘And people died when you were in Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Christ knows where else.'

It was true.

Running her hand over David's weather-beaten face, she tried to soothe his outrage. Having missed his presence, she was for once determined not to be sidetracked until her more basic appetites had been appeased.

The effect that her caresses had on both of them was slow to mature. Being more tired than he would have admitted to, David had spent some of the idle time while he awaited the outcome of the Chinese Security Service raid on Mr Xu's apartment wondering why he still did what he did. These last two jobs had had none of the satisfaction that most of his other
work had had. The reports that he had written were most unlikely to see the full light of day. He, at the time, had no idea that the Chinese Foreign Ministry was planning to pat itself on the back by sending his second report to the UN. What appeared to be lack of a tangible output from his work depressed him.

And a persistent niggle kept pushing into his consciousness that he had been set up, and not just by the Chinese but by the British – that is, by Susie – as well. He still wasn't sure why it had all happened; but his estimation of his journalism, and more particularly his integrity, was different from that of the Chinese authorities.

But Susie was now ready and she pushed herself physically on to him hungrily and urgently. All other thoughts and feelings relegated for the time being, they made love gently but intensely, the warm bubbling water around them adding to the pleasurable sensations. With the familiarity of practice, they both came together, and then again, and then subsided into the depths of the hot tub and just held each other, all hunger satisfied.

For David, they were the moments of almost stress-free tenderness that Susie was capable of when the mood took her. However, even relaxed and replete as he was, he knew her all too well.

‘There were upsides …'

Susie's public-service jargon as always pervaded even her most intimate moments. David waited for the gem of retrospection that he knew would follow.

But soothed in her turn by David's lazy trawling fingers ambling across her breasts, Susie lost the thread of her thoughts.

The gurgling of the hot tub dominated for a timeless period during which neither thought, only felt. Then a different niggle that David knew had been buried for some time in his deepest brain pushed to the surface.

There's no future in this
, he thought.
The sex is unbelievable and exciting, and what I've just been through could never have happened without her. But it's not a lifestyle. She's all order and process; I'm more about chaos and uncertainty. It wouldn't work! And she did set me up for this Chinese thing; the illegal immigrant nonsense in Britain was just to get me hooked.

‘So what about this Linda Shen then?'

Susie was back into her Foreign Office persona again. Linda fascinated her.

All David knew about Linda was what Julie had told him.

‘She's one of the earlier “China Wives”,' David said. ‘Kidnapped in Canada while on a business trip, shipped to Australia and then to China. Apparently, she was one of only three out of the twelve women Julie knew about who was not from South America.'

‘It was that simple.'

‘Susie, I only know what Julie told me and what she knows is what the Australian Security Service told her when she was set up as a member of the trafficking gang.'

‘Julie was set up by the Border Agency; Janice Liang was set up by the Chinese Security Service – so was Linda set up, too?'

‘She and Julie were colleagues at the Border Agency until she disappeared, Susie. I'm sure you know more than I do about what went on with that lot.'

‘Linda married this Shi guy, had his child. She helped him with his activities. Very successfully, it would seem. But she also signposted what she was doing in the UK, and in a way that those with detailed knowledge of Chinese criminal gangs and trafficking would recognise. Why did she do that, David?'

‘Hell, Susie, I don't care. Your lot at the Foreign Office must know – ask them.'

‘I was only making the point that Linda Shen isn't all that she seems.'

‘Well, she's presumably on her way back to the UK with her
son. According to Julie, the Chinese authorities made no objections and stamped on the Shi family when they demanded the child.'

‘As if that wasn't suspicious.'

‘Susie!'