The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  Madame Xu nodded. ‘If Brother Q cannot get rid of the ghost, then clearly it is resistant to the efforts of normal operations against paranormal infestations. I think a feng shui reading may be an interesting way of attacking the problem from a different angle.’

  Wong was adamant. ‘No. Cannot. I already have difficult assignment this week. Busy today, all day tomorrow, maybe next day also. Confidential one. Also, I don’t believe in ghost. Don’t want to take this assignment.’

  ‘It’s not his cup of tea,’ said Joyce.

  Wong started to lower the cup of bo leih he had just raised to his lips.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that’s not your cup of tea,’ said the young woman.

  The confused geomancer blinked at her, his cup stuck halfway to his mouth.

  Superintendent Tan leaned over and put his small, fat hand on the back of the geomancer’s thin, wrinkled hand. ‘I know you don’t want to take this case, but you will.’

  Dilip Sinha laughed and clapped his hands together. ‘There you have a fine example of emotional blackmail, which is what I believe they call this. You don’t want to do it, but he knows you will do it for the sake of your old friendship with the Super.’

  ‘No,’ said the police officer. ‘That’s not the reason why I know he’ll take it. When I tell him what the dentists have offered to pay, he will take it. Dentists yau cheen. Plenty rich.’

  Wong suddenly looked interested and lowered his cup.

  ‘Tell.’

  By the time the meeting came to a close with a platter of pulut durian, ondeh-ondeh, kueh kosuree and other coconut-flavoured Malay sweetmeats, Wong had agreed to go to the dental surgery on Orchard Road the following afternoon. Superintendent Tan left the table to hurry home to his wife Selina, a teacher, and their two children.

  As the gathering broke up, Wong quietly told Joyce that he wanted to spend the following morning doing a feng shui reading of the home of Danita Mirpuri, after which he would meet the missing girl’s mother, who was due to finish her appointment with the hairdresser at lunchtime. Then he would spend the afternoon at the dental surgery.

  ‘You also have some work. You please tonight write down everything you have found out about this girl, especially about her boyfriends,’ he told the intern. ‘Put it on my desk tomorrow morning. Then you can take day off. Go to HMV.’

  ‘Sounds like you have some homework to do tonight, plum blossom,’ said Madame Xu. ‘Just like in school. Better hurry home and have a quiet night.’

  ‘Home? I’m so not going home,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m going out. I’ll see if I can find out anything about Danita from the club. That’s where her mates hang out. I’ll also see if I can find out anything more about your girlfriend, CF. ’ Madame Xu and Dilip Sinha suddenly spun their heads to stare at Wong. ‘Your girlfriend?’ said Madame Xu.

  The feng shui master was speechless.

  ‘He came to the disco with us last night,’ said Joyce. ‘And he was the first to pull.’

  ‘Pull what?’ asked Sinha.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ said Wong, furious.

  Joyce pulled out a mirror and a black lipstick to ready herself for another late night at Dan T’s Inferno.

  Wednesday:

  Life is not a

  mini-series

  As planned, CF Wong spent the first two working hours of Wednesday morning at the Mirpuri house in Mount Faber. He already had diagrams of the family home on file in the office. (Winnie had miraculously managed to find them at the bottom of one of twenty unmarked cardboard boxes in the office meditation room.) So on this visit he focused particularly on the young woman’s bedroom, which was a malodorous pile of clothes, magazines and used tissues. He also spent some time with her aunt, compiling a list of key dates in the young woman’s life.

  The only other family member at home was Dani’s brother Karim, but Wong had been told by the servants that the young man had had a very late night hanging out with some dissolute, drunken Westerners, and wasn’t expected to wake before noon.

  The house was of the Tui orientation, with its main door facing west. Dani’s room was in the north-east of the home, facing a large tree growing in a neighbour’s garden.

  Despite the tree, Wong reckoned that it was basically a good location for a young woman to grow up, although there were certain problems with the room—one being that it had an excess of water energy. It was painted baby blue and pink, it contained a fish-tank, and the pipes for the whole block ran up the outside wall near the window, providing periodic gargling noises. This was not a good combination for a restful location, especially considering that the occupant was a wood person, born under the sign of the fire horse.

  Nevertheless, the problems were all fixable. The analysis was relatively easy, and he had soon run out of ways to look busy.

  As usual with relatively wealthy people, the problem was one of over-abundance. They always expected him to suggest a list of things to add to the house—a statuette of a horse here, a pile of stones there, a sprinkling of salt by a window. But as with the office, the house was not ready for items to be added to it. There were already far too many things in the dwelling place. It was a jumbled mess of energies and influences. Looking around Danita’s room, it appeared to him that there was barely a single item in it that was necessary or had a real function. The books were leftovers from her childhood, the desk computer did not work, the collection of dolls of the world were dusty and neglected.

  People did not understand the importance of destruction, he decided. There must be as much destruction as acquisition in a person’s life. Otherwise the result was stagnation, accumulation, and eventually a clogging up of energy flows by dead items And this deadness immediately transferred itself to the spirit of the person living in the cluttered home. To him, it seemed so obvious. How was it that people never noticed the immediate improvement in their inner being that followed a session of throwing things away?

  Or was it something to do with Singapore society, where acquisition was treated as an end goal in itself, more important than happiness or contentment? Ideally, a person should have slightly more destruction in his or her life than acquisition. That way, a person would gradually change the balance of their existence from material to spiritual as they aged. They would thus end their lives gloriously unencumbered. But this concept was impossible to sell to people for whom shopping was entertainment. Most clients would be happier if feng shui meant nothing more than the addition of a fish tank in a hall or the hanging of a golden ornament by a door.

  He left a detailed list of instructions with a servant. The missing young woman’s mother had left the house at 9.48 a.m. that morning to go to the hairdresser, asking Wong to report to her later. There had been no further contact from the kidnapper, and Danita, to Wong’s delight, remained missing.

  The geomancer arrived back at his sweltering office in Telok Ayer Street mid-morning, only to find Winnie Lim in a state of great excitement. She had bad news for him. ‘Landlord he says you must pay for new air conditioner because you threw old one out of the window.’

  ‘But I did not throw it out of the window. It fell out by itself.’

  ‘Still you must pay, he say. Air conditioners do not fall out of window by themselves, he say.’

  ‘This one did.’

  ‘Still you must pay.’

  ‘This is not right.’

  ‘Never mind. He is boss. This is his building. You must buy new air conditioner.’

  ‘Will not.’

  ‘You want us all to die of heat, is it?’

  The geomancer, who had just sat down, suddenly rose to his feet, fired with anger. ‘You write to landlord. Tell him we have lawyers. Tell him we will not pay rent. You write now. Official letter. Use letterhead.’

  ‘Silly to fight. We die first of heat before you get any money from him.’

  But despite her protests, she started to type out a letter to the landlord.

  Wong sat down again, and then noticed that Joyce’s
desk was empty. ‘Where’s Joyce?’

  ‘Don’t know: missing.’

  It was almost eleven o’clock. Hang-overed, thought Wong. She went to the bar again last night. Or was it hanged over? Over-hanged, perhaps? Or just hung?

  He decided to sit at Joyce’s desk, because it received a little more of a breeze from the window, and do some writing in his journal. The pleasures of having spent two undisturbed hours doing feng shui readings that morning had left him feeling calm and creative.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Phone,’ Winnie barked, knowing somehow that it wasn’t for her.

  The geomancer picked up the handset. It was Superintendent Tan phoning from the Liew and Leibler Dental Surgery. He had spent several hours there, he said, and wanted to brief him on the case. The dentists had explained that the ghost seemed to have no regular schedule, but could appear at any time of the day or night. Each time it appeared, it kept up a murmuring wail that came and went for an hour or so before disappearing.

