The Feng Shui Detective Read online

  He looked around at his fellow diners, who had both stopped eating, spoons halfway to their mouths.

  ‘The simple way to do that is to be in charge of the body after the murder,’ the geomancer continued. ‘So Henry Wanedi moved to a place where he and his wife were completely not known. He opened a yin house. It meant he would get no visitors from people in the village. No one wants to visit a yin house household. You know how superstitious people are in Malaysia. So the Wanedis lived completely by themselves.

  ‘In his job, as a dead bodies person, he had lots of powders, things, strange yeuk to try out on the poor woman. She was an heiress—remember, Leong told us that? She became ill of course, with the bad medicine he gives her. He pretends to be ill also. When he is asked to do any real dead bodies he does them. It is good practice for the murder he is about to do. Finally, he kills her. He swaps clothes with her. He use her big bucks to buy this house. Now it is his. He is now in the funeral business. He can do everything with the body himself. No one will have any chance of finding out his crime. In this case, murder will not come out, so he thinks.’

  Sagwala pulled at the tips of his black moustache, like a Victorian villain. ‘Clever, C F, very smart. But what gave her, I mean him, away?’

  The geomancer wiped his mouth with a napkin. The hawker food was not bad, but he was eating sparingly, knowing that a banquet would be provided at the Sagwala household that night. ‘There were a number of things. I trod on an earring when I was reading the house. It had a pin and was an earring for ears with holes.’

  ‘Pierced ears,’ supplied Joyce.

  ‘Yes. Yet the earring of the Mrs Wanedi we met was not the same. It fell off in the restaurant. Do you remember, Joyce? What sort of earrings slide off your ears? Clip-on earrings. Designed for people who are not having pierced ears. So I thought the earrings in the house did not belong to the person sitting with us in the restaurant. It was easy to take the next two steps to check what I thought. I look at the earlobes of the person who says she is Mrs Wanedi. And I look at the person in the box. The live one has no holes in her ears. The dead one does.

  ‘She went to the toilet in the restaurant with us. She went the wrong way. She went to the men’s toilet. Then she came back. You showed her where the women’s toilet was. But she said earlier that she and Mr Wanedi had already been to the restaurant. She should know where the ladies’ room was. It was a small but interesting mistake. Once I began to think maybe she was a man I just watch. I see how she moves. How she sits. How she walks. Definitely a man. Also, there was the bathroom in the house itself. No one who had been a woman for fifty years could make such a mess in the bathroom. Even if she had lost her domestic servant. It was a male bathroom, as Joyce said.’

  ‘Of course. The seat was up—the toilet seat,’ the young woman exclaimed.

  ‘Yes. Even when he was disguised as a woman, he still did his pee-pee standing up. He forgot to put the seat down afterwards. Some habits you don’t think about. So you cannot fix them. “The trappings of a man’s life are his life,” said the sage Lu. He may try to leave them behind. But they will follow.’

  ‘And the room with the bad energy . . .’ said Joyce.

  ‘The cutting ch’i.’

  ‘Yeah. It was a woman’s room, all flowers and stuff,’ said the young woman. ‘It was the real Mrs Wanedi who had a bad time with the illness, not Henry. Like, wow. He killed her and then switched clothes. That is so totally, utterly evil.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘She, I mean he, was a good actress. I mean, all that crying and stuff. It isn’t easy to produce real tears when you’re not really sad. I know, I’ve tried a few times.’

  ‘It is if you have help,’ said Wong. ‘Did you notice she always put the handkerchief to her eyes just before she cried. Not after? A little laat jeiu jau— what is it in English?’

  ‘Fresh chilli oil,’ said Sagwala.

  ‘Yes, fresh chilli oil in the handkerchief would make your eyes red and crying and make your nose pouring.’

  ‘Running,’ said Joyce. ‘Your nose runs. Not pours. Well I suppose it could pour . . .’

