Wong still looked unhappy. ‘I was told this was the route,’ he said, pulling out a scribbled diagram from his bag. Attached was a map from the inflight magazine.
‘That’s the normal route,’ agreed Captain Malachy. ‘But we’ve just changed it a bit. We still get from the same A to the same B.’
‘Does the route matter? Surely the destination is the key thing?’ Sir Nicholas asked.
‘Every person has directions which are lucky at some times and unlucky at some times. This plane…it is good luck for this plane to travel east or southeast, but bad luck to travel northeast.’
‘But sometimes you just have to go from A to B, Mr Wong, and there are no choices.’
‘There are always choices.’
‘What if your clients move office from north to southeast, and that is a bad direction for them on that date? You don’t expect them to abandon their new office and buy another one in a good luck direction, do you?’
‘I will not ask them to do that. But I will ask them to make their journey a bit longer so that they arrive from the right direction. Sometimes I send them right out of town, many mile, and then they come into town from a different place. If their good luck is ensured by them arriving from the southwest, I will tell them to leave their office and travel due south, and then approach their new office from the luckiest direction.’
‘I see. Well, it doesn’t look like there’s much we can do about it now. The decision has been made, and you can’t really change these things once you are in the air—unless of course there’s a major emergency of some kind. How bad is the bad luck?’
‘Pretty bad,’ said Wong. ‘Shar number five.’
‘Well, this may be a good test of just how valid feng shui is,’ put in Captain Malachy. ‘If we have a safe journey, it may be a black mark for you, Mr Wong.’
‘That means the odds are very much in our favour,’ said Sir Nicholas. ‘Accidents are thankfully rare. But I do want to make sure you feel comfortable. Is there anything you can do to alleviate the bad luck?’ he added, hoping to mollify the feng shui master.
‘I try,’ said Wong. ‘I walk round a bit and take a look.’
In the days of the Early Sung, a Prince who was heir to a throne approached a wise man who lived in a cave.
‘I want to learn how to be the greatest of kings,’ said the Prince. ‘Which kings should I visit and what gifts shall I bring them?’
‘Visit no kings,’ said the wise man. ‘Get rid of your rich robes, fine crown and expensive sword. Dress as a poor man and visit each of the Nine Kingdoms carrying only a crust of bread.’
So he did.
In each of the kingdoms, he was treated badly, except for the ninth one, where all were treated equally. When he returned home and took the throne, he declared that the laws be rewritten so that they protected people who had neither land nor money.
He said: ‘When we look after the rights of the least, we look after the rights of us all.’
Blade of Grass, the only way to protect the rights of a community is to protect the rights of the individual.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
Joyce was walking along the corridor as fast as she decorously could when she encountered a familiar face: the helmet-haired, impeccably dressed Kaitlyn MacKenzie. The Queen’s soon-to-be newest employee made no sign of recognising Joyce, but allowed her eyes to drift across her and move on. This sort of behaviour always annoyed Joyce, so she made a point of stopping, turning and catching her attention.
‘Hey! Hi, Kaitlyn. Remember me?’
She stared.
‘We met like, yesterday?’
‘Oh, yes, hi, uh…’
‘Jo. Enjoying the flight?’
‘It’s all right. I’ve seen it all before.’
‘How’s your new job? I haven’t seen much of Robbie Manks. Where’s he sitting?’
‘He’s with me. We’re in the Leopard Lounge, on the top deck. With a young man you’d probably like to meet.’
‘And who might that be?’
‘Oh, just a member of the royal family. Not that we are supposed to talk about it.’
Joyce knew that this was the moment to make a glib joke but was struck dumb. A member of the royal family! A young man. A young man. Could it be? Was there the slightest chance that it could actually be…? There was no choice: she had to ask.
‘Is it, er, Prince Will?’ Joyce said, her voice instantly sticky with emotion.
Kaitlyn scoffed. ‘Certainly not. We’d have a zillion extra security guards if it were. ‘Nor is it Prince Harry. If it was, I wouldn’t be prowling around down here. It’s no one particularly interesting, unless you are totally desperate. Go and check him out if you want.’