  ‘Although I normally am helluva sceptical about ghost stories, I find this one really intriguing,’ he said. ‘There are so many separate witnesses: both dentists, the assistants, even the patients and a cleaning woman.’ He had arranged for an officer to compile a list of instances where the spirit had allegedly been heard, seen, felt, smelt or perceived in any way. ‘I’ll fax it to you. But as I say, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to it.’

  The police officer also faxed floor plans of the surgery and a list of birth dates and birth places of staff. The geomancer tucked away his journal and devoted the next couple of hours to drawing up lo shu charts for the dentists, their assistants, their new business and the office building itself. But he told the police chief that he would have to wait until the afternoon when he would actually visit the premises before he could come to any firm conclusions.

  ‘A dentist surgery very difficult,’ Wong told Tan. ‘Almost as bad as a kitchen. You see, the rooms are small. But there is always much metal. There is always water. There are always cutting machines. There is fear. There is pain. There is money.

  All in a small space. All these things have very great effect on ch’i energy. Dentist office one of the most concentrated places of emotion, understand or not?’

  Wong asked for Dr Liew Yok Tse to be put on the line, and told him that he did not want to design or undertake a full cleansing process until he had personally experienced the disruption introduced by the unseen visitor. ‘I must listen to the ghost,’ he said. ‘Then I can make the room so that he does not come anymore, ming-mm-ming-baak?

  ’ ‘Understand,’ said the dentist, sounding tired and unhappy.

  Lowering the handset, the geomancer was amazed to find that his office administrator had actually finished a task assigned to her. Unlike most of the jobs she was supposed to do, the replacing of the air conditioner impinged directly on her personal comfort—and therefore qualified as something she was willing to do something about.

  Winnie held up the letter she had typed. ‘Finish,’ she said.

  At that moment, the office door crashed open. Joyce Mc-Quinnie staggered in, moving awkwardly like an old woman robbed of her Zimmer frame.

  ‘Morning,’ she croaked in a low, damaged voice.

  ‘Los’ your voice?’ asked Wong.

  ‘Had a late night. Hoarse.’

  ‘Horse?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Wong said: ‘Never mind horse. Got a job for you. Please to proofread this letter. Winnie wrote letter.’ He expected Joyce to be amazed at evidence that Ms Lim had actually done some actual secretarial work, but the young woman seemed to be too ill to comprehend the miracle that had taken place.

  ‘Can you please do it, C F ?’ she asked. ‘I’m so like bleeeeeaagh. People my age should not be allowed to drink. Oh yeah, that’s right, we’re not.’ She fell into her chair, slumped backwards and covered her face with Winnie’s gossip newspaper.

  ‘Okay. Give.’ He was annoyed. Did Mr Pun really expect him to function normally if he had to spend all his time babysitting a teenager? The geomancer snatched Winnie’s typewritten sheet. He began reading it with the usual pained expression that accompanied all examinations of Ms Lim’s written work. But halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened. ‘Wah!’ he said. ‘Aiyeeaah.’

  ‘What?’ asked Winnie, who was proud of her endeavour, and peeved that he should make such a fuss. ‘Mistake? If you don’t like, do it yourself.’

  ‘Mistake? This letter have plenty mistakes,’ said Wong. ‘But also have answer to a puzzle.’

  He pulled his chair across to Winnie’s desk, and sat very close to her, much to her discomfort. He stared at her typewriter, and started scrawling on a piece of paper. Then he leapt to his feet and grabbed his bag.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Joyce groaned from under the classifieds.

  ‘Out. To find kidnap victim.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘Why not you stay? Sleep?’

  ‘It’s my case, remember? Dear God,’ said the intern, moving her aching bones with difficulty.

  Joyce had insisted that they go to a coffee shop on Cross Street so that she could revive herself. ‘I feel like death warmed up,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a type of cake?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Or actually, maybe it is.’

  After a large paper cup of something called caramel macchiato, the young woman began to revive. Then she ate a sausage roll and a double-chocolate muffin. ‘Vitamins S, C and G put me back on my feet,’ she said. ‘Sugar, caffeine and grease.’

