The biggest shock to the British political consciousness was the scale of involvement, worldwide, of UK-based criminal groups. Prompted by such organisations as the Nigerian National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking of Persons, the United Nations had moved to the forefront of highlighting the problems, not just in Africa, where trafficking had been historically endemic, but also in the more so-called advanced countries.
‘This UN Report makes interesting reading.’ And if the Foreign Office Permanent Secretary thought something to be interesting reading, it was inevitably going to be.
‘Modern Communications and Their Impact on the Illegal Movement of People around the World.’
It was the work of a new UN department whose inception owed much to Susie Peveral’s endeavours.
People like Susie were used to the portentous and obscure titles of official documents. But what they were normally interested in, of course, was the content not the title. In this instance, it was the unexpected conclusion, buried in the detail of the report, that South America had emerged as the source of a new wave of migrants, who were being transported with surprising ease from Brazil, Argentina and even Chile to Canada and beyond – even, it seemed, to Australia. It was this document, along with Susie’s and the Foreign Office’s own intelligence, that had proved to be the genesis of the project that David Hutchison had agreed to undertake.
Back in the security of her own office after the briefing meeting with David, and after having successfully sold the idea of using external help from the media to force people trafficking up the public agenda as well as the Government’s, Susie was almost exultant. Unlike an in-house report, at least David’s work was guaranteed to be published, even if its circulation might end up being truncated.
And as she allowed herself a brief moment to daydream, a ping from her computer brought her back to reality. She was being copied the sort of document that both intrigued and irritated her. It said so much yet it still didn’t say enough. But it did open up a new area of investigation with as yet unknown implications. The Australian brief suggested that the two strands of the overall trafficking endeavour that were emerging within their jurisdiction might well be totally separate.
‘So,’ she said addressing the computer screen, ‘trafficking Chinese women to Australia may not be a part of the mainstream operation. But it’s certainly riding on the back of it.’
The computer screen could offer no more elucidation than the words that she was reading.
The organised worldwide movements of illegal economic migrants, movements that were generally based on men, with women only as dependants, were still the politicians’ principal focus and their nightmare. Trafficking women for the sex trade was always there as a basic operation, financially underpinning everything. But as the global activity had developed and become ever more organised and ever more commercialised, the sex trade part had moved into the background as it always attracted far more official attention than the trade in economic migrants. However, it was always seen as an inseparable part of the same illicit business activity. Now the Australians seemed to be saying something different; there was this presumption of a separate activity. At least there was for Australia; it was a potential complication that Susie knew had to be taken account of.
But was it as clear-cut as it seemed? Was it too simple a conclusion in such a complex environment? The bulk of the male and family immigrants, or potential immigrants, into Australia were certainly not trafficked by the big players emerging in the investigations around the world, as far as the Australians could tell. Whether that meant in their area that there were only local operations wasn’t clear. Much of the Australian experience suggested small-scale activity, but they had no evidence that that was necessarily the whole story.
For women trafficking, particularly Chinese women, however, the evidence for a complex international operation was now beginning to emerge, even if the numbers that were being talked about were often single digit. Again, the picture was not clear.
‘Maybe David will be able to throw light on it.’
Women trafficking, as a specific topic, wasn’t strictly in David’s brief but his known tendency to regard his brief as merely guidance was one of the reasons why Susie had wanted him.
The Australians were still not clear how the Chinese women were getting into the country, or more particularly why they were being brought in, but they had taken steps to be more proactive in this area. The inferences of British involvement in these steps meant nothing to Susie. The Australians had also established, in the half-dozen or so cases that they had become aware of, that the women were all educated professionals.
Nonetheless, there was also a rapidly growing but intuitive suspicion that the women trafficked into Australia were actually in transit. The country’s ease of access to China appeared to be the key.
The Australians were learning fast.
12
Alice Hou knew that she was now in Australia and that Australia was the same sort of country as Canada. She also knew from the periods on the cruiser as it made its way across the Pacific Ocean, when conversation with the other three girls was possible, that they all had originally been trafficked to Canada from Brazil. At least two of them had said that they had. The fourth girl in the group appeared to be too traumatised to contribute to the conversations.
‘How old are you?’
Scrubbing decks with Patience Zhang had been one of the opportunities to exchange stories.
‘Twenty-five.’
Alice herself was twenty- six.
It soon transpired that Patience and the silent April Cheng had been forced to leave Brazil because, despite its burgeoning prosperity and their professional qualifications, non-indigenous people like them had difficulty in finding jobs. Both had faced prejudice and even violence when they tried to seek employment. They had left São Paulo of their own free will, aged twenty-five, but had used the services of a people trafficker who, as always, promised the earth, took their money and left them stranded in Canada. Like Alice and the fourth girl, Janice Liang, they had all qualified for Canadian passports as a result of residence, having an occupation that meant that they would be no burden on the Canadian taxpayer and were of good behaviour. How this had been managed with such ease in the normally rigorous Canadian system none of them knew but their identities had consequently been cast in stone by the authorities.
