China Wife

About the author

Hedley Harrison graduated from London University and joined a major oil company progressing to senior management and seeing service in the UK, Nigeria, Australia and the North Sea. He has published two novels with Book Guild Publishing:
Coup
in 2011 and
Disunited States
in 2013.

By the same author

Coup
, Book Guild Publishing 2011

Disunited States
, Book Guild Publishing 2013

CHINA WIFE

Hedley Harrison

Book Guild Publishing

Sussex, England

The practice of slavery is as old as civilisation but the format has moved with the times.

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

1

‘Linda Shen?'

‘You're resident in Shanghai?'

The young woman made no response. It was obvious that the immigration officer had the facts in front of him.

Used to seeing all of the world and his wife, the immigration officer noted the finely drawn features and slight figure of the well-dressed and confident young Chinese woman in front of him without any obvious sign that he had registered her existence. But he was well aware of her.

‘You're married – recently?'

Again the documents and her ring provided the answer for her.

‘Say as little as possible,' had been her husband Shi Xiulu's instruction. ‘Don't give them the chance to ask follow-up questions.'

She hadn't contradicted Mr Shi despite her better understanding of how the UK immigration system worked. In her short time as a married woman in China she had learned that husbands, particularly ones like hers, were not to be challenged openly.

So she had said as little as possible. It did not put the immigration officer off.

‘Is your husband a British citizen?'

That opened up a different line of questioning.

‘Tell the truth wherever possible,' was also a part of her instructions.

‘No, he's a Chinese citizen.'

‘Yet you are travelling on a British passport?'

‘I'm British – British born.'

‘But I thought that the Chinese authorities didn't allow dual nationality?'

Even if this were true, the immigration officer wasn't really interested in the answer. His questions were only to give time for Linda Shen's credentials to be checked against the database. The highlight on his computer screen told him that this was the woman whom they were expecting and to let her through into the UK. The Border Agency and various UK police forces were informed of her arrival. A short message of confirmation and appreciation was received in Beijing.

‘They only queried my British passport.'

Linda didn't tell her husband that she had been concerned about the length of the hold-up at Immigration and about the undemanding questions that she had been asked; there didn't seem to be any point. It was a small piece of rebellion; the thoughts of her new baby gurgling its day away in the care of her mother-in-law ensured that such rebellions were always going to be small. At least she was in Britain, even if she wouldn't be meeting any of her relatives while in the Manchester area, and even if she wouldn't be able to make contact with her former colleagues at the Border Agency.

The immigration officer had asked where she would be staying. To Linda's surprise, he didn't seem interested in why she was visiting.

They must know something
, she thought to herself.

The sense of freedom that she had felt on the aircraft, overlaid by her longing for her baby son, evaporated the moment she had emerged with her designer suitcase from the customs hall. The dozen or so hours on the Qantas flight from Hong Kong quickly became a cherished and regretted memory. Her promised personal assistant – her ‘minder' in her eyes – was there waiting for her. The placard bearing the scrawled ‘Linda
Shen', held awkwardly by a squat, tough-looking Chinese man in his forties, was in her face before any thoughts about contacting her former friends at Heathrow could surface. She was instantly trapped. Her minder/assistant turned out to be deferential in a contemptuous, disdainful masculine way but quick and efficient in all that he did. Only at night would she be free of him.

Over the satellite telephone line Mr Shi had given his wife further instructions: blend into the background, behave as any British young wife would. Except that a stunningly attractive young Chinese woman with as much Gucci and Prada about her as she had was never going to blend into the background in cosmopolitan London, let alone in the Manchester suburbs – even if the Border Agency and the Greater Manchester Police hadn't been looking on.

‘She's made contact.'

The smilingly obsequious manager of the Twin Dragons showed Linda Shen to a seat where she was quickly joined by a party of young Chinese people of her own sort of age. A free night out at a restaurant that they would never be able to afford for themselves, no questions asked, was hard to resist at the going rate for university tuition fees. The smooth-talking Chinese man who recruited and accompanied them offered no names and asked for none. What he and the gorgeous young woman, who seemed to be the main guest, talked about the four Liverpool undergraduates couldn't really have cared less about. They were the rent-a-crowd employed to cover for their two unnamed companions; that was fine with them.

