Mr Wong Goes West (10 page)

‘What gun?’

‘Not sure yet. We have an expert working on it. He reckons it was a Beretta. A PX4 Storm pistol, probably, with fine bore ammo; maybe a bullet of seven millimetres or so. Smaller than normal, probably to minimise the sound.’

‘You catch the bad guy already?’

‘Yeah. We caught him. We’re fast workers.’

‘So my job is to clean up here.’

‘No,’ said Chin, looking alarmed. ‘We’ve got more SOCOs coming in to do some tests later today. It’s still a sealed-off crime scene. You can’t touch it, I’m afraid.’

‘I do not mean that sort of cleaning. I mean cleaning up negative forces coming out from here. I do not need to touch anything in this room.’

‘Oh, that. Yes, well you can start that any time you like, as long as it doesn’t interfere with police work.’

‘Thank you.’

Wong asked to be escorted back upstairs, and he started work on the conference room.

Jason McWong jumped up when he saw Joyce arrive, spilling his Venti-sized coffee over the table. He gave her a hug, and
refused to let go, even though a pint of tepid latte was spilling down his trousers and into his left Doc Marten.

‘Wow,’ said Joyce. ‘Why such a warm welcome? Did I win the lottery and nobody told me?’

Jason answered only with a long watery sniff. Below him, the paper coffee container, now empty, rolled to the floor and disappeared under the table. Joyce realised that he was in an emotional state, his heavy body a-tremble. She pulled away from him just enough to look at his face. His eyes were red.

‘I just want to be held,’ he whimpered.

She glanced at Nina and realised that she too had been crying. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened? Has something awful happened?’

Jason nodded, but was too overcome to speak. He sniffed again and eventually let go of Joyce. He lowered himself back into his seat, and reached towards the table for his drink. ‘Where’s my latte?’ he said, baffled and annoyed.

‘In your left boot,’ Nina told him.

Jason wiggled his toes, heard a squelching sound and realised that she spoke the truth. ‘How’d it get in there?’

‘Something awful has happened,’ Nina said to Joyce. ‘It’s Paul.’

Joyce’s hand had flown to her mouth. ‘Paul? What? What? Tell me.’ Nina’s tone could only imply death or dismemberment. Jason seemed to be occupied with wondering whether he could get his coffee back out of his boot and into a cup.

‘He’s been arrested,’ Nina said.

Joyce relaxed slightly. Most members of the group had been arrested at least once in their lives, and Paul had already been arrested at least once this year. It was an activist’s life—indeed, it was what several activists lived for. ‘Is that all?’

But Nina looked so worried that Joyce snapped the look of concern back onto her face.

Joyce knew that this brush with the law had to be much worse than usual. ‘What is it? What’s he done now?’

‘Murder,’ spat Nina angrily. ‘He’s been done for murder. They say he killed someone. It’s ridiculous. It’s totally ridiculous.’

‘
Murder
?’

Nina nodded.

‘He wouldn’t murder anyone,’ Joyce said, a tone of outrage in her voice.

‘He’d never murder anyone,’ Nina agreed.

‘Except maybe a veal farmer,’ put in Jason.

Joyce considered this and decided that it was a fair comment. ‘Or a mink farmer,’ she added.

‘Or a battery hen farmer,’ added Nina.

‘Or a fox hunter,’ said Jason.

‘Or pet shop owners.’

‘Or people who kept caged birds.’

‘Or a big-scale polluter.’

‘Nah,’ said Nina.

‘I mean, if it was a
really
big-scale polluter.’

‘Maybe,’ Nina conceded.

There was a palpable ripple of discomfort at the way this line of conversation was running and they dropped it by unspoken mutual consent.

‘But he wouldn’t kill anyone else,’ said Nina.

‘Too right,’ said Joyce.

There was a pause in the conversation.

‘So who did he…I mean, who did he not…I mean, who did they say he killed?’

‘An oil guy from BM Dutch Petroleum,’ Jason said. ‘An official.’

