Mr Wong Goes West

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

  He nodded. ‘It is, as you say, an awful situation to be in.’

  ‘Can we get him out on bail?’

  Abel shook his head. ‘On a murder charge?’

  ‘But his parents could pay a big bail bond. They’re rich.’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Is he estranged from them?’ Joyce asked.

  ‘No, I spoke to them. I think they rather admire him. His father does, anyway. But I think bail is unlikely, given the charges…and the evidence.’

  ‘Trumped up, of course.’

  She expected Abel to enthusiastically agree with her, but he said nothing.

  ‘I’ve known Paul for years,’ she went on. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. I mean…’ she decided not to go down that avenue again. ‘I mean, he’s a good guy. He would never murder anyone. What sort of evidence do they have? This has got to be some sort of frame-up.’

  Again, there was a gap during which time Joyce expected the Professor to agree with her, and once more he said nothing. She started to feel affronted—how come Abel Man wasn’t rushing to Paul’s defence? An unwelcome thought struck her. ‘Do you…do you think he’s guilty?’

  ‘That’s a question you cannot ask a lawyer. Or even teacher–lawyers. Or even builder–teacher–lawyers.’

  She waited for him to explain himself.

  ‘One of the things that happens to your brain in the first few years of practising law is that you get a logical disjunct. You learn how to marshal any number of facts together without drawing any conclusions from them.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

  ‘If lawyers didn’t have that ability, they couldn’t work. They would be constantly researching the facts, discovering that the client they are defending is guilty, or the person they are prosecuting is innocent, and then they’re sunk. They have to abandon the case or continue with it, hoping that they fail to prove what they have set out to prove. If they win their case, they get kudos for themselves, but have caused an act of injustice to have occurred. It’s an impossible situation.’

  ‘I see…I think.’

  ‘That’s the heart of it: you think. We don’t. We just get as many facts as we can, and we put ourselves into the shoes of the judge and the jury and try to process the odds. Lawyers count rather than think. Are the number of facts implying guilt higher or lower than the number of facts implying innocence, in the eyes of people listening? It’s a largely mathematical computation. It takes place in the lawyer’s head. It never translates to the natural next stage, which is: do I, personally think he really did it or not?’

  ‘Is that what happened in the OJ Simpson thing?’

  ‘In that case, there was only one crime and only one possible offender at the scene—a suspect who acted in an unmistakably guilty way straight after the murders. If the defence lawyers had allowed such an inconvenient little fact to penetrate into their souls, they would have been unable to defend him. So they turned it into a mental game. How can we amass enough circumstantial facts to prompt the jury to react in a particular way? As for the question of whether he did it or not, the defence lawyers would not have allowed themselves to even think about it. Otherwise they would have been unable to operate honestly. Either that or they thought about the question, reached the unavoidable conclusion and decided they would be happy to continue in spite of this, thus to operate dishonestly.’

  ‘Eww. They sound like bad guys.’

  ‘Exactly. People like you and I wonder how others can stand up and lie in front of people, speak the opposite of what is in their hearts—but there are people who can. Most lawyers, I like to think, cannot. Again, I have no empirical evidence for that claim. It’s probably more a wish than an assertion.’

  He stopped talking and gave her a friendly smile. Construction work in a new town must be a lonely job for someone as bright as he was, and Joyce imagined it must be pleasant for him to take a break and chat about something he had obviously thought a great deal about. She let the silence surge around them for a while. But then it occurred to her that he had avoided answering her question. What exactly did that mean? Was he gently letting her know that Paul might actually be guilty?

  ‘What is the evidence against Paul?’ she asked at last.

  The Professor looked down at his feet for a while before answering. ‘It’s a long list. They have a confession from a staff member who allowed him to get past the security doors and enter the aircraft hangar where the plane was parked. She claims he told her that he just wanted to take pictures—he apparently charmed her.’

  ‘He can be very charming, in an odd, quiet sort of way.’

  ‘They have a security video of him entering the aircraft minutes before the shooting. The victim was killed in a room on the lower deck of the craft.’

  ‘Couldn’t we argue it was circumstantial evidence? Someone else may have been there?’

  ‘I haven’t finished. They have people working on the aircraft who saw him pull the trigger—they were watching him and the victim through the plane windows.’

  ‘Oh. That’s bad.’

  ‘And they have a video of him leaving the aircraft a few minutes later. He was caught almost immediately. At least one eyewitness has made a positive identification of him. And the security videos are nice and sharp—you can see his face clearly.’

  ‘Cheese.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But have they got any record of him actually murdering the guy? The other guy may have pulled a gun first. I mean, as far as I know, it would be unlikely that Paul even owned a gun. Maybe the other guy tried to kill Paul, and Paul grabbed the gun and shot back in self-defence.’

  ‘Hah! Now you’re thinking like a lawyer. I like it. Instead of acknowledging that the evidence strongly implies he did it, you are adding up the facts and looking for gaps and loopholes.’

  ‘But maybe it was like that. Or maybe he was framed.’

  ‘None of this is impossible.’