  Joyce seemed impervious to the noise and bustle of the coffee shop. Wong found it rather uncomfortable. Why did it have soft low sofas, instead of stools or stiff wooden chairs like restaurants were supposed to have? The dark smell of coffee made him feel nauseous—as did the revolting cow-milk stench coming from her drink.

  In between mouthfuls of what Wong thought was disgusting-looking food, she shared what she had discovered the previous night about Danita Mirpuri. Wong listened reluctantly. He thought it unlikely that she would give him any useful information, but there was always a chance that she had stumbled upon something that might help.

  ‘Nike turned up? And so did his friend Sy. Sy dated her for forever, like three weeks, so he knew like everything there was to know about her. And Dani’s brother Karim spent the evening with me and my hangers?’

  Danita was quite the social animal, Joyce said. She had several boyfriends, whom she played off against each other. One boyfriend named Ram was heir to a middle-sized retail fortune. But he was crazy. At first the parents were quite keen on him. But then they were eventually persuaded that the question marks over his sanity might not compensate fully for the cash he might bring to the family.

  The mother had reluctantly asked policeman Kinny Mak for some advice about getting rid of the suitor. The policeman had met Danita several times, and then he too had fallen in love with her.

  ‘It was all like such a mess, totally,’ Joyce said, trying to drink and yawn at the same time. As she spoke, she lowered her drink and held her tired head in both hands as if it had suddenly become far too heavy for her neck to support. ‘Like her parents told her to choose one or the other? Initially they liked the crazy rich kid better. They thought he would fit better into their family—which was probably right, because they are all a bit crazy, the Mirpuris. Especially Karim. You should have seen what Karim did last night! He—but that’s another story.’

  She suddenly looked away and bit her lip, distracted by her memory of the previous night.

  Wong looked at her crossly. ‘Karim is sick this morning.

  They said he went out with wild friends. They think it is your fault.’

  ‘As if. He’s the wild one. Not me. He—’ ‘Talk more about Danita, please, not her brother.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Okay. Anyway, the family was a bit greedy.

  They reckoned that a policeman in Singapore didn’t do too badly if he was tippe
d to reach senior rank?’

  Dani had promised to make her final decision by the previous week, Joyce said. When the time came for her to announce it to the family, she stunned them by naming a third person—a male called Charles Winterbottom none of them had ever heard of. He worked as a stockbroker downtown.

  When her father told her that she could only select from the list of two pre-approved candidates, she threw a tantrum and ran off to stay with one of her girlfriends—or that was what she told people, anyway.

  Mak, the policeman, was incensed. He went off to find her. That’s where the trail stopped for a couple of days. Dani was hiding with a girlfriend or something. She came home on Saturday night and everything seemed normal. And then on Sunday she disappeared again.

  ‘And then the news turned really bad,’ said Joyce. ‘On Monday. Like her mum got this note saying that Dani had been kidnapped and that we would never see her again unless she put one million Sing dollars into a package and left it at a certain place at a certain time: the little park off Maxwell Road?

  Real cop show stuff.’

  ‘So what did she do?’ asked Wong.

  ‘Nothing. She treated it as a joke. This is real life. She ignored it. But yesterday morning she got a call from a guy sounding angry? He said he had really kidnapped her and that she would come to harm if she didn’t come up with the money? That’s when she called us?’

  Wong scribbled notes as she spoke. Joyce’s version of the story had turned out to be more detailed than Mrs Mirpuri’s.

  ‘But there’s more,’ said Joyce. ‘It gets worse. I found out something amazing about another young woman in your life.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your girlfriend.’

  Wong’s face became a mask of anger. ‘Please to stop saying this. I do not have girlfriend. I spend a long time last night to try to explain to Madame Xu—’ ‘Ha,’ Joyce laughed. ‘Did they tease you about that? Sorry. Couldn’t resist it. But the way the girl was looking at you, she did look interested in you. Hey, where are you going?’