The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (17 page)

‘You stole those from him?’

‘Just borrow them. Noticed something. Always he carry two remote controls. But why? Only one garage door that needs remote control. Officially.’

‘So the other control opens something else . . . ?’

They walked briskly down the ramp from the roof level to the third floor. Joyce trotted quickly around to make sure there was absolutely no one around. Looking over the balcony, she noticed that the staff was having a meeting at ground level.

Wong placed himself at a distance of about six metres from Allie’s apartment and pressed both the remote controls. Nothing happened. Then he turned to his left, jabbing the button and waiting to see whether there was any reaction. When he pointed one of the remote controls to the extreme right, there was an audible click coming from some distance away.

This was followed by a gentle whirring noise. Wong and Joyce watched amazed as an entire section of wall lifted itself up and tucked itself into the ceiling cavity. There, in a secret room built beside Allie Ng’s apartment, was a vintage car.

‘That’s amazing,’ said Joyce, rushing up to the vehicle. ‘You’ve found it!’

She touched it to make sure it was real. Then she happily surveyed her reflection, which appeared upside down in the gleaming chromework. ‘CF, this is wonderful! Old Ben Nevis will be like
sooo
pleased.
And
we’ll get paid. Phew!’

Wong looked smugly happy with himself and strolled over to join her at a leisurely pace.

But then Joyce turned to him and her face fell. ‘Hang on a minute. Maybe we won’t. There’s a problem. This isn’t the 1910 Alfa Romeo 24.’

They raced down the stairs to look for Alyn Puk. Joyce was told by the entrance guard that the security chief had gone to the Ridley Park main security chamber. This was a small outhouse tucked behind a glade of dawn redwood trees in Nevis Au Yeung’s front garden, occupied by two uniformed guards and a bank of twenty-three video screens, two of which were focused on the car park entry-exit point.

The fat, unhappy guard was standing with Nevis and Foo-Foo, running through the security videotapes of the past three or four days. Although the room was air-conditioned, Puk had sweat stains running from his armpits to his waist.

Foo-Foo used her elegantly manicured index finger (with a purple-painted, jewel-encrusted false fingernail) to press the fast forward and rewind buttons, Puk scribbled down a record of the cars coming and going, and Nevis slumped in a corner, a mumbled trickle of Chinese curses flowing from his lips.

On the largest screen, a string of cars could be seen being driven in and out of the car park at fast-forward rates, but none of them was a royal blue Alfa Romeo.

Wong and McQuinnie joined the watchers as the stultifyingly boring video ran on and on. A grey car passed out of the building. A black car passed out. A white minivan drove in. Peter Curdy’s green replica car passed out. A brown van passed in. Suma Ng’s yellow hatchback passed in. Nevis Au Yeung’s sister’s dark purple Lexus passed in.

‘Try another tape,’ hollered Nevis.

The guard slammed another videotape into the machine and the same scenes began repeating themselves, but in a different order. A white car. A grey car. A burgundy car.

Joyce had never seen anything so boring in her life, but so conditioned was she to giving her attention to any active television screen that she found herself focusing on it. Three minutes later she was rewarded by a glimpse of Petey Curdy driving across the screen. She started singing: ‘Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang. Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang . . .’

Foo-Foo looked at her. ‘I remember that movie! Dick Van Dyke.’

‘Yeah,’ said Joyce. ‘Brilliant movie. My dad gave me the video when I was six.’

‘I saw it at the cinema. Of course, I was
very
young at the time.’

The two women sang together: ‘Oh, you, pretty Chitty Bang-Bang, Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, we love you . . .’

Nevis Au Yeung looked at Wong. ‘They are saying what?’

Wong looked blankly back at him, screwing up his lips and shaking his head as if to say: I know nothing.

‘— Hey!’ Joyce suddenly stopped singing, screwed up her face and moved closer to the screen. ‘That’s not Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’

Wong, as usual, had no idea what his assistant was talking about, or whether she was merely uttering nonsensical noises. But it seemed she had observed something.

‘What?’

She pointed to the screen. ‘Curdy’s changed his car. Look.’

‘Stop TV please,’ the
feng shui
master said to Foo-Foo.

She pressed the pause button and the picture froze, shivering slightly, and missing a section along the bottom.

Wong barked at his assistant. ‘What do you say, Joyce?’

The young woman pointed to the green car. ‘That’s not the car that the Curdys have been arriving in. That one had running boards.’

‘Running boards?’

Joyce pointed to the car on the screen video, to the space beneath the doors. ‘See here? There below the doors? He had a car with running boards under the doors before. That’s very important. That’s where the wings are hidden, you see.’

Nevis Au Yeung rose heavily to his feet and joined the small group clustered around the television. ‘What wings?’ he asked in a curiously high voice, forgetting to be angry.

‘The wings that make the car fly,’ Joyce explained, as if she was talking to an idiot.

The chairman’s wife nodded enthusiastically. ‘Right,’ said Foo-Foo. ‘I remember. Wings come out of the running boards when you go off a cliff and you can fly.’

‘This car can
fly
?’Au Yeung asked, incredulously.

‘Of course,’ said Joyce. ‘How else could they escape from the pirates?’

Nevis straightened up and looked even more aggrieved. ‘How come no one told me this car could fly?’

‘This car looks similar, and it’s the same colour, but it’s different. A bit, anyway.’ Joyce stabbed the play button and the car on the screen disappeared off screen.

