Mr Wong Goes West (23 page)

‘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.’

Sinha nodded. ‘I see. Well, it is not literally cleaning out devils, but it is certainly to do with removing negative energy and creating the right sort of space for positive energy to settle.’

‘So you are a feng shui master, are you?’

‘Not at all. There is a feng shui master on board, a good friend of mine, but I am not he. I am a master of several Indian techniques, including one called
vaastu shastra
. It is widely seen as the Indian equivalent of feng shui. It is similar in many respects, and there is much overlap in the basic philosophy, and in the final outcomes. But there are many differences, at the same time.’

‘
Vaastu shastra
? Never heard of it.’

‘Sadly, it is not as famous as feng shui, not having had the marketing that feng shui has had. Yet it is often considered, certainly in India, as being older than feng shui. Indeed, the Indian
vaastu
associations claim that feng shui is a distorted, bowdlerised version of
vaastu
.’

‘I bet the Chinese don’t like that.’

‘You bet correctly. They believe the opposite: that feng shui inspired the creation of
vaastu
.’

‘Which do you believe?’

‘Generally speaking, creative codes of belief tend to go from India to China, not the other way around. For example, Buddhism quite clearly went from India to China. The Chinese legend of the monkey king, Sun Wukong, is clearly inspired by the much older Indian legend of Hanuman, the mischievous monkey god of Hinduism.
Vaastu shastra
comes from the early days of the Aryan arrival in India, which is some four millennia old. Feng shui, it is claimed, is also four millennia old—but a few decades younger than its Indian equivalent, I suspect.’

She nodded, but her expression was of a person gathering facts while declining to be impressed by anything. ‘So how is it supposed to work? I mean, feng shui,
vaastu shastra
and all that? It all sounds a bit superstitious to me.’

Dilip turned to face her, swinging his entire seat around—these in-flight swivel-able armchairs were a delightful idea, he’d decided. ‘Not at all,’ he declaimed, grandly. ‘It is all entirely rational and even scientific to the most rigorous degree.’

She looked sceptical. ‘So how would you or a feng shui master change my life? Wouldn’t you just move the furniture around and add some trinkets? Hang a solid gold horse from my light bulb or something?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s the general belief. But in reality, it’s nothing like that. Most modern masters of
vaastu
or feng shui, the good ones anyway, do not come into your house and add things to it. Most homes are overstuffed with items of all sorts. Job number one is to de-clutter the house, to destroy much of the unneeded stuff in it, to clear out the dead energy.’

‘Now that makes sense to me,’ Moore said. ‘My home is full of junk.’

‘And if I may be so bold, the presence of clutter in a person’s environment detracts greatly from a person’s ability to operate successfully in that environment. Clarity is key—in your physical environment, and in the decisions that you have to make to operate your life successfully. It’s really all one—behaviour and environment.’

‘It all sounds a bit more psychological than I expected.’

‘It is very psychological.’

She leaned forward and placed her chin on her fist. ‘So. Can you tell me in a sentence or two how I can fix my life using
vaastu shastra
techniques?’

He smiled. ‘You’ll be surprised to hear that I can. These things may be complex on the surface, but they are built on very simple truths.’

He leaned back and joined his fingertips together, looking up and thinking for a few seconds. ‘Let me put it like this. Consider your desk, whether it is an office desk, or a table at home where you receive and write letters. What happens at that desk? Answer: every day, a number of letters are received. Or faxes. Or advertisements. These are all items with potential energy implications. They are all bits of paper urging you to react in some way—to buy a product, or respond with a phone call, or change the way you do something. Now what we should do is to react to that potential energy transaction in some way—and thus burn up the energy in it. We should either fulfil it, by doing what it says, or we should make a decision that we are not going to fulfil it, but instead throw the paper away. But instead, we take that piece of paper, and we balance it on our desk, unwilling to make an immediate decision. This happens to a number of pieces of paper every day, and then before we know it, there is a huge pile of pieces of paper on the desk. When it gets too high, we take the pile
of paper, and we tuck it into a drawer. When the drawer gets so full that it cannot close, we tuck the paper into a cardboard box and stick it under the desk. Soon our desks are jammed with paper—underneath, inside, and on top.’

‘Good God! You’ve been spying on me.’

‘Alas, it is what most people’s desks look like.’

‘What’s the effect of all these unfulfilled bits of paper? What did you call it—potential energy transactions?’

‘I shall tell you. The day comes when you arrive at your desk, and you have lots of work to do, but you can’t do it. You feel an incredible amount of inertia. You can’t get started. And you have no idea why.’

‘You peeping Tom! You’ve been staring at me through my office window.’

‘The reason why you can’t get started is that your desk is swamped with frozen energy. It is lying there, waiting to be handled. But the inertia infects everything you do, so that you end up unable to do anything.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s grim, but it all rings horribly true. What about computers? I use mostly email these days.’

‘They’re just the same. The only difference is that instead of physical letters arriving at your desk, emails arrive in your inbox. Again, each of them is a potential energy transaction. And again, the right thing to do would be to delete each one, or reply to each one—and then delete it. But that’s not what we do, is it?’

‘It is not.’

‘We leave them there in our inboxes.’

She nodded guiltily.

‘And soon there are six hundred emails in our inboxes.’

‘Eight hundred.’

