1

he watched the movement of her hands

He watched the movement of her fingers. Steam rose from the pan on the stove. There were no other sounds but the noise of the bubbling water and the knife cutting onto the wood.

Usually by this time he would have been outside, walking up and down the vines. He checked them at this time every morning. Today he didn’t move.

Her fingers were pale brown and thin. Delicate. The sun was streaming in from the window behind her, the morning was warm. As always at this time of day, at this time of year, the dust particles hung in the air. The dust particles that so offended his wife, as if they were an indication of the house being unclean.

If she knew he was watching her, she didn’t let on, didn’t turn. It was her first day, and she knew to keep her head down and get on with the job. She had to prepare lunch for seven people.

He watched her slice the onion and then chop the garlic. She didn’t use a garlic press. Then she washed her fingers, rubbing soap into them. She wiped down the board, then took a white bag from the fridge. She stood at the board and removed three large cuts of pork from the bag, which she then started to cut into strips.

Pitt looked down at his empty coffee cup. He had finished it nearly half an hour earlier. He wondered what Daisy would think if she came back and found him still there.

Halfway through chopping the pork she stopped, reached over and turned off the gas. She blew a strand of black hair away from her eyes and rubbed her wrist across her forehead, the point of the knife held away from her face. She cut up the remainder of the pork.

Pitt wondered what she was preparing. Daisy always made sandwiches. If she laid some crisps or nuts on the table she thought she was being experimental.

She lifted the board and pushed the dissected pork into a glass bowl. She walked over to the shopping bag with which she had arrived that morning, and removed two small bottles. She then proceeded to sprinkle soy and fish sauce over the meat. Pitt didn’t know what they were. He wanted to ask, but they hadn’t spoken yet, and he didn’t want to show his ignorance.

She put the bottles on the side and turned the meat over, coating it. Her fingers gripping the bowl seemed strong.

Pitt swallowed. He stood to get himself a glass of water from the fridge.

2

no man allows himself to be strangled by a complete stranger

Pitt had never killed anyone before and his ruthlessness surprised him. Those who knew him might not have expected anything less but that was because his exterior gave nothing away. And when the exterior shows nothing it is too easy to assume that nothing lies beneath. Even Daisy, who had been his wife for nearly nineteen years, presumed a cold heart and a complete incapacity for emotion.

He knew himself, of course. He knew what lay hidden. That was why, when it happened, he assumed he would be nervous, he assumed he would have doubts. Yet, he felt no fear. Just an absolute certainty in the righteousness of his actions.

He used his bare hands. His victim struggled of course. No man allows himself to be strangled by a complete stranger. Indeed he landed several powerful blows with both feet and fist. But Pitt had made up his mind. This man had to die. The blood from Pitt’s nose dripped onto his face, splashed on his cheek. A drop went into his tortured mouth, as he gasped for air. Pitt let the blood run, took the brutal kicks to the lower half of his body.

The man expended a lot of effort in a short space of time, and then he was finished. He gave in before he died because he knew. Maybe he didn’t want to die fighting. Maybe he wanted to die at peace. Maybe he thought that by giving up the fight, Pitt would relax his grip.

Pitt’s grip never changed. He couldn’t tighten it, because it was already as strong as he could make it. Neither did he slacken off. The man died eleven seconds after giving up. Pitt kept his grip tight for another full minute. Delaying meant he increased the chances of getting caught, but he had never killed a man before and wanted to make sure.

When finally he was convinced that he would never breath, walk or lie again, he let the head fall with a bump onto the floor, then stood up and looked over his shoulder.

3

the self-fulfilling prophecy of insecurity

Daisy had not been well named.

The name Daisy speaks of summer. Daisy is a little girl running through a field, laughing. Daisy is a young woman on a bike on a May morning on her way to college.

Daisy Pitt was not a pearl, and her fifty-one years had so far passed without being blessed by a single summer. Sunny days did not happen in Daisy Pitt’s life. They were too hot; just as rainy days were too wet, and cloudy days too grey and windy days too blowy and frosty days too cold.

Daisy Pitt didn’t know what it was like to be happy, but she did know fear and insecurity, bitterness and boredom, and it was some of these unattractive qualities which led her to bring Yuan Xue to the house in the first place.

Daisy complained all day about housework. Ironing and cleaning and dirty marks on windows. Mostly, however, she complained about cooking. She complained to her mother and to the men who worked on the vines, but mostly she complained to her husband. When Pitt was drawn to discuss the subject, he would tell her to employ a cook, and Daisy would prevaricate and mutter and change the subject, although not for very long.

The truth was that she feared having another woman in the house. She feared the comparison. She feared her husband falling in love with the other woman, that one day he would announce that he was in love with the cook.

However, she also feared that her cooking was so bad and so unimaginative that perhaps her husband would become fed up with her, even without the provocation of another woman, and would ask her to leave.

As with most insecurities, this inner concern created barriers between them that would not have been there had she not been insecure in the first place. Yet Pitt wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was Daisy. They were trapped, until such time as one of them died.

Daisy didn’t really know how her husband felt about anything. They never talked. Perhaps one might talk at the other one, usually with Daisy doing the talking, but they never had a conversation, they never exchanged ideas and discussed things. They never started at a point, and talked something through, in order to get to another point.

While it might have seemed a good idea, if she had been wanting to employ a cook with whom her husband would not fall in love, to take on a much older woman, the thought of having someone like her mother around scared her even more. She wanted someone younger, someone without her own ideas, without the confidence to judge her. And she wanted a woman, as she felt there was more likelihood she would get the pliable, docile servant her insecurity demanded.

Yuan Xue arrived on a misty morning in early summer and was set to work in the kitchen. She was Han Chinese. Daisy had found her through a friend. Pitt had never expressed any opinion on the Chinese to Daisy, but she suspected that he would be wary and suspicious.

4

wake up when you see daylight

Yuan Xue had left China in late February. She was nineteen years old. She and her family had been saving for three years to buy her way out, but they hadn’t been able to collect all the money that she’d needed to pay for her transport out of the country, and for the long journey across Asia and Europe. There had been flights, buses, trucks. Whatever was best to cross any particular border, a tangled route to shake off detection. The promise at the end was worth it.

They had spent four weeks crammed in a truck in the cold. By the end of that time, the stench of illness and impending death had been their companion. Yuan Xue’s grandma had given her instruction on how to shut her brain down. She said it would be the only way to survive being couped up so long in such a confined space with so many people. To place your brain in hibernation. Wake up when you see daylight.

Yuan Xue had shut herself off, but it had been the hardest thing she had ever done. She tried not to wonder how she would be required to work off her passage when she arrived, but the fear of it haunted her. She had heard stories, although her grandma said that they were tall tales put around by government people who did not want their citizens being smuggled out of the country to a better life.

5

he held a small dead bird in his hands

Fried rice with pork. Most of the guys joked about it, like they were eating at a Chinese restaurant. A series of numbers filled the air. Yuan Xue understood a little English, but not enough to know what they were saying. They were laughing a lot and she assumed they were enjoying it. She glanced over her shoulder a couple of times, but she never saw Pitt talking. She wondered what he thought of it, but every time she looked he seemed to be eating, so she presumed he liked it. She wondered what his voice sounded like.

When they returned to the vines, all the food had been finished. Pitt thought he might stay and drink tea. He told himself he wanted tea, even though he never drank tea in the afternoon. He didn’t like to admit that he wanted to watch her clear up. He wanted to look at her hands, the strength in her fingers as she removed the empty plates and bowls from the table. He wanted to be able to look into her eyes without her seeing him.

But Daisy didn’t move from the table, so Pitt did.

*

‘Where did you find her?’

Pitt heard the question but didn’t want to answer. He had been thinking about her all day and didn’t understand. He never thought about women. He had a wife, and every now and again they had sex, but not often. That was all. It had been years, even decades, since he had thought about women in any kind of romantic way. He thought that there was no romance in his life, although his love of his vines, the care and attention he paid to the wine, the warmth and passion with which he invested every enterprise, from planting a new vine, to tasting the finished product, the dedication and pleasure he had taken from watching his young vineyard mature into a producer of a fine English wine, was full of romance and jouisance, a joy of life and work that never, ever reached the surface.

‘Daisy found her,’ he said. He stood up and looked up at the sky. He held a small dead bird in his hands. He didn’t want to talk about her, although he knew there was no work to be discussed. He looked up at the sky as if he might find the answer to the mystery of the dead sparrow if he looked long enough.

Jenkins laughed.

‘It’ll be like going to the Peking Palace every day.’

‘You complaining?’ asked Pitt. He pointed away to the west, slipped the bird into his coat pocket. He would put it in the bin when he got back. ‘Cloud coming in, but it’s not going to rain. Not today. Another few days and we’ll need it.’

