The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (31 page)

McQuinnie and Wong watched with amazement as her Sydney relative cantered up to Ismail and Madeleine, followed by two police officers. ‘That’s the man, officer,’ said Brett to the taller of the men in uniform. ‘He’s kidnapped that girl. Arrest him. I would have done it myself, but I was worried that I might hurt him.’ He was trying to look cool and calm, but his face was glowing with pride at being part of a major disturbance, a public spectacle. ‘Those guys behind them, there—they have the evidence. They’re with me,’ he added.

‘Ohhh,’ said Wong. ‘I don’t think this is good idea.’

He was right. It turned out not have been a good idea, Joyce decided quickly.

The police had herded them all into a van and taken them for questioning. There was no immediate evidence that a crime was in the process of taking place, but that didn’t seem to worry the officers concerned. She realised that since the man making the accusations was an ordinary Sydney citizen, he inspired a degree of trust, while three out of the four other people involved were foreign, and all seemed rather odd to say the least.

Arriving at the police station, Joyce was painfully aware of the suspicion in the eyes of the officers dealing with them. But she understood it. She was aware that the visitors, as a group, were bizarre enough to excite comment even without specific accusations of wrongdoing from a citizen. The young Chinese woman had visible scars on the inside of her arms—apparent evidence of drug-taking. The tall, dark-skinned man was menacing and vaguely resembled the Muslim militants one saw on television. And the little old Chinese man spoke broken English and didn’t seem to make much sense. Add in a lot of confused-sounding talk about imminent death at a major tourist landmark, and you had a recipe which got police officers very excited indeed.

They were separated in the station. Joyce tried desperately to tell a senior officer a long and involved story about why the Muslim man should be detained. But she saw from the listener’s face that he felt the facts didn’t seem to fit the picture. She soon found herself being interviewed by the officer in a small room with a woman constable sitting nearby as chaperone.

‘So. You are saying that he intends to kill her.’ The interviewer was in his early 30s. He had a clear complexion and an upright stance, but he looked tired and never smiled. He had pale gray eyes and a jaw that was too large.

‘Yes. I keep saying.’

‘But you have no evidence of that.’

‘He’s taken out loads of life insurance on her life.’

‘My wife’s taken out life insurance on my life. So does that mean she is trying to kill me? I’d be a bit upset if she was.’

‘Of course not. But this is different. He’s a bad guy. He really is. I just know he is.’

The officer, whose name was Denton Gallaher, and who had just been refused a promotion for the second time, sighed.

His fingers tapped nervously on the desk, as if he were longing for a cigarette.

‘Okay, let’s go back a bit. How is he planning to kill her? I didn’t really understand that when you told it to me the first time. By supernatural means, right?’

‘He thinks she is going to die today. You see, he’s a
bomoh.
Like what you might call a fortune-teller sort of thing. He’s predicted that she will die today. So he’s just waiting for it to happen.’

‘But how has he predicted she is going to die? Will she be shot with a laser beam by some visiting aliens? Will she spontaneously combust? Will she be eaten by a giant shark leaping out of Sydney Harbour right to the top of the bridge? She’s hardly likely to die of old age, now is she?’

‘He didn’t say how she would die. He just said she would die. We don’t know how she will die. Someone might kill her.

Or she might just . . . die.’

‘You believe him, do you?’

‘Well . . . yes, I suppose so.’

‘You don’t sound very sure. Now you just said he was a bad guy. Why should you believe him? If he’s such a bad person, he may be lying, right?’

‘We had her fortune checked by a lot of different people.

Including my boss. They all said the same thing.’

‘The old Chinese gent.’

‘Yes. They all agreed that this was a really bad day for her.’

‘Well they’re right. I’ll tell you something else, without a crystal ball, neither. This is a bloody bad day for me, too. We all have bad days. Or haven’t you noticed?’ Gallaher leaned back in his chair and toyed with a pen, clinking it against his shiny front teeth.

‘Look. I didn’t ask you to arrest him.’ Joyce was becoming irate.

‘Your cousin did.’

‘Yeah. Well it wasn’t my idea.’

‘So what do you think we should do?’

‘Let us go so that my boss can save the life of the girl.’

‘So you think I should just let everybody go?’

‘No. You need to detain the Malaysian guy. Amran Ismail. You have to lock him up. Just for one day, even. Just until the end of today. Then Maddy will be safe. The danger period will be past.’ Even as she said it, she realised just how stupid she sounded. She was amazed at herself. How had a sharp, sceptical, sassy teenager somehow been transformed into this pathetic creature who sounded like a gullible tea lady, running around trying to spread terror about what sounded like gypsy predictions?

Gallaher leaned back in his chair. ‘Now come on, little lady. This is Australia. You say you lived here when you were a kid. In Australia we don’t lock people up without evidence, even if we think they are fishier than Sydney Fish Market at five o’clock on a Monday morning. That’s just the way we do things.’

‘So you are going to let him go free?’

‘I am almost certainly going to let him go. We’re running a few checks, but as far as we can tell, Mr Ismail and Ms Tsai are a legitimate pair of tourists who have come here for a legitimate purpose—to do some touristing. They have committed no crime, nor is there any evidence that they are in the process of committing any crime. They were visiting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which is a recommended activity for tourists, and boosts our economy. Indeed, it should be a compulsory activity for tourists, if it was up to me.’

Joyce, unhappy and confused, looked around desperately for help. The room had no windows, but the door was slightly ajar, drawing her eye. No one passed by. She glanced to her right, where a woman police officer sat, quietly taking notes.

