by Unknown
There was no time to ponder such issues, and the presence of his impatient young assistant drove him to set to work, to do a reading of the house and grounds. The next few hours were spent drawing charts, taking compass readings, notes, measurements and photographs, watching the sun, studying the shadows, calculating the squares, and moving slowly from room to room.
Wong was not sure whether the householders had always been eccentric or whether the events of the recent past had unhinged Mrs Wanedi, because there were many signs of clutter and ill-organisation. In the corridor, he stepped on a sharp pin which painfully pierced the slippers he always carried to walk around other people’s homes. It turned out to be an earring. In the kitchen they found everything in disarray, with perishable food on the table and tinned meats in the cool box. The kettle which had produced their undrinkable tea was still boiling away in one corner, almost dry.
In the back bedroom, they found a used condom behind some furniture. The second door of this room led to a corridor which communicated directly with the passage leading to the kitchen. The finding suggested a reason why Ms Tong the cook might have been so noisy. ‘She was banging away with more than pots and pans,’ quipped Joyce, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the condom. Next to the kitchen the washroom was in an untidy state, with cosmetics and damp towels on the floor. ‘A guy’s been in here,’ said Joyce, lowering the toilet seat, and Wong had to agree. Clearly a male in the area—a servant or a neighbour—had recently visited the house. That Mr Gangan, perhaps?
In a room with a floral curtain, they found a pretty four-poster bed. ‘This is nice,’ said Joyce and then noticed that Wong was grimacing.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘This is where Henry Wanedi was, and where he died,’ the geomancer said. ‘The southwest corner of a Hum Kua House is the location of the force of death. Often you have bad health if you sleep in such a spot. And look, look here.’ He pointed to a jutting edge made by an extension that had been built on to the west of the house. ‘It points straight to the bed. Makes cutting ch’i right on the person in the bed. Very bad.’
‘Like, this would have made him ill?’
‘It would have made it hard to get better. And the ceiling. It slopes down here. Squashes the ch’i. Squash-squash. Very bad.’
Even without a technical knowledge of feng shui, Joyce evidently found the house oppressive, because she soon tired of her tour and went out for a breath of air in the garden.
It was late in the afternoon when Wong stepped into a room on the west of the house and found himself in a study which appeared to have been converted into a laboratory. The walls were scarlet. Bottles of chemicals filled shelves, and there were tins of powders and other technical equipment that he did not recognise. There were some large boxes on one side of the room, and some trestle tables in the centre. He assumed that this was a room where the corpses would be worked on—he never really knew what morticians did to bodies. He supposed they would beautify them, put powder on their faces and dress them, rather as a department store window dresser would clothe a mannequin. The walls were lined with an old-fashioned scarlet flock wallpaper, which introduced fire ch’i into a Li room, causing a disturbing, destructive clash between fire and metal energies.
‘Have you met my husband?’
Wong turned suddenly to see Mrs Wanedi looking at him from a door on the far side of the room. Her silent arrival had taken him by surprise, but he tried to smile and look composed. ‘I hope I do not disturb you,’ he said.
‘Not at all. This is where the dead bodies were handled, so you being a feng shui man, it stands to reason that this is the room which you will have to check out most carefully. It used to be the study. Have you met my husband?’
She was looking at a large box on one side of the room and he noticed that it was open-topped. He peered in to see a dead body in the shadows. It gave him an involuntary shiver, which he hoped did not show. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I did not know this was the room in which the dearly departed is staying.’
‘Oh, I should have put him in the living room for a proper wake, if we knew anyone here, but we don’t. All our people are dead or emigrated, except for my niece from overseas. There wasn’t any point in laying him out for wiewing. After all, who is there to wiew him? So my own dear Henry is here, where I can work on him.’
He was listening for a hint of madness in her voice, but found none. She spoke calmly, and with a clearly detectable vein of affection.
‘Henry loved his work, and although we did not do much business here, he enjoyed setting up this room. We did a couple of funerals for people nearby, before he became ill. It seems fitting that Henry himself should be dealt with in the facilities he set up.’
‘Are you going to, er . . . ?’