Jenkins shook his head and smiled. He knew that Pitt would never be drawn.

‘She’s nice,’ said Jenkins. ‘Looking, I mean. Some of these Chinese birds, you know...’

Pitt glanced rudely at him, hoping it would be enough, then looked back at the sky. South this time, to see what the sun was doing.

‘Nothing to look at, you know, some of them. But her, she’s nice. Something about her.’

Pitt turned his back. Had he just felt jealous? He had. He was jealous that someone else had noticed her. Maybe they all had. Maybe they were all talking about her. He looked down over the land to see how many of the other guys he could see. None of them were in sight. Maybe they were all sitting in the kitchen, taking a break, drinking cups of tea and chatting quietly to the new hired help.

‘I need to run up to London,’ said Pitt suddenly. ‘Need to talk to Oxford Street.’

He turned and walked away. Jenkins didn’t say anything. Watched his back. Couldn’t read Pitt. Couldn’t talk to him either, but he tried sometimes.

6

a young woman of great sorrow

The summer was long. Yuan Xue worked every day, cooking and helping to run the house. They had given her a room at the back on the ground floor. She seemed happy to work from the moment she rose until she went to bed. Daisy would ask her to do something and find it had already been done, so after a few days she stopped asking. She was a little intimidated by this efficiency, but Yuan Xue kept her head down and never spoke, so Daisy did not feel her position challenged. And she had the power to get rid of her, if it came to it, which was the ultimate comfort.

The only time that Yuan Xue took off was every alternate Saturday afternoon. She would leave at around four o’clock in the afternoon and return some time after midnight.

*

‘She seems nice,’ said Daisy.

It was a Saturday evening. Yuan Xue had left a mild chicken curry that Daisy had just had to re-heat.

‘Yes,’ said Pitt.

‘I mean, I think I’ll probably keep her on beyond the three months. The lads all seem to like her.’

‘Yes.’

Daisy shovelled food into her mouth. Pitt tried not to look at her, but he could hear her chewing. He wondered if she appreciated the flavours, the number of different herbs which had gone into the sauce. He doubted it. What did Daisy know about the finesse of Chinese cooking? How often did Daisy watch Yuan Xue prepare lunch or dinner?

Daisy was glancing up, hoping to catch Pitt’s eye. Hoping to get a reaction.

‘I think Blain and her, you know, I think there might be something there. I see them looking at each other.’

Pitt didn’t rise to the bait.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said.

But he had noticed, which was why he knew that Daisy was lying. She was testing him. It wasn’t Blain who was interested, it wasn’t Blain who seemed to have some unspoken thing with Yuan Xue. It was Jenkins.

He wondered if that was who she went away with on her Saturday evenings. Early on he made up some excuse to keep Jenkins in work all that Saturday, then had him stay for dinner. But Jenkins had seemed quite happy, and there had been nothing to indicate that Pitt had managed to get in the way of anything. And he had embarrassed himself so much by interfering like this, even though there might well not have been anything with which to interfere, he didn’t do it again.

‘Do you actually notice anything?’ Daisy asked. It was a direction in which she regularly took the conversation. He knew not to rise to it.

‘You’ve noticed she’s Chinese, I suppose?’

He didn’t reply. But he had noticed she was Chinese. Just as he had noticed the slim hips, the short legs, the small breasts over which her long black hair sometimes hung as she placed a dinner plate before him. He had noticed the dark eyes and pale brown skin and the look of sadness and the delicious lips, and he had wondered if they ever smiled. He wondered what he could do to make them smile.

*

He noticed, maybe on the third occasion that she had gone off for her Saturday afternoon and evening, that on those days she was nervous, edgier, and that the following day, the Sunday morning, the air of melancholy which hung over her was much deeper and that she was a young woman of great sorrow.

7

listen

‘Listen.’

Pitt looked into Jenkins’ eyes and then turned his head away. They were standing in the shade at the back of the farmhouse, but Pitt still was squinting in the light. He had spent the previous few hours in the cellars. He spent more time than was needed there, but it was his home. Where the wine was. Where the wine matured. There was nothing he could do to help the process, but it felt natural to be in the dim light.

It was a warm day, but much cooler out of the sun. He could hear the buzz of a couple of insects. He lifted his head and looked at the sky. Away to their left there was a plane leaving its contrail against the pale blue of the sky, but it travelled soundlessly to them.

Pitt looked back down at the dead starling which was lying at their feet.

‘No birds,’ said Pitt.

