China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  Perhaps he was right. But privately Hazel doubted if she fitted the profile of an employer of domestic servants either. She was the wrong age, the wrong social class, and a brief glance at her hands would have confirmed that she was accustomed to doing pretty much whatever needed doing herself.

  On the other hand, she did know someone who could tell her first-hand about the employment of Asian women by English families. She glanced at her watch. Ash would be at the shop: there was no likelihood of bumping into him if she called on Frankie Kelly.

  If he hadn’t had to part with his car, or had shown more urgency about acquiring a new one, she would have been forewarned by its presence in his drive. As it was, the first she knew that Ash was at home was when he answered her knock at his door.

  It was hard to say which of them was the more surprised. They gaped at one another for a moment, each for their different reasons discomfited. Hazel recovered first, and cleared her throat.

  ‘Sorry, Gabriel, it wasn’t actually you I was looking for. Is Frankie in?’

  At least he could answer that honestly. ‘I’m afraid not. She’s visiting some friends in the Lake District for a few days. The boys have gone with her.’

  Hazel went on regarding him speculatively for just a little longer than was polite. What she was thinking was: You risked your life to get them back. Now, because you’ve got a new little friend to play with, they’re in the way. Well, damn you, Gabriel Ash.

  What she said was, ‘Isn’t it a bit early for school to have broken up for Christmas?’

  Her tone was carefully neutral – practice with her tutor Sergeant Mole had brought this fundamental police skill to a high pitch of perfection – but Ash heard the disapproval in it anyway. It brought a faint dark flush to his cheeks. ‘Is it anything I can help with?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re busy,’ said Hazel, holding his eye with her own. ‘Plus, you’re not a nanny from the Philippines.’

  He tried a hint of gentle humour. ‘I can’t keep anything from you, can I?’

  She didn’t even smile. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Gabriel.’

  If she had stood on his doorstep for half a minute longer he would have broken down, dragged her inside, made a full confession and thrown himself on her mercy, accepting whatever the consequences might be. But she didn’t. She gave him a crisp little nod, more dismissal than farewell, and headed back to her car.

  If she had known what she was doing to him – what he was doing to himself – she wouldn’t have left him standing there in his own doorway, bereft as a priest who has lost God. But she didn’t, and she did, and she even rather enjoyed doing.

  FIFTEEN

  Deprived of one source of background information, Hazel hunted around for another. Not for the facts and figures about human trafficking, which were a matter of record somewhere within the great interactive police estate and which could all be accessed by someone with a command of information technology. She would do that as well, probably from the comfort of her own sofa this evening.

  What she wanted now was some insight into the immigrant’s world. How it felt to be so far out on your national limb that you’d actually fallen off and landed in someone else’s long grass. The stresses and vulnerabilities of living in a foreign country, and how those pressures reinforced the ties with fellow exiles. She’d hoped Frankie Kelly could give her a glimpse into a society within a society which knocking on doors and showing her warrant card would not.

  In truth, she had no idea how a greater understanding of the social structure of Norbold’s Asian community would help in the search for Rose Doe’s killers. Perhaps it wouldn’t help at all. The girl hadn’t died here. She might have been coming here, but there was no real evidence that she was. Norbold was on a fairly direct route from Myrton to either Coventry or Birmingham, both large cosmopolitan cities. Norbold had a long-established Chinese community, and Hazel was on friendly terms with several of its members. But the information she wanted was fairly specific. She doubted, for instance, that Elizabeth Lim, the faintly patrician head of Norbold Quays High School, could give her much insight into the world of domestic service. Horses for courses, as DCI Gorman had said.

  Frankie Kelly wasn’t a domestic servant either; nor was she Chinese. But as a professional nanny working in the area for fifteen years she would probably have known several Asian girls employed in local households, as nannies themselves or in other capacities. Now Hazel wished she’d remained on Ash’s doorstep long enough to ask for Frankie’s phone-number. She’d been too startled to think quickly enough. But she could have quizzed the nanny as effectively on the phone as in person, and she was probably going to have to call Ash to get her number. The prospect annoyed her.

  Before she did that, though, she thought she’d try another member of Norbold’s Asian community she knew well enough to chat with. Admittedly, Mrs Kiang had been born and bred locally, and when not selling flowers spoke with as broad a Midlands accent as anyone on the terraces of Norbold Tanners Football Club. (The name derived from the town’s once-strong, now virtually defunct leather industry. So did the club’s slogan, ‘Never Say Dye’.) Just how great a connection she felt to more recent arrivals from her ancestral homeland Hazel would only learn by asking her. It would mean buying some more flowers, but they would cheer her up in this dark spell, of the year and of the spirit.

  Mrs Kiang was alone in the shop, using her quiet time to make up some bouquets. Hazel watched admiringly as her deft fingers selected the stems for height, colour and foliage, and wrapped around each the cellophane sleeve with its subtle silver logo.

  ‘I call them Apology Bouquets,’ explained the florist. ‘Not too big, not too expensive, just right for men to pick up on their way home if they’ve forgotten their anniversary or not noticed their wife’s new hairstyle. The big orders – weddings, funerals, milestone family celebrations – pay the mortgage. Apology Bouquets put food on the table every day.’

