The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘Maddy’s cousin.’

  ‘Yes. Owner of the flat in Ridley Park. Wife of dentist.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’

  ‘Now I remember something what she said. She said that she had friends in Hong Kong could sort out problems—any sort of problems—but not ghosts. She said many strange things. I think she is from triad family. I think Maddy also got mix up with triads. I think she was girlfriend of one triad. Senior triad. Name Jackie Sum. She is young, pretty. What they like.’

  ‘So if she was one of them, why do they want to . . . kill her?’ She clearly found the phrase hard to say.

  ‘There is one thing no triad girlfriend is allowed to do. She did it, I think.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Leave.’

  ‘Oh.’ Joyce contemplated this for a while. ‘So they’re cross with her because she wanted to leave the triads and be, like, a normal person?’

  ‘I think so. So she leave Hong Kong. She go to Malaysia.

  She change her name. She move around only at night. She hang out in underworld in Malaysia. She meet Ismail. He looks after her. She is happy for a while. But Ismail is also difficult person, dangerous person. Also ho marfan—much trouble. After he found out that she had much big bad luck coming—then again she is in danger.’

  ‘Huh. The moral of this story seems to be don’t date dodgy guys from the underworld. They may be cool guys with big pecs but they eventually try to kill you.’

  Wong nodded. ‘Too bad.’

  Silence returned. Joyce had become increasingly nervous.

  Her shoulders were hunched. She appeared to be shivering.

  Every time someone walked by, she followed them with her eyes. Every time someone glanced at them, she tensed herself, ready to spring up and start running again. Every time she heard a car engine roaring, she imagined a group of men with guns jumping out of the car and running towards her.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question. Why were they coming to see me? Why me? I’m nobody. I’m a schoolgirl. I’m nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know. They have been looking for Maddy for long time, I think. Their contact in Singapore maybe see her or her boyfriend visiting home of Madame Xu. So they go to see Madame Xu yesterday, after we go to airport. Dilip Sinha is there. He tells them that Maddy is a friend of yours. He gives them our names, name of our hotel. So they fly to Sydney on next plane. They arrive early this morning. They go straight to hotel. They want to see you, because they want you to tell them where Maddy is.’

  ‘But I don’t know where Maddy is.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong. He didn’t want to tell her what he thought the most likely outcome would have been had they been caught: that the triads would have beaten or tortured them half to death in a bid to find the slightest clue to Madeleine Tsai’s whereabouts.

  The feng shui master glanced at the young woman. He felt odd, uncomfortable, fidgety. He wondered for a moment whether he was coming down with an illness. But then he realised that the unfamiliar feeling was more emotional than physical. His hostility had waned, and had been replaced by a small spark of sympathy. Children are not normally required to deal with triad death threats.

  Again, the quietness flowed around them. The small park seemed such a natural, peaceful place. It was strange and terrifying to be talking about evil and murder in a sunny, green spot so filled with freshness, flowers and chirping insects.

  ‘CF,’ said Joyce, without looking around at him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  Wong nodded. ‘I too.’

  She turned to him. ‘You know, when you see this sort of thing in the movies, the hero gets more and more determined to risk everything to save the person in trouble. He’ll, like, go out on a limb. He’ll give up his own life, even.’

  He looked at her with curiosity. What was she about to suggest?

  ‘But it’s not like that in real life,’ she said. ‘Is it? You know what I wanna do?’

  ‘What you want to do?’

  ‘Go home.’

  Wong nodded. ‘Me too.’

  ‘I hardly know Maddy. Why risk my life to rescue her? It’s kinda dumb really if you think about it.’

  ‘Kinda dumb, yes.’

  ‘She’s probably hung out with these sort of people all her life. She’s an underworld person. She knows how to handle herself in these situations. I don’t. What do I know? I’m experienced at nothing. I’m experienced at being in school. And working in a tax office. I know the names of all the members of N’Sync. Those are the only things I’m good at. I’m out of place in, in, this situation.’

  ‘Understand.’

  She turned pleading eyes to him. ‘I wanna go home. Please, CF?’