‘Nah. I’m kind of busy myself, still working on the case. We’ve made some amazing progress.’
‘How very nice for you. I’m going to get a cocktail.’
Ms MacKenzie, looking extra tall in high-heeled shoes, tottered away towards the club bar.
Joyce stood still and pondered. What Kaitlyn had just said stopped her short. This might be the moment when she should find an excuse to visit Robbie Manks and be introduced to a real live royal—a young male one, no less. Young implied unattached, or at least unmarried.
Joyce was no groupie, but she was a young woman. She had been brought up on the same fairytales as other female children have been since the dawn of time. There was no way on earth she could be told that a real, live, unmarried actual prince or similar was hanging around in the vicinity without at least having a look. And perhaps introducing herself. After all, princes did sometimes date commoners, or even marry them. Look at Prince Charles and Princess Diana—what a fantastic fairytale romance that was! If you discounted the infidelity and lies and misery and death, of course. It was an opportunity that could not be allowed to slip past. And now that Kaitlyn had propelled herself out of the way on her new Jimmy Choos, this was the perfect chance.
Joyce smoothed down her hair, held her hand in front of her mouth to check her breath (which she hoped was chocolatey after the spectacular dessert she’d downed) and nipped up the back steps. She followed the signs to the Leopard Lounge, on her way to find her prince.
The first thing she saw was Robbie Manks dozing in a lounge chair in a small group of people, most of whom were reading or sleeping. Joyce scanned them, trying to zero in on anyone who might be a prince. There was an empty chair next to Robbie: that must have been where Kaitlyn had been sitting. There were two young men in the group who appeared to be in the all-important twenty to thirty bracket. One of them was a gaunt, spotty young man in a T-shirt and jeans with a tattoo on his arm: probably not royal material. The other was in an expensive-looking dark suit, and was watching a movie with a sort of regal disdain. Pay dirt.
‘Hi, Robbie. Mind if I join you?’ Joyce chirruped, perching on the edge of Kaitlyn’s chair.
‘Hmm? Sure,’ said Manks, his voice thick with sleep. ‘Just having a little think here.’ He turned his head away from her and immediately returned to his nap.
‘Hi!’ said Joyce, thrusting her hand out at the young man in a dark suit. ‘I’m Joyce. I’m a friend of Robbie’s.’ She would have preferred to announce herself as “a professional geomantic investigator on her way to feng shui Buckingham Palace” but she suspected that such a line might transgress Manks’s endless strictures about discretion.
‘Hey,’ said the young man in black, failing or choosing not to notice her outstretched hand. He gave her a dispassionate glance that lasted a third of a second and returned his gaze to the television monitor. He appeared disinclined to introduce himself.
Joyce interpreted this haughtiness as confirmation of his elevated status: clearly he was someone grand and impressive who was right to treat her as if she was a nobody. She was a nobody, comparatively. He must be constantly approached by women. There was no way he could know just what an interesting nobody she was.
; But how was she going to find out exactly who he was? There was no other way than to get him talking.
‘Cool plane,’ she said, immediately regretting it. What an inane and obvious comment.
The young man did not reply.
‘I like it,’ yawned the tattooed young man sitting behind her. ‘Better than Virgin upper class, even.’
She gave Mr Tattoo a perfunctory nod to acknowledge his comment and focused back in to her target. ‘I guess the rest of your family aren’t on this flight, otherwise there would be zillions more security guards,’ she offered.
The young man in black scratched his nose.
Power, Joyce decided, was definitely an aphrodisiac. There was nothing particularly special about the gentleman in front of her. His ears stuck out, there were dark circles under his hooded eyes and he had shaved badly, leaving a patch of stubble under a slightly too-wide nose. Yet she could see past all this. To her, he represented everything that was contained in the word ‘prince’: castles and horses and jewels and international fame—in other words, the final paragraph of every fairy story, all the way from Cinderella to the Barbie movies and Shrek. At the same time, she felt rather appalled for having these thoughts. She was a feminist, she was independent, she despised ancient patriarchal traditions, and she was generally more anti-monarchist than pro. So why was she so entranced by the young man who was so studiously ignoring her? She guessed that the desire to be part of a fairytale must be a primal thing—so deep that it swept other things aside, even closely held feminist principles.