‘Exactly,’ said Jenkins. ‘One of the lads pointed it out yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t thought about it, but once he said it, you know... I can’t remember the last time I saw a bird around here.’

Pitt stepped away from him and looked into the trees that made up the small wood at the back of the farmhouse. He didn’t like Jenkins realising these things before he had. He was usually aware of everything going on around him. How do you miss the birds?

‘How many have you found dead?’ he asked.

‘I wasn’t counting at first. Since we realised, maybe a dozen. So maybe twenty or more in all.’

Pitt turned back. Felt like Jenkins was looking at him as though he should have a ready-made explanation.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Pitt. ‘If there are no birds coming here, where are the dead ones coming from?’

Jenkins shrugged.

‘A lot of the ones we’re finding have been dead for a while, not so many are recent. Maybe they just stumbled into the area, not as attuned to whatever it is that’s killing them.’ He paused. Pitt didn’t look convinced, but it sounded plausible. ‘Then they die,’ Jenkins added, unnecessarily.

‘You know any vets?’ asked Pitt. He didn’t like animals, had never kept a pet. ‘You know, are there vet pathologists, something like that?’

Jenkins shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ he said.

‘Find out,’ said Pitt. ‘Find someone, take them a bird.’ He looked down at the starling with distaste, as if the starling was entirely to blame. ‘Find someone, you know, someone who’ll keep it quiet for the time being. We don’t want some public health people all over the place for nothing.’

Jenkins nodded and bent down to pick up the bird. Felt a twinge in his back as he did so.

‘Obviously,’ said Pitt, ‘if it’s serious, and we have to do something, we’ll do it, I just don’t want some Ministry jobsworth coming down here and poking his nose in if it’s not needed.’

Jenkins nodded again. He rubbed his back. Looked at the bird, and then stared up into the sky, hoping that a sudden flock of starlings would negate the conversation they’d just had. Another plane had come in to view, it’s trail crossing that of the other plane, which was now out of sight.

‘Should we take the nets off?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if there are no birds. Would make things easier.’

Pitt didn’t answer.

8

slow movements in near silence

Yuan Xue was experimenting, cooking a Thai dish. Fresh root ginger. Lemon grass. Kaffir lime leaves. Garlic chives. Fresh coriander. Prawns. Squid. Coconut milk.

He watched her from his place at the kitchen table. He had been watching her every morning for the previous five weeks. They had fallen into a ritual that was at once both comforting and exciting. Daisy always left the house in the morning. Pitt didn’t know where she went. He wondered if Yuan Xue found it uncomfortable that he sat there, watching the movement of her fingers, watching her glide slowly around the kitchen, watching her clothes stretch across her breasts as she reached up to the high shelves, watching the slow dancing movements of her feet.

Sometimes he felt a dryness at the back of his throat, but that was easily solved by drinking water. He didn’t think it was sexual, the urge that drove him to remain at the breakfast table long after he was due out in the fields. It wasn’t sexual, but he didn’t like to examine it in case it might have been.

It was the warmth of the moment, which had nothing to do with the sun and the stove. The warmth of watching someone quietly do their work. Slow movements in near silence. He couldn’t express it, he possibly didn’t even know how to think about it. The calm spread through his body, and he knew no other word for it than warmth.

The slow, precise movements of her hands, the gentle chop of the knife on the board, the grating of strange roots. Occasionally he would catch the aroma of fresh ginger or cinnamon, or the scent of some vegetable that he did not know.

Some days he longed to talk to her, to stand beside her and ask her to talk him through what she was doing. The ease of that conversation meant that it was not for wont of an opening line that he did not speak. He just could not bring himself to engage her. He didn’t know what scared him. Other days he quickly accepted his reticence, did not torture himself and would sink into the elegy of the moment.

Eventually his work would drag him away, or Yuan Xue would finish what she was doing in the kitchen and self-consciously leave to do take up some other task. Pitt would feel like the clothes had been taken off his back.

9

the room suffocated her

None of the people on the trip had known what they were coming to. At first Yuan Xue kept her distance, but after a week or so she found that she needed the company. She could only turn her brain off for so long.

There was much talk of forced labour and mussel picking. Some of them already knew people or had family members who had been forced down this route. It didn’t sound dangerous to Yuan Xue, until she heard stories of ill-treatment and her fellow countrymen dying, and how nobody cared. However, when she had finally joined in a conversation and voiced her opinion, the others hadn’t seemed interested. One or two of them had given her a strange look, and she’d had no idea what it had meant.

