The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  The geomancer’s face was set, but with exhaustion rather than fear. The long weekend holiday he had craved had turned out to be nothing like a vacation. It would be impossible to imagine anything less relaxing than to fill three days with two long-haul flights, divided by a long day of breathless action— especially since the non-flying hours had been significantly over-supplied with painful police interview sessions.

  Arriving back in Singapore on Saturday evening, the heat and humidity had hit his face like a hot hand towel from a restaurant. He could smell petrol and pollution in the air. The undying roar of the traffic on the highways sounded curiously loud. The aroma of spices and fried fish drifted from an open window. Somehow the noise and the stink seemed wonderfully comforting. Okay, so this place wasn’t as spectacular as Australia. But it was home.

  And although he had a day’s grace before getting back to work, he had been unable to relax on Sunday. Words related to ‘death’ and ‘loss’ had been too much in evidence in his waking hours during recent days. They had—maybe—lost Madeleine Tsai, and might have to fly back to Sydney for an inquest. He had definitely lost his chance of a big reward from Old Man Tsai. And Singapore also reminded him of death: Amanda Luk had lost her life, and the assignment at the surgery remained irritatingly in need of resolution. In all, the past week had been far too stressful. He desperately needed to get back to his quiet, safe world of floor plans and ancient calendars.

  But what to do? First, the unquiet spirit at the surgery had to be dealt with.

  On entering the offices, Wong had immediately noticed that both Liew and Leibler had changed noticeably since the events of Thursday morning. Both seemed years older. The tall, angular Liew Yok Tse was stooped and shrunken, and appeared to have lost weight. He and Cheung Lai Kuen stood close together, apparently taking comfort from each other’s presence. She held on to his arm.

  Gibson Leibler had lost his strut. There was no spring in his step. His head was bowed. He shuffled on his feet, his face unshaven and his eyes looking sore. He noticed that the surgeon’s collar was standing awry on one side and his left ear contained a spot of shaving cream. The implication was that this was a man who was living alone. Had he walked out on Cady? Or had she thrown him out?

  Both of them watched from the waiting room as the feng shui master entered the haunted surgery holding his lo pan and another, smaller device, which was encased in plain wood and had unusual markings on it. He walked carefully around the room once with his lo pan and then put it down on the tray next to the dentist’s chair.

  ‘He’s in the chair,’ whispered Joyce. ‘The ghost. He’s in the chair. I can hear him.’

  Wong picked up the other device.

  ‘What is that?’ asked the young woman, who was watching carefully from behind the outward-opening door.

  ‘Feng shui metal finder.’

  ‘Never heard of that before.’

  ‘It is for finding unseen metal. These days usually you can get a floor plan. Will show you where metal pipes are.

  This is good when you need to find metal not on floor plan.’

  Wong carefully went around the edges of the room and stopped when he got to one of the side walls. He slowly lowered his compass to ankle level and then lifted it up as far as he could reach. Then he bought it back down again, roughly to shoulder level.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is metal here which is causing the problem.’

  ‘Ahhhh,’ moaned the ghost. ‘Owww-unhh.

  ’ Wong marked the spot on the wall with his pencil and then reached down into his bag. He lifted out a drill with a fine point and plugged it into a socket he found near the sink.

  ‘What are you doing?’ This was Dr Liew.

  ‘Getting rid of the ghost,’ said Wong.

  ‘Don’t! That stippled wall covering cost a fortune,’ said Lai Kuen, holding on to her boss’s arm. ‘Amanda got her friend to do it. I don’t know if we will be able to replace it. Look, this is ridiculous, can’t you stop him?’ That last comment was aimed at Dr Leibler, who showed no reaction.

  ‘But shouldn’t you find out what the metal is?’ asked Dr Liew. ‘What if it’s a water pipe or something? Or something electrical? You could hurt yourself.’

  ‘Ohhh,’ said the ghost.

  Wong said nothing, but turned the machine on. The whine of the drill in the small room was so loud that all conversation had to stop. The geomancer used two hands to steady the machine as it bit into the plaster. He pressed harder, and the drill head slowly sank in, millimetre by millimetre, with the sound rising a tone as he put pressure behind it.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he shouted.

