‘How do I know-lah?’ Winnie said, irritated. ‘Stolen.’
‘When?’
She shrugged her shoulders again and looked at him crossly. ‘I come in, not here. This morning. Half hour ago, about.’
‘You call management? Police?’
‘Too busy-lah! So much work, see?’ She swept her hand over her desk to encompass the morning’s mail—four unexciting envelopes and a small package, all of which appeared to have been issued by machine.
‘Water on walls is humidity,’ Wong explained to Joyce. ‘Big problem in Singapore.’
‘Why doesn’t the electricity short out?’ Joyce asked, flipping on the light switch. There was a short, sharp fizzing noise as the overhead bulb flashed once and then went out.
‘Because we do not turn the light on,’ he said, his eyes closed. Why did the gods hate him so?
‘Oops. Sorry.’ The young woman, forgetting to flick the switch down again, walked over to the window to look for clues. Sticking her head out through the rusty hole in the window where the air conditioner had been, she looked down and gave a snort. ‘Hah! It’s not been stolen. It’s fallen out. It’s down there. Isn’t that our air conditioner? Look.’
‘Aiyeeaah! Very bad, very bad,’ said a worried Wong, moving swiftly to her side at the window to have a look. He abruptly took her shoulders and pushed her to one side before putting his own head through the hole. He winced in real pain as he looked down. ‘Eeee,’ he squealed between almost-closed teeth. There was a distorted cube of metal on the concrete floor outside.
Pieces of twisted metal dangled out like ruptured organs. There was a blood-like puddle of dark liquid beneath the main casing.
He breathed out noisily. ‘Aiyeeaah. Very bad.’
‘It’s not so bad. It never worked particularly well. And so noisy. It’ll be good to have a new one.’
‘No! Very bad that it falls down. Very illegal in Singapore for air conditioner to fall down. Big trouble. Jail, maybe.’ He turned his eyes to look at Winnie. ‘For relevant office manager.’
Winnie ignored the implicit threat and pretended to busy herself with the envelopes on her desk. ‘Aiyeeaah,’ she said, staring at the letter she had just opened. ‘Someone write you letter in computer language. Cannot read-lah.’
‘Give to Joyce. She can read,’ said Wong, wiping the humidity from his desk with a tissue from Winnie’s box.
‘Sure,’ said Joyce. ‘Hand it over. But first I have to ask you a question. What does aiyeeaah mean?’
Winnie tilted her head to one side, thinking. There was silence for thirteen seconds. ‘Cannot translate. No word in English. Only in Chinese and Indian.’
‘So what is aiyeeaah in Indian?’
‘Aiyoh,’ said the Singaporean.
‘But what does it actually mean?’
‘Aiyoh means aiyeeaah. Aiyeeaah means aiyoh.
’ ‘Thanks.’
Winnie flung the letter in Joyce’s direction with the grace of a toddler doing ballet. It landed on a cabinet on the wrong side of the room, where it balanced for a moment, before falling neatly into a wastepaper basket.
‘I think leave it,’ said Wong. ‘Probably it belong there.’
Joyce got out of her creaking seat and retrieved the letter.
‘Might be something important. You never know.’
She looked at the single sheet of paper for a few seconds. ‘Nope. Gibberish.’
‘Not computer language?’ asked Wong.
‘Not any language. Computer garble. Or secret code perhaps,’ she added with a laugh.
She dropped the letter back into the bin, then threw herself ungracefully into her chair, where she sprawled back and fanned herself with an eighteenth century Chinese molding she had picked from a shelf behind Wong. ‘Can you believe this heat?’ she said.
The geomancer opened his writing book but didn’t feel creative in this furnace. The lack of white noise from the air conditioner meant that the roar of traffic outside seemed extraordinarily loud. And Joyce, no doubt, would turn on her headphone thing which made irritating tsik-tsika-tsik-tsika-tsik drumming noises. How could one even think in such conditions?
‘I go tea shop,’ he said, snapping his journal shut.
‘I go HMV,’ Joyce said, imitating her boss’s low, staccato voice.
‘I go home,’ chanced Winnie.