*

Pitt met Jenkins coming the other way on one of the quad bikes the guys had persuaded him to buy three summers previously. Pitt never rode on them himself.

He had a dead bird in his pocket. A finch of some description, although he couldn’t be sure which type. He wasn’t an expert. Finding the dead bird had further rotted his humour for the day, a process that had begun with Daisy ripping him to shreds over the poor yield that looked like it was coming their way at the end of the summer. As if Pitt could do anything about the weather and the atmospheric conditions and the dying birds.

Jenkins slowed the bike down and cut the engine when he drew up alongside Pitt.

‘Bad news,’ he said. The expression on Pitt’s face didn’t change.

‘The guy we took the bird to...,’ and he let the sentence drift off and shook his head.

‘Who did he show it to?’ asked Pitt.

‘A contact he had at DEFRA.’

Pitt breathed out strongly through his nose, his lips tight shut, his face set in stone.

‘What did he find wrong with it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jenkins.

‘So why the Hell is he showing it to DEFRA?’

‘Because it’s unexplained. Birds are dying all over the place, there’s shit coming down from somewhere, and he thinks we’re not doing enough to get to the bottom of it. Thinks we’ll need the ministry’s resources.’

‘Crap,’ muttered Pitt. ‘Did we get a timescale on that?’

Jenkins shook his head.

‘Good,’ said Pitt. ‘If it doesn’t involve pigs or cows or sheep, we should be all right to hold them off for a few weeks.’

He looked up at the sky and wondered where the plague was coming from.

‘They found nothing wrong with the bird?’

‘Nothing.’

Pitt breathed out heavily, his hand unconsciously touched his pocket.

‘What does that mean?’

Jenkins stared at his boss and then looked past him, away along the line of ripening seyval blanc vines.

*

She had lost her virginity at sixteen, and although she had never had a regular lover before leaving Fujian Province, she had slept with several of the older boys and young men from her village. Sometimes it had been fumbling, sometimes tender, occasionally erotic. But it had never been brutal. She had never felt used.

These men, these white men who paid for her, raped her horribly. They didn’t beat her or hit her or cut her, but what they did was not making love or even, in her mind, having sex. They fucked her in a barbaric way, in the way an animal would brutally take advantage of another of its kind.

The room was large, several beds spaced out. Armchairs at the side. If there were windows they were covered up, but this was not a place that would ever be blessed with natural light. A few side lamps and that was all. Just enough light so that she could always see what was coming.

The first night had been horrible, but she came to realise that it had been a test. To see what she could take, to see whether she was suitable. She had no idea what would have happened to her if she hadn’t been.

Subsequent nights were worse. She would be raped by more than ten men in an evening, she would be expected to take more than one at a time. She was expected to look like she was enjoying it. On the third Saturday she was penetrated by something that she thought was going to split her open. As she cried out, her hair was grabbed and another cock rammed into her mouth. She gagged, and then she sucked, because she knew that was what she had to do.

Such incidents were not rare. Yung-Chow told her that when she had worked off the remainder of the cost of her passage to the UK he would let her know.

She was not alone. There would be six girls in the room. Some of them were Chinese, but they were just as likely to be from eastern Europe or Thailand or Indonesia. They were not allowed to talk to each other, only to the men.

She was surprised at how many women these men could take, but that was because she did not know about the drugs they took.

She would cry all the way home. After the first night she learned to have pain killers ready. She would get herself together for Sunday morning, although she wondered if either the husband or wife noticed how she was feeling. She tried desperately not to show it.

10

and she never knew that her sadness was killing the birds

Yuan Xue had no idea that she was killing the birds. They started dying the day she arrived at the vineyard. She thought fondly of that first day, because that was before the Saturday evenings had started.

Daisy gave her no direction as to what to make, so she decided not to second guess what they might like. She was told to make lunch for seven people, including Mr Pitt, and she had heard that the English liked Chinese food. She didn’t yet know that the English liked the bastardised version of Chinese food, where everything is cooked in sauces that all taste the same, sauces made in a factory with too much sugar, too much salt, too many additives. She made a simple dish, fried rice with pork. She had thought that maybe she would be left alone to get on with her work, but the man had sat and watched her. She didn’t know why.

She had taken the few ingredients and tentatively started cutting and chopping. She wondered if she was being judged. Was this man sitting watching over her to make sure she could cook? To make sure that she knew how to grate fresh ginger?