  Sagwala leaned forwards. ‘What a long, slow, cruel, calculated crime, C F. The man must have been really very, very strong-willed to restructure both their lives in this way, over a period of what? A year or so? Purely for the purpose of getting rid of his own beloved wife and stealing her money.’

  Wong nodded. ‘Anyone who can have a red-colour study . . . they can do any evil, I think.’

  Joyce’s eyes suddenly widened. ‘Yeuccch. Now I know why she, I mean he, kept leaning on me. On my left boob mainly.’

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ said Wong. ‘Maybe he was not by himself. I don’t know but I think maybe he had what is called a partner in crime. Ms Tong the cook was with them before they came to here. She stayed in the house all the time. She was the only person with them. I think maybe she plans to meet Henry Wanedi. Maybe she will help him spend the cash from the sale of the house.’

  ‘The niece from overseas,’ said Joyce. ‘Ms Tong could have been his secret lover, and would return today and tell us she is the niece from overseas.’

  ‘Maybe so. Or maybe some other accomplice,’ the geomancer said. ‘There is a female involved, I think. She is coming. This is why I say we must stay here and eat. The niece is coming at lunch time today, remember? That’s why I ask driver to bring enough food for four, her also.’ Wong lowered his spoon and wiped his mouth.

  For several minutes, there was no sound except that of Chief Inspector Sagwala tucking his fourth plateful into his cavernous mouth.

  Then the doorbell rang. The police officer rose reluctantly to his feet, aware that duty was again calling. ‘That’ll be her now. You coming with me?’

  But C F Wong had slipped away to another table and was busy scribbling in his journal.

  Printing errors

  In the twenty-ninth century BC there was a man named Fu Hsi. He had great skill in designing things. But not palaces. He liked to design gardens and rivers.

  There was a big flood. The River Lo overflowed. Fu Hsi spent many days walking on the hills around the palace. He drew maps showing where dykes should be built. When the flood came back, the palace was safe. Fu Hsi became very famous.

  One day, he was sitting on the banks of the River Lo. He started watching the turtles which swam there. His eyes fell on the patterns on the shells of the turtles. One of them had a shell which had a section in the middle at the top and eight sections around it. Fu Hsi noticed something. The dots in the east, middle and west segments added up to fifteen. When he added the marks north, middle and south, they were also fifteen. Southwest, middle and northeast too added up to fifteen. Northwest, middle and southeast were also fifteen in total.

  This became known as the nine-piece magic square. Blade of Grass, the main thing was that Fu Hsi learned that there could be order in things. Order that you cannot see but is very magical.

  He had knowledge of architecture and knowledge of hidden magic. Fu Hsi became the founder of feng shui.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’,

  by C F Wong, part 81.

  His hand stopped, mid-flourish, and he looked at his watch. Oh, already 9.15. Time to go. He would have to do some more writing later. C F Wong slipped his journal into his desk and slid his chair back, the sudden scraping like a roar in the quiet room where his office administrator was sinking back into sleep. The noise caused Winnie Lim’s head to bob up. ‘I will come back before lunch. Maybe twelve o’clock,’ he told her.

  Joyce McQuinnie, who was in the middle of a lengthy, murmured personal call on the phone, told her listener to hang on. She spoke to her boss over her feet, which were on her desk encased in a pair of pointed cowboy boots, purchased, oddly, as a souvenir of Melaka. ‘Where’re you going? Am I coming?’

  ‘This is your decision. I am going to Hong Siu Publishing Company in Orchard Road.’

  ‘Oh. Was that the assignment you said abo
ut last week, and I’m like, “Yawn-yawn, that’s as dull as a dead dodo’s doodoos”? Like an office in an office block?’ She spoke with the voice of a yawn.

  ‘No. No one is dead there. But, yes, it is an office in an office block.’ He picked up his bag.

  ‘I think I’ll just stay and write up my notes from last week. I’ve got so much to do today I don’t think I can spare like, a minute even.’ She put her feet back on the desk and resumed her somnolent conversation, which seemed to consist mainly of making humming noises.

  ‘Okay. Winnie, if there are any important calls, please call me at Update. I will definitely be back before one.’ The office administrator did not reply, being now engrossed in adding green glitter to the gold paint on her nails.

  ‘Update?’ This was Joyce, interrupting herself again.

  ‘Update is the name of the magazine Hong Siu makes.’

  ‘Becky, gotta go. Catch ya.’ Joyce abruptly threw the handset into its cradle, jumped to attention and started sweeping items into her shoulder sack. With a canine yelp of extraordinary volume, she extracted the paper cup of coffee she had swept into the bag, and cleaned out the frothy mess with a paper tissue. ‘Yuk. Hang on two ticks. Just getting my bits. I’m coming with you.’

  Ten minutes later they were both slumped silently in a taxi, which was locked in a log-jam of cars gently drifting northwards along New Bridge Street. The young woman’s interest surprised Wong. The previous Friday he had explained that the present assignment was very much the standard corporate feng shui reader’s task: to go to an office where business had been poor, and arrange for changes to ensure better fortune. The building was a relatively new skyscraper in Orchard Road, and the job was scheduled for two mornings. Joyce had said that it sounded dull.

  He admitted to himself that it would not be a challenging task. He recalled having done a similar job in the very same building, maybe two years ago. It was an almond-shaped tower on a rectangular podium, and belonged to the Four West Houses, being of the Chien Kua, with its back facing northwest and its element being metal. The office suites within radiated outwards like a wheel, and he was hoping that the one he was about to visit would be northwest or northeast of the centre, the more prosperous directions for such a house. But given the business problems, he knew it was more likely that it would face south or southeast.

  Still, there was much that could be done even in the worst cases. He thought with pleasure of instances where he made simple changes to the placement of elements within an office suite and caused a dramatic change in the way the ch’i energy flowed. Once he had dealt with an executive, born under an earth sign, who had encased herself entirely in a wood-panelled office, which of course destroyed her natural soil energy. The geomancer’s first move had been to add a red carpet under her chair, to provide a supportive and protective layer of fire ch’i. He then moved her desk to the northwest corner of the room, facing southeast, to build up the woman’s ability to command respect. Other changes made outside her office caused the energy to flow smoothly through the premises, pooling slightly around her desk. During a follow-up visit the following week, he found that the general improvement to the office environment would have been detectable by anyone with any sensitivity.

  Wong, like many feng shui masters, knew the lore of several of the more serious schools of the arcane art, and had no scruples about mixing elements of the Flying Star method with those of the Eight Directions or Three Yuan method, if the result was a workable solution to a difficult problem.

  Yawning in the taxi, Joyce explained her change of heart. He had not previously mentioned that the publishing house was the office of Update, a small but lively twice-a-week tabloid newspaper of which her flatmate Emma, a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines, was an enthusiastic reader. Update had started as a weekly, two years ago, but now appeared on Tuesdays and Fridays. Joyce, although she had spent less than a month in the city-state, had quickly got into the habit of reading it—particularly enjoying a four-page section called Yoot at the back of the magazine, featuring music and celebrities.

  She said she was especially keen on one reviewer, who signed himself B K. ‘He reckons the Mooneaters are really cool, while most people are like, ‘Moon-Who?’ B K also loves That Guy’s Belly, have you heard them?’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘That Guy’s Belly.’

  ‘Whose belly?’

  ‘No, I guess not. But, like, it’s good to see that there’s someone in this part of the world who appreciates music with a bit of like, class, you know? I mean, it’s not all good. There’s this columnist called Phoebe Poon who is just awful, always trying to be clever-clever, you know, whatever, while really she’s just the pits. She really sucks.’

  ‘Sucks what?’ asked Wong, instantly regretting the question.

  ‘Not sucks anything. Just sucks.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he lied.

  Talking to Joyce was always exhausting. He knew that some adult men were attracted to young women, but had they ever tried talking to them? They were so completely separate a species that he could not see how any form of human relationship could be possible. One could communicate better with a dog.