  ‘I’m going to need a couple of them,’ said Hazel. She explained her mission. ‘It’s probably a long shot. I want to talk to people in the local Chinese community who came here to work as housekeepers, nannies and so on. I hoped you could point me in the right direction.’

  She saw suspicion in Mrs Kiang’s gaze and hurried to reassure her. ‘I’m not looking for illegal immigrants – really I’m not. We’re trying to solve the murder of a girl we think was trafficked here. We’re trying to make sure that what happened to her doesn’t happen again – that however they get here, with or without the right paperwork, these girls are going to be safe in this country. They’re not criminals, they’re victims. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences. I’m just trying to help some abused and frightened girls who’re a long way from home.’

  The florist thought about that for some time, her fingers continuing to work on autopilot. Finally she gave a fractional nod. ‘I can’t tell you much. As you know, I was born here – I never was an immigrant. But you hear things. Things that happened to a friend of a friend; to someone’s neighbour’s niece. We can talk about them, if you want.’

  A man in his mid-thirties came in. Apology Bouquet, thought Hazel, relishing her new knowledge, and so it proved. He picked a bunch out of the bucket without, so far as she could see, looking at anything but the price tag, paid for them and left. There were no other customers, so Mrs Kiang made tea in a kitchen even tinier than the one behind Ash’s shop.

  Hazel sniffed the scented steam rising from her cup and nodded appreciatively. ‘Lapsang souchong?’

  ‘Is it? It was on offer at Tesco,’ said Mrs Kiang absently.

  ‘The first thing you need to understand about these girls,’ she went on after a minute’s reflection, ‘is that they’re not refugees. They’re not even economic migrants. They’ve fallen for a scam. They’re mostly educated girls from decent families, who answer a newspaper advert – or these days, a post on-line – offering them the chance of a career in Europe. Foreign travel was so difficult in China
for so long that now anyone who can afford it wants to see a bit of the world. If they can earn while they travel, so much the better. The advertisements say that English families – and French families, and German families, and Swedish families – are seeking au pairs and nannies and housekeepers, and offering good wages and excellent terms of employment including use of a car and holidays with the family. More travel, you see. Very attractive to Chinese girls.

  ‘Maybe you think they’re naive. But there’s nothing suspicious about these adverts. They appear in respectable newspapers and they seem perfectly genuine. Real jobs with real European families will be advertised the exact same way. The girls probably have school-friends who answered them and are having a wonderful time. They have no reason to doubt that these agencies will do what they say they’ll do: vet the families, agree wages and conditions with them, arrange work permits and provide transport. All the girls have to do is pay an upfront fee as an earnest of good faith – the employers will pay most of their travel expenses – pack a bag, and meet at a given railway station at a given time. Everything else will be done for them.’

  She sighed. ‘Only of course, somewhere on the journey the story changes. Once they’re safely out of China, where they speak the language and can turn to any state official for help, they find themselves being treated less and less like clients and more and more like product. The Cathay Pacific flights they were promised turn into a bunk on a flag-of-convenience freighter. The bag they packed doesn’t contain enough for a month’s sea voyage, but the traffickers sell them what they need, at a price. If they haven’t got the money, there are other ways of paying. They end up owing more than they’d have earned even if the jobs had been proper ones, paying proper wages.

  ‘When the freighter finally docks, they’re landed in a country they don’t even know the name of and herded onto lorries for the last dash across Europe. It may be days before they see the sky again. If they’re lucky, somewhere along the road the Greek or Italian or French police may stop the lorry and repatriate them. They might get home hungry, penniless and ashamed, but they will at least get home. The unlucky ones will reach their destination.’

  ‘I take it there are no eager families waiting for them to arrive,’ murmured Hazel.

  ‘Not for these girls, no,’ said Mrs Kiang. ‘Some of them will find themselves working in private houses, more as skivvies than servants – poverty wages, minimal time off, no foreign holidays, no car. Some of them will be directed to sweatshop labour in small factories on nameless industrial estates, living in houses that have been or should be condemned, paying everything they earn for the privilege. And some of them – the pretty ones, the ones with nice manners and soft hands – will be bought by pimps and brothels.’

  ‘Can’t they get away? Are they under constant guard? Don’t they know we’d help them if we knew?’

  ‘They are guarded,’ said the florist, ‘quite closely at first. That’s when they still have the strength and spirit to want to escape. Later they’re just too tired, too beaten down. And then, you see, they’ve been told that the police are looking for them. Not to help but to punish them. Miserable as their lives are, they’re afraid of something worse. They no longer try to escape. They try to stay out of sight.’

  ‘Mrs Kiang,’ said Hazel, appalled, ‘how do you know all this?’

  The woman looked at her levelly. ‘Detective Constable Best,’ she said, ‘how come you don’t?’

  There was a phone-call. Cathy took it into the kitchen, dismissing Ash with a smile, and closed the door between them.