She had presumed that he ran the vineyard, and yet he sat throughout the whole process watching her. That first morning she had expected him to speak, but he hadn’t said anything.

She felt his eyes on her hands and fingers, but somehow even then, even on that first day, she had known that there was nothing sexual or sinister or threatening in his presence.

*

He sat and watched her every morning. After the first day she had known that he wasn’t going to speak. Sometimes she wondered if she should talk to him, and she would play out conversations in her head. Simple words. She would describe what she was doing. She would talk about the kaffir lime leaves and how they complemented the coriander. She would explain about soy sauce and how the saltiness counteracted and complemented the sweetness of brown sugar. She would describe the interaction of the flavours, the sweet and sour, the saltiness and the spiciness, and how to combine all four in one dish. And he would stand and listen and ask questions.

She stood in the kitchen and enjoyed preparing food for him. As she came to accept and expect his presence, she slowed down and became more obvious in what she was doing. She allowed him to see more clearly, as the dishes she prepared became more elaborate. On the days when, for some reason, he was not there, she missed him. And when he was there, she would always pay attention at lunch to make sure that he had enjoyed what she’d cooked.

He never spoke to her, and when Daisy was there he never even looked at her, and she knew not to look at him. Daisy presumed her husband would be disinterested in a Chinese servant, and he played the part.

Yuan Xue settled into her role, and the comfort that his presence brought her. And she settled into her role as the brutalised sex slave on Saturday nights and hoped that she hid her shame and embarrassment and fear from her employers.

And she never knew that her sadness was killing the birds.

11

they say there are no birds at birkenau

‘They’re coming next week’ said Jenkins.

They were in the cellar. Pitt had been down there for three hours. It was another warm day outside, a bright sun and no clouds. Once Yuan Xue had left the kitchen, Pitt couldn’t face the heat. He had come down to the dark room and sat with his wine. Sometimes he talked to the wine, but not so much any more. There had been a time when he’d talked to the wine more than he’d talked to his wife. Now he just didn’t talk at all. The only conversations he had were with the men about the vines; other aspects of the business. But words had dried up, and if he could have gone through life without ever saying anything he would.

‘What day?’ he said. The words groaned out of his mouth.

‘They’ll let us know,’ said Jenkins.

He waited for the boss to say something. He waited for the expletive but it didn’t come.

‘We have to have a press strategy,’ said Jenkins.

‘What?’

‘If this kind of thing gets out to the press, you know what they’re like. A slow news day, they love this kind of shit. Birds are dying, a whole area of the country with no birds.’

Jenkins stared at him, waiting. For leadership. Some part of him liked the thought of the press turning up, and him getting a little bit of attention. Saw himself as the spokesman for the vineyard, but he knew how horrendous it would be for business.

‘There is such a thing as bad publicity,’ said Jenkins.

‘They say there are no birds at Birkenau,’ said Pitt. ‘The birds don’t fly there.’

Jenkins nodded and looked away. Shivered. He was chewing gum, and Pitt heard it between his teeth.

‘Well, I don’t know about that, but that’s what we’re talking about. There’s no good association with birds leaving a place. It’s creepy. It’s weird. It’ll be bad for business.’

Pitt nodded. The conversation was at an end.

12

a thought which transcended rationality

She was preparing fried noodles with vegetables. A more elaborate concoction of spices, as she had judged that the tastes of the men were becoming more sophisticated. It was a Friday morning, cloudy but not cool. The following day had already begun to prey on her, there was a tightness in her muscles.

She took her time over the vegetable preparation. There was little else to do that day and she felt comfort in Pitt’s presence. No words had been said, and she still had not caught his eye.

He watched her hands and the movement of her fingers. She took a small red chilli from a pack and laid it on the wooden board. She cut the stalk off the end and then hesitated. There was total silence in the room and from outside. No planes overheard, none of the men driving a tractor through the vineyard at that moment. There were no birds.

She swallowed and looked at the floor in his direction. She had thought about this moment many times. She would wait another few seconds. She felt nervous, but somehow even those nerves were submerged beneath the weight of her fear of the following night.

She saw his feet move and then he stood and walked slowly towards her. He stopped beside her. He was looking at her, but she kept her eyes diverted, now looking back down at the chopping board.

They hadn’t been this close to one another before, and they breathed each other in. She heard him swallow. He felt captivated and ridiculous. What would he say to Daisy if she walked in now? How absurd would he look? The guilt would be draped on him as sure as if he was making love to Yuan Xue on the kitchen table.

