Mr Wong Goes West (12 page)

‘How come you sound so English?’

‘The British legacy. Most legal people of my generation trained in London.’

He gestured at her to follow him onto the balcony. ‘Come. There’s air over here which we can actually breathe. Nice stuff, air. Don’t get much of it in my line of work.’

A few short strides took them to a minuscule balcony at a dizzying height above the street. Joyce noticed the little old lady that she had asked for directions below them, having tottered just one hundred metres further along the road.

‘Now what can I do for you?’

‘Sorry to disturb you, Professor, but I’m here to ask about Paul Barker.’

He looked out into the sunshine, his eyes half-closing in the glare. ‘Thought so. You can call me Abel.’

‘Thanks. Have you spoken to him? Nina said—’

‘I spent some time with him last night.’

‘How’s he doing?’

‘As well as can be expected.’

‘That’s a cliché.’

‘So was your question.’

‘But how is he? I mean, is he okay? He must be so shocked. I mean, what an awful thing to happen to…to be accused of something like that.
Cheese
.’

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.’

‘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.