China Wife

by Hedley Harrison

  It was so different from the leisured times that they had spent in bed on holiday. It was as if they were two different people. Susie was fascinated by the way that they could fire up on such occasions as the O2 Arena and now, but mystified and a little frightened that she could act with such abandon.

  In the warmth of Susie’s large and spacious bath, David’s feelings were rather more mixed up than hers. The situation was simple to her. She had a job to do and had secured the help of the one man she most wanted in her bed. It was a perfect scenario. But Susie, as well as having the rapidly disappearing inhibitions of her background, also had its basic honesty. Self-gratification she knew full well was a part of what was going on.

  David, on the other hand, had a vague sense of being used. But try as might he couldn’t work up any real anger about it. Never one to stand on his dignity and for one whose only pride was in the excellence of his work, his irritation quickly turned to amusement. The idea of being paid in money and in sex seemed to him to be a great bargain. The idea of being tied down in a stable relationship was taking longer to assert itself in his mind.

  She’d be absolute shit as a honey-trap spy, he thought.

  And he almost said so. It wasn’t that he realised such a comment would be very hurtful, it was more that he knew instinctively that Susie just wouldn’t understand the inference; she took herself too seriously.

  In any event, Susie had other thoughts to pursue.

  ‘So what do you know about this bloke Igor Petrov?’

  ‘Jesus! Susie. Where did that come from?’

  As she laid back against him running her hand down the soapy wetness of his inside leg, the unexpectedness of the question made him almost forget the sensation that she was creating. Almost.

  David arrested her hand before it encroached too far up and generated feelings that it might be too difficult to control. If she wanted to talk business, he was happy for that, too, but combining business and pleasure was more than he felt inclined to in their present situation. For once, Susie seemed to sense his hesitation. Gently, she eased his hand so that it came to rest around her right breast and gave a little sigh of contentment.

  Pleasure seemed to win out with her, too; but only seemed to.

  ‘Petrov?’

  Strike that, he thought, she’s anything but shit!

  But she didn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘Have you ever heard of a Joe Kim?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  David was disappointed, even relaxed in a warm bath and after very satisfying sex, Susie, it seemed, still could never quite let go the business side of things. She was getting impatient. She wanted an answer. David answered her first question.

  ‘I took Petrov’s photo in circumstances that I regretted. That’s it. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Petrov was an East European thug who for every fifty labourers and field workers he smuggled into the UK brought a young woman for purposes that we can only guess at. Latterly, these women have all been Chinese.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  David reacted to the harder tone that Susie adopted as much because she was squeezing his hand harder around her breast as because she was challenging his reluctance to admit something that she thought he knew.

  David had slept with many women, but he would have been the first to admit that Susie’s combination of stimulation and inquisition was way beyond his experience.

  Whatever he thought, or wanted, she was clearly going to mix business and pleasure!

  ‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that, yes, the dead man was an East European of pretty unsavoury character and behaviour. How he ended up in the sea off the Dorset coast I haven’t a clue.’

  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.