Mr Wong Goes West

by Mr Wong Goes West (v5. 0) (epub)

  ‘Very hard to do this in one day. Better you have the meeting in another place,’ Wong said.

  ‘That would seem to be the obvious answer. But, Mr Wong, we are selling a place. A building. A very fine building that happens to be a flying building. A flying building that we are saying is the very best place to hold a meeting in any city in the world in which it lands. Thus it stands to reason that the meeting has to take place in Skyparc. It would be absurd for it to happen anywhere else.’

  Sir Nicholas clasped his hands behind his back and thrust his chest forward. Clearly, he was a former military man.

  ‘One of the sales angles for Skyparc is that it has the sort of first-class conference rooms that is ideal for top-level summits, be they business meetings or political ones. We have to demonstrate that that is true. We have to imply that now that Skyparc has landed in Hong Kong, the best meeting room in the city is not at the Mandarin Oriental, or the Four Seasons, or the Grand Hyatt, but inside an aircraft on the apron of Chek Lap Kok airport. Furthermore, Skyparc is unique in being a meeting place beyond the concept of national boundaries. We can organise a summit on this aircraft and fly it to a place where it is subject to no jurisdictional boundaries of any kind. It will be the only place in the world ideal for inter-governmental summits dealing with tricky territorial issues: the Israelis and the Palestinians can meet here, as can the Singhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils, and so on and so forth. Do you understand?’

  ‘Understand.’

  ‘Fine. Now Ms Teo will take you into Skyparc itself. She will arrange for you to have access to the parts you’ll need to go into.’ He dismissed them with a short bow of his head.

  As they walked out of the hangar and onto a gantry leading to the aircraft, Wong decided to ask Teo about the murder. After all, she was clearly talented at memorising facts. ‘Who died? Who killed the man who died?’

  ‘There’s not much we can say,’ she said. ‘The whole thing is sub judice now. A man from BM Dutch Petroleum was shot, and an intruder was caught red-handed. An environmental activist. Someone who has been waging a war against the petrol company for years. That’s it, really.’

  The feng shui master nodded. ‘But if I do a reading of this airplane, to make sure there are no bad vibration there, then better you tell me more detail about exactly where the man was shot, how he was shot. Or let me talk to someone who know about it.’

  ‘I see. Well, there are a couple of cops still here. Would you like to meet them? I think you’ll find them in the aircraft.’

  As they approached the enormous, double-decker plane, Wong was curious about how much it appeared to differ from other aircraft. The entry door seemed wider, and seemed to be made of wood and brass. The windows were not a line of small portholes, but were long, thin and rectangular.

  The public relations woman noticed his surprise, and gave a laugh. ‘Strange, isn’t it, the first time you see it? They’ve gone to town to make this different. It’s the iPhone of the aircraft world. It is amazing what a difference you can make, just by getting the designers to think outside the box for a change.’

  As he got closer, it became clear that the wood and brass were faux artistic surfaces laid onto a rather conventional aircraft door. Close up, he could see that the door was neither oversized nor materially different in any substantial way. But the rectangular windows were genuinely eye-catching. And much more pleasant to look through, he imagined, than the tiny, too-low oval windows that were standard in every other aircraft on the planet.

  Stepping onto Skyparc, he was pleased to turn to the right and find himself in a relatively large, open space, rather than the usual narrow aisles. The rows of seats that normally filled the body of an aircraft were missing. Instead, comfortable armchairs, which would not have been out of place in a gentleman’s club, were scattered around the room in clusters. As he walked through the room into the next, he was surprised to find himself in a space that was not the normal tube-like space in a curved fuselage, but had straight walls like a normal room. He soon realised that there was a series of interlocking rooms, some of which had staircases leading to an upper floor.