‘He wouldn’t kill an oil official from BM Dutch Petroleum,’ said Joyce, wondering whether he would.

‘He wouldn’t,’ said Nina. ‘He wouldn’t kill a fly.’

‘Now that’s true. He definitely wouldn’t kill a fly,’ Joyce echoed. Most of the gang would far sooner kill a nasty polluting human than an innocent bug of any kind. ‘Where did it happen? I mean, where do they say it happened?’

‘On that plane? That special plane at Chek Lap Kok?’

‘Skyparc?’

‘Yeh.’

‘Skyparc. That’s
so
weird. I was supposed to go up there today. I had an appointment at…well, just about now, actually.’

‘You did? On Skyparc? Geez, you some swanky high-class lady dese days, Jojo.’

‘Yeah, I…’ Joyce stopped. Her mind raced. Of course! Now the pieces fell into place. That’s why her authorisation had suddenly been withdrawn. A man had been murdered on the plane, and a member of Pals of the Planet—her sort-of buddy Paul—had been accused of doing the dirty deed. The security people must have gone through their database and instantly barred access to everyone on the list who was registered as a member of the Pals. That’s why she’d been dropped suddenly by Robbie Manks’s contacts.

‘I was supposed to go and like feng shui it this morning—with my boss—but yesterday afternoon they suddenly said that I couldn’t go. I think it’s because I’m a member of the Pals of the Planet. I was
negatively vetted
,’ she said, knowing that such a phrase would impress this group. ‘I must have been.’

‘We’re all going to be negatively vetted,’ said Nina gloomily. ‘For the rest of our
lives
. Paul’s going to be done for murder and the Pals will be made illegal,’ she said, bursting into tears.

Over the next twenty minutes, all the details came out. The story was electrifying. Joyce realised that odd, quiet, obsessive
Paul, by becoming part of a major news report, had become part of history, at a stroke overtaking all the noisy, clever, ambitious kids in the class.

She listened in a daze, her mind running on multiple tracks at once. She felt she was part of the discussion but at the same time merely an observer, little more than an astral projection that happened to be in the room. The young woman could not escape the feeling that life was rolling too fast, too many things were happening in quick succession, there were too many problems to solve and too many paths to choose from.

Nina did most of the talking, with Jason nodding and Joyce listening silently, with her hand to her mouth, as they sat knee-to-knee around a Lilliputian table at Starbucks in the basement of Jardine House in the Hong Kong district originally called Victoria, but now known unimaginatively as Central.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Jason. ‘Our Paul, locked up for murder.’

Joyce felt they were becoming permanently bonded together by the horror story they were sharing. This is what life was, she semi-subconsciously decided: an endless series of conversations in which people tried to make sense of their lives by chopping them up into stories and trading them with each other: some funny, some sad, some shocking, some exciting, some endearing, some boring, some tragic. Moving, shared tales created strong bonds; shallow, trivial ones cooled relationships and caused them to drift apart. The power of a story was not related to how much drama or death there was in it, but in how involved the listener was. A nuclear bomb on the other side of the world could be ignored, but a firecracker at the next table could not.

And the fact that Paul was only a kid—twenty, maybe twenty-one—was also a factor. A man of forty being arrested
was not really news: such tales were just grey paragraphs in grey newspapers. But a young person being thrown into jail—that was different. You wanted to find out more. What happened? What led up to it? Who should be blamed? Was it the parents? Did he fall into bad company? Children were always seen as blank slates. Anything that turned them into news items, whether as victims or perpetrators, were stories that demanded to be pored over.

Then there was the money. Wealth was always a factor, whether or not it should be. Paul was a spoilt upper-middle-class brat who had gone to an international school: one couldn’t listen to a tale of someone like him coming to grief without an emotional reaction, whether it was ‘he deserved it’ or ‘I blame the parents’.