Patience and April, like Alice, had all still been paying off the costs of their journeys to Canada when they were kidnapped. Because of the so-called interest on their debts, they were getting no closer to settling them. Alice knew that this was the traditional trap of people in her position, especially as the interest rate had doubled once they were made Canadian citizens. As Patience had learned to her cost, the only means of enforcement that the traffickers then had was violence and the threat of putting them into prostitution. As distinct from Europe, where the illegal immigrant problem was massive, the traffickers were more relaxed about how they kept hold of their girls in Canada and understood the basic economics of the situation. The more the girls thrived, the more they thrived. That was until such time as they were confronted with a greater economic power, in which case, as with three of the girls, they were happy to sell their merchandise on no questions asked. Whether Janice Liang’s experience in this respect was exactly the same as the others, Alice was never able to find out.
‘They raped you!’
Alice’s horror was matched by Patience’s surprise that nothing similar had happened to her. It hadn’t.
‘We’ve all been raped and beaten up,’ Patience said.
Again, Alice was unclear whether ‘all’ included Janice Liang.
Like Alice, Patience had been working as a waitress, despite being a qualified accountant. April and Janice had worked in the kitchens of a large hotel in Winnipeg. They both had similar middle-class qualifications.
Of the four girls brought together to Australia only Patience and Alice were liv
ing in the dormitory over the shops in Little Bourke Street in Melbourne. Neither knew what had happened to April and Janice.
The uncertainty of what was going to happen to them was very stressful.
An explosion of crashes and screams shattered the sleep of the six occupants of the dormitory. The noise was rapidly approaching up the stairs.
Sleeping top to tail in three narrow beds there wasn’t very much room to move around. As the women tumbled out of bed, they trampled over each other. Tempers flared.
‘Alice!’
A rather plaintive Patience pushed her way towards her travelling companion. Knowing only each other, they tended to keep only each other’s company.
The two men who smashed their way through the door were unknown to the women. They were followed after a few moments by a third man who hovered in the doorway initially. The original two Chinese men who forced their way into the tiny room were clearly thugs, the muscle in support of the third man, imposing his will before he deigned to enter the action.
Alice couldn’t understand the harsh shrieks that the men were uttering but the hand gestures were obvious. They were being ordered to their knees. Partially brutalised by their recent treatment, all six did as they were bid.
The man who entered the room when all of the women were submissive and silence had returned was tall for a Chinese. He was followed painfully by the man who had in effect been their jailer.
Jo Li – a punning nickname that none of the girls understood, for he was surly and anything but jolly – was bleeding from a cut over his right eye. His battered state as much as the fierce determination of the two foot soldiers and cold disinterest of the tall man intimidated the six frightened women into a state of abject obedience.
‘Alice Hou?’
The tall man addressed Jo Li but Alice knew that it was a demand for her to identify herself. The cold harsh tones of the man made Alice quail. She didn’t have time to wonder what worse could happen to her but she somehow knew that whatever it was had started.
She stood up.
One of the foot soldiers backhanded her across the face and barked something at her, the words of which she didn’t understand, but which clearly was an order for her to stay on her knees. She subsided, her cheek stinging from the force of the blow.
‘My apologies, Miss Hou.’
If she had been in less of a panic, Alice might have interpreted the tall man’s remark as the sarcasm that it was. He probably couldn’t have cared less if she was in pain, only if she had been damaged. Again, if she had been in any sort of state to think about it, Alice would perhaps have realised that, despite the endless taping up of her face and her arms and legs, there was never any actual injury done either to her or to the other three girls. The four of them had been knowingly preserved, even if it wasn’t apparent to any of them.
Jo Li was forced to the floor and under one of the beds. The five other girls were then forced to lie face down on the beds, leaving Alice still kneeling in front of the tall man, head down and senses numbed by what was happening. She was used to being regularly trussed up, but the only force that had ever been applied to her was that necessary to overcome her resistance to being bound.
This was different; that much she sensed, even if the same care to avoid permanent injury was being taken.
Alice was conscious that another person had come into the room. She was only aware that it was a woman and of her presence when she saw a pair of booted legs appear in her vision. That she could only see the woman’s legs and feet said that she was very close to Alice.
Alice couldn’t see what she was carrying but she soon found out.
Pulling her head up by her hair, the woman forced a wedge of material into Alice’s mouth. The taste of the gag surprised Alice. In the past, all sorts of unpleasant things had been forced into her mouth. This time it was sterile like a medical bandage. The material bag that was then pulled over her head seemed to be equally clean and sterile. The woman moved quickly to bind the bag around Alice’s neck with what she felt was more of the dreaded packaging tape.