But how to get his attention? She decided she needed a different approach. Perhaps she could do something for him. He was probably used to being served. ‘I need a drink. I’m heading over to the bar. Can I get you one?’
He shook his head without replying.
She heard Mr Tattoo speak from behind her. ‘I’ll have one. Apple juice, please.’
‘Fine.’ Now she was stuck. She had to leave the chair next to His Royal Highness the Prince—she’d decided that his regal manner must establish that he was somewhere very high up in line for the throne, perhaps straight after Will and Harry—to get a drink for the non-entity behind her. She rose to her feet, gave the T-shirted young man a small, obviously fake smile, and started to walk over to the bar.
‘Get me a coffee, please, Joyce. I need to wake up,’ Manks mumbled.
‘Of course. And how about a glass of rat poison for everyone except the Prince and myself?’ was uttered sotto voce.
When she reached the bar she found Mr T-shirt Tattoo had followed her.
‘I’ll help you carry the stuff back,’ he said. ‘It’ll be hard to carry two drinks and a coffee.’
Joyce decided she might as well use this unattractive individual to get clues about the identity of their majestic companion.
‘Can you just remind me of that guy’s name? I know him but I’ve forgotten it.’
‘Who? Max?’
‘Ah, yes, that’s right. Max. Of course. Max.’
Max? Max? Was there any member of the royal family called Max? Any cousin or nephew or half-brother of Prince Will? She could not recall a Max, although she knew that the younger generation of royals did have trendy names—there was a Beatrice, wasn’t there? And a Zara? But mostly they had boring names such as Andrew and Edward and George, she thought. There was no Max that she had ever come across. But these days, there could, in theory, be a Prince Max.
‘Royals are strange people,’ she mused.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Do you hang out with them a lot?’
‘Way too much.’
Joyce decided Mr Tattoo must be a school friend of the royal visitor. ‘Isn’t it kind of fun?’
‘Not really. We long to be ordinary. I know that’s kind of a cliché, but it’s actually true.’
‘We? Are you…?’
‘A member of The Family? Sort of. I’m afraid so.’
‘And Max?
‘He’s a mate from Gordonstoun.’
‘Oh. So. Are you like royal?’
He smiled. ‘That’s a funny way to put it. But I suppose I am sort of on that list, so to speak, for better or worse. But don’t blame me. It’s not my fault.’
‘Who exactly are you? Sorry, I should know, but…’
‘No, there’s no reason why you should know. I’m not a famous member of The Family, and hope never to become one. Only a few are famous, thank God.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Army.’
‘As in…?’
‘Army. Yes. My full name is Edward Peter Andrew Armstrong-Phillips. But everyone calls me—’
‘Army. Are you a prince?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a cousin of Prince Will or anything like that?’
‘Pretty much. A cousin once removed. I’m the grandson of Princess Marjorie, who is the Queen’s youngest sister. I’m fourteenth in line to the throne, so if the other thirteen pop off, you’d have to call me King. I’d be Edward VIII. Not much chance of that happening, I’m pleased to say.’
‘What do I call you now?’
‘Anything you like. How about “waiter”? After all, I have offered to carry our drinks to our seats.’
‘Forget apple juice. Let’s have some Moet,’ Joyce said.
She spent the next ten minutes at the bar talking to Army, during which time she discovered that he was twenty-four years old, but considered himself rather immature. He liked machines and wanted to be a mechanic or an electrical engineer but his family members would not hear of it. He had never had a proper job. His parents wanted him to inherit the directorships of several family companies, but he flatly refused to agree to it. He complained that he had no idea of the value of money, like most of his royal contemporaries, so it was wrong to put him in charge of looking after the stuff.