  ‘Stop!’ yelled Lai Kuen.

  Suddenly the drill changed tone, as it hit something inside the wall. There was a metallic splintering sound.

  Wong turned the drill off. It took a few seconds to whirr to a halt. Silence filled the room. Complete silence. The ghost had gone.

  The feng shui master turned to his assistant. ‘Did you bring invoice book? Is invoice time. Then dinner.’

  More than two thousand years ago, the great sage Confucius was sitting and talking to four young scholars about what would bring happiness to them.

  The first said that he would achieve happiness if he achieved the rank of Minister of Defence.

  The second said that he would have ultimate joy if he became Minister of Finance.

  The third said that he would reach the peak of human pleasure if he became the Emperor’s Master of Ceremonies.

  The fourth student was bored by the discussion. He played his lute.

  Confucius said to him: ‘Tseng Tien, I want you to answer the question.’

  The young man said: ‘Happiness is to be with a group of friends, bathing in the River Yi in late spring.A cooling breeze blows through the rain altars. We sing at the tops of our voices as we stroll home.’

  Confucius said only Tien understood anything about happiness.

  No wisdom has ever surpassed that of Confucius.But one who may have been equally wise was Lao Tzu, Blade of Grass. Two and half millenniums ago, he said:‘He who is satisfied, is rich.’

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong, part 351

  ‘What is that thing, anyway?’ Madame Xu stared suspiciously at the dish on the table.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Joyce. She flicked through a book on Australia that Brett Kilington had given her. ‘It’s that.’ She held the book up and showed Madame Xu the image. ‘It’s called a kangaroo.’

  ‘But what IS a kangaroo?’

  ‘It’s a native of Australia.’

  ‘Really,’ said Madame Xu, amazed. ‘And to think my nephew married one of those to get a passport.’

  Joyce had bought some kangaroo meat and a box of macadamia chocolates back as a souvenir of Sydney. Ah-Fat had agreed to stir-fry the kangaroo meat as long as he could have a portion himself out of curiosity.

  ‘Tastes like chicken,’ said Joyce.

  ‘I’m not really sure if I want to eat it,’ said Madame Xu. ‘It’s got such fat legs in the picture. I’m worried it might give me fat legs.’

  ‘If eating this stuff makes you fat, we’d better force-feed CF with large amounts of it,’ said Dilip Kenneth Sinha. ‘He looks skinnier than ever. It must have been all the stress of your adventures in Australia.’

  ‘Australia very nice place,’ mused Wong. ‘But very shocking things happen there. Police they arrest you all the time. Every five minute, almost. Worse than China even. But policemen not so bad as some China policemen.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Joyce. ‘The first time they arrested us it was because of Brett. And the second time, they did have a pretty good reason for detaining us and talking to us. They thought we were landing helicopters on their most famous national building.’

  ‘It all sounds much too dramatic and exciting for me,’ said Sinha. ‘Thank goodness I wasn’t there. Sampling this kangaroo meat is probably enough exciteme
nt for me.’

  ‘It’s full of crocodiles too,’ Madame Xu said. ‘And arboretums’ ‘Aboriginals,’ Joyce interposed after some thought. ‘That’s what we call the native peoples of Australia. It’s a good place.

  If you ever go down there, I’ll give you a list of places to visit.

  Nightclubs, shops, everything. Fab CD shops. They’ve got it all.’

  ‘Why don’t we plan a joint excursion?’ Sinha suggested.

  ‘This is not a meeting to plan our holidays,’ said Madame Xu. ‘This is a working dinner. And we can get to work now, because the final member is here.’

  Superintendent Gilbert Tan hurried into the night market.

  ‘So sorry, so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m very late, is it? Helluva rude of me. Food here already, good, good, then we can start eating right away.’

  ‘Try this,’ said Madame Xu. ‘It’s special. Joyce bought it from Australia.’

  ‘What is it?’ the police officer asked, shuffling his seat close to the table and sniffing deeply.

  ‘It’s slices of Australian natives. Apparently everybody eats them down there. It’s allowed. They are known as arboretums.’