  ‘Maybe there was someone else on the plane, who looked like Paul if you were peering through the plane windows from a distance.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Professor exclaimed. ‘A good argument. Except for the inconvenient fact that there was no one else on the plane. Various technical staff were working in the hangar, but they were all on the outside of the plane. And the windows on this aircraft were unusually large and clear. So the engineers got a good view.’

  ‘So he is the only suspect,’ Joyce said.

  ‘Like OJ.’

  ‘Can we get OJ’s lawyers? No, forget I said that. But I know Paul wouldn’t have shot anyone in cold blood. There must be something else to it. What does he say happened?’

  The Professor sighed. ‘That’s the problem. He’s not saying anything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Joyce asked, although she knew the answer.

  ‘He’s not talking to anyone. Not to his friends, not to his parents, not to social workers, not to me. When he has to say something, he just recites lists of songs or singers from the 1970s. Songs from before he was born.’

  ‘He’s a collector. He loved the 1970s, and wished he had been born earlier. The whole song titles thing—it’s a game our gang used to play all the time. We called it Obcom, from the disorder obsessive-compulsive.’

  Abel nodded. ‘I gathered it was something like that. Nina told me.’

  Joyce sighed. ‘So he’s not defending himself?’

  The Professor shook his head. ‘Nor giving me the information that I could use to organise some sort of defence for him.’

  ‘It doesn’t look good.’

  ‘On a murder rap, it’s very bad indeed. Indeed, I would call it a hopeless case. Unless of course a friend, a good friend, could persuade him to open up a little.’ He turned to face her and lifted his eyebrows, setting her a challenge.

  ‘I could try. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do any good. What are you going to do?’

  ‘One does what one can, when one can. I have certain things planned.’<
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  ‘Such as…?’

  ‘I’m going to finish sanding the ceiling.’ He slipped his goggles back on and raised his electric sander to shoulder height. ‘This has to be finished by seven o’clock.’

  Joyce left the room as the machine began to scream.

  Half an hour later, she was on a different train, this time on her way to prison. She had decided to visit Paul anyway. It didn’t matter whether he was guilty, whether he would receive her, or whether he would talk to her. They’d been friends, he was in big trouble, and she felt it was her duty to show herself, and make herself available as a shoulder or listening ear, whatever he chose to respond to.

  Perhaps the fact that she was sort of an investigator, if only a feng shui man’s assistant, may cut some ice with him. Wong’s agency specialised in scenes of crime. It may be that Paul didn’t want to talk to a social worker or a lawyer or his parents, but would talk to her, as she was in a unique position of being both a friend and a professional investigator.

  And she hadn’t missed the message in Abel Man’s closing words: perhaps the only thing that could save him would be if a friend could persuade him to abandon his vow of silence. And anyway, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to rest until she’d at least tried to be that friend.

  Caught up in her own thoughts, she did not notice the man following her all the way to the prison gates.

  When organising your work space, it is important to position yourself and your colleagues in a configuration that correctly takes into account each person’s role, place in the hierarchy, focus of activity, personality, birth date, temperament and ambitions. In a conference room, where one individual guides a group of people in discussions and decision-making, one concentrates primarily on ensuring that the chairman’s position is clear and strong. At home, the patriarch can have a chair with its back to the door, but in a business situation this should never be the case: he needs to know what is behind him as well as what is ahead. He needs to make sure no one stabs him in the back, metaphorically or otherwise. Further, the leader’s chair must not have a window behind it: such a position subconsciously creates an image of lack of support. The leader has to have something strong and solid behind him—a wall, representing a mountain of strength.

  Using details of Sir Nicholas Handey’s birth—he was born in the Year of the Monkey, 1932—Wong decided that west-southwest was his most positive direction. He was able to make slight adjustments to the room easily, to give power to the chairman’s seat. Fortunately, the conference table was round, so simply changing the relative positions of all the seats and moving the table itself a quarter turn, gave Sir Nicholas’s seat control over the other seats.

  After strengthening the positive, Wong’s next job was to alleviate the negative. The room where the man had been shot would remain off limits to everyone, including the VIP visitors touring the plane. So all he had to do was to provide evidence that any bad luck that came from that room, in any direction, had been alleviated professionally. His function, he understood, was merely to allow the Europeans to boast that the work had been done.

  While unschooled practitioners of the art would merely hang a mirror outside the door, the geomancer preferred to use a mixture of physical and psychological remedies. For immediate effect, he asked for rugs and carpet runners in certain colours to be placed in the room and a harsh piece of modern art on the wall to be removed. Pots of cacti and floral displays of dried plants tied to angular sticks were taken out; replaced with live, flowering houseplants. Dead light bulbs were renewed, with the fittings adjusted so that light did not glare directly onto the occupants or their paperwork and was reflected, instead, at least once before it softly reached desk level, the energy therefore gently dissipating.

  He ordered that mirrors be hung at certain places, and the spot directly above the place of murder was assigned powerful elements that would absorb negative energy. Fish and other animals, apparently, were not considered suitable for aircraft in flight, but Wong ordered that a temporary tank of miniature turtles be installed just for the day, for the duration of the meeting, to be removed when the plane was due to take off the following day. He also organised for a calming oil-painting of a Suzhou garden to be installed close to the entrance of the conference room. This would introduce a natural earth energy into a space that was in danger of being affected by the over-strong fire and metal energies of the gun that had been used in the room beneath.

