But as for herself, she had no interest in him whatsoever. She and Petey could be friends or not friends. It made not the slightest bit of difference to her. She was far too busy to be distracted by stuff like that. She had a job to do. So for her, the best reaction would be to continue with her life exactly as normal. If they bumped into each other at any time in the next few hours, so be it.
But they didn’t. By mid-afternoon, Joyce found her attitude had changed yet again. His face kept popping into her mind. In her mind, she replayed yesterday’s scene continuously, zooming in on the way his lips slowly puckered themselves up and then—pop!—a little kiss shot out in her direction. She was soon longing to see Pete Curdy again—but only so she could show by her cool, detached expression that she had absolutely no need whatsoever to see him again.
By four o’clock, she found herself sitting outside Allie Ng’s flat, on the hood of one of Nevis Au Yeung’s spare BMWs, trying to think of an excuse to re-visit the workshop. But even if she thought of something, what would she say when she got there? And anyway, how could you strike up a conversation with a gorgeous guy through a soundproof glass window?
No solution presented itself until Wong had nearly finished his work making feng shui charts for the building, its owner and the missing cars. She had an idea. She strode into Ng’s living room, where the geomancer was sitting, poring over twenty pages of lo shu charts he had drawn.
‘You know, I was thinking. If that Alfa thing is the most valuable car in the building, you better see how it fits into the calendar,’ said Joyce. ‘Remember how you told me that cars have birthdays and ages too?’
‘Ah,’ said Wong. ‘Yes. How old is it? I think he say made in 1910.’
‘We’d better make absolutely sure. I’ll go and ask the Curdys for you. They’ll know.’ Before he could say no, she raced out of the door and headed for the sealed workshop.
She pressed the button at the garage’s front door. A buzzer sounded, but time passed and there was no response. The shutter did not move. She tried to lift it, but it was firmly locked. So she walked around the side. She found the tinted window and raised herself on her toes to peek through.
‘Huh?’ This time she couldn’t see anything at all in the room, except some tools hanging on the wall. The lights were off. Had they gone home already? Bother!
Perhaps she just needed to get a better angle. She gripped the edge of the sill and pulled herself up. It was hard to see, but there appeared to be nothing there—not even the car. ‘Bugger,’ she said. ‘Missed ’em.’
‘Can I help you?’ said a voice.
She looked behind to see Alyn Puk standing next to her.
‘Oh, er, yeah, hi!’ Joyce stammered. ‘I was just looking for the Curdys! Are they in today? Mr Wong needs to ask them something!’ She flashed him a pleasant smile. ‘I’m just taking a message!’
Joyce bit her lip. Why did she suddenly have to speak like a child doing an errand for a grown-up? Why did she feel she needed an excuse? She was an assistant feng shui consultant, and was fully entitled to walk around the premises.
Puk looked coldly at her. ‘I suggest you stick to your job, which is wandering around with a compass, and keeping black magic out, isn’t it?’
‘Okay!’ she said, suddenly meek. ‘I didn’t mean any harm! Just wanted some info from them about the age of the Alfa! I didn’t know they’d taken it out.’
She had taken a few steps away when Puk spoke again. ‘What did you say?’
‘I didn’t know the guys’d taken it out,’ she repeated. ‘It’s not in there.’
‘What do you mean it’s not in there?’ Puk suddenly looked alarmed.
Joyce, wondering why this was so difficult for him to understand, spoke slowly. ‘There’s nothing in that garage. It’s empty.’
His eyes full of horror, Puk leapt to the workshop window and peered through.
‘No,’ he breathed. ‘Dear God.’
He fumbled with a leather pouch hanging from his belt to get his communicator out. He was so nervous that he couldn’t open it with his fat fingers.
‘Want me to help?’ Joyce offered.
‘NO!’ he shouted. Finally managing to open the latch, he snatched out the walkie-talkie and yelled into the microphone. ‘Harris. Come up to level three, now, urgent, code red. Run, damn you. Bring the remote key for the workshop.’
They waited in silence for one hundred and twenty seconds until Wu arrived at a sprint, pointing the remote at the front shutter of the garage.