  He knew then, if he hadn’t known before, that whatever had brought her here had nothing to do with affection, for himself or for old times, had nothing to do with the still unresolved situation between them. She wasn’t in Norbold to seek any kind of forgiveness, or understanding. The decision he’d agonised over for two years, whether to end their marriage, was a matter of no consequence to her. She had other irons in the fire, was using him as a windbreak while she tended them. That was all he had ever been to her: a useful shelter from life’s inconveniences. From having to be careful with money, from anxiety about the mortgage, from wearing last year’s clothes when this year’s were so much more becoming. She had used him, always, and she was using him still.

  He opened the kitchen door, just had time to register her look of surprise, took the phone from her hand – the call still unfinished – dropped it onto the quarry-tile floor and crushed his heel down on it. He said quietly, ‘I want you out of this house tonight.’

  All the way home, Mrs Kiang’s words haunted Hazel. She should have known. None of this was occult information: human trafficking was a criminal enterprise, and that made it CID business. No doubt efforts were being made to eradicate it, and no doubt they were difficult and only intermittently successful. Was that why it wasn’t top of Division’s to-do list? Why it wasn’t the subject of fierce debate at every table in the Meadowvale canteen? Or was the reason that the victims of this crime were not blue-eyed blondes but golden-skinned girls with black hair and dark eyes?

  Hazel knew there had been occasions in the not-too-distant past when British police had been judged guilty of institutional racism. She believed – she hoped – no one would have applied the description to her. Of those she worked with, some were better officers, and better human beings, than others, and some probably shouldn’t have been police officers at all because they didn’t like people, any people, enough. The disrespect, overt or tacit, with which they treated members of the black and ethnic minorities was routinely evident in their dealings with the white community as well. At least those officers who harboured racist views now kept them largely to themselves instead of parading them for general approval. The best legal system in the world can’t police what goes on in people’s heads. Sometimes you have to settle for controlling outward manifestations, in the belief that weeds will die if you cut off their access to the sun.

  But if some individuals still got it wrong, the law got it right. It made no distinction between citizens of different ethnicities. Nowhere did it say it was a lesser offence to victimise people whose appearance and antecedents differed from those of the law-makers. So why was this vile trade being tolerated by the authorities? Perhaps, Hazel thought, for the simplest of reasons: because their best efforts weren’t good enough. Perhaps it was like asking why the National Health Service tolerated the common cold. The answer was, Because it defied every attempt to do anything else. One reason trafficking was so difficult to tackle was that all the parties to it wanted to keep it secret. The traffickers did, the girls’ employers did, even the girls themselves did, told and believing that discovery would only make their situation worse.

  Rose hadn’t succumbed to the brainwashing. Rose had recognised the trap she’d stumbled into and known that her only hope lay in alerting the authorities in this cold, damp, distant land. She’d seen the least scruple of a chance in a wind-blown archaeologist peering at a standing stone in the middle of a field, and risked everything on the possibility that he would help her.

  And she’d lost. Her courage and determination had won her not freedom but the coldest, dampest end imaginable, and she would never know if her sacrifice had been of value or not. If she’d died for nothing, or set in motion events that would finally confound her abusers.

  Hazel found that she wanted, more than she’d wanted anything in a long time, that Rose Doe’s death would not have been in vain.

  Before she was a police officer, Hazel was a teacher. Her subject was information technology, so she knew her way around the shadowy corners of the worldwide web. After supper – David Sperrin had finally made a contribution to the catering arrangements: she got home to find he’d been to the chippy – she began to do a little research.

  Her first thought was to go straight to the dark web, where surely anyone engaged in human trafficking would have their presence. But then it occurred to her that, in the area of domestic service at least, the potential
employers didn’t see themselves as criminals. They just thought they were being smart, getting their help cut-price and under the counter, and would have resented deeply any suggestion that they were effectively bidding for slaves. Such people clearly had money and property, might well be pillars of their communities, and would probably never find their way to the dark web.

  Instead she concentrated her efforts on advertisements that anyone could see. There were more agencies in the domestic service sector than she would have expected in these egalitarian days. There were even a couple in the Norbold area, and she made a note of the contact details. But there was nothing to indicate any kind of hidden agenda – nothing calculated to attract clients looking for special arrangements. No one offered a tariff of girls from different parts of the world.

  As the hour grew late and her focus began to slip, on a whim Hazel ran a search for those words that had so unsettled Sperrin. She still thought the likeliest explanation was that the branding on the flowers she’d taken him had slid under his guard at a vulnerable moment. But just because Mrs Kiang called her shop China Roses didn’t mean no one else used the name. And she was surprised again by the sheer range of enterprises which identified themselves that way, from a producer of hand-painted porcelain in Nottingham to the operator of narrowboat holidays on the Grand Union Canal.

  Finally she found an advertisement that sent a tiny frisson of recognition up her spine. It wasn’t offering staff to clean your house, walk your dog, do your shopping and serve the drinks at your cocktail parties. It was, she thought, offering Asian prostitutes.

  It didn’t, of course, say so in as many words. It was still in a place anyone could see it, and left an e-mail address anyone could respond to. But she didn’t know what else would be meant by:

  China Roses

  Beautiful girls fresh from Asia

  skilled in the ancient arts of the Mystic East.