‘No!’ snapped Wong to his administrator. ‘Phone someone. Get new air conditioner. Get old one taken away. Quick. Before police come. Aiyeeaah.
’ Winnie glared at him.
Joyce followed him out of the door.
The feng shui master was moving quickly towards the staircase, but stopped suddenly on the top step. Something half-remembered had momentarily halted him. But the memory of the ticking he had heard when he had first stepped into the room had gradually sunk from his conscious mind to his subconscious. He gave his head a quick shake to clear it, and then trotted quickly down the stairs.
The offices in Telok Ayer Street were set away from the main traffic of the nearby financial district, but the continuous sound of traffic still filled the air with a rushing noise like a distant sea. The feng shui master stepped into the sun, blinking, and strode quickly to get into a patch of shade. It was equally hot outside, but somehow the heat was more bearable than it was in the office. The intern hurried after him. They had barely walked two dozen metres when they were stopped by a screech.
‘Wooooong,’ came a high-pitched voice.
CF Wong spun to look behind him. He saw only Joyce, walking behind him, but the voice hadn’t been hers.
‘Woooong,’ came the shriek again.
‘It’s Winnie,’ said Joyce, indicating the window above them by looking up.
The geomancer lifted his eyes to see his office administrator leaning out of their fourth floor window.
‘The phone! Calling. Important,’ she screamed.
‘You get it,’ he shouted, walking back until he was standing directly under her.
‘You say what?’
‘Get it for me.’
‘Okay. You wait,’ said Winnie, and disappeared back into the darkness.
Wong and McQuinnie stood on the pavement, looking up expectantly at their fourth floor office window.
A few seconds later, Winnie reappeared—and threw a small object out of the window. The two people on the ground stepped aside as something small and dark fell to the ground and hit the pavement with a cracking sound. It bounced once, spun in the air for a second, and then fell into the gutter with a splintering sound.
‘Oh dear,’ said Joyce, looking at the smashed office mobile phone.
‘Ji-seen,’ said Wong, shaking his head. The feng shui master looked back up at Winnie. ‘Aiyeeaah crazy woman, you throw phone down, smash it, why? Expensive. Very much money, you don’t know? You pay.’
‘Not me,’ screeched the woman. ‘You tell me get phone for you, I get it for you.’
‘I mean get message for me, not get phone.’
‘Next time you say what you mean-lah,’ she spat.
‘Who call?’
‘Don’t know.’ Her head disappeared inside and she pulled the window shut behind her.
Joyce dropped to one knee and picked up the phone. The main body was in one piece but the antenna had almost come off and two small pieces of the casing lay nearby. The LCD screen was cracked.
‘Hello? Hello?’ said a tiny voice.
Amazingly, the phone was still working. ‘Must be Japanese,’ said Joyce, putting it to her ear. ‘Indestructible. Hi. You want CF ? Hang on a tick. He’s just here.’ She handed him the phone. The voice had seemed familiar, but she hadn’t been able to place it.
He looked rather unnerved by the way a piece of the casing, almost detached, swung under the handset as he took it from her.
‘Waai? ’ Joyce wondered just what Winnie would have to do to lose her job—burn the office down, perhaps. The office administrator had made herself completely indispensable, havin
g spent four years creating a filing system that only she understood. No client file could be retrieved without her.
Very little useful work could be done when she was away. Nor could she ever be replaced. It was a good trick, and one worth remembering, the young woman decided.
She looked over at Wong, and mentally willed him to have his conversation in English. She hoped this would be news of an interesting new assignment. The work diary for the week was worryingly empty.
‘You say what?’ said Wong to the caller, switching into English.
He said nothing more for a minute or so, and then his face took on a very serious expression. ‘Kidnap? Very bad, very bad,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘Gung hai-la!’ he added. ‘Of course. We come right away. No?’
The feng shui master tended to hold handsets a few centimetres away from his ear, and the young woman could hear the voice of the caller, but not what she was saying.
‘No?’ said Wong. ‘Oh, tomorrow, okay. Morning, eight o’clock? No? Oh, hair cut. Understand. Will come after one hour. No? Two to three hours? For purning. Oh, perming.