For twenty agonising seconds, the three of them waited until the metal garage doors swung upwards to reveal what they had all already realised. It was empty. The Alfa had gone.
Harris Wu was speechless. His jaw dropped open and he stopped breathing. Beads of sweat sprouted from his forehead. He wandered through the yellow-lit workshop and then wandered out again in a daze. ‘Oh my God,’ he whispered.
Joyce tried to comfort the two of them. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. Maybe Dick Curdy has taken it out for a test drive. To see if whatever he did to it was okay. Or maybe Nevis Thing’s gone for a drive in it himself.’
But Puk was inconsolable. ‘Dick and Peter both left early today. Dick went to collect an over-sized pre-war spark plug from a parts store and Pete’s gone to their home workshop to reline the clutch friction plate.’ He reached out with a fat arm to steady himself against the wall. ‘The Alfa’s gone. And so am I. I’m bloody history, man.’
He was right. The car had vanished. And Puk and Ng were given notice of termination immediately by Nevis Au Yeung himself, over a mobile phone, in the most colourful of language.
Dick and Petey Curdy, who had left the premises at one and three o’clock respectively, had been summoned back to the site immediately. Dick was close to tears as he wandered around the empty workshop. ‘I’ve been working on that car, on and off, for ten years,’ he said. ‘It’s like losing a family member. Bloody, bloody hell.’ His younger brother, his face heavy, put an arm around his shoulder to comfort him. Any glimmer of flirtation between him and Joyce was forgotten. The missing car was the only object of adoration now.
Minutes later, Puk, Wong and Harris were summoned by telephone to a meeting with the chairman in conference room AY-1.
‘Come,’ sighed the distressed security guard, gesturing for Wong to follow. ‘Let’s go.’
The feng shui master was confused. Puk was moving away from the house.
‘We should go to house for conference, yes?’
‘No. The meeting is in conference room AY-1. That’s Mr Au Yeung’s car.’
‘Oh.’
As they walked across a set of lush, carefully trimmed lawns to an open area containing a silver stretch limousine, Wong thought back over the past minutes of panic. The search for the car had been thorough and heartbreaking to watch. Allie Ng had once more been roused from his daytime slumber—clearly he was having a bad week, and it wasn’t going to get any better.
Puk, Ng, several other staff and a group of police officers had crawled over the building, peering into every corner of the car park for clues. They had even stuck their heads into the small room where Wong had spent two days comparing measurements and drawing charts.
There was no sign of the vehicle. It wasn’t to be found anywhere in the building. And yet both entry barrier guards—the 6 am to 3 pm man and the 2 pm to 11 pm man—were adamant that it had not been driven out of the only exit. An initial examination of the tapes from the security cameras backed up their assertions.
As Wong, Puk and Harris reached the limousine—an eight-metre-long stretched Lincoln Towncar imported from Chicago—they could see that it contained Nevis Au Yeung in a state of apoplectic fury. He was a short, fat, volcanic mountain of anger.
Four large bodyguards surrounded the car.
There were two rows of three seats facing each other in the passenger cabin of the limousine. A small, walnut coffee table lay between them.
Puk, Harris and Wong climbed in and
sat with their backs to the driver. Nevis and a silk-clad woman sat opposite them. Joyce waited politely outside the car not knowing what to do, until the woman, whose body was twenty-ish and parts of whose face were thirty-ish, reached out and grabbed her hand, dragging her in to sit next to her. ‘I don’t know who you are, dear, but you might as well sit next to me,’ she said. ‘I’m Foo-Foo.’
Joyce was stunned by the sheer opulence on display inside the car. The seats were cream leather and as soft as cushions. The inhabitants were sumptuously dressed. Nevis Au Yeung had a Jhane Barnes camel-cashmere blend one-button jacket over Polo Ralph Lauren double-pleated golf trousers and A. Testoni caramel tasselled loafers. The woman was wearing a Kay Unger light and dark pink paisley strapless crinkle dress with matching scarf, over Cesare Paciotti honey-suede bunched boots.