  The aircraft really was revolutionary. Instead of first, business class and economy cabins, there were multiple rooms on two levels, each with different designs and seating arrangements. One was built for a cabaret and featured a tiny stage. Another was a bar, a third was a modern coffee shop, a fourth was called Food Street and had multiple eateries, and so on. One of the lounges on the upper deck looked like it had come from a discotheque, another appeared to have been lifted from a colonial 1920s sitting room, complete with Chesterfield sofas, and a third was a cinema with a relatively big screen. The chairs were varied and cleverly designed. Each had a matching seatbelt built into it.

  Teo led him into an upper-storey space, where the delegates for the meeting would gather. ‘They’ll stop here and have some drinks and canapés before the meeting proper,’ she said. In the place of the usual narrow galley, there was a counter with a lit display of pastries and cakes. On the wall behind the counter, bottles of alcohol and optics were suspended. She turned a switch and mood lighting gently started glowing. She flipped another switch and a slow-swirling light effect started to paint patterns on the walls on all sides of the room.

  ‘Very…different,’ said Wong, a traditionalist who did not like mood lighting, and would have preferred an uncarpeted floor and cushion-less, hardwood black-lacquered furniture: simple and elegant and sturdy (and cheap).

  ‘Then, they’ll go into the conference room, which is here.’ She opened a pale pine door to show him a large room with a round table and minimalist panelling, which no doubt slid to one side to reveal projector screens.

  Then she led him back down the stairs to what she called ‘the back office’ rooms. ‘These are the executive offices, where Mr Seferis was when…yesterday.’

  ‘Mr Seferis is the man who was shot?’

  ‘He was. Ah, and here’s a police officer.’

  She explained to the officer who Mr Wong was and why he was here. The policeman introduced himself as Chin Chunkit from the Hong Kong police. Clearly bored by his task, he seemed torn between sticking to his brief to repel anyone who approached, and being pitifully grateful to have someone to talk to. In the event, he decided to compromise and let Wong put his head into the crime scene, but not to step into the room further than the doorway.

  ‘We are very careful with evidence these days,’ the officer said. ‘You drop one invisible fibre on the floor, big trouble.’

  The room was an elegant office with several desks, one of which was rather messy. Mr Seferis had obviously been in the middle of paperwork when he had been interrupted.

  ‘We’re not a hundred per cent sure which door the assailant entered through—there are two ways in,’ Chin explained in Cantonese. ‘We haven’t been able to find a video record showing his exact approach, and there are no clear other signs. There were a lot of fingerprints and fibres, which have been sent off by the SOCOS—scenes of crime officers—for examination. They’ll eventually answer the question for us. Now it’s my belief that the perpetrator entered through this door.’

  ‘He come in and surprise Mr Seferis and shot him?’

  ‘I think not. I think he must have entered and talked to him for a little while. As you can see, the door is on that side and he was shot by someone standing over here. So the two of them must have talked for a little while, moved around a bit. Seferis stood up from his desk and moved slightly, facing away from his desk. The assailant, judging by the angle of the bullets, stood here. The discussion turned into a row. It was so loud that a group of technicians working outside heard them shouting. Then the assailant shot four times at point-blank range. Some technicians were actually working on this window here, just behind where the killer stood, and saw what happened. He fired off four shots one after another, all at the same angle. The first hit Seferis just under his heart. He slid down the wall, and the second hit him in th
e shoulder as he fell. The last two shots, probably fired in panic, went straight into the wood panelling. It’s mahogany, which is bad luck for the hardwood conservationists, but good luck for the aircraft people. Mahogany is a very strong wood, it absorbed the bullets, preventing any harm being done to the aircraft walls.’

  Wong leaned forwards and peered at the wooden panels. There was a single hole in the wood, apparently made by two bullets hitting the same spot.

  ‘What gun?’

  ‘Not sure yet. We have an expert working on it. He reckons it was a Beretta. A PX4 Storm pistol, probably, with fine bore ammo; maybe a bullet of seven millimetres or so. Smaller than normal, probably to minimise the sound.’

  ‘You catch the bad guy already?’

  ‘Yeah. We caught him. We’re fast workers.’

  ‘So my job is to clean up here.’

