Authors: Nury Vittachi
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 would 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.’
‘That’s right, no king.’
‘Only a Queen.’
‘She is not married?’
‘She is married. She’s married to the Duke of Edinburgh.’
‘Ah. A Queen can marry a Duke?’
‘Yes, yes, a Queen can marry anyone she wants. Even a commoner. Even a foreigner. But not a Roman Catholic. That makes things awkward.’
‘Understand,’ said Wong, not understanding at all. ‘If the Queen marries the Duke, does the Duke become King?’
‘No. He was actually a Prince—Prince Philip—before she married him. After marriage, he became a Duke. The Duke of Edinburgh.’
‘So a Duke is bigger than a Prince?’
‘Uh, no, not really. It’s all rather hard to explain. He’s still a Prince, as well as being the Duke of Edinburgh.’
‘Oh. He is Scottish?’
‘No, he’s Greek.’
‘Edinburgh is in Greece?’
‘No, in Scotland. But he’s not Scottish himself. Although they do now live in Scotland. For some of the time. It’s a bit complicated.’
Wong was alarmed when the truck they were in skimmed too close to some sort of fork-lift baggage vehicle, nudging it to one side, and causing it to tip over with a loud crash. ‘
Aiyeeah
,’ he said, putting his hands to his ears.
Manks did not appear to notice, continuing to talk. ‘I’ve got some very good documents explaining it very simply and clearly. They’re in my bag at the hotel and I will be very happy to give you one. It’s a short book, really, but admirably clear. Explains everything you need to know about the royal family. I wrote it myself, actually.’
Wong nodded. ‘What sort of job is it and how much you pay? I am very, very busy this week.’
‘I think the money should not be a problem. We’ll pay your usual fee, of course, plus the usual expenses. We pay promptly and discreetly. Indeed, discretion is our middle name. This is what I want to talk to you about at this moment: the importance of discretion.’
‘I see.’
‘I want to impress upon you the importance of total, utter discretion at all times in this affair. We want you and Ms McQuinnie to do some work with The Family, and their main London residence, Buckingham Palace, while regarding this job as entirely private. You will get a lengthy briefing about this, and you will be asked to sign a succession of documents, some of which are very lengthy. Everything related to this assignment must be kept discreet and private. Indeed, I would go so far as to use the word
secret
.’
‘Why secret? Something bad happen in Buckingham Palace? Someone murder someone there?’
‘No, no, no, no, no! That would be preposterous, not at all. It’s just that
anything
that the royal family do—well, if the press gets hold of it, that’s the end of it. While the royal family is
held in high esteem by the vast, vast majority of the public, the press in my country is rather anti-monarchy. Extremely anti-monarchy, you might say. Especially the damned columnists. Evil nightmare monkeys, every last one of them. Anything that leaks out is used against them. If people were to find out that money was being spent on a feng shui master, they would likely raise an enormous fuss—the headlines would say, “Despicable royals use public purse for financing nutters” or something. They’d say that even when the Queen uses her own money for something.’
‘Nutter?’
‘A nutter—it’s British slang—it just means “crazy person”, really. The press would assume that anyone who believed in feng shui would be mentally deranged, that’s all. No insult intended or anything.’
‘No problem. Many of my client are Asian businessmen. They also like to keep everything secret.’
‘Well, this is exactly the same as that.’
‘Mostly because they are crooks.’
‘Oh. Well, perhaps not exactly like that, in this case.’
They drove around another hangar and began a second circuit of the same trail. But this time, the truck hit a fire hydrant, pushing it over and causing pressurised water to gush out in a fountain behind them. Once more, Manks appeared not to notice—although he did look surprised at the drops of water which fell onto his windscreen. ‘Rain out of a clear sky. That’s good luck in British superstition,’ he said approvingly.
Wong shuffled along the bench seat, closer to the middle of the vehicle, realising that it would be safer to be away from the sides. It was a wise decision. Seconds later, they clipped an airport bus, knocking off its wing mirror.
Manks was lost in his own world, unaware of the results of his erratic driving. He wanted to move on to matters of detail. ‘Now, The Family has had a great deal of bad luck in the past couple of decades.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘You follow royal news?’
‘No, somebody told me.’
‘There have been an unwarranted number of high-stress events, tragedies even.’
‘Yes, being born with such big ears and long noses—this very negative.’
‘I wasn’t really thinking of that. I was really referring to the string of bad marriages, the death of the Princess of Wales and so on.’
‘Princess of Wales die too?’
‘Too…?’
‘Lady Diana died in car crash.’
‘Oh, I see, no…there isn’t
another
princess who died. The Princess of Wales is the formal title of Lady Diana…er…Princess Diana, to be more correct. They are one and the same person.’
‘She was a princess from Wales?’
‘No, she was a commoner from England. But her title was the Princess of Wales.’
Wong decided it would be wiser to not try and make sense of any of this. He took a small notebook out of his jacket. ‘I will need their full names, date of births and place of births. Then I can start research immediately. Take a long time to do full feng shui reading for each member. How many person?’
‘Well, I’m really just thinking of the immediate family, so no more than eight or ten people. Perhaps twelve.’
‘You know their names, ages, date of births?’
‘Of course.’ He tapped his temple. ‘I’ve been working with
them for years. It’s all up here. Who would you like to start with?’
‘Head of household. Queen’s husband.’
‘Ah, Prince Philip. Well, he may be the man of the house, but it would be a protocol problem to consider him the head of the household. So let’s start with Her Majesty. Tell you what. Let’s pause for a minute.’
He stopped the truck at a forty-five degree angle across the road, opened his briefcase, and pulled out a laptop computer, which he had left on standby. Bringing it to life, he called up a photograph of the Queen. ‘Okay. There she is. Elizabeth Regina, born in 1926.’
Wong jotted it down. ‘Her family name is Lagina?’
‘Regina. Elizabeth Regina. That’s not really her family name, but that is the formal name she carries. The women are Regina. Kings are Rex.’
The feng shui master’s eyebrows wrinkled at this. ‘But Joyce told me that “Rex” means “dog” in England.’
Manks considered this. ‘That’s true, in a manner of speaking. In the West, the Latin word
Rex
is used as a name for dogs, but also is the word for kings.’
Wong slowly shook his head. No wonder Western civilisation was in such a mess. There was no sense of propriety.
The public relations man continued: ‘Technically speaking, members of the royal family only have first names. But they are known colloquially as the Windsors, as if it was their surname. But when they have a need to sign their full names on any document, they normally write Mountbatten-Windsor.’
Wong wrote it down. ‘So her surname is Mountbatten-Windsor. That was name of her father?’
‘Actually, no. I think one could not accurately say that that was her father’s name.’
‘Oh. You don’t know who the father was?’
‘Of course we know who the father was!’ Manks looked horrified. ‘We know her father and her father’s father and so on, all the way back to Egbert, King of Wessex, who reigned from 802 to 839 AD. Creating a long and distinguished line stretching back over one thousand years—just think of that, Mr Wong. One thousand years!’
‘In China, one thousand years is not long. I come from line of Yellow Emperor, nearly five thousand years ago.’
‘Well, that’s China. A thousand years is a long time in England.’ He stopped. ‘I’ve lost my line of thought.’
‘You say you think her father’s name not Mountbatten-Windsor.’
‘Ah, yes, that’s right. Well, it’s like this. The surname of Queen Victoria’s eldest son Edward VII was actually Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which was the family name of his father Albert, a German. When war broke out between the British and the Germans in 1914, Edward’s son George assumed a name that sounded less Germanic and more English.’