Understand. After three hours. About lunchtime. Okay.
Bye bye.’
He lowered the phone. Joyce, who had more familiarity with such instruments than her employer, took it from his hand and pressed the end call button.
‘I have important job to do,’ he said. ‘Girl is kidnap.
Must find.’
He walked off at a brisk pace towards Orchard Road.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Joyce, trotting behind him.
He turned around. ‘We? I thought you go to HMV?’ he said, pronouncing the ‘V’ as ‘wee’.
‘Naah. I was only joshing. If someone’s been kidnapped, you’re gonna need me, right?’
He didn’t answer.
‘So where are we going?’ she repeated.
‘Dim sum shop. Breakfast first.’
‘Isn’t this rather urgent? Shouldn’t we go and see the parents or something?’
‘Mother busy today. Meet her tomorrow.’
‘Oh. Isn’t that kinda strange?’
‘Yes. Must eat and think.’ He quickened his pace as he raced down the road but failed to lose her.
Ten minutes later they had settled into their seats at a restaurant. The young woman turned up her nose at the menu. ‘It’s all in Chinese.’
‘Very special place. Only for Chinese. Food very delicious,’ said Wong, licking his lips as he expertly plucked a dumpling from a basket of har gow.
‘Do they have blueberry muffins?’
‘Don’t know. Ask.’
Joyce waved to the maître d, a fat man named Ooi wearing a dirty vest and calf-length trousers. It wasn’t difficult to catch his attention, since he was sitting reading a Chinese newspaper at a table less than a metre away from them.
The restaurant was tiny, and had been difficult to find. Wong had marched quickly down Telok Ayer Street, and then taken a succession of sharp turns that had led him into a dirty-looking alley somewhere off Amoy Street. He had finally come to a halt in front of the doorway of what seemed to be an inner city residential building, with his assistant trailing twenty metres behind.
Wong had rung a doorbell. After they had been let into the premises, Joyce could see that the restaurant was actually the living room of a tenement house. It appeared to be unlicensed, judging by the lack of any signage indicating that it was an authorised business. The geomancer had immediately been given several bamboo baskets of food—the proprietor obviously knew his tastes. But none of the greasy-looking dumplings enticed the young woman. The feng shui man was impatient to eat, but was evidently conscious that he should wait to see if his companion could find something to eat. ‘You like cha siu bau? Cha siu so?’ he had asked. ‘Siu mai?
’ ‘I don’t think so,’ she had replied, giving him an apologetic wince.
Joyce dropped her chin into her hands. Another problem: A breakfast joint that didn’t serve breakfast! What was she doing in this crazy place? Did her father know what he was doing sending her here? When she thought of him, her emotions wavered uncomfortably between anger and affection. She lived in a state of longing to see him—but spent much of her mental energy compiling lists of complaints to give him.
She recalled how her favourite teacher at Hong Kong Island International School, a kindly, stick-thin Welshman named Daffyd James, had told her father that she was an unexceptional achiever only because she had been disadvantaged by her unstable home life. ‘She’s actually very bright. If you put a little time and attention to the matter of your daughter’s progress, she could really thrive,’ Mr James had told her father. ‘She needs a parent.’
So Martin McQuinnie had hired one. He purchased a week of the time of an educational consultant to visit his daughter and ask her questions about what she wanted to do. Since everything in Joyce’s life had been transient, all ambition seemed pointless to her. She told the man—a retired university professor who was on the board of one of her father’s companies—that she wanted to go out and do some practical work; grow trees or look after animals or something. Being a gardener greatly appealed to her.
Her father had agreed to give her a year off to taste the real world on condition that she applied to a good university. Her first choice of college was unwilling to give an unconditional place to a student with such a poor record. But it offered her a spot if she could submit one Grade A 10 000-word piece of completely original research on a topic from a list dreamt up in an idle moment by the dean. The final item was: ‘Feng Shui: Art, Science Or Quasi-Religion?’ She chose it immediately, having become slightly acquainted with feng shui in Hong Kong.
