Authors: Nury Vittachi
Wong smiled. The sun was starting to shine in his life again. Over the past day, the feng shui master had become increasingly enthusiastic about this assignment. Everything had gone well. The client had said he was happy to reimburse them for the business class tickets they had not purchased. The hotel was comfortable and had good Chinese food on its menu. Joyce had been banished from the task, so he could work efficiently and without interruption. The schedule was relaxed, with him doing the on-board conference area today, and then flying off to London for more work tomorrow.
And then there had been the icing on the cake: the murder.
Once Joyce had moved out of earshot at the hotel, Robbie Manks had filled Wong in on the details of the ‘incident’ that had so upset him. Apparently an environmental activist—a well-known extremist in greenie circles—had broken into the plane while it was parked at the airport yesterday morning. The man had shot and killed a petroleum executive and then tried to escape. But airport technicians had seen the whole thing through the aircraft windows and had alerted police, who pounced on the killer as he was trying to leave the hangar.
For the feng shui master, the incident was proof that the gods were going out of their way to make things up to him, having been so mean over the past few months. A murder undeniably introduced a massive amount of negative energy into a space. It meant that his role was far more important than would otherwise have been the case. More importantly, it meant that he could jack up his fees. Best of all, the murderer had been caught, so he didn’t have to do the difficult part of
the job, which was to work out who did it and gather proof for a legal case. That particular ball was firmly in the court of the law enforcement people. All he had to do was check out the space, alleviate the negative vibrations, and collect his fee. Life was sweet.
Wong and Teo abandoned the buggy, went down an escalator, and then stepped outside into the bright sunshine, whereupon they boarded another small vehicle, which trundled them towards the hangar where the fabled visiting aircraft was housed. Minutes later, they stopped at a security gate and Teo had a long and earnest talk with security staff, producing a long series of papers to justify Wong’s presence on the site. Clearly, the murder had brought down the shutters heavily, and officers had become hostile to allowing anyone into the hangar who had not been born and raised there.
After three sets of people had examined the papers, Teo and Wong were allowed through.
‘Hard to get in here,’ he commented.
She agreed. ‘That was the problem. It wasn’t hard enough, before. We used to just have two staff at the barrier. I guess one was in the toilet, or fetching coffee or something, and the perpetrator got past the other one.’
‘He sneak past?’
‘No. He tricked her. That’s what I heard. He said he was a local environmentalist and he didn’t have a pass but he wanted to go in and take some pics, do an environmental assessment on the new plane. He was cute and charming, and she was a bit of a greenie, you know vegetarian and all that, so she let him slide through.’
‘I know this type of woman. Very troublesome. Too bad.’
‘It was a very naughty thing to do. You should never let anyone past security like that. But it was hard to blame her.
She wasn’t a trained security guard or anything. More just a receptionist or PA.’
‘Very bad to let a bad guy in.’
‘True. But we felt kinda sorry for her. I mean, she was quite young, and it all seemed innocent enough.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was sacked on the spot, of course. I think she’ll be lucky if she’s not prosecuted.’
‘And this bad guy. He did what?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Mr Manks told me a bit. But not too much. He shot somebody.’
‘Well, it was in the newspapers this morning, so I guess it isn’t a secret any more. He got into Skyparc and then shot a guy working there. Then he tried to escape but the techies saw it all through the windows, and tipped off the guards, who came running. They grabbed him before he was even out of the hangar.’
They had reached a long corridor and she ushered Wong into a room on one side. In it, three men were waiting. One of them, a tall man with a walrus moustache, stepped forward to greet them.
‘Mr Wong. Good morning. My name’s Handey. Most people call me Sir Nicholas. I have the honour of being chairman of Skyparc Airside Enterprises. Now you understand that your role has become rather more important than we had expected, due to the highly regrettable incident yesterday morning. We hired you because we wanted to make sure everything was correct for the meeting; so we didn’t make the sort of protocol mistakes that we would have been unable to see without the help of a…er…specialist such as yourself. But since the incident of yesterday, things have become more serious. A death on
the plane is bad luck to the superstitious of any country, Mr Wong, Britain or China or anywhere else. We’re going to make damn sure we don’t have any British or Chinese bad luck signs around—fortunately, for the British, that’s a simple enough affair. We make sure that we don’t have thirteen seats at the table, we check the calendar to make sure it’s not Friday the thirteenth, we chuck a bit of salt over our left shoulder, hope it lands on a black cat, and that’s pretty much that. For the Chinese, though, we understand that it’s all a bit trickier, a bit more detailed. That’s where you come in. We want to be able to say to our visitors that we have one of the world’s finest feng shui masters on our team, and that we can assure you on his behalf that any negativity has been completely excised.’
‘Very hard to do this in one day. Better you have the meeting in another place,’ Wong said.
‘That would seem to be the obvious answer. But, Mr Wong, we are selling a place. A building. A very fine building that happens to be a flying building. A flying building that we are saying is the very best place to hold a meeting in any city in the world in which it lands. Thus it stands to reason that the meeting has to take place in Skyparc. It would be absurd for it to happen anywhere else.’
Sir Nicholas clasped his hands behind his back and thrust his chest forward. Clearly, he was a former military man.
‘One of the sales angles for Skyparc is that it has the sort of first-class conference rooms that is ideal for top-level summits, be they business meetings or political ones. We have to demonstrate that that is true. We have to imply that now that Skyparc has landed in Hong Kong, the best meeting room in the city is not at the Mandarin Oriental, or the Four Seasons, or the Grand Hyatt, but inside an aircraft on the apron of Chek Lap Kok airport. Furthermore, Skyparc is unique in being a
meeting place beyond the concept of national boundaries. We can organise a summit on this aircraft and fly it to a place where it is subject to no jurisdictional boundaries of any kind. It will be the only place in the world ideal for inter-governmental summits dealing with tricky territorial issues: the Israelis and the Palestinians can meet here, as can the Singhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils, and so on and so forth. Do you understand?’
‘Understand.’
‘Fine. Now Ms Teo will take you into Skyparc itself. She will arrange for you to have access to the parts you’ll need to go into.’ He dismissed them with a short bow of his head.
As they walked out of the hangar and onto a gantry leading to the aircraft, Wong decided to ask Teo about the murder. After all, she was clearly talented at memorising facts. ‘Who died? Who killed the man who died?’
‘There’s not much we can say,’ she said. ‘The whole thing is
sub judice
now. A man from BM Dutch Petroleum was shot, and an intruder was caught red-handed. An environmental activist. Someone who has been waging a war against the petrol company for years. That’s it, really.’
The feng shui master nodded. ‘But if I do a reading of this airplane, to make sure there are no bad vibration there, then better you tell me more detail about exactly where the man was shot, how he was shot. Or let me talk to someone who know about it.’
‘I see. Well, there are a couple of cops still here. Would you like to meet them? I think you’ll find them in the aircraft.’
As they approached the enormous, double-decker plane, Wong was curious about how much it appeared to differ from other aircraft. The entry door seemed wider, and seemed to be made of wood and brass. The windows were not a line of small portholes, but were long, thin and rectangular.
The public relations woman noticed his surprise, and gave a laugh. ‘Strange, isn’t it, the first time you see it? They’ve gone to town to make this different. It’s the iPhone of the aircraft world. It is amazing what a difference you can make, just by getting the designers to think outside the box for a change.’
As he got closer, it became clear that the wood and brass were faux artistic surfaces laid onto a rather conventional aircraft door. Close up, he could see that the door was neither oversized nor materially different in any substantial way. But the rectangular windows were genuinely eye-catching. And much more pleasant to look through, he imagined, than the tiny, too-low oval windows that were standard in every other aircraft on the planet.
