The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (5 page)

He pointed to the corner of the office where the kitchen items were. ‘Knifes, waste bin, toilets, these things very negative. Things which look like those things, or which remind you of those things, also very bad. Understand? Never associate Mr Tik or his career or home with any of those things, understand or not?’

‘Yeah-yeah. Peasy.’

There was one other thing he was nervous about: her use of English. ‘Also, please try to talk so Mr Tik understand what you say.’

‘He speaks English?’

‘Yes, he speaks English.’

‘So . . . ?’

The
feng shui
master took a moment to consider how to explain. He picked up his
Dictionary of Contemporary English
Idