Mr Wong Goes West (19 page)

‘Yes, I guess so. Listen: the windows are big on this plane. Could someone get in or out through the windows?’

The engineer shook her head. ‘The windows don’t open. But you’re right—the windows are unusual on this aircraft.’

‘I’ve never seen rectangular windows on a plane before.’

‘That’s true. All others have oval ones—every type of plane, every brand, every country.’

‘Why is that?’

‘It’s to do with metal fatigue. One of the first commercial passenger planes of any size was the de Havilland Comet in the 1950s, and it had rectangular windows. But the fuselage kept cracking and depressurising. To find out why, they sank one into a swimming pool. They found out that the corners of the windows became stressed—the constant pressurising and depressurising of the plane caused cracks at the corners of the windows.’

‘That doesn’t happen with round windows?’

‘Correct. You know how hard it can be to rip open a plastic bag, like a bag of chips?’

‘Yeah?’

‘But if the manufacturer puts a tiny nick into the plastic bag, it’s much easier to tear open?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The same principle works with aircraft windows. The right-angled corners of square or rectangular windows are like the nick in a plastic bag—the metal tears much more easily there than anywhere else.’

‘I see. Round windows are like a plastic bag with no nick. You can’t tear them.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So how come Skyparc’s got rectangular windows? Are they dangerous?’

‘They would be, except they’re reinforced at the corners. The special windows add a bit of weight, but given the scale of the A380 airframe, it’s negligible. It’s really just a matter of taking advantage of modern design capabilities.’

‘Going back to my question: could anyone get in or out through a window? If they took the window right out, for example?’

Poon shook her head. ‘No. None of the windows have been removed. They’re embedded. It would be a big job to take one out and replace it. We just did some very minor work on tightening the rivets. That’s all.’

Joyce was disappointed. She’d hoped to be able to suggest that the ‘real’ killer entered and exited the plane through a window. ‘Tell me again, who actually saw the shooting?’

‘Danny Tang—he’s over there, doing some paperwork.’

Joyce thanked Ms Poon and approached a young man in blue overalls, who seemed to be in his mid-twenties. ‘Er…hello, Mr Tang? I’m investigating the shooting on Wednesday. Can I ask you a few questions?’

He looked up and spoke in a slow drawl. ‘Same ones the police asked, I guess?’

‘Probably. Can you tell us in your own words what happened?’

‘Yep. That’s the first question they asked. Well, it was like this. Ms Poon and I were working on the window mountings just in front of the wing.’

‘Ms Poon and you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She said she didn’t see anything—that only you were at the window.’

‘Yeah, well, she was around. But she went to work on the wheel mountings. I guess you’re right. I was the only one who really saw what happened.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, it was like this. I was standing on the platform checking the window mounting. Most of them were fine, but there were a couple which could have been tighter, which we…which I did some work on.’

He paused and half-closed his eyes, as if trying to recreate the scene in his mind. He spoke slowly and carefully, pausing at intervals to chew the gum he was holding in his cheek.

‘Let me see, I had just lowered the screw gun when I heard some shouting. I look up through the window and see some people moving inside the plane—two guys. The shutter is three-quarters down, so I couldn’t see much. I didn’t want to stare—just wanted to get on with the job. But then there’s a shot. That grabs my attention. I put my whole face to the window.’

‘Yeah? And what did you see?’

‘I saw the dead guy—well, he wasn’t dead then, he had just sort of fallen backwards, against the wall. He had obviously just been shot. He was like falling slowly down the wall, you know? Then there was another guy, a young guy. He had a gun. He shot three more times. One hit the falling guy in the shoulder as he fell and the other two went into the wall of the plane. Luckily they were soft-tipped shells and the plane walls in that room are reinforced mahogany panelling. So they exploded on impact, messed up the panelling, but didn’t do material damage to the plane itself. They didn’t, like go through the plane walls. Sorry to sound callous but we are trained to worry about the fabric of the plane—that’s kind of our focus, if you know what I mean.’

‘But did you get a good look at the young man? Did you see his face?’

‘I did a bit—just for a couple of seconds. He was a white guy, early twenties, high forehead, biggish nose, wore green socks. Dark brown hair, a bit streaky. Bit of acne on his cheeks, baggy eyes.’

‘Thanks,’ said Joyce, trying to smile, but with a sinking heart. Paul’s own mother would not have been able to have given a better description.

The next person she interviewed was the Skyparc chief of security, an Australian named Ryan Drexler, who she found in a room full of monitors on level two of the hangar.

‘This is state of the art security,’ Drexler boasted, showing a mouth full of Hollywood-white teeth. ‘As well as the cameras in the hangar, we have cameras on the plane itself, including one on the only entrances to the lower and upper aisles. They’re constantly running. But that’s common enough. Our really fancy extra on this particular plane is this. We call it the electric net.’ He tapped fiercely on a keyboard and brought onto the screen an outline of the aircraft from above. It was crisscrossed with a fine network of green lines.

‘There are circuits built right through the shell of the aircraft which detect moving heat sources—in other words, people. But they would also work if, say, a dog or rat or some other animal got loose in the hold or elsewhere on the plane. Any unwanted presence on an aircraft, human or otherwise, is simply not tolerable these days.’

He tapped the keyboard again, looking through a list of records. ‘Now I’m going back to the precise time of the murder. Here we are.’

After a few seconds, a diagram of the main body of the aircraft appeared on the screen, and there was a glowing area close to the back.

‘See that? That shows there was one human being, or animal of a similar size, on the plane at that time. We happen to know that that was Mr Seferis.’

He clicked over to another screen.

‘These sensors take a snap of the plane every few minutes—we can choose the interval. Now we have the next picture. You see how the glow has spread and seems to have two centres?’

‘Two people on board.’