  ‘Sounds yummy, but perhaps I go for something more familiar,’ said the Superintendent, pushing the dish away and reaching for a dish of char kway teow.

  The police officer suddenly stopped, mid-grab. He looked over at Joyce. ‘Before I forget, I just want to say I’m sorry about your friend, Joyce. The girl who died in Australia?’

  ‘Poor dear Clara,’ Madame Xu said.

  ‘Madeleine,’ Wong said.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing but I knew she would die the moment I saw the picture of her hand,’ the fortune-teller said. ‘It was tragic but it had to be.’

  ‘Er, thanks.’ Joyce quickly wiped the smile off her face. ‘It was, er, very sad. But I think she’s in a better place sort of thing?’

  Madame Xu put her hands together prayerfully. ‘A paradise where there is no more laughter and no more tears.’

  ‘Yeah. Whatever.’

  There was little conversation for the next fourteen minutes, and the members of the investigative advisory committee of the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics did justice to the creations of Ah-Fat, the night market’s best chef. Despite his protestations, Superintendent Tan consumed most of the kangaroo, which had been cooked rendang style.

  Only when all appeared to be reaching a point of satiety did thoughts turn to matters of work.

  ‘Now,’ said Gilbert Tan. ‘What do we have to report?’

  He looked from face to face.

  ‘I want to hear Wong’s story about the dentists,’ said the fortune-teller. ‘So what happened? I am all on tenterhooks. Is the ghost exorcised?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Wong looked up from his journal, in which he had started scribbling again. ‘It was quite simple. But I had to put some different things together.’

  ‘I helped,’ said Joyce proudly. ‘In fact, if not for me, he might not have been able to solve the thing, right, CF?’

  The geomancer gave her a sidelong glance. ‘The problem was not too difficult. Simple mathematics. A matter of putting one and one together.’

  ‘Two and two.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two and two,’ said Joyce. ‘The phrase is, putting two and two together. Not one and one.’

  ‘Same-same.’ The geomancer turned to Madame Xu. ‘You see, it was easy for someone like me, who always has pen and paper and is scribbling. I wrote down the times of the visit of the ghost. Saturday at one afternoon, Monday at nine morning, Tuesday at six afternoon, Wednesday at four afternoon. You see?’

  Sinha jotted it all down. ‘No, I can’t see any pattern. No, wait, hang on . . . Yes. No. No, I don’t get it.’

  ‘I cannot do sums,’ said Madame Xu. ‘Concepcion does all the household accounts for me. I don’t know where I would be without her.’

  ‘Aha!’ This was Sinha, who had continued to scrawl in a tiny hand. ‘I’ve got it. The ghost was on a timer. It went off every eleven hours. So it also went off, let me see, at 11 p.m. on Sunday morning, 10 p.m. on Sunday night, 8 p.m. on Monday night, 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning and 5 a.m. Wednesday and, and, 3 a.m. Thursday, but no one was there to hear it at those hours. Those not being office hours.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong. ‘Regular yet not regular.’

  ‘Suspiciously regular for a ghost,’ said the Indian astrologer.

  ‘Or to put it another way, suspiciously irregular, since the ghosts I know prefer to appear at the same time every year. Certainly not in 11-hour cycles.’

  ‘Can I tell them my contribution now, CF, please?’ said Joyce excitedly.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Well, it was like this, see? We were in the airport in Sydney and he was telling me all this about the ghost arriving and the fact that it seemed to be on an 11-hour cycle. We noticed from his notes that the time from when the ghost started moaning to his last groan was always an hour and fourteen minutes. You know what lasts exactly an hour and fourteen minutes, don’t you? Only one thing in the world.’

  There was silence.

  ‘The last act of La Boheme?’ offered Sinha.

  ‘Part one of The Sound of Music?’ suggested Madame Xu.

  ‘No. Do you give up?’

  Sinha put his fingertips together. ‘We do not. Let me think. The exchange of vows at an Indian wedding? A business lunch at Raffles? A taxi drive from Tampines to Sentosa during rush hour?’

  ‘No. Now do you give up?’

  ‘I do,’ said Madame Xu.