Without lifting the knife too high she offered it to him, her fingers trembling slightly. He took it, making sure their fingers didn’t touch. She couldn’t breath, her throat was dry. She heard an insect buzzing inside the window.

He manoeuvred the chilli out of her fingers as she didn’t seem able to move. He sliced it lengthways, as he had seen her do many times in the past couple of months, and then began to chop it very finely, the movement of the knife so slow that it made no sound on the wood. Her fingers were still resting on the board beside him, no more than a couple inches from the knife.

He was standing next to the cook chopping a chilli, aware that his throat was dry and his heart was pounding. She let her eyes drift over his hands and up the length of his arms, but they never reached his face. She couldn’t look at him. Would he be standing so close if he knew what she would be doing the following evening?

He suddenly thought again of the shame if Daisy returned at that moment. Or if Jenkins or one of the other lads came back in. He hesitated and slowly laid the knife down on the board even though he hadn’t finished. He couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to leave her side. He wanted to stand this close, he wanted their hands to touch, he wanted to hold her. More than anything he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to ask her where she had come from, and why she was here and where she went on Saturday afternoons and what was it about those days that made her so sad.

Suddenly he realised something, and he didn’t know why he knew, he didn’t know where the thought had come from. He had never had a thought like that in his life. He had never before had a thought which transcended rationality.

He frowned, not really understanding, then he slowly turned away without looking at her, lifted his hat from the far side of the kitchen and walked slowly back outside. Finally when he was gone, she was able to breathe properly, but she felt the the horrible weight of his leaving, and she wondered if she had in some way overstepped the mark.

She heard his footsteps on the stones outside and watched him walk away towards the vines, his hat on his head, his shoulders slightly stooped.

13

yung-chow liked to take care of his girls

He sat in the small café looking along the road. It was wet in the city, which seemed odd after such a long dry summer. They had been predicting rain for weeks.

On the Friday night he had gone to bed early but not slept. Eventually, when he had heard Daisy’s long slow comfortable breaths and had known she was asleep, he had risen, gone downstairs to make himself some tea, and then had sat at the computer. He wanted to know what it was that Yuan Xue did on a Saturday. There were no obvious answers, but he learned a lot and he used his imagination.

The following day he had followed her. She had gone to north London, she had gone into a large house in the late afternoon, and she had emerged long after dark. He had seen the other young women go in, he had seen the succession of men. He knew what it was that saddened Yuan Xue, and as he sat in the small café drinking endless cups of coffee, he knew what was being done to her at that moment. He also knew there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t go in there himself, he would be hopelessly outnumbered, and it would not release her from her bond. He could not call the police, as she would be arrested too and likely deported. He sat and drank coffee, and turned off his mobile phone so that he did not have to listen to Daisy calling him every half hour, and waited until Yuan Xue walked out of the house, on unsteady legs, close to midnight.

A taxi was waiting. Yung-Chow liked to take care of his girls.

It was the following night, and Pitt was back in the same café. He had been thinking all day, but he had no plan. The previous night he had watched all the men in and out. He hadn’t followed Yuan Xue home, he had watched the men, the last to leave. And the last to leave was the only Chinese man there; and he knew he was the one who held bond over Yuan Xue.

The house operated every night, the men had started to arrive. When he had left the vineyard that afternoon, when he had made his excuses to Daisy, he had thought he would be nervous. But he felt nothing.

*

He sat in a corner of the room, his second glass of neat Johnnie Walker in his right hand. Now that he was here, having lied his way in on the back of three drunk marketing executives who had arrived forty minutes earlier, he knew that he needed to act like a customer to avoid suspicion. Reticence would be convincing for only so long.

There were six girls, of an age he could not really judge. He thought maybe eighteen or nineteen. Two Asian, the rest eastern European. He found nothing erotic about them. There were eleven other clients, who were by turn drinking and fucking and popping pills. He was not naive but he was surprised by the animalistic nature of the pack.

Yuan Xue would not be coming back here.

‘There’s a problem?’

He looked up. There was an older woman. Late forties, hair died blonde, a sharp, unattractive face. He shook his head.

‘You’ve not been here before,’ she said. ‘How did you find out about us?’

‘You don’t want my business?’ he said roughly.

She shook her head and smiled, but she saw through him and he recognised this. He lifted his glass.

‘I’m almost there,’ he said.

She nodded and turned away. He watched her go, as she went to the back of the room and through a door, which she quickly closed behind her.