The attempt to mask the meeting between Linda Shen and the principal fixer for the main Chinese organisation in the Manchester area did not fool the police surveillance team. For them, the fact that the meeting had taken place was as important as what it was about.

Cambridge Evening Spectator
Late Edition – Friday, 23 May 2003
BIZARRE CORNER-SHOP ROBBERY

Around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 21 May, two supposedly Muslim women wearing traditional black burkas and sunglasses that rendered them completely unrecognisable, entered the corner shop of Mr Malik Hussein only a few hundred yards from Addenbrooke's Hospital. Having presented Mr Hussein's seventeen-year-old daughter, who was alone serving in the shop, with a computer-produced note and a small leather bag, they forced the terrified girl to empty the till.

‘They had these things pointing at me under their clothes,' the poor girl said, who was convinced that the objects aimed at her were weapons.

According to Detective Constable Karen Cater, not a word was spoken and the two women quickly left with just under £260.

‘On further questioning,' DC Cater said, ‘Miss Hussein, having recovered her composure, volunteered that she thought that the women were definitely not Muslim and that in fact one of them could have been a man.'

It seems that, after snatching the cash, as they approached the shop door, one of the ‘women' hesitated to allow the other to leave first. This, Miss Hussein said, showed both a deference and a courtesy that was not normally shown to Muslim women or between Muslim women except in a mother– daughter situation, which this was obviously not. But it was not untypical of the behaviour of Westernised men.

The police declined to comment on Miss Hussein's remarks about Muslim culture but acknowledged the possibility of the Muslim dress being a disguise.

At approximately 4.15 p.m., as a group of students dressed in a variety of costumes began a noisy procession through the centre of Cambridge as part of Rag Week, a heavily made-up
young woman dressed as a Harlequin handed in a leather bag containing just under £260, in denominations that appeared to match the money stolen from Mr Hussein, to the Rag office.

A member of the Rag Committee contacted the police when they saw the reports of the robbery in the morning daily paper.

The police and the university authorities ascribed the incident to an ill-conceived Rag prank and condemned it totally. The whereabouts of both the two Muslim women and the woman dressed as a Harlequin are still unknown.

2

It was a cold, well, cool, crisp morning. The Australian version of winter is never really challenging, although snow does fall in Melbourne occasionally. It had in June 2009, Julie had heard. She hadn't actually been in the country then. At that time she had been enjoying the almost non-existent warmth of a Scottish summer, during a posting to Edinburgh that had been the envy of her colleagues.

Even now, in June 2010, Julie really wasn't acclimatised to the day-to-day weather of Melbourne. Arriving in April, she had been told, was a good time. The temperature difference with the UK wouldn't be that significant. There was no doubt that her body clock had adjusted to Australian time but her temperature control hadn't yet adjusted to the cyclical nature of the weather. It wasn't the temperature in itself; it was the rapidity of the changes that she struggled with. She never seemed to choose the right clothes. As she had discovered during all that hurried packing, she had a rather more extensive stock of clothes than perhaps was typical of a young woman in her late twenties. Clothes were her passion, but a large choice wasn't much help when you could never judge how the weather would evolve during the day.

It was the same with her hair. She'd had her cherished near-shoulder-length black locks cut off in the panic of moving to Australia and in the anticipation of long hot days and swarms of flies. But the days had yet to be hot. Having short and
manageable hair, she acknowledged, however, was not a bad thing.

Nonetheless, she had noticed that, although she was probably in the middle range in height, weight and age of the women that she was seeing hurrying on and off the trams and the underground trains of Melbourne's transport system, she was sartorially inferior. In Melbourne's business district, the young Australian women didn't seem to do casual.

All of this indecision and confusion rather depressed Julie. In Edinburgh while working in the UK Border Agency enforcement section, despite her relative youth, she had been recognised as a sharp and dynamic decision-maker, able to analyse and react swiftly to situations and to push through the necessary solutions. In her department, the turnover of illegal immigrants deported – on whose fate it had been Julie's job to make adjudication decisions – was higher than it had ever been. Her quick no-nonsense approach was much appreciated by her bosses.

But then suddenly it had all gone wrong.