  The geomancer looked out of the window and marvelled for the thousandth time at Singapore’s skyline. He still missed the easy predictability of life in calm, rural Guangdong, but he had to admit, there was something enjoyably energising about this electric city, with its towering glass and steel monoliths, which the tropical morning sun was even now turning into million-watt fluorescent lights. And the people, uniform in their white shirts and black briefcases, appeared to be electrified as well, so busy getting things done that their whole lives disappeared in a blur of inconsequential activity. So often he found himself trying to fix the office of some harassed executive with his lo pan, when he longed to tell the man that the best thing would be to flee the office and spend a month squatting on a rotting jetty in Guangzhou watching slow ferryboats ply the Pearl River.

  ‘You know people in Singapore. I think the people in Update they will be very busy. Perhaps we should not talk to the staff too much. Just do our work quietly.’

  ‘No prob, gotcha,’ murmured Joyce, who had suddenly become sleepy again.

  ‘The job, it should not be hard.’

  ‘Neat.’

  ‘No, publishing places are often very messy. But I think this will not be difficult. I did a similar office in the same building two years ago. Brighter Corp. The offices, when you move in, are very badly designed for feng shui. But I could see what had to be done. It was easy to redesign the office so that the problem went away completely. Brighter Corp did very well after that, and moved to a much bigger office six months ago. I did that one too.’

  He smiled at the memory. There was nothing wrong with boasting a bit if you are an old man just telling the truth to a young person who would benefit from hearing it. For a fleeting second Wong felt correctly positioned in life, as if the spheres and the stars had momentarily swung into the right positions. Little irritations aside, life was good. A friendly sun glinted from the window of the taxi opposite. A DJ’s babble trickled, uncomprehended, into his ears from a panel in the door at his elbow. The driver was nodding at the wheel. A tree waved in the slight breeze. Wong looked at Joyce and found, for the first time, an absence of hostility in his own gaze toward her, although he sensed no warmth in it.

  Eight minutes later, the taxi broke free from the slow train of morning traffic on the main road and turned in to the dropping-off point of a grand but rather character-less skyscraper. Wong saw, through the glass doors, the familiar pink-brown floor of polished granite, and dark marble walls, a combination that was now more or less uniform for lobbies of Singapore office blocks.

  Heading from the car to the building was like running from a fridge through a sauna to another fridge.

  When they were in the fashionably dark mirror-walled lift, the geomancer looked at the address card in his hand, and noticed somethin
g which gave him a start. ‘Oh. Hong Siu Publishing is on the same floor that Brighter Corp was on. I wonder if—’

  But his question went unasked as the elevator arrived on the twelfth floor and the door opened. To the left of the elevator bank, they saw the glass doors of Hong Siu Publishing, and he received his answer. The company to which they were heading was housed in the old offices of Brighter Corp.

  Somewhat taken aback, he rang the bell, and a smiling, helmet-haired receptionist buzzed the door open, and led them to the editor-publisher, Alberto Tin, a chubby man of about thirty, who clamped one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone handset to which he was listening, and whispered: ‘Wait a minute. I’ll come, quick. Sit, sit.’

  Joyce retreated to the black leather sofa behind them, but the geomancer remained standing and peered into the main premises to the left of the publisher’s office. With difficulty, his sleepy assistant pushed herself off the marshmallow-soft seat and joined him. The space had been divided into a main work room and a series of smaller offices on either side. There were desks piled with paper, each with an individual computer, apparently where the writers and editors worked; another part featured desks in clusters, carrying large monitor screens and surrounded by computer equipment, which presumably housed the design and production staff.

  The staff, mainly young people in casual clothes, seemed caught up with what they were doing on their screens, and didn’t look up when the newcomers stepped into the room. The air-conditioning was set very high, and strip-lighting gave the room a blue-white glow. The stop-start, clickity-clack of computer keyboards formed a low undercurrent of sound.