The young woman was deeply frustrated with herself for being unable to communicate her fears intelligibly. Then the feeling suddenly changed to anger.

‘Okay, let him go then,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll regret it if you read in the
Sydney Morning Post
tomorrow that a young Chinese visitor was killed.’

‘
Herald. Sydney Morning Herald.
That would be a surprise, and yes, I guess I would rather not see that headline in that paper or any other. But I see no signs that Mr Amran Ismail is likely to do anything terrible to his young Chinese fiancée. He says so, and he seems to make sense—much more sense than you and Mr Wong do. The young woman herself is not talking very much, but it is clear that she seems to feel very unsafe whenever we take her away from Mr Ismail. And you and Mr Wong can only give me a wild story that some undefined supernatural destiny has decreed that she die today. And Mr Kilington is a bit of a bloody silly hoon who probably wears his Reg Grundys on his head when at home in my humble opinion. It’s not much to go on, now, is it?’

‘So you’re not going to do anything? You’re just going to let everyone go?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said that I was going to let Mr Ismail go. And his fiancée. They have committed no crime. I’m rather sorry to have wasted their sightseeing time. They might, conceivably, sue the police for that. They’ve done no harm to anyone. But I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Mr Wong, Mr Kilington and your good self. You see, wasting police time is a very serious crime in Australia. It’s a particularly serious crime in my department, because we are criminally understaffed, thanks to the minginess of the government. And it is the most serious crime of all when I am the individual whose time is being wasted, because I am a bloody impatient bastard who doesn’t like being monkeyed around with by people playing silly buggers. Do you get my point?’ His voice had risen in pitch and volume throughout this speech and the last words were uttered in barely repressed fury.

‘Yes,’ said Joyce in a tiny voice, suddenly terrified. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else, but sat and squirmed. She waited for him to continue, but he held the moment, appearing to be enjoying her discomfort.

He languidly rose to his feet and strolled around in a circle for two minutes before sitting down again.

‘Do you understand,’ he whispered, putting his face close to hers, ‘that I could lock you up and throw away the key for what you are doing?’

‘Ahem.’ The female officer coughed. She apparently did not approve of physical closeness between her boss and the young woman being questioned.

‘Gotta bad throat?’ Gallaher snapped at her.

‘She’s a minor,’ the woman said. ‘She’s under eighteen. Go easy. We should really have a social worker in here.’

‘This is unofficial. Just a little chat.’ Gallaher turned his face, back to Joyce’s. He continued to speak very quietly. ‘I’m going to go and have a cup of tea. And then I’m going to decide what to do. If I were you, I would be saying my prayers. I would be praying that nice officer Gallaher enjoys his cup of tea and that it leaves him in a good mood. Because if it fails to lift me out of the bad mood you have got me into, it could be very bad news indeed for you and Mr Wong and Mr Kilington.’

He stormed out of the room.

Joyce burst into tears. ‘I wanna go home,’ she wailed.

The woman constable handed her a tissue.

Two hours later, C F Wong, Joyce McQuinnie and Brett Kilington were released. They were not charged. Nor were there any further interviews. The lengthy delay seemed designed merely to punish them for wasting police time. Gallaher had given them a severe lecture, telling them that if they stepped one inch out of line again—‘And that includes crossing the road one nanosecond after the green man has started flashing’—they would be hauled in and charged with a lengthy assortment of crimes which he, personally, would compose for the purpose.

Wong took a long deep breath of cool, free Sydney air as he stepped out on to the street. In truth, he was astonished at how unviolent their experience in the police station had been. While Joyce—judging by her continuing sobs and sniffs—had found the session traumatising, the geomancer had found it fascinating and rather uplifting. Although he had spent many hours in the offices of police officers and detectives in Singapore, this was the first time for many years that he had been on the wrong side of an exchange with the law.

Some thirty years ago he had spent several uncomfortable days negotiating with corrupt members of the Public Security Bureau in a town near Guangzhou after his parents had had a dispute with neighbours. He remembered none of the details— but he would never forget the feeling of utter powerlessness that the officers of the PSB had conjured up inside him. These men had the power to destroy people’s lives at a whim, and they went out of their way to demonstrate this to anyone who fell within their clutches. And it wasn’t just financial or social ruin that they could bring about. They were not above physically harming, maiming or killing individuals who did not do exactly what they wanted. But what was worst of all was the evil in their faces: the higher the rank of the officer, the less humanity in his eyes.

What a contrast with the Australian constables. These men were large, firm, hard-nosed, and even menacing—but throughout the meeting, it was clear that they did everything according to the book. There was an underlying sense that they were working towards examining evidence and establishing the truth—two issues that simply were of no interest whatsoever to the mainland officers who had arrested him. And they had been polite, too: there was no hitting, no spitting, no cursing, no blood-curdling threats of torture and death. How on earth did they ever get confessions out of people in Australia?

In contrast, the police with whom he had dealt in China almost never failed to get confessions—whether they had detained the right people or not. Nor did they care. Trials were quick and predictable in China. The lack of a proper legal system was the biggest single curse of the mainland, he decided. It spread corruption and fear. Again, he recalled the thin, piggy eyes of the chief PSB officer at that station in Guangzhou. Wong had never experienced such terrifying coldness from a human being again until some years later, during the time he lived in Hong Kong, when his small office had been visited by triads—but that brought up other painful memories.