Questions had been raised over certain of her past decisions and she had found herself passed over when a new division in Aberdeen was formed. Discussions with Lothian and Borders Police had been stressful, even if they hadn't led to anything. Worse, from Julie's point of view, was the fact that the nature of the concerns expressed about her had never been fully spelled out, and what had been said had seemed to her to be insincere and contrived.

She had had a strong sense of being set up. But she couldn't conceive of any reason why this should have been so.

But the painful realisation that her career in its present form was almost certainly over produced the strong suspicion that it was Tariq who was responsible for her woes. She had spent nearly six years of her life, starting with her original university infatuation with him, in a relationship that had for all of those years been, it transpired, entirely one-sided. From the initial
excitement of what she supposed to be first love, it had always been Tariq who had led.

What Tariq had wanted she had willingly given to him or done for him. As she came to realise, it was he who had steered her into the Border Agency, he who had urged her into the enforcement work. And now it seemed that the manipulations that she had been an unwitting partner to had been anything but innocent. And even if the Scottish police couldn't make the link between the increase in the number of Chinese women seemingly disappearing into the British countryside and her favourable decisions on their immigration status, Julie knew that such a link existed. She was mortified at her own gullibility and at her blindness to Tariq's role in manipulating the system through her. But still she didn't know why he had done it.

So mortified was she in fact that it never occurred to her that Tariq's judgement of her capabilities had been amazingly prescient. Neither did it occur to her until very much later in Australia that others among British officialdom also appreciated her capabilities and that Tariq's manipulations were trivial compared to those that these people were capable of. Her sense of being set up, and not by him, strengthened every time she went around the mental loop of her relationship with Tariq al Hussaini.

She had resigned.

Abandoning her entire future in Britain and picking up on a suggestion from her erstwhile boss, she had set off for Australia. Again, it was only very much later that Julie recognised that her decision to resign had been seeded and that the suggestion that she emigrate hadn't been a casual effort to assuage her hurt at her seeming career failure; it had been more purposeful than that. Tariq had pleaded with her to stay, but as she now knew that it wasn't their relationship that was driving his pleading, she was resistant to the pressure he attempted to put her under.

But in the short term her confidence had been all but destroyed by the recriminations and the subterfuges necessary to extract herself and her worldly goods from Edinburgh and to get herself settled in the Victorian capital. ‘Settled', though, was a term that Julie herself would have been unlikely to have used: after six weeks in Melbourne she was realising that, despite its extensive similarities to Britain, Australia could still seem like an alien society. And it wasn't just the uncertainties of the variable weather.

However, somewhere under what she hoped to be her temporary disillusionment, the old Julie wasn't quite dead and she sleepwalked her way through renting an apartment and registering with an employment agency and establishing the beginnings of a stable lifestyle. It was the employment agency, under gentle official coercion, that had set her up for an interview bright and early on Tuesday, 8 June 2010, though they had not been very clear what the job was about. The fact that her life was being carefully stage-managed still didn't occur to Julie.

Suspicious, but mindful that her finances were in need of serious replenishment, something of her old spark returned as she attempted to tease out the job description from the agency. She failed, but curiosity as well as financial expediency eventually prevailed – rejecting the interview was never really an option.

But that was Tuesday and still over twenty-four hours away. Monday nonetheless was already under way.

Julie had rather hurriedly drawn on her stock of clothes as she belatedly prised herself out of bed and out into the crisp morning to still the rumblings of her empty stomach. The bootleg jeans were fine; the boots were less so, imprisoning her legs and making her ankles ache. But this she decided was more about the height of the heels and the time lag since she had last worn them than anything else. But she didn't care. With a job in prospect, she had at last felt positive again and
free from the demons of her recent past. The rest of her was warm and comfortable, and for the moment her time was her own.

The double-glazing-deadened clanking of the trams down Spring Street as she sat in what was becoming her favourite corner coffee shop brought her back to the reality of Australia. Even if she wasn't a part of the frenetic early-morning hustle around her, it had a familiarity about it. There was no snow but the wind was blowing rather viciously up the street and she was glad that she had succumbed to an urge to be warm and had stopped off for breakfast here, rather than following her original intention of breaking her fast in Melbourne Central. The window shopping could easily wait until later. Not that she needed much urging. She was too fond of the exquisite scrambled egg for which this place was famous. Getting colder and colder as she had walked, and with the prospect of some anonymous glutinous mess of eggs at the end of her journey, rather than the real thing, it was a decision that essentially made itself.