It was almost impossible to breathe. The air in the car had been entirely replaced by designer perfume, as Nevis’s Bvlgari BLV Pour Homme did battle with his girlfriend’s Clandestine by Guy Laroche.
The four new arrivals sat in terrified silence as the tycoon growled a lengthy monologue. ‘Idiots. You idiots. I am surrounded by incompetence. Do I have to do absolutely everything myself? Do I have to stay up all night guarding my own car by myself ? Do I pay security staff a huge fortune to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?’ He continued in this vein for ten minutes, his statements heavily decorated with bursts of Cantonese Joyce could not follow (curses by the sound of them and by the way Wong winced).
The only person who remained calm throughout the tirade was the woman who was always referred to outside her presence as ‘His latest—er—wife’. The implication, Joyce decided, was that she was the girlfriend of the moment.
Whatever her status, the woman—who went by the name Foo-Foo Au Yeung—was not only unperturbed by the tycoon’s outbreak, but was positively beaming. She felt that the latest disappearance totally justified her theory. She was having an absolutely wonderful day.
‘I told you,’ she said, during a pause in her partner’s thunderous ranting. ‘Black magic. The only explanation. I said this all along. Now perhaps you’ll all believe me.’
Everyone else remained frozen in their seats, except Wong who had started scribbling in a notebook.
Foo-Foo turned to look at him. ‘Well? What about you feng shui people? Since we are dealing with black magic, only you can help us.’
Wong bowed his head deeply to indicate that he accepted this fact. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We can help I think.’
Joyce blinked in surprise at his answer. What was he going to suggest? Should we hold a séance to get rid of some invisible wizard spiriting away cars?
Nevis went quiet, seemingly struggling to deal with his own beliefs. He leaned forwards and spread his thick, bejewelled fingers on the walnut platform. ‘I am a businessman,’ he growled. ‘I deal with hard facts. Yet even I cannot imagine how this was done. I don’t normally believe in black magic, but . . . well, I can’t explain how this happened. And neither, it seems to me, can you,’ glaring at Puk and Harris. Then he turned back to Wong. ‘Maybe you are our last hope, Mr Wong. As Foo-Foo says.’
The feng shui master, in a state of sheer terror, nodded far too much, looking like an executive toy.
Nevis continued in a voice that was two degrees quieter than before, but somehow ten degrees more dangerous: ‘But don’t fail me. If you fail me, I won’t forget it. Do you understand? And I won’t pay you either. Not one cent. Is that understood?’
‘Yes-yes-yes,’ Wong stuttered. ‘We can help. I think. But first have to do more work. More compass readings. More study. More charts. Very busy.’
So saying, he rose to his feet, bowed once, and crept out.
Joyce, terrified to be abandoned in the car awash with Au Yeung’s anger, gave Foo-Foo an embarrassed smile and crept out behind him. ‘Gotta go, gotta help,’ she said in a tiny girlish voice that she recognised as her own, circa age nine.
‘Geez. So how did the car vanish? Was it a helicopter, like I said? Harris and me, we checked all round here but didn’t find any signs of anything.’ She squinted in the bright sunshine as they stood on the roof deck of the car park.
Wong shook his head. ‘Car has not vanished. Cars do not vanish.’
‘Where is it, then?’
‘Still here.’
Joyce looked irritated. ‘But we looked everywhere. I mean, a car is a huge great thing. You can’t just tuck it behind a dustbin or something.’
‘Correct,’ said Wong. ‘Need a big space. So we need find space that we have not check yet.’
‘Are there any?’
He bowed his head. ‘There are spaces we not yet check. Not many.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like next to baby’s bed.’
Joyce wondered if he were joking. ‘Doesn’t she sleep in a cot?’
‘She has small room, about two metres wide. Dining room of flat a little bigger, about four metres wide, same size as mother-father room.’
‘So I don’t think you could hide a car in there. You’re joking, right?’
‘A car is not so wide as you think. I walk around. I measure cars. Average car is 1.6 or 1.7 metres wide. Not too big.’
‘But come on, CF. Where could you hide a car in that tiny flat?’