Stepping onto Skyparc, he was pleased to turn to the right and find himself in a relatively large, open space, rather than the usual narrow aisles. The rows of seats that normally filled the body of an aircraft were missing. Instead, comfortable armchairs, which would not have been out of place in a gentleman’s club, were scattered around the room in clusters. As he walked through the room into the next, he was surprised to find himself in a space that was not the normal tube-like space in a curved fuselage, but had straight walls like a normal room. He soon realised that there was a series of interlocking rooms, some of which had staircases leading to an upper floor.
The aircraft really was revolutionary. Instead of first, business class and economy cabins, there were multiple rooms on two levels, each with different designs and seating arrangements. One was built for a cabaret and featured a tiny stage. Another was a bar, a third was a modern coffee shop, a fourth was called Food Street and had multiple eateries, and so on. One of the lounges on the upper deck looked like it had come from a discotheque, another appeared to have been lifted
from a colonial 1920s sitting room, complete with Chesterfield sofas, and a third was a cinema with a relatively big screen. The chairs were varied and cleverly designed. Each had a matching seatbelt built into it.
Teo led him into an upper-storey space, where the delegates for the meeting would gather. ‘They’ll stop here and have some drinks and canapés before the meeting proper,’ she said. In the place of the usual narrow galley, there was a counter with a lit display of pastries and cakes. On the wall behind the counter, bottles of alcohol and optics were suspended. She turned a switch and mood lighting gently started glowing. She flipped another switch and a slow-swirling light effect started to paint patterns on the walls on all sides of the room.
‘Very…different,’ said Wong, a traditionalist who did not like mood lighting, and would have preferred an uncarpeted floor and cushion-less, hardwood black-lacquered furniture: simple and elegant and sturdy (and cheap).
‘Then, they’ll go into the conference room, which is here.’ She opened a pale pine door to show him a large room with a round table and minimalist panelling, which no doubt slid to one side to reveal projector screens.
Then she led him back down the stairs to what she called ‘the back office’ rooms. ‘These are the executive offices, where Mr Seferis was when…yesterday.’
‘Mr Seferis is the man who was shot?’
‘He was. Ah, and here’s a police officer.’
She explained to the officer who Mr Wong was and why he was here. The policeman introduced himself as Chin Chunkit from the Hong Kong police. Clearly bored by his task, he seemed torn between sticking to his brief to repel anyone who approached, and being pitifully grateful to have someone to talk to. In the event, he decided to compromise and let Wong
put his head into the crime scene, but not to step into the room further than the doorway.
‘We are very careful with evidence these days,’ the officer said. ‘You drop one invisible fibre on the floor, big trouble.’
The room was an elegant office with several desks, one of which was rather messy. Mr Seferis had obviously been in the middle of paperwork when he had been interrupted.
‘We’re not a hundred per cent sure which door the assailant entered through—there are two ways in,’ Chin explained in Cantonese. ‘We haven’t been able to find a video record showing his exact approach, and there are no clear other signs. There were a lot of fingerprints and fibres, which have been sent off by the SOCOS—scenes of crime officers—for examination. They’ll eventually answer the question for us. Now it’s my belief that the perpetrator entered through this door.’
‘He come in and surprise Mr Seferis and shot him?’
‘I think not. I think he must have entered and talked to him for a little while. As you can see, the door is on that side and he was shot by someone standing over here. So the two of them must have talked for a little while, moved around a bit. Seferis stood up from his desk and moved slightly, facing away from his desk. The assailant, judging by the angle of the bullets, stood here. The discussion turned into a row. It was so loud that a group of technicians working outside heard them shouting. Then the assailant shot four times at point-blank range. Some technicians were actually working on this window here, just behind where the killer stood, and saw what happened. He fired off four shots one after another, all at the same angle. The first hit Seferis just under his heart. He slid down the wall, and the second hit him in the shoulder as he fell. The last two shots, probably fired in panic, went straight into the wood panelling. It’s mahogany, which is bad
luck for the hardwood conservationists, but good luck for the aircraft people. Mahogany is a very strong wood, it absorbed the bullets, preventing any harm being done to the aircraft walls.’
Wong leaned forwards and peered at the wooden panels. There was a single hole in the wood, apparently made by two bullets hitting the same spot.