  ‘I think it is good idea,’ he said. He started fumbling inside his jacket. ‘Wait first.’ He pulled out a large envelope that contained what Joyce recognised to be ticket folders from Susan Leong’s travel agency. Wong studied the writing on the tickets. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He ran his fingers over the wording and mumbled in Cantonese. ‘Ho marfan.

  ’ ‘What?’

  ‘Big problem. I bought cheap tickets. Cannot change date.

  Can fly home tomorrow only. Not today.’

  ‘Can’t we just buy new tickets?’

  ‘No. Very expensive. Very wasting. To not use these tickets.

  Cannot.’

  Joyce was annoyed. ‘I’ll pay for them.’

  ‘You have money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have credit card?’

  ‘No. Dad says I can get one when I’m eighteen.’

  ‘So how you pay for the tickets?’

  ‘You pay on your credit card. Daddy will pay you back.’

  ‘I got no credit card. Credit card bad feng shui. Makes money move away, cannot see it go. Very bad.’

  This stumped Joyce. ‘That is like soooooo dumb. Whoever heard of a grown-up without a credit card? I didn’t even know it was allowed.

  ’ Wong grit his teeth and folded his arms.

  She bit her nails and thought for a while. ‘I know. I’ve got it. Some of my family from my dad’s side still lives in Australia. I’ve got an Aunt Su in Sydney. She’ll give us some money.’

  She grabbed the geomancer’s forearm. ‘If I get money from my family, can I buy two tickets out of here on the first plane?’

  Wong, still irritated, gave her a look of tentative approval. He unconsciously put his hand protectively over the wallet in his inside jacket pocket. ‘Maybe we can leave early. But only if you pay. I already spend too much.’

  Just under an hour later, they were knocking on the door of a small house somewhere between Redfern and Chippendale. Wong was intrigued by the suburbs. He stared open-mouthed as the Sydney buses—which took them on a roundabout route through the district of Glebe—ferried them past street after street of neat little houses in tidy rows. Each one had its own small, square front garden, one bay window on the ground floor and two windows on the first story. On some streets, almost all the houses seemed to have identical hanging baskets dangling by the front door.

  ‘Ho daw,’ exclaimed Wong. ‘So many.’

  After travelling past eight or nine streets of tiny houses, Wong had started to sketch a small home in his notebook. ‘Houses pretty-pretty. I think in China these houses very good. Very popular. Can have many home in small place. So many people can be inside. China has many people. China has small homes, but not so pretty.’

  Joyce pulled her goggle-eyed employer off the bus at one street that appeared indistinguishable from all the others. Then she dragged him by the arm to a house right at the end of a long row of what he had seen described as terraced cottages.

  ‘I think this is it,’ she said. ‘Number 17.’ They had been unable to phone Auntie Su in advance because Joyce couldn’t recall her Aunt’s surname. All she knew was that she wasn’t a McQuinnie or a Smart. But she had been to the house several times as a child.

  She took a deep breath. T
he air in Sydney tasted wonderfully different to that in Singapore. She had become used to high humidity and always being too hot or too cold. The temperate, dry, breezy air of Australia was deliciously refreshing. There was a fragrance of hyacinths in the air, mixed with the unmistakable smell of fried chips. She knew that music or photographs could strongly evoke memories, but had not realised that the taste of the air and suburban smells could do the same. Joyce felt eight years old again.

  Stepping up to a chipped front door painted a faded shade of leaf green, she rang the bell and waited.

  There was no response. Joyce lifted up the knocker to make a bit more noise, but stopped as she heard sounds from within the house. ‘She’s there. I can hear her.’

  They heard the locks being fiddled with and a chain being put in place. Then the door opened about three centimetres.

  ‘Yep?’ said a male voice.

  ‘I’m looking for Auntie Su—I mean, Mrs Susilla. I’m her niece. My name’s Joyce McQuinnie. Is she home?’

  ‘Nope.’ The door was shut with a considerable degree of violence.

  Joyce banged the knocker.

  The door opened again—the same three centimetres.