‘Look at map. Total width of inside rooms of apartment is eight-nine metres only. Four metre and four metre. Outside frontage is bigger. Total width is 12.5 metres. I think possible is secret room there.’
‘A secret garage, where a car could be hidden, you mean?’ He nodded.
Joyce said: ‘But how could they get it into the apartment? The doors are so tiny.’
‘Not through the doors. Did you notice this?’ Wong pulled two small remote controls out of his pocket.
‘Where did you get those?’
‘Borrow from Mr Harris.’
‘You stole those from him?’
‘Just borrow them. Noticed something. Always he carry two remote controls. But why? Only one garage door that needs remote control. Officially.’
‘So the other control opens something else . . . ?’
They walked briskly down the ramp from the roof level to the third floor. Joyce trotted quickly around to make sure there was absolutely no one around. Looking over the balcony, she noticed that the staff was having a meeting at ground level.
Wong placed himself at a distance of about six metres from Allie’s apartment and pressed both the remote controls. Nothing happened. Then he turned to his left, jabbing the button and waiting to see whether there was any reaction. When he pointed one of the remote controls to the extreme right, there was an audible click coming from some distance away.
This was followed by a gentle whirring noise. Wong and Joyce watched amazed as an entire section of wall lifted itself up and tucked itself into the ceiling cavity. There, in a secret room built beside Allie Ng’s apartment, was a vintage car.
‘That’s amazing,’ said Joyce, rushing up to the vehicle. ‘You’ve found it!’
She touched it to make sure it was real. Then she happily surveyed her reflection, which appeared upside down in the gleaming chromework. ‘CF, this is wonderful! Old Ben Nevis will be like sooo pleased. And we’ll get paid. Phew!’
Wong looked smugly happy with himself and strolled over to join her at a leisurely pace.
But then Joyce turned to him and her face fell. ‘Hang on a minute. Maybe we won’t. There’s a problem. This isn’t the 1910 Alfa Romeo 24.’
They raced down the stairs to look for Alyn Puk. Joyce was told by the entrance guard that the security chief had gone to the Ridley Park main security chamber. This was a small outhouse tucked behind a glade of dawn redwood trees in Nevis Au Yeung’s front garden, occupied by two uniformed guards and a bank of twenty-three video screens, two of which were focused on the car park entry-exit point.
The fat, unhappy guard was standing with Nevis and Foo-Foo, running through the security videotapes of the past three or four days. Although th
e room was air-conditioned, Puk had sweat stains running from his armpits to his waist.
Foo-Foo used her elegantly manicured index finger (with a purple-painted, jewel-encrusted false fingernail) to press the fast forward and rewind buttons, Puk scribbled down a record of the cars coming and going, and Nevis slumped in a corner, a mumbled trickle of Chinese curses flowing from his lips.
On the largest screen, a string of cars could be seen being driven in and out of the car park at fast-forward rates, but none of them was a royal blue Alfa Romeo.
Wong and McQuinnie joined the watchers as the stultifyingly boring video ran on and on. A grey car passed out of the building. A black car passed out. A white minivan drove in. Peter Curdy’s green replica car passed out. A brown van passed in. Suma Ng’s yellow hatchback passed in. Nevis Au Yeung’s sister’s dark purple Lexus passed in.
‘Try another tape,’ hollered Nevis.
The guard slammed another videotape into the machine and the same scenes began repeating themselves, but in a different order. A white car. A grey car. A burgundy car.
Joyce had never seen anything so boring in her life, but so conditioned was she to giving her attention to any active television screen that she found herself focusing on it. Three minutes later she was rewarded by a glimpse of Petey Curdy driving across the screen. She started singing: ‘Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang. Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang . . .’
Foo-Foo looked at her. ‘I remember that movie! Dick Van Dyke.’
‘Yeah,’ said Joyce. ‘Brilliant movie. My dad gave me the video when I was six.’
‘I saw it at the cinema. Of course, I was very young at the time.’
The two women sang together: ‘Oh, you, pretty Chitty Bang-Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, we love you . . .’
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 11