Free My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons Page A

threesome is that one of them always ends up staring out the window. Puts you right off your stroke, mate.’ He brightened slightly, his beefy face turning a lighter shade of green. ‘But the
good
thing about a threesome is that even if one drops out, then you’re still having sex with someone.’
    Bill had got back to the office to find that Devlin was sending a team to Yangdong. Chairman Sun had called a snap press conference and their clients at DeutscherMonde were nervous. Who knew what he might say if the Burgundy and Sprite started to flow? Bill looked up as Nancy Deng came through the front door with one of the Germans, the long-haired one in a leather jacket, Wolfgang, the one who looked like a mechanic who had won the Lottery.
    ‘Here he comes,’ Nancy said.
    Shane and Bill stood up as Chairman Sun entered the show home, flanked by a delegation from the local government and a dozen members of the media.
    At a discreet distance, Bill, Shane and Nancy Deng followed with their anxious German as Sun led the press pack through gleaming rooms, down sweeping staircases, under crystal chandeliers and round an Olympian swimming pool, talking in Shanghainese all the while. His bodyguard, Ho, that slab of a man, was never far from his side.
    At that lunch Bill had pegged the Chairman as one of those men who rise to the top by keeping their mouths shut, but clearly when he did open up, he was a man who was accustomed to being listened to, even without the presence of a translator.
    The journalists were all Chinese apart from two Shanghai-based Westerners. One of them was a razor-thin American woman in Jimmy Choos, and the other was Alice Greene. She smiled at Bill, whom she had not seen since his wedding day, and he nodded back.
    In his experience journalists were rarely good news for lawyers.
    They were going outside. Chairman Sun led the way out of the show home and Bill thought it was like stepping out of a Las Vegas hotel on to the surface of the moon.
    As far as the eye could see, the bleak landscape was mud, churned by construction work and the summer rain. The farms had long been bulldozed and the barren fields where the new houses would stand were already partitioned, ropes staking out the plots of land, parcelling out the future. There was a cop on the door of the show home, a young Public Security Bureau policewoman with a fading love bite on her neck. As they filed outside Bill saw that there was security everywhere, although it was not easy to tell where the private guards ended and the PSB state police began.
    There was something curiously martial about the site. Inside the wire that staked out the development there was a long, orderly line of snout-nosed trucks with red flags fluttering on their bonnets. Men in bright yellow hard hats swarmed between orange diggers adding to the piles of earth, their lights flashing in the mist. Everywhere there were patches of water with an oily, rainbow-coloured sheen, and on the far side of the wire, like a defeated army corralled into a POW camp, the farmers and their families stood watching.
    The lawn had yet to be laid outside the show home and the woman in Jimmy Choos began to topple backwards as her heels sank into the mud. Bill caught her and she flashed him a professional smile.
    ‘I’m from
Shanghai Chic,’
she said, holding on to him for support. ‘Where are you from? Isn’t this hilarious? We’re doing a big piece.’
    On the far side of the wire, a few bored-looking security men were attempting to move the villagers on. But they didn’t want to move and began to argue with the guards. Then the dispute suddenly erupted into fury, the kind of hysterical, almost tearful scene that Bill had seen break out without warning on the streetsof Shanghai. Press the wrong nerve, he thought, and all at once these people go ballistic.
    He watched as a grubby-faced boy of about twelve drew back from the wire, and picked up something from the ground. He hefted it in his