  ‘No,’ said Chin, looking alarmed. ‘We’ve got more SOCOs coming in to do some tests later today. It’s still a sealed-off crime scene. You can’t touch it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I do not mean that sort of cleaning. I mean cleaning up negative forces coming out from here. I do not need to touch anything in this room.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, well you can start that any time you like, as long as it doesn’t interfere with police work.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Wong asked to be escorted back upstairs, and he started work on the conference room.

  Jason McWong jumped up when he saw Joyce arrive, spilling his Venti-sized coffee over the table. He gave her a hug, and refused to let go, even though a pint of tepid latte was spilling down his trousers and into his left Doc Marten.

  ‘Wow,’ said Joyce. ‘Why such a warm welcome? Did I win the lottery and nobody told me?’

  Jason answered only with a long watery sniff. Below him, the paper coffee container, now empty, rolled to the floor and disappeared under the table. Joyce realised that he was in an emotional state, his heavy body a-tremble. She pulled away from him just enough to look at his face. His eyes were red.

  ‘I just want to be held,’ he whimpered.

  She glanced at Nina and realised that she too had been crying. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened? Has something awful happened?’

  Jason nodded, but was too overcome to speak. He sniffed again and eventually let go of Joyce. He lowered himself back into his seat, and reached towards the table for his drink. ‘Where’s my latte?’ he said, baffled and annoyed.

  ‘In your left boot,’ Nina told him.

  Jason wiggled his toes, heard a squelching sound and realised that she spoke the truth. ‘How’d it get in there?’

  ‘Something awful has happened,’ Nina said to Joyce. ‘It’s Paul.’

  Joyce’s hand had flown to her mouth. ‘Paul? What? What? Tell me.’ Nina’s tone could only imply death or dismemberment. Jason seemed to be occupied with wondering whether he could get his coffee back out of his boot and into a cup.

  ‘He’s been arrested,’ Nina said.

  Joyce relaxed slightly. Most members of the group had been arrested at least once in their lives, and Paul had already been arrested at least once this year. It was an activist’s life—indeed, it was what several activists lived for. ‘Is that all?’

  But Nina looked so worried that Joyce snapped the look of concern back onto her face.

  Joyce knew that this brush with the law had to be much worse than usual. ‘What is it? What’s he done now?’

  ‘Murder,’ spat Nina angrily. ‘He’s been done for murder. They say he killed someone. It’s ridiculous. It’s totally ridiculous.’

  ‘Murder?’

  Nina nodded.

  ‘He wouldn’t murder anyone,’ Joyce said, a tone of outrage in her voice.

  ‘He’d never murder anyone,’ Nina agreed.

  ‘Except maybe a veal farmer,’ put in Jason.

  Joyce considered this and decided that it was a fair comment. ‘Or a mink farmer,’ she added.

  ‘Or a battery hen farmer,’ added Nina.

  ‘Or a fox hunter,’ said Jason.

  ‘Or pet shop owners.’

  ‘Or people who kept caged birds.’

  ‘Or a big-scale polluter.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Nina.

  ‘I mean, if it was a really big-scale polluter.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Nina conceded.

  There was a palpable ripple of discomfort at the way this line of conversation was running and they dropped it by unspoken mutual consent.

  ‘But he wouldn’t kill anyone else,’ said Nina.

  ‘Too right,’ said Joyce.

  There was a pause in the conversation.

  ‘So who did he…I mean, who did he not…I mean, who did they say he killed?’

  ‘An oil guy from BM Dutch Petroleum,’ Jason said. ‘An official.’

  ‘He wouldn’t kill an oil official from BM Dutch Petroleum,’ said Joyce, wondering whether he would.

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ said Nina. ‘He wouldn’t kill a fly.’

  ‘Now that’s true. He definitely wouldn’t kill a fly,’ Joyce echoed. Most of the gang would far sooner kill a nasty polluting human than an innocent bug of any kind. ‘Where did it happen? I mean, where do they say it happened?’

  ‘On that plane? That special plane at Chek Lap Kok?’