Deep breath and he threw the rest of the whisky into his mouth. He walked past two men roughly abusing one of the Asian girls. Her face was contorted, but she made no sound. The door was locked. He wondered if he should kick it in, but decided instead to wait.

When it was opened half a minute later, he stepped through, closed the door quickly behind him and punched the blonde-haired woman in the throat. She fell back, and he locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

He found Yung-Chow in a small dark office, sitting behind a desk, on the phone. When Yung-Chow saw Pitt he knew there was trouble.

14

they all broke with a sharp crack

Pitt looked over his shoulder and finally released the dead man’s neck from his grip. She was standing in the doorway, still clutching her throat, still struggling for breath. He did not wilt from the look of loathing, but recognised that she was not just the hired hand. She turned and started running down the corridor in the other direction. A few large steps and he was behind her, and again he thumped her hard on the neck, bringing her to her knees. Feeling absolute contempt and hatred for the woman, he dragged her back to the office, where he threw her down on the floor beside Chow. He reached into his pocket. He had not come with any plan, but he had pocketed a pair of handcuffs, one of many sex toys lying in the other room. He grabbed her roughly by the wrist, then handcuffed her right hand to the radiator. As she struggled and tried to hit back, he took her left hand and quickly and expertly, as if he had done it many times before, bent the fingers back so that they all broke with a sharp crack at the same time. She cried out in pain, then he let her slump back down onto the floor.

He lifted the phone and called the police. And then he walked calmly back down the corridor and through the dimly lit room, where women were crying out in pain and men were drinking and enjoying themselves, and walked down the stairs and back out into a warm light London evening, the first hint of dusk just beginning to appear in the eastern sky.

15

the first tear ran softly down her cheek

Two days later there was a piece in several national newspapers. It wasn’t a big story, but there was a picture of Yung-Chow, and enough of his dark past had been handed to the media so that no one eulogised him or made any extravagant claims to his good character and loss to the community.

It was the day the ministry were due to come to the vineyard. A phone call had alerted Jenkins that they would be accompanied by a tabloid photographer and reporter. It sounded like news.

Pitt stayed in the kitchen, a paper open on the table in front of him, watching Yuan Xue clear up. Jenkins had already spoken to Pitt three times that morning, and was surprised that Pitt hadn’t been more concerned.

Yuan Xue was preparing vegetables, grating ginger and nutmeg. Pitt had seen the story and photograph early on, but had not said anything. He looked over at her back and watched the gentle movement of her body as she worked at the chopping board. He saw a flinching in her shoulders when he pushed the chair back from the kitchen table. He approached her slowly, suddenly worried that he might have done the wrong thing.

His face impassive, he stood next to year and laid the folded paper, open at the picture of Yung-Chow, on the work surface in front of her.

She stared at the paper, her eyes widened, her mouth opened to let out a small gasp. He had no idea if she could read the report, but Yung-Chow was in the paper, there was a photograph of the house cordoned off. It was obvious something had happened. She put her hand to her mouth, felt the beating of her heart.

He wanted to tell her that it was all right, that she would never be seeing Yung-Chow again, that she was free. He wanted to hold her hand. He wanted her to lay her head on his shoulder and cry, to release the months of melancholy and grief. He wanted to stroke her hair, and then take her away from this kitchen out into the bright morning. He wanted to walk through the vines and tell her everything about them. He wanted to sit under a tree and drink wine and listen to stories of her childhood. He wanted to lean towards her, press his cheek to hers, then slowly find her lips with his.

He closed his eyes and swallowed. Then he left the paper in front of her and walked slowly away.

She turned and looked at him. She couldn’t understand the report, but she knew. She knew that Pitt had known about Yung-Chow and she knew that somehow Pitt had taken care of the problem, and she felt the most extraordinary lifting of the heart. She wanted to say thank you, but there were no words there. She stared at the back of his head and hoped that he would turn round, so she could at last catch his eye and acknowledge her gratitude.

He hesitated at the door. The first tear ran softly down her cheek, and she wiped a finger across her face. She thought of running across the kitchen and throwing her arms around him.

He opened the door and stepped out of the kitchen without looking back.

*

When the man from the ministry came, accompanied in the same car by two members of the tabloid press, they were greeted by the sound of birdsong. Having expected only insects or quiet, it was the first thing they heard when they stepped out into the open.

Jenkins shrugged. The man from the ministry and the two members of the tabloid press made a positive visual confirmation of the birds, and then got back in the car and drove away.