‘Am I handling it myself? Yes of course. I was always his assistant. We had a young man working for us when we first came. Sam Ram something, we brought him from K L, like Ms Tong. But when it became clear that business was going to be slow, he left to do something more exciting or interesting. I assume he went to Singapore. But Henry said that I could be the assistant. I’ve been his unofficial assistant many, many times.’
She moved over to the box and gazed down with loving eyes at the shadowy corpse inside. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone else do you, darling Henry,’ she said.
Wong felt he should have guessed that the corpse was in the room: it was air-conditioned to a temperature noticeably colder than any other room in the house. ‘I will go?’ Wong asked, and started to move towards the door.
‘No. You don’t have to go. Let me ask you a favour. Saya hendak ke . . . I need to go down to the shop to get some things, and I am scared of driving. Can you lend me your driver?’
‘Yes, of course. It is time we go too. Joyce and me will take you where you want to go. I just call my driver. We come back tomorrow, is it okay?’
‘Yes, of course. Come any time after eight. My niece will be here to take me away at lunch time. And she’s arranged for someone to take my dear Henry. I hope you can be finished by then. If not, I am leaving the keys with the property agent. The removal wan will come for the furniture probably the next day.’
‘Yes, madam,’ said Wong.
A twilight breeze caused the palm trees to wave slowly at the car, as the geomancer, his assistant and their new friend rolled down the peaceful country roads, past small houses with yellow-lit windows, each containing a little scene of a family eating its evening rice. The night was cool, and Wong kept his window rolled down. The two women sat in the back, chatting quietly, while the geomancer studied lo shu diagrams on the house’s birth in the front passenger seat. But he found it difficult to focus in the gathering darkness, and slipped his papers into his bag.
Dusk in the Malaysian countryside is always enchanting. Wong had always felt the country to be vastly underappreciated in terms of its physical beauty. In many ways, its vistas were as striking as those of Thailand or Indonesia, and its general efficiency level, he felt, was considerably higher than those two countries. Night fell quickly, as if a giant hand was turning a dimmer switch. Invisible cicadas raised a sound like static, and a night-caller in a forest nearby could be heard making its characteristic tooee-tooee-tooee cry. There was a smell of frying in the air.
Mrs Wanedi talked a little, and then fell silent, and then got out her handkerchief and wept, and then started prattling again. It became clear that what she wanted was food. After two days with nothing to eat, she needed nourishment, but could not face tackling Ms Tong’s abandoned oven to cook anything.
Wong immediately offered to buy her a meal at any eating house in the area.
‘There’s only one,’ she said in eager reply. ‘Henry and I went a couple of times when we were first looking at this place, a long time ago, but we never got into the habit of socialising here. We thought we would fix up Sun House, get the business going, and then there would be plenty of time to get to know the neighbours. Henry was a friendly man. He w
ould be sad to know that he would . . . before he would get a chance . . .’
She buried her head in her wet handkerchief and started sobbing again, and then, with a watery sniff, jerked upright and took hold of herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m all right, really. It’s just that . . . Well, this whole episode here has been strange for me. I guess, in a way, I am glad we weren’t wery sociable to the neighbours. It meant that I could have him all to myself for these final months.’
In a neighbouring village, they found Chin’s Chicken Kitchen, a small tongue-twister of a restaurant with round tables and uncomfortable stools. It was busy, but a table was found for the party towards the back. Chin’s was a noisy place where diners gorged on kari ayam goreng and mosquitoes gorged on diners. Mrs Wanedi tried to keep in control of herself, but found it difficult. She ate a large amount of plain noodles, but could not touch any of the main dishes she had asked for. Her earring fell off her left lobe and landed in her soy sauce dish. She kicked off her shoes under the table and then couldn’t find them. Joyce had to get on her hands and knees to retrieve them.
‘Excuse, I must make a little visit to the ketandas,’ Mrs Wanedi sniffed, and left the table. A few moments later, she was back, having lost her way, and then started to move in the opposite direction. Joyce leapt up and did her gallant young person bit, taking her arm and guiding her to the ladies’ room.