  ‘When will she be back? We’ve come a long way. We’re from Singapore.’

  ‘Singapore,’ repeated the voice. The door swung open another two centimetres and a somewhat aquiline nose looked out. Hooded eyes on either side of them peered at Wong.

  ‘Are you one of her relatives? Are you a cousin of mine?’ said Joyce, trying to elicit a warmer welcome. ‘I’m Auntie Susilla’s niece.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the voice.

  ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘Okay.’ The door was wrenched open with such force that the chain tore from the jamb. This elicited a string of curses. ‘Pardon my French,’ said a stocky man in his early twenties, waving his hand like a traffic cop to usher them into the tiny vestibule. He was unshaven and was wearing a sleeveless shirt. His muscular arms were thick and there were scars on his skin. He didn’t smile. Despite the perfunctory gesture of welcome, his expression remained faintly suspicious.

  ‘Mum didn’t say to expect anyone. She’ll be back in the arvo,’ he grunted.

  ‘I don’t know French,’ Wong whispered to Joyce.

  ‘He’s speaking Australian,’ she hissed.

  ‘But he just said—’ ‘Never mind.’

  There was an uncomfortable period where the visitors stood in the hallway waiting for further prompting.

  Their host eventually growled again. ‘Suppose you want tea or something. Kitchen’s on the left.’

  Wong nodded his thanks, and they took seats around two sides of a little square table set against one wall.

  Joyce said: ‘Got any green tea? He likes green tea.’

  He considered this for a while. ‘Nah. Got Gatorade. That’s blue.’

  Joyce pondered. ‘He’s got Gatorade,’ she needlessly repeated to Wong. ‘It’s blue.’

  The geomancer shook his head.

  ‘Thanks, but I think, no,’ she said. ‘Ordinary tea will do him. Make it with no milk and no sugar. Just dip the teabag in three times, that’ll be strong enough.’

  The young man busied himself with a kettle and some teabags, only dropping the spoons on the floor two or three times. It wasn’t a complicated operation, but Joyce was quite impressed. Most of her older sister’s boyfriends would have been unable to accomplish such a task.

  ‘You’re good at domestic stuff then,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Can roast a chook even,’ he said proudly with an involuntary smile. ‘Want anything to eat? A sambo?’

  Wong decided to attempt to enter the conversation. ‘Your mother is where?’

  ‘Down the bingo.’

  ‘Dunabingo. Is that in Sydney?’

  ‘Course.’ He gave him a quizzical look. Wong decided he would leave the conversation to Joyce.

  The man looked at Joyce. ‘She didn’t say anyone’d lob in.’

  ‘She didn’t know we were coming,’ she said.

  There was a silence. Their host’s smile had quickly disappeared again. ‘Your dad’s Martin McQuinnie, right? My mum doesn’t like your dad, does she? Calls him a rich bloody bastard who doesn’t look after his own.’

  Joyce nodded. ‘Yeah. They never really got on.’

  ‘She says all your side of the family are good-for-nothing bludgers who care for nothing but money.’

  ‘I guess she hasn’t really spoken to anyone on our side for a long time. Like years and years.’

  ‘She says you got no hearts,’ he added, undisguised bitterness in his voice. ‘The McQuinnies got cash registers instead of hearts, she says.’

  Joyce was struggling to keep smiling. If she wanted to borrow money from this family, she would have to keep on good terms with them—but this hectoring was becoming increasingly hard to take. ‘That’s her opinion. But it’s probably all from some like misunderstanding or something. You know how people fall out?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the young man said. ‘But your old man did pretty well with the property business, we heard. Never shared any of his loot, did he?’

  ‘I think he made most of his money after your folks fell out with him. They’d stopped talking to him, so he could hardly go and hand them a load of cash, could he?’

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ he said in a mumble. Involuntarily, he looked around at the small, shabby room. ‘I could have done with a better upbringing. This is bloody skungy.’ As if to demonstrate his anger, he bent the teaspoon into a neat right angle.