It was obvious that many of the clientele of the coffee shop were regular and looked-for daily visitors. Julie wouldn't have counted herself as one of these but she was slowly becoming one. Her welcome was assured and the slow recognition of her as one entitled to a favourite seat on the padded bench at the back of the eating area was apparent. Tables were mostly for two but generally rarely occupied by more than one at this time of the morning. The service was slick and Julie was impressed by the facility with which some of the long-standing customers were served with their first caffeine fix almost before they had even got themselves seated. And, with the mixed hopefulness and trepidation that was Monday morning, the sense of being in a somehow alien world diminished somewhat.

The noise level was low and dominated by the hissing and spluttering of the shining Gaggia coffee machine as if the early-morning
privacy of the customers was not to be disturbed by unnecessary chatter nor their concentration on the sporting or financial pages of
The Age
broken by needless courtesy greetings. And being Australia it was usually the sporting pages that demanded first attention. Very few financial crises would have outweighed the need to know whether the Ashes series was going to go to the wire again. And, again, being Australia it was probably unnecessary to read the actual printed word to be in the know. The faces of those seeking their coffee fix after a Metro or car journey would readily have been able to tell you how things had gone.

All of which being said, the coffee shop was rather more crowded this day than Julie had ever yet observed it. She put this down to the total absence of customers sitting outside. The diehard smokers had been forced into abstinence and inside by the arctic blast whistling between the canyons of the office buildings that verged on Spring Street and filled the space behind it.

It was this unusual intensity of people, still discreet in their noise and movement, that attracted Julie's attention to the figure temporarily blocking the shop doorway rather than his Greek-god good looks. Like the diehard smokers, he was obviously trying to escape the wind, or so Julie imagined, but unlike them it was equally obvious that this was the first time that he had set foot in the coffee shop. This gave her a fellow feeling.

Always alert to the needs of her customers and to the proximity of competing establishments, the waitress steered the man towards Julie's table. Single occupancy, of necessity, was going to have to be foregone.

‘Do you mind?'

Julie was hardly going to say no!

The silence between them wasn't going to last either.

‘You don't like scrambled eggs, then?'

Julie took in the obvious humour in the man's remark; the
relish with which she was consuming her breakfast was clearly all too apparent. The sparkle in the clear blue eyes that met her more complex, almond-shaped brown ones lingered as she considered her reply. The muffled but persistent opening bars of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture emitting from her shoulder bag somewhere under the table cut off her half-formed response to be replaced by a distinctly unladylike curse under her breath. The blue eyes opposite sparkled even more.

The speed with which Julie untangled her mobile phone from her belongings impressed the man. Starting to lever himself to his feet in a question of whether she needed privacy, she flashed a negative in a quick, friendly smile. The displayed mobile phone number wasn't immediately familiar to her; not that many numbers were after so short a sojourn in Melbourne, but that meant that she didn't know whether she would mind being overheard or not.

‘Julie Kershawe.'

To the man sitting opposite Julie, the ensuing conversation must have seemed bizarre in the extreme. From time to time she glanced across at him, half embarrassed, all the time rather irrelevantly thinking that no man had the right to be quite that gorgeous.

‘Tariq, I don't want to talk to you!'

‘I don't care if you've been up half the night waiting to talk to me!'

‘I don't care if you bought a new mobile phone especially to call me!'

She stabbed at the button to cut the call off.

Her companion focused on her more obviously as her silence seemed to demand filling.

But whatever he might have deduced from the one side of the conversation that he had heard, and despite the steady rumble of background noise he had heard, his face gave no sign that he was about to make conversation about it.

Nonetheless, he produced a knowing smile that seemed to
invite a confidence from Julie. But, despite being very aware of the silence, she was not inclined to offer one. She was happy to wait for him to take the initiative.

The intrusion of Tariq into her new life was most unwelcome and something that she needed to think about; it wouldn't just be about buying another mobile phone.

‘So what's a Pom doing here in the winter then?'

It was so crass a question that they both laughed. Their amusement attracted the waitress and coffee top-ups. The atmosphere became almost light-hearted.

‘Have you really got time to hear my life story?'

Well, yes, he certainly had; but he was only actually going to be interested in the more recent part of it.