  To get the details straight, the geomancer had asked for more information about the victim—Dmitri Seferis. He had been born in Germany to a Greek family, and was a thirty-three-year-old corporate finance executive who had been at BM Dutch Petroleum for about four years. Born in 1974, he was a Water Ox.

  Any murder is a sad story, of course, but there seemed to be something particularly poignant about this one. He had been working quietly at his desk when he was interrupted. He seemed to be a nice man: Wong remembered from his visit to his room that there were plants on his desk and a photograph of his family—a pretty, dark-skinned wife and two attractive small children. Wong liked murders: they raised his fees. But this did not make him feel guilty as he was doing something worthwhile in return. By efficiently compensating for the negative energy created by the incident and introducing positive energies, he would help the victim’s co-workers recover more quickly.

  After making these and other short-term changes, the geomancer sat down with the aircraft’s senior interior design executive, Sammy Bulowski, and made a list of long-term alterations that would further improve the space inside and outside the conference room: a change of colours for the walls and carpets, for a start. He told her that the normal layout of an aircraft was extremely bad feng shui—long, straight aisles with blocks of seats on either side. The design of Skyparc, though, was far superior.

  ‘Should always avoid straight lines,’ he said. ‘You have straight lines, energy moves too fast. People feel unsettled. Good fortune disappears. Dead ends are also bad. Energy stagnates. But if you have curves, wavy lines, energy flows slow-slow. Like a river. A river has a main channel, but is never straight. Always it curves. Always there are side branches. Always there are rock pools.’

  The feng shui master explained that although you could not see ch’i energy, anyone could feel it. ‘It is the life energy…Inside you. Outside you. In every space. In spaces with a lot of people, you feel the people energy. In spaces with no people, you feel the land energy.’ Mixed layouts were ideal. Good ch’i moved like a stream of water or a gentle breeze or even a river of humanity. It flowed, it meandered, it sometimes settled and circled for a while in a single spot before moving on. ‘When you design things, think of invisible rivers,’ he said. An awareness of invisible energy could be found in the wisdom literature of every major society. In Chinese, it was feng shui. In India, vaastu. In European culture, they spoke of ley lines.

  As the afternoon wore on, it became evident that there was nothing left for him to do: he was merely killing time to make it look like he could justify describing this as a full day’s work. And then there were more important decisions to make. He wondered whether to prepare an invoice on the spot—he always carried a book of them in the pocket of his dark, box-shaped Mandarin-collared jacket. Could he ask for the first half of the money now? Or should he wait until the entire two-part assignment had been done, including the London leg? One needed to do a bit of strategic thinking here. Getting money in multiple small lumps sometimes resulted in the getting more of it than asking for a single chunk. It seemed to the payer that he was paying less. On the other hand, dividing the bills allowed an opportunity for the payer to default on later parts, so perhaps it was better to get it all at once.

  Normally, Wong asked for a fifty per cent deposit before he started work. But this assignment had arrived so suddenly that they were in Hong Kong on the job before contracts had even been drawn up. Yet he decided he needn’t be too worried. It was unlikely that someone as famous as the Queen of England wou
ld write a bouncing cheque. She had her credibility to think about. Would she be insulted if he refused her cheque and demanded cash? How would he phrase the question: ‘If Her Majesty does not mind, please pay cash, thank you?’

  As he struggled with this issue, he saw Robbie Manks approaching him.

  ‘Just step this way, Mr Wong, I’d like to talk to you about something,’ the public relations man said. He grabbed the feng shui master’s arm and drew him to the exit of the aircraft.

  Wong was immediately worried. Whenever anything unexpected happened as he approached a pay-off moment he was put on edge. Was Manks trying to wriggle out of his financial duties? The Englishman certainly looked uncomfortable. But this was not surprising: everyone had looked miserable all day, as was only to be expected at a location where a murder had taken place.

  Outside the aircraft, Manks pulled him into the sort of flat-topped truck that carried bags and cargo around the runways. And then he slipped into the driver’s seat and set it in motion. Manx noticed Wong’s raised eyebrows. ‘Don’t worry. I can handle it. I’ve got an HGV licence, you know. HGV—heavy goods vehicle. Was in the army for a while. Done all sorts. I have an advanced driving licence, too. Anyway, prefer to talk while driving. Safer. Less chance of being overheard, and you know me, like to be super discreet. Secret of my success.’

  As they drove around the back roads of the airport, keeping well away from the runways, Manks spoke conspiratorially about the London assignment. ‘As I said, I wanted to talk to you about doing the next bit of the job, which will involve you heading to London with us for a couple of days.’

  ‘For the family.’

  ‘That’s right—The Family. They refer to themselves as The Firm, but that’s an in-joke for members of The Family only. We humble workers don’t use that term. It’s just for members of the monarchy.’

  ‘The monarchy—the King and so on.’

  ‘The royal family, actually, which does not have a king at the moment.’