  ‘Skyparc?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Skyparc. That’s so weird. I was supposed to go up there today. I had an appointment at…well, just about now, actually.’

  ‘You did? On Skyparc? Geez, you some swanky high-class lady dese days, Jojo.’

  ‘Yeah, I…’ Joyce stopped. Her mind raced. Of course! Now the pieces fell into place. That’s why her authorisation had suddenly been withdrawn. A man had been murdered on the plane, and a member of Pals of the Planet—her sort-of buddy Paul—had been accused of doing the dirty deed. The security people must have gone through their database and instantly barred access to everyone on the list who was registered as a member of the Pals. That’s why she’d been dropped suddenly by Robbie Manks’s contacts.

  ‘I was supposed to go and like feng shui it this morning—with my boss—but yesterday afternoon they suddenly said that I couldn’t go. I think it’s because I’m a member of the Pals of the Planet. I was negatively vetted,’ she said, knowing that such a phrase would impress this group. ‘I must have been.’

  ‘We’re all going to be negatively vetted,’ said Nina gloomily. ‘For the rest of our lives. Paul’s going to be done for murder and the Pals will be made illegal,’ she said, bursting into tears.

  Over the next twenty minutes, all the details came out. The story was electrifying. Joyce realised that odd, quiet, obsessive Paul, by becoming part of a major news report, had become part of history, at a stroke overtaking all the noisy, clever, ambitious kids in the class.

  She listened in a daze, her mind running on multiple tracks at once. She felt she was part of the discussion but at the same time merely an observer, little more than an astral projection that happened to be in the room. The young woman could not escape the feeling that life was rolling too fast, too many things were happening in quick succession, there were too many problems to solve and too many paths to choose from.

  Nina did most of the talking, with Jason nodding and Joyce listening silently, with her hand to her mouth, as they sat knee-to-knee around a Lilliputian table at Starbucks in the basement of Jardine House in the Hong Kong district originally called Victoria, but now known unimaginatively as Central.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Jason. ‘Our Paul, locked up for murder.’

  Joyce felt they were becoming permanently bonded together by the horror story they were sharing. This is what life was, she semi-subconsciously decided: an endless series of conversations in which people tried to make sense of their lives by chopping them up into stories and trading them with each other: some funny, some sad, some shocking, some exciting, some endearing, some boring, some tragic. Moving, shared tales created strong bonds; shallow, trivi
al ones cooled relationships and caused them to drift apart. The power of a story was not related to how much drama or death there was in it, but in how involved the listener was. A nuclear bomb on the other side of the world could be ignored, but a firecracker at the next table could not.

  And the fact that Paul was only a kid—twenty, maybe twenty-one—was also a factor. A man of forty being arrested was not really news: such tales were just grey paragraphs in grey newspapers. But a young person being thrown into jail—that was different. You wanted to find out more. What happened? What led up to it? Who should be blamed? Was it the parents? Did he fall into bad company? Children were always seen as blank slates. Anything that turned them into news items, whether as victims or perpetrators, were stories that demanded to be pored over.

  Then there was the money. Wealth was always a factor, whether or not it should be. Paul was a spoilt upper-middle-class brat who had gone to an international school: one couldn’t listen to a tale of someone like him coming to grief without an emotional reaction, whether it was ‘he deserved it’ or ‘I blame the parents’.

  Joyce knew the beginning of the history Nina was relating: that the remaining members of Obcom 70s had decided to march alongside Friends of the Earth at a demonstration against pollution in Hong Kong, and had eventually dropped their focus on music and had become the local branch of Pals of the Planet. From pop music to environmental activism may seem a stretch, but they were sister subjects for politically correct teenage rebels at the time. The metamorphosis had been organic and natural. After their star performer’s dramatic failure on ‘Masterbrain’, the group had lost its focus, and the wave of concern about the mess that adults were making of the planet became their new uniting emotion. The skill they had developed in collecting, processing and distributing trivia was useful, and they sent out dozens of fact-packed press releases about the effects the deteriorating air quality was having on the health of residents.