In turn, Joyce shared her family history—how her mother had been a career-obsessed television presenter in the United Kingdom and had interviewed an Australian property developer and fallen in love with him. The marriage had been spectacularly stormy—both being prima donnas used to getting their own way. After ten years of shouting, Joyce’s mother decided that she was not cut out to be a wife, a mother, or an Australian and had returned to England to present gossipy midday shows aimed at homemakers. Joyce’s father had won uncontested custody of their two daughters. He had expanded his company to various places, including New York and Hong Kong, and had taken the two girls with him every time he moved. Unsettled by the break-up and the peripatetic nature of their lives, the two girls had performed poorly in their studies at various international schools. Joyce’s older sister had become increasingly wild and had left home at seventeen, moving to Boston to live with a man that no one else in the family had ever met. Joyce had reacted in a different way. She had become quiet and indifferent.
Her father had eventually pulled strings with a Singaporean property developer friend and got Joyce a summer job as an intern in a feng shui consultancy. That summer had changed her life. CF Wong and Associates specialised in doing the feng shui at scenes of crime—studying the harmony or lack of it at places where crimes had occurred and helping police understand what had happened. She’d now been with the consultancy for two and half years. She kept in touch with her sister and her father, but couldn’t help but feel abandoned by her mother.
‘My parents don’t know me at all. Especially my mum. They’re a million miles away, literally and in every other way. So I’m happy hanging out in Singapore. I’ve got a few friends there. My boss is a grumpy old man, but I like the work,’ Joyce told Army. ‘It’s all about helping people and sorting out problems. It kinda mixes business with something a bit more spiritual, which I really like.’
Army absently stroked a pimple on his cheek as he spoke. ‘I know what you mean. Like you, I’ve never been hungry or penniless or on the street. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe a person needs to be hungry. My main problem is that my ambitions are
all screwed up. They have always been tiny—get to level 15 at Game Boy, get a Nintendo Wii, get a nice car, et cetera. But I don’t want to run the world, or even a small company. I’m starting to realise there is something desperately wrong with me. I don’t want stuff. Everyone else wants stuff, don’t they? My mad brood wants me to inherit directorships and estates and all that kind of thing, but who gives a toss? I don’t think that sort of thing will make me happy.’
‘What would make you happy?’
‘That’s a hard question. When I was a teenager I had terrible acne and no social skills at all, and cousins and friends were all much handsomer than I was. No one ever looked at me at royal functions. It’s the same even now—no one is interested in me, not with Will and Harry around. I’m not saying that I don’t have friends. I made some good friends at school. I met Max there—he can be a bit of a dork, but he’s my best mate. By the way, you haven’t told me your name.’
‘Oh,’ said Joyce. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
She was in love.
Dilip Sinha had been pleased to get to Hong Kong in time to get on board Skyparc before it left. He was grateful to Wong and McQuinnie for recommending him to Manks. He had managed to have a good chat with Wong before the feng shui master was summoned to a meeting with Sir Nicholas Handey. Now the Indian astrologer was trying to enjoy a snooze in one of the leather armchairs on the lower deck—but he couldn’t sleep. He had the feeling he was being watched. Half opening one eye, he was curious to note in his peripheral vision a woman with white hair looking intently at him. Unsure of whether to feel insulted or complimented, he turned to catch her eye. ‘May I help you, madam?’ he said in a neutral tone.
‘Sorry to stare,’ she said. ‘But I was just wondering. Are you one of the people who is travelling with Mr Manks? One of the, er, how shall we say, mystical people?’
Sinha was not sure whether he should confirm this or not—having had the same speech about discretion that Wong had been given.
‘I realise it’s supposed to be a secret and all that,’ the woman continued. ‘But Manks is useless at keeping secrets. He’s my cousin. I’m Janet Moore and I’m on the board of Skyparc Airside Enterprises—I’m a non-executive director. It’s really through my connections that he got this assignment. Anyway, I know all about the group of mystics that he is importing to clean out all the devils from Buckingham Palace, or whatever it is you do.’
Mr Wong Goes West Page 16