‘And eventually we select them all and stick them into a file called “archive”—which is simply the computer equivalent of
the cardboard box under the desk. And the result is the same. Our email systems become full of frozen energy, and inertia spreads out of it. We find ourselves unable to do any useful work.’

‘I’ve often wondered why I feel like I am walking in treacle. So what should one do about all this?’

Sinha waved a bony index finger at her. ‘This is what I recommend. Divide all your paperwork into two piles. One of stuff which is useless and should be thrown away. And one of stuff that you think may be of use one day. Then you throw both piles away.’

‘Both piles?’

‘Both piles. By that stage, you will have started to feel the benefits that clarity can bring.’

‘And I suppose one should delete all one’s emails as well.’

‘Exactly. Even if you don’t, that nice Mr Gates has arranged for the computer to blow up every few years, so that all your stuff gets wiped out anyway.’

Janet Moore folded her arms. ‘This is surprisingly practical advice. Not what I expected at all.’

‘Use the sticky finger technique. Every letter that arrives: pretend it is sticky. Pretend you cannot let it go until you have dealt with it. Only then will the stickiness disappear and you can throw it away.’

Sinha stared into the middle distance as he moved into philosophical mode. ‘Business is about activity. It is not about making stuff. It is about
moving
stuff. It is useless to make a million widgets unless you can sell a million widgets. Manufacture is not the key: distribution is. Activity, movement, animation—that’s the heart of business. If your desk, your working environment is clear, if your office is clear, if the paths in and out of your hands are clear, then there is movement.
Then there is activity. Then there is velocity. Then riches and wealth will grow in the space. There needs to be space for them.’

‘You’re a genius. Will you come and give a speech at our next AGM?’

‘I would be honoured, madam.’

Wong had just ordered another portion of nouvelle cuisine Chinese delicacies when he looked up and saw Joyce walking towards him in a daze.

‘Where did you go?’

‘I met someone. Had to talk to him. He is sooo amazing. Never mind.’ She shook herself and blew out her cheeks to clear her head. ‘Listen. I found out something interesting.’

‘What?’

‘Remember the security guy said there were no cameras on the backstairs? Well, he was trying to get friendly with me just before, and he said there
were
cameras on the backstairs—he said he was spying on me earlier. It doesn’t add up.’

‘Oh. Interesting. Did you get pictures of crime scene?’

She handed Wong the photographs. He went through them carefully. Most showed Seferis’s desk or the wall with the bullet holes in it.

‘This all about angles,’ said Wong. ‘There are few things I notice. One, desk of Seferis is in wrong place. It should be along here a bit.’

‘Maybe the guy who did the interior design didn’t know about feng shui. I mean, this plane was built in England or France or somewhere, wasn’t it?’

‘Nothing to do with feng shui,’ said Wong. ‘Just good design skills. Feng shui and good design skills go together. This desk is in wrong place.’

Joyce stared at the picture. ‘Hmm. See what you mean. It’s sort of out of balance, isn’t it? It should be that way, a metre at least.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe the guy just moved it, so that he gets more light from the window behind him or something?’

‘No. And see the next picture.’ In this image one could see the desk leg had been bolted to the floor—and one metre to the left, there was a dent in the carpeting.

‘Look. This show the desk was in right position before. But someone move it, and screw it to the floor, so that it cannot be move back. Mr Seferis was put in that place for reason,’ said Wong.

‘That may be true, but how do we know that has anything to do with the murder? Perhaps the guy who was in charge of designing the office just wasn’t very good at his job, and moved things around a few times. Or perhaps the guy at the next desk wanted a bit more space, and got Seferis shifted a bit?’

‘Maybe so. Look at more pictures.’

Several showed images of holes in the mahogany panelling.

‘There were four shots fired,’ the feng shui master said. ‘Two hit the man, two hit the wall. All four at same angle. They were fired from other side of room, away from the door where they say Paul came in.’

‘Well, the guy at the window said that Paul and Seferis were arguing for a while, so perhaps they kind of moved around, you know, danced around each other for a bit.’

‘Possible. But I think is strange that all bullets were fired at same angle. Seferis was hit by first bullet. Then he started to
slump down. If a man was holding gun, the man would have lowered the gun sights and shot Seferis again, in the chest, many time, to make sure he was dead. But instead, the gun kept pumping at same angle. Exactly same angle. No change. As if fired by blind man.’

‘I see what you mean. The first shot goes in his chest. But as he is slumping down, the next goes into the same spot, which is now his shoulder, and he falls further, and the third and fourth go into the wall.’

‘Yes. They all go at same angle.’

‘You saying he was shot by a blind man?’

‘No. Even blind man would have followed sound of the man falling and would have aimed gun down a bit.’

‘You saying that he wasn’t shot by a human? He was shot by some sort of robot that couldn’t change angle? That seems weird. Especially since the techies say they saw Paul pull the trigger.’

Wong shook his head. ‘The people did not see Paul pull the trigger. Really, they only hear shots being fired. Only one person say he saw what happen.’

‘That guy Danny Tang. But he was pretty close. I mean, he was right at the window, or so he said.’

‘Only one person need to tell lie to make everyone else misinterpret facts. If Danny Tang did not see what he say he saw, then evidence your friend kill Seferis become much smaller. Evidence only say Paul got on the plane before Seferis died, and got off after someone or something shot Seferis.’