On hearing this, her father recalled that one of his partners in a consortium building shopping complex in Shanghai was a Singapore businessman named Pun Chi-kin, whose company East Trade Industries had a feng shui master on permanent retainer. A few strings were gently pulled. The geomancer in question was given no choice in the matter. The retainer was increased slightly and Joyce found herself enrolled as an intern for the summer in the offices of CF Wong & Associates on Telok Ayer Street, Singapore.
Although she had been initially embarrassed to accept a post arranged by her father, she had found the assignments fascinating and Singapore fun—it was so much easier to be in a place where English was spoken than in Cantonese-dominated Hong Kong. And the jobs she had had, following CF Wong around factories and offices and homes, mostly of very rich people, proved far more interesting than her only previous experience of work: a school holiday internship doing filing in a tax consultant’s office. At first, she had intended only to stay at the feng shui consultancy for the minimum time it would have taken to complete her essay project—and then spend the rest of her gap year travelling the world. She wanted to see Tibet and South America.
But the job was turning out to be addictive. Her father had not realised that although Mr Wong’s principal retainer was paid by a property company, he had achieved a reputation as an expert at surveying other locations with negative ‘vibes’: scenes of crime. And from the moment Joyce spent an evening with the investigative advisory committee of the Union of Industrial Mystics—and their police liaison officer, Superintendent Gilbert Tan—she was hooked.
Yes, life in Singapore as an assistant to a feng shui master was fun. But it was the little things that constantly threw her off balance. There were simply too many adjustments to be made. Without the protection provided by family apartments well stocked with servants, she found Singapore difficult. She didn’t understand the customs. She couldn’t eat the food. She often felt that she didn’t speak the same language as her employer. The conventions were all wrong. And this was an obvious example: he seemed to have absolutely no idea that early morning foods were meant to be different from lunch foods. Who in their right mind would eat dumplings and spicy fried noodles for breakfast?
She waved again at the man at the next table. He didn’t get up but lowered his paper and
raised his eyebrows to let her know that she had his attention.
‘Do you have any like breakfasty stuff? Like eggs?’
‘Har gow. Siu mai. Cha siu bau,’ said the man, pointing to the steaming baskets in front of her employer. The man pointed to his ear and opened his hand to show that he didn’t understand English.
‘No, I mean like real breakfasty stuff.’ She turned to Wong. ‘Can you tell him I want a blueberry muffin—and a cappuccino. Do they have cappuccino here?’
‘Don’t know. I think no. No cup of chino. Only Chinese tea. If you don’t like dim sum, try fry noodles. Very good breakfast.’ He wrinkled his forehead, cross that she did not realise how privileged she was to be offered Ah-Ooi’s exclusive cuisine.
‘Oh pants.’ Joyce decided she would have breakfast later. ‘I’ll wait. Never mind,’ she said, loudly and slowly to Ooi. Then she turned to her boss. ‘So someone’s been kidnapped. That is like SO serious, isn’t it? Shouldn’t the mother call the police?’
‘Cannot,’ mumbled Wong, struggling to deal with a prawn dumpling that had burst in his mouth and filled it with aromatic oil. ‘She think police do the kidnapping.’
‘Oh. Well, I suppose she shouldn’t, then.’ The young woman was nonplussed for a moment.
Then she looked at him again. ‘Hey. Hang on. But I thought Singapore police were all straight. The superintendent. Gilbert Thing. They’re all cleaner than clean, right?’
The feng shui master nodded, irritated at having to talk instead of eat. ‘Mother of kidnap victim very strange. I think you met her before. Mrs Mirpuri.’
‘Dani’s mother. Dani—you mean Dani’s been kidnapped?’ She was alarmed. ‘Danita Mirpuri?’
‘Does she have any other daughter?’
‘No.’
‘Then must be Danita Mirpuri.’
‘Geez. That’s awful. She’s my friend. Well, I’ve met her three or four times. She’s really a friend of Nike’s. She was supposed to come last night. Remember I told you that one of the gang hadn’t turned up? To meet the Iceman? And she said she’d phone Nike on Sunday and she didn’t. So she’s like really missing.
The Feng Shui Detective Goes South Page 7