Fighting to prevent herself being sick, Alice tossed herself from side to side. The woman grasped her head firmly but, as Alice later realised as she relived the day, gently, and told her very loudly in English to keep still.
‘If you don’t struggle, you won’t get hurt.’
As Alice also again later realised, unlike the way that she had been spoken to before, it was said calmly and without menace.
In her terrified state Alice didn’t think to wonder why the woman might have known that she would understand English more readily than Mandarin. Equally, since she was so stressed out, she didn’t register that the accent of the woman was neither Canadian nor Australian, the only two English accents that she knew. Who the woman might have been wasn’t something that exercised Alice at that point in her life.
‘Hurry up!’
Alice heard the demand from the tall man. She knew it was the tall man; none of the foot soldiers ever spoke. In her current state of mind, the slight anxiety in the man’s tone didn’t register.
Her hands were roped behind her and her ankles roped together. Again, it was firmly done and not as painfully as in her previous experience. She had a limited movement within the ropes that had never been possible with the tape. Alice was lifted by one of the foot soldiers. From the hard pressure on her stomach and the pounding motion that went with it, it was obvious to her that she was being carried over the man’s shoulder downstairs. The motion and the pounding in her stomach began to make her feel sick. Sweating, and with her pulse racing, she desperately struggled to control her breathing and to hold down the contents of her stomach.
The journey away from China Town was lost to Alice. The various motions that she was subject to completely confused her. The sounds of shouting, of blows and of what was clearly more violence, were beyond her ability to grasp as her brain’s functions began to close down. Jo Li’s colleagues and various assorted elements of the Melbourne Chinese underclass had rallied to prevent the removal of Alice from their protection. Well aware that Alice was a valuable trading commodity and well aware that the anger of their gang superiors could be unremitting and even fatal, the fighting was fierce if brief.
‘Into the van!’
This was one piece of the action that did penetrate Alice’s brain. But the grinding of the opening of the van’s doors was for Alice overtaken by her being thrown on to the floor of the vehicle and all of the breath being knocked out of her. Forced to take in air only through her nose, she lost consciousness briefly as her oxygen intake was insufficient. She could feel the bitter vomit in her mouth as she came to. Frantically, she swallowed back the acid; it burned its way back down her gullet. Eventually, she managed to gulp in some air through her mouth as the convulsive movements that she was making forced the material plugging it partially out of it.
‘Mother of God…’
She wasn’t a very good Catholic so she could only recite parts of the liturgy that had otherwise failed to lodge in her brain as a child
The next problem for Alice after getting control of her breathing was that her brain began to take over again. But her brain was by no means as in command of her thoughts as her body was of her breathing.
She went into an immediate panic. She could feel her whole body stiffen. Even as her laboured breathing settled down, her head seemed to get hotter and hotter. Again, she struggled not to be sick. The material in her mouth was soggy and now bitter-tasting, but the tightness of the bag over her head made ejecting it completely impossible.
Then she lost consciousness again and for a period knew nothing more of the journey that she was being forced to undertake.
Julie Li was concerned about the captive.
‘I need to check that she’s OK. She might have settled down, but we have to be sure she hasn’t quietly choked herself to death.’
The tall man didn’t seem very interested. He’d done his bit – he had re
moved this Alice Hou from the custody of the rival group; it wasn’t his job to keep her alive.
‘We’ve gone to all this trouble to procure this woman because she’s supposed to be a virgin and twice as valuable as the rest. And we’ve started a war to do it. The last thing we need is for her to die on us!’
She was angry at the callousness of the man sitting lazily beside the driver.
But Kim Lee Sung knew she was right. Which bit of his half-Korean, half-Chinese self inhibited him from accepting and agreeing with what a woman said to him, he wouldn’t have known. He was suspicious of this Julie Li, he didn’t know where she had come from, he didn’t like the Europeanised name she used and he didn’t like the aura of self-confidence that she generated. She wasn’t deferential enough for him.
‘She’s too Australian, too European,’ he had said to the elderly Chinese man who had told him that she was joining his team.
Of course, he knew what he meant; she did have something un-Chinese about her face and about her manner, and she did wear her skirts too short for the blood pressure of the younger members of the organisation. Nonetheless, she was good at what she did; she knew a lot of people in and around the Australian Police, and enough manufactured dirt about them to ensure at least their inaction in the face of the activities that they engaged in.
Julie knew just about enough about Mr Kim to know that the half grunt, half shrug was all that she was going to get by way of agreement to check out the young woman prone on the floor of the vehicle.
In the back of the camper van, she eased the bag from Alice’s head. It was very dark since they had long since left Melbourne and its surrounding conurbations. She knew that they were heading for Echuca but she neither knew exactly where that was nor how long it would take to get there. Julie knew very little about Australia outside of the confines of Melbourne. In her new situation, this was something of a worry to her.
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