‘Cute,’ she whispered to herself, as Petey’s face whisked past.

‘The car or the driver?’ said Foo-Foo with a laugh.

Joyce bit her lip, not realising she had spoken out loud.

‘Mr Au Yeung. You think you have one big problem in your garage: disappearing cars,’ Wong began. ‘But this is not true. Really you have two big problem in your garage.’

They were standing on the third floor of the car park. The evening sun was shining low in the sky at an angle where it slanted into the building. Everyone was squinting.

The
feng shui
master waved his hand at the diminished row of collectable cars and the empty climate-controlled workshop, its shutter open like a shocked mouth. ‘You think thief using black magic was disappearing your cars. Between nine o’clock morning and eleven o’clock morning, the cars vanish. But no cars leave the building at that time. So where do they go?’

Wong picked up the remote control. ‘Answer is nowhere. They do not leave the building.’

He pointed the remote control at the wall of Allie Ng’s flat and put his thumb on the button that triggered the infra-red beam. ‘Allie Ng is cousin-brother of Harris Wu, the architect who built this building. Ng and Wu is the same word in Chinese. Different dialect. Same character. Same name. Harris Wu built two automatic doors, not one. First is for workshop. Second is secret door built on side of Allie’s apartment.’

The wall began to rise, tucking itself in to the ceiling revealing the 132 Bugatti secreted there.

There was a gasp from the assembled watchers.

‘First, your Jaguar XK160 disappears. But was not taken out of garage. Just stored here. Everybody looks for clues at exit doors, can find none. Because car has not gone out of exit.’

He turned to stare at the suddenly terrified Allie Ng, who looked wide-awake for the first time. Harris Wu tugged uncomfortably at his shirt collar, his eyes turning to stare at Wong.

‘Car stays in secret compartment for a while. Maybe one day, maybe few days, I don’t know. But when Ng is on night shift and no one else is here, in the middle of the night, video is switched off and car is quietly driven away.’

Allie Ng started to walk backwards but Puk, who had already hung up his uniform, grabbed him firmly by the arm.

Nevis Au Yeung spoke in his deep, rumbly voice: ‘I don’t understand. Where did that secret wall come from?’

Wong said: ‘Architect who built building built it. Who else? Few days after, 1930 Aston Martin taken, same system. Stored for few days, then taken away when everything quiet. A week ago, 132 Bugatti taken. But still here. Not taken out yet. Hidden in apartment space.’

Harris Wu fell in a slump to the grimy floor and put his hands over his face, a picture of misery.

‘That’s amazing,’ said Au Yeung. ‘And my Alfa? Is that hidden here somewhere else?’ The short, fat tycoon snatched the remote control out of Wong’s hand and clicked it at all the walls he could find. ‘Here maybe? Or here? Or here? Give me a clue, Wong, where is it?’

The
feng shui
man said nothing, and the businessman’s attempts to use the device to make other walls tilt upwards produced no movement.

‘Alfa is different problem,’ said Wong. ‘Not hidden behind walls.’

Joyce piped up, grinning. ‘We didn’t solve that one through
feng shui
methods,’ she said. ‘Actually it was something I noticed that helped us find out what happened to that.’

The
feng shui
master continued: ‘Alfa was not stolen today. It was stolen two days before.’

Nevis and Foo-Foo gasped.

‘But how?’ Puk asked. ‘It was here this morning. I saw it myself. We checked on it every morning and every night, me and —’

‘Will explain,’ said Wong. ‘The two Mr Curdys came every day for past two weeks. They arrive in their own replica classic car. Spend all day working in sealed garage on Mr Nevis Au Yeung’s Alfa. But they are not really servicing it. They are removing pieces. They take out engine cover from Alfa, put it on their car. Next day they take out mudguards, swap with their car. They do it very carefully, so no one notice. In small-small steps, they swap most dis- dis- dis . . .’

‘Distinctive?’ suggested Joyce.

‘Thank you. Distinctive bits of Alfa. They put distinctive bits of Alfa on to their car. Two days ago, they leave their car here and drive off in Alfa. Car in workshop still looks a bit like Alfa.’

Dick Curdy spluttered, in a
faux
upper-crust British accent: ‘I say, steady on.’

Puk was baffled. ‘But how? I don’t get it.’

Wong turned to the security guard. ‘When you look through yellow-tint security window every morning, you see old car. You think is Alfa. But really is their car with a few Alfa pieces on it. They gamble that you don’t notice any difference between one old car, another old car. Looks almost the same. They think you and Mr Au Yeung too stupid to notice difference.’

The tycoon growled: ‘So they’ve taken my car away and left me with theirs?’

‘No. This afternoon, they drove off in their car. So there is nothing left in the workshop—nothing at all.’

The tycoon nodded, the truth slowly dawning on him. ‘They drove off with my car and their car, the car your girl refers to as a Chitty. The flying car.’

‘Yeah,’ said Joyce. ‘That’s just my nickname for it. ’Cause it looks like the car in the video? Caractacus Potts’?’

Dick and Petey started to walk away.

‘Stop them,’ Nevis Au Yeung said.

Curdy turned to Wong. ‘You can’t prove any of this in court.’

‘I don’t need to prove anything in court. I am my own court of law,’ said Nevis.

The four large men who always hovered near the tycoon moved swiftly to grab hold of the Curdy brothers.