  Joyce had a set speech she had made a couple of times about how she would have swapped all the family fortune and huge empty apartments to have had a humble home containing a loving mother and/or father. But she decided that this was not the time. And looking around the sad home, she realised with a start that it might not even be true. She couldn’t even begin to imagine growing up in this tiny, malodorous, stuffy place.

  The tiny sprig of sympathy that threatened to sprout within her was quickly crushed by their host’s now-naked hostility.

  ‘Of course we wouldn’t have taken any of the money, even if you had offered it to us. Since it comes from a tainted source.

  Property being theft and all that.’

  Joyce was about to reply when Wong interrupted. ‘Must not stay too long. Must get business done. Move on. Go home.’

  She nodded. But how could she ask for money from this resentful, spiteful young man? Maybe Aunt Susilla would be more reasonable. ‘Your mum and my dad must be a bit friendly. I used to come around here when I was a child. You don’t remember me, do you? I remember you a bit. You had floppy hair and always wore a Superman suit. Your mum sent me a book of Australian mammals once for my birthday. When will Auntie Su be home?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘What are you here for, anyway? Wanna borrow money?’

  ‘Course not,’ she said, blushing immediately. To cover her embarrassment, she blurted out: ‘We’re on a mission. We’re here to rescue a kidnap victim.’

  Their host’s head jerked up. He seemed unsure of whether he had heard her correctly.

  ‘A kidnap victim,’ Joyce repeated, trying to imbue her voice with superiority. ‘She was brought to Sydney on Wednesday night by a bad guy from Malaysia. She’s a friend of mine. So we came to find her. We often do this sort of thing. We help the police. I saw a dead body once. We get involved in all sorts of exciting cases. A woman was found dead in bed yesterday morning. A woman from one of our cases. We were consulted. The superintendent of police comes to talk to us regularly. I’ve spoken to him loads of times. We often have to deal with these sorts of things quite a lot. That’s what we do.’

  He was amazed at this drama-laden speech—as was Joyce herself.

  ‘So you’re bloody heroes or something, are you?’

  Joyce didn’t know what to reply. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  The young man eventually revealed that his name was Brett,
which rang a vague bell in Joyce’s memory. She recalled him as a thin, unsociable boy with lank hair who wouldn’t let her play with any of his toys. His surname was Kilington. This came as more of a surprise to her. She had never really thought of Aunt Susilla having a surname.

  Brett said he hated his name. ‘They used to call me Killer at school. I killed a guy once. Well, a dog. I hate names. I wish we all had numbers. When I was a kid I tried to just use a number. Nobody would use it. Bastards.’

  Wong shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Joyce: I don’t think we will get any—you know. I think we go back to old plan. Look for girl. Stay tonight. Leave tomorrow. You have telephone book? I want to make call,’ he said.

  Brett still had his suspicious eyes firmly on Joyce. ‘So you some sort of agents, then, are you? Special forces or something?’ Rising to his feet, he looked at the teenage girl and the skinny old man. ‘You don’t look like special forces. You look like . . .’ He trailed off, evidently unable to decide what they looked like.

  ‘We are, er, a civilian division, you could say. We help the Singapore police, but we’re not actually police ourselves in a manner of speaking,’ Joyce explained.

  ‘Phone?’ repeated the geomancer.

  Brett beckoned to Wong to follow him. ‘This way. Phone’s there. Book’s under. Got it?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The young man returned to the kitchen, intrigued with what Joyce was saying. He had a nervous habit of banging his left fist against the kitchen counter. There was a bandage over the knuckles of his right hand. ‘So let me get this straight. You and the old geezer are here to rescue a kidnap victim. Where is she?’

  ‘Can’t say,’ said Joyce, mysteriously. Then she decided that she had better be more honest. ‘Don’t know exactly. Do you know what feng shui is?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he blinked, apparently taken aback by the abrupt change of subject.

  ‘Well the guy who has kidnapped her is a bomoh. That’s a Malaysian mystic, like. We think he’ll take her to the worst feng shui spot in Sydney.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Don’t know. We need to contact local feng shui people to find out what the worst place is. Because that’s where we’re likely to find her. See? Simple, really, when you’re experienced at this kind of thing.’