Joyce knew the beginning of the history Nina was relating: that the remaining members of Obcom 70s had decided to march alongside Friends of the Earth at a demonstration against pollution in Hong Kong, and had eventually dropped their focus on music and had become the local branch of Pals of the Planet. From pop music to environmental activism may seem a stretch, but they were sister subjects for politically correct teenage rebels at the time. The metamorphosis had been organic and natural. After their star performer’s dramatic failure on ‘Masterbrain’, the group had lost its focus, and the wave of concern about the mess that adults were making of the planet became their new uniting emotion. The skill they had developed in collecting, processing and distributing trivia was useful, and they sent out dozens of fact-packed press releases about the effects the deteriorating air quality was having on the health of residents.

Everything had run along predictable lines for the first year of the existence of Pals of the Planet Hong Kong, with
the group making local paper headlines with their campaigns against idling engines, wasteful air-conditioning and other crimes against humanity. But Paul had become increasingly secretive. He was the original chairman of the group, but after a visit to London had decided to hand the title to someone else. Nina had taken it. He had become a ‘special operative’ for head office instead, working on various international schemes, some of which he darkly hinted were ‘top secret’ and could not be shared.

‘For a while, we thought he may have become an Earth Agent,’ Jason said.

Joyce gave him a puzzled look.

‘Earth Agents—that’s a new extremist group that likes to shut down facilities.’

Nina added: ‘It’s an interesting group. They reckon that what’s happening is that there’s a war-to-the-death going on between Planet Earth and the human race, which is kind of true, if you think about it. Anyway, they reckon Planet Earth is in the right, and the human race is in the wrong, which is also true if you think about it. So they are a group of people who have “changed sides”, sort of thing. They’re on the side of Planet Earth and aim to destroy human projects that damage the environment.’

Joyce liked the sound of this.

‘Interesting idea,’ she mused.

‘Interesting, but not practical,’ Nina explained. ‘The first few operations they’ve done have been completely illegal and very dangerous to people on both sides. A security guard was badly injured at one of their break-ins at a power plant. And they even put out a statement saying that they considered themselves at war, and using phrases such as “collateral damage”. It all got a bit too nasty.’

‘So you reckon Paul became one of them?’

‘We worried about it. But I asked him directly, and he claimed he wasn’t. He said he was in special operations for Pals of the Planet.’

‘Do you believe him?’

Nina thought about this. ‘I do. I think I do. Paul’s not quite insane enough to be an Earth Agent. Almost, but not quite.’

Jason nodded his agreement.

Nina went on to explain that Paul had become interested in BM Dutch Petroleum’s new, supposedly ‘green’ fuel and had researched it obsessively for weeks. It was a complete scam, he had announced. This was hardly an original discovery. Every environmental group in the world, from Greenpeace to Friends of the Earth, had said the same thing. And even
National Geographic
, which could hardly be described as a group of wild-eyed activists, said it was ‘a scheme widely accepted as an attempt to fool the public’. And then, when Paul heard that the Skyparc plane was due to touch down in Hong Kong, he’d told the others that he was going to pay it a visit.

‘By that time, he almost seemed to be not part of the group any more,’ Nina explained. ‘He hardly came to the meetings, and we kind of resented the fact that he had all these other so-called projects going, which we didn’t really know anything about.’

Jason nodded. ‘Yeah. He seemed to have gone a bit extreme, over-the-top.’

Joyce blinked. If Jason, who was said to have anti-nuclear symbols tattooed on his buttocks, was describing someone as extreme, Paul must have been several kilometres beyond rational thought.

When the group had heard of Paul’s arrest the previous day, it all seemed to fit. Their former leader had tried something daring, getting on to the airside of the terminal at Chek Lap Kok, and then breaking into Skyparc itself. That was pretty
impressive. They would have expected him to adorn the plane with pro-environment banners or spray-paint his favourite slogan, ‘Combat hunger, eat the rich’, onto its fuselage. But when they learned that he was a murder suspect, it was clear that something had gone horribly wrong.