‘Right, kid. The murderer has come on board at this time and is in the room with the victim.’

‘Could he have been upstairs, or below in the luggage department? At a different level?’

‘In theory, yes. The sensors are not three-dimensional but send a beam from the ceiling of the plane straight to the lower floor. They could have been on different floors. But I think it is more likely that they were on the same floor, in the same room—given that the technicians saw them through the window, it seems beyond doubt that that was what happened.’

Joyce nodded. Things looked very bad for Paul.

‘And then we also have the video tapes, showing the perpetrator—’

‘The suspect.’

‘Hmm?’

‘He’s innocent until proven guilty, so he’s just a suspect at the moment, not a perpetrator.’

‘Whatever. Let’s just call him the bad guy, shall we? The intruder, if you like. Anyway, here he is.’ Drexler pressed a button and a security tape played. It clearly showed Paul getting into the aircraft and going up the stairs to the upper deck.

‘Green socks,’ the security chief said. ‘Makes him easy to identify. Where does he buy them from, I wonder? Not the sort of thing you see around the place commonly. Stupid thing for
an intruder to wear. We could probably have tracked him down through his socks—had we needed to.’

‘He’s going up the stairs,’ said Joyce. ‘But the crime was committed on the lower deck, right?’

‘That’s true. He must have sneaked down at some point to the lower deck. There are other cameras on the plane, but none of them caught him doing that. There was no camera on the backstairs. Still, you can’t escape the timing. Look at this.’

He pressed another button and the digital clock on the tape became more prominent. ‘The assailant, er, the suspect, got on the plane at eleven thirty-six and fourteen seconds. The murder was committed at about eleven forty-five, according to the people who heard the shots. At eleven forty-eight and nineteen seconds, we have this scene.’

He clicked with a mouse and the shot changed to Paul, looking worried, coming down the stairs.

‘So he went back upstairs before leaving?’

‘Yes. Must have used the backstairs again. Clearly he wanted to do more than kill Seferis. He wanted to take something from the aircraft—steal some important papers or something, obviously. But it looks like he couldn’t find them. See how he’s leaving empty-handed?’

‘Could it be possible that he went straight upstairs, spent the whole time there, and left after hearing the shots?’

‘It would be possible, except for two things. First, somebody shot Dmitri Seferis, and this guy was the only other person on the plane. Second, the engineering staff actually saw him sneak downstairs and shoot the bugger. I understand they got a good view of the whole thing.’

‘Joyce? Joyce?’ Someone was calling her name. She looked around to see Nicola Teo waving from the doorway. ‘Time’s up, I’m afraid, Ms McQuinnie. Time to get on board.’

‘I’ll be flying to London with you,’ Drexler said. ‘I’m also in charge of on-board security. So you can ask me more questions if you like, when we’re in the air.’

From the moment she entered the world’s most expensive aircraft, Joyce had had enormous trouble stopping herself squealing with excitement at the extravagance of it all. To her, it was a spectacular flying nightclub, with every room having a different theme. The planet’s most daring designers had been given free hands and almost unlimited budgets on each section; as a result, the on-board lounges (they didn’t use the word ‘cabins’) were a wonderland of colours and experiences. There were also several shops and even a swimwear boutique at the back of the lower deck—which was known as The Promenade. The upper deck was officially called The Penthouse.

An hour after takeoff, they were enjoying their first meal in the air. J Oscar Jackson Jnr had been right: it was first class all the way. The private envoy sat with Wong and McQuinnie around a table in Food Street on the lower deck of Skyparc.

Forcing his eyes away from the menu’s foie gras and beef Wellington, Jackson had ordered a steamed chicken breast and Caesar salad. But his gaze kept drifting to the meals that the others had ordered. Joyce wanted burger and chips and ended up with a ground Kobe beef patty topped with avocado served in garlic naan with a side order of herb-crusted pommes frites. Wong had asked for plain
cha siu faan
—barbecued pork with rice—and ended up with a tray of Chinese items in almost nouvelle cuisine style. The feng shui master had peered
suspiciously at the unfamiliar presentation when it arrived, but seemed happy enough to eat it.

Joyce, ravenous, was speaking with her mouth full. ‘How come yesterday I was not even allowed to go near the hangar because of the negative vetting stuff, and today I am fine to actually fly right on this aircraft with all these swanky people?’ she asked Jackson. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

‘Uh…as I said, my people are a little higher up the ladder than Mr Manks’s people,’ Jackson said, slipping a forbidden crouton into his mouth and letting it melt slowly in his left cheek. ‘When something horrible happens, we go to security code red. Nobody gets in unless they are essential personnel. Anybody who’s not like a blood relative of the Queen gets instantly banned. But after a couple of days, things start to get more reasonable. They let us pull rank, they let us make a list of exceptions, they let us pull strings.’

‘Does that mean I can now go and see the crime scene? Cheese, this burger is like
totally
amazing.’

‘No. They’re keeping that room strictly off limits. Besides, Mr Wong saw it yesterday. It would be hard to argue that you need to see it as well, given your youth, et cetera. You can see it on screen, though. There’s a camera in the room.’

‘There is? So did they film the murder?’

‘Sadly not. That would have made things simpler for everyone.’

‘How do I get to see the room through the security camera?’

‘Go and ask Drexler, the security guy. He has all that stuff. He also has pictures taken straight after the murder. He might even print them out for you.’

Joyce took another enormous bite of her burger and spat bits of ground beef at him as she spoke: ‘Are you going to tell us
about who you really are and who sent you and what you think happened on Wednesday and why you think Paul is innocent, and so on and so on?’

Jackson finally squeezed the crouton with his tongue and felt it dissolve deliciously in his mouth. ‘In good time. I need to eat just now. Not that this is going to take me very long.’