  ‘I most certainly do not,’ said Sinha. ‘I can never resist a challenge and I will never give up. Let me think. Oh, I don’t know. I give up too. Do tell.’

  ‘A minidisc,’ said Joyce, clapping her hands together with glee. ‘You know. Seventy-four minutes?’

  There was silence.

  ‘A minidisc,’ repeated Joyce. ‘You know, the recordable disc players from Japan? Like CDs but small, teeny things, squarish?’

  The astrologer looked at the fortune-teller. ‘This thing.’ She fumbled in her bag and handed over a square of metal.

  ‘We used to call these pocket transistors,’ said Sinha.

  ‘Yes, but they don’t call them radios any more,’ said Madame Xu. ‘Concepcion’s daughter has one. They call them Walkie-Talkie-Men or something, right?’

  ‘Er, sort of,’ said Joyce, ‘Anyway, the discs that you get with these machines, they are always seventy-four minutes long. So we worked out that the ghost was made of one of these things hooked up to an 11-hour timer. It was buried in the wall. Wired up to the electricity supply.’

  Madame Xu was confused. ‘But why did the sound come from the middle of the room when it was really from a machine in the wall? CF said that the moaning came from just above the chair.’

  Wong explained: ‘The machine was hidden away. Two speakers were buried in the wall. One on one side, one on the other side. Special effect. If you stand in the front of the room, sound seems to come from in between. New invention.

  Called stereo.’

  ‘It’s not a new invention. My dad’s had a stereo for years,’ said Joyce. ‘It must have been invented at least ten years ago.

  Anyway, there’s this thing called stereo imaging. They’ve had it years, only these days they do it better and with smaller speakers. My dad’s—’ ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ sighed Madame Xu. ‘I am really far too old for all this.’

  ‘Here,’ said the young woman, pulling a magazine from her sack. ‘I bought this from the airport bookshop to explain it to CF. There’s an article in here which will explain.’

  Madame Xu looked at the magazine: ‘Rocksoff. I don’t think I subscribe to this particular journal.’

  ‘You should. You’d really like it. There’s a column on page 62 called High End Audiophile. It’s about spatial imaging and all that stuff. You should read it. It’s a good magazine. My dad gets it. I’ll lend that one to you if you like.’
>
  ‘That’s really very generous of you, dear.’

  Wong interrupted to interpret. ‘The sound comes from both sides, two speakers. But if you use correct speakers, correct volume, from some parts of the room it sounds like sound comes from middle of room. Between speakers instead of from speakers. Very clever. Special effect.’

  ‘Ah. I see,’ said the fortune-teller.

  ‘But who did it?’ asked Sinha. ‘The American I suppose?

  Wanted to scare off his Singaporean partner and nab the business for himself?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Wong. ‘I am only feng shui man. Not police man. Superintendent Tan is looking at the case. He will tell us in good time. It was not Dr Leibler who organise the ghost, I think.’

  ‘CF and I talked about this on the way here. We reckon it might not have been the dentists at all,’ said Joyce. ‘It was probably that woman Amanda Luk, who was killed last week. Sorry to speak ill of the dead and all that. Thank God I never met her. It would be awful to meet someone who died. But she redecorated the office, remember? Before they moved in. She got her friends to install that sound equipment there while they did the place up. Maybe.’

  ‘What was the motive?’ asked Sinha.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Joyce. ‘She wanted to get rid of Dr Liew. Scare him off. That’s what I think.’

  ‘But do you have any idea why she did it?’

  ‘Dunno. My theory is that she had something going with Dr Leibler, but Dr Leibler won’t divorce his wife and marry her because he doesn’t have enough patients. Not enough income. Getting divorced is the most expensive thing you ever do in your life—that’s what my dad says. So I reckon Amanda Luk cooked up this scheme to get rid of Dr Liew, so Dr Leibler gets all the patients at that practice, marries her and they live happily ever after?’

  ‘So who or what killed Amanda Luk?’ This was Madame Xu.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Joyce. ‘But I know it wasn’t a ghost. Maybe it was Dr Liew. Or maybe the other woman assistant at the surgery did it.’