The young woman returned with a grim expression. ‘I wonder if, like . . .’
‘Yes?’ enquired Wong.
Joyce looked at him with sadness in her eyes. ‘She says she’s fine. But I think she is in a bad way. Like, totally. She was leaning so hard on me I was practically carrying her. You don’t think she would like, top herself? I mean, is it all right for her to be alone in that house?’
Wong nodded. ‘I agree. She is a strange mix of the strong and the weak,’ he said.
After a quiet, low-key meal, the driver dropped Mrs Wanedi off at her lonely dark house—and that corpse in a box—while Wong and his assistant headed back to their hotel on a coastal road in Melaka.
‘I think it’s a horrible house and I think that Mrs Wanedi is mad. If she wasn’t mad before, I think she definitely would be after living there. Brrr,’ Joyce said, giving a shiver of horror. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be like cruel and stuff. She may have just been driven crazy by losing her husband. I mean, it must be so awful to have nobody to talk to. How long were they married?’
‘I think twenty years. Perhaps she does not want to talk to anyone. She had Ms Tong to talk to, remember? She got rid of her. And that neighbour is there. Gangan.’
‘Wonder why she got rid of the cook? You’d think she’d be dying for some company, you know. And that young guy, he looks as weird as . . . I dunno.’
They arrived at the hotel at 9 p.m. and stopped in the coffee shop for a nightcap. The geomancer had a cup of green tea. His assistant had a mochaccino, which turned out to be a dangerously over-filled cup of what Wong was convinced was shaving cream.
The hotel was quiet. ‘You don’t like me, do you, Mr Wong?’ Joyce said suddenly.
Wong did not know what to say. ‘No, no. Not so.’
‘Be honest. I get up your nose.’
‘No, you don’t get up me at all. But we are quite different. It is not too easy to . . . talk. I think maybe you are a bit yang.’
‘I’m seventeen. That’s not young.’
‘Not young, yang.’
‘Oh, I see. Yeah. I guess I am a bit yang. I reckon Asian men often find Western women a bit yang, but I have a yin side as well. But never mind, I’ll try and be less yang, if it helps.’
She took a long slurp of her drink and expertly licked the foam off her upper lip. ‘You know, my dad was like, “Mr Wong’s gotta vacancy for an assistant this summer,” and I was like, “Great.” But it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t really want anyone, did you? I can disappear, you know. Just say so. There are other ways I can spend my time. I could just do the research in libraries, or I could apply to some other feng shui masters. There are lots in Singapore these days, and they even have them in New York and London now.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Wong. ‘It is my pleasure to have you accompanying me this summer, Ms McQuinnie. Please stay.’
‘Do you really mean that?’ She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I’d rather stay, to be honest, C F, I mean, Mr Wong.’
‘You can call me C F.’
‘Thank you, C F. And you can call me J-M-small-C-big-Q.’
‘J . . . M . . . ?’
‘I’m joking. Call me Jo.’
They chatted for a while, and he was guiltily pleased to hear her poke fun at her father’s friend Mr Pun, although he was careful not to add any negative comments himself. You never know what can get back to the boss. How strange people are. He recalled the words of one of the sages of the Blue Mountain: ‘No lake in Heaven is as wide and deep as each man’s lake of dreams.’
The following day dawned warm again. The coolness of the Melaka morning was delicious, but Wong could feel it evaporating minute by minute. By six, he was breakfasting on fresh fruits on the tiny balcony of his room in the hotel. The sunrise was glorious. By seven he had been for his morning walk, and the pavements were becoming hot. He guessed Joyce was not an early riser, so he did not disturb her, but arranged for the driver to pick him up alone. By 8.15, he was grateful to enter the shady rooms of Sun House. On his arrival, he phoned the hotel to wake Joyce, and arranged for her to be in the foyer to be picked up by the driver at 8.45.
At 9 a.m., C F Wong phoned the police. ‘Chief Inspector Jhoti Sagwala? C F Wong here. I’m here in Sun House. Remember I said on the phone? I need you to come over. Quite urgently please.’
‘C F, how are you? So you are finally here. What a delight. When are you coming for a banana curry?’ the languid man replied. Wong could hear he was picking his teeth after his breakfast—probably his second.
‘I am very well, thank you, Jhoti,’ said Wong. ‘And I will certainly arrange to share a meal with you. But we have to get some small business out of the way. Then we can relax and eat rice. I want you to come quickly to Sun House. My driver and my assistant will pick you up. They are on the way to your office now.’
Wong heard the creak of a chair as Jhoti lifted himself out of his characteristic slouch. ‘What’s up? Why the excitement?’
‘It is Mrs Wanedi. She is dead.’
‘What? Mrs Wanedi? Dead you say?’
‘Dead, yes.’
The police officer gave a deep sigh—the unvoiced groan of a man who really does not like excitement of any kind. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Shall I bring an ambulance?’
‘Bring whatever you like. But it is too late to save her now. She has kicked her goose.’
Fifteen minutes later, the car slid to a halt in front of Sun House, sending leaves and gravel flying. Wong met the Chief Inspector, Joyce, and a female police doctor named Poon Bo Seng at the door. Joyce was weeping. ‘It’s awful,’ she said, wiping her red nose. ‘But I knew it would happen. I said last night. Poor woman. We should have stayed or made her come to our hotel or something. Oh, it’s so sad. I’ve never had dinner with a someone who committed . . .’
‘Never mind. Follow me,’ said Wong.
Dr Poon, an obese Chinese-Malay woman with a Foochow accent, marched rapidly alongside him. ‘So what? Suicide or natural? Could have died of grief or something, was it, maybe? Sometimes happens when a woman loses a husband after a long marriage.’
‘I do not know what it was. But it was not grief,’ the geomancer said, leading them down to the back of the house where the mortuary workshop was. ‘You are the doctor. I hope you will tell me soon.’
They marched down the silent dark corridors and entered the mortuary. Chief Inspector Sagwala gasped. ‘What is this?’ he said, looking at Mrs Wanedi, who was standing to attention, uncomfortably handcuffed to one of the timbers in the low ceiling. ‘She is not dead. What are you doing, C F? Have you gone mad
?’
Joyce gasped and stared from Wong to Mrs Wanedi and back again.
‘Let me go, this mad man has attacked me,’ the figure shrieked.
Wong stepped quickly across the room and roughly ripped off the furious creature’s dress. It fell to the floor.
‘What’re you—’ said Joyce, her hand over her mouth.
‘Rape!’ screamed Mrs Wanedi. ‘Help me, help me. Don’t look, don’t look.’
The figure twisted until it had turned around, but not before they had seen the outline of male genitalia underneath an unsavoury pair of off-white underpants.
‘She’s a man,’ Sagwala said needlessly.
‘Yes. It is a sample of the male species,’ said Wong. He took the police doctor by the arm and guided her to the box on the far side of the room. She blinked at the corpse in the box, and Sagwala pushed past them to take a look—as did Joyce, more gingerly, afterwards.
‘Ms McQuinnie, Chief Inspector,’ said Wong. ‘Let us leave the room. The doctor will examine the body. She will tell us if this is Mrs Wanedi here in this box.’
He ushered them out of the room, and two minutes later Dr Poon called them back to inform them that the body in the box, despite the close-cropped hair and male clothes, was female. ‘No doubt,’ she said. ‘Is a woman.’
Over a meal of bak kut teh at Sun House (fetched from a village hawker by the driver), the feng shui master told Jhoti and Joyce how he came to believe a crime had been perpetrated. ‘This could have been a perfect crime. It was cleverly constructed. Like a well-oiled watch,’ he said.
‘Clock,’ corrected Joyce.
‘Same. Many men murder their wives. This is unfortunate. They murder them because they wish to run off with their secretaries or maids. They wish to take with them the properties of the wife. But murder is a messy business. Guns and knives leave holes and things. And murder will come out. Nowadays, all poisons can be detected. No, the murderer today has to be excessively smart. As smart as houses, as they say in England. He has to make sure that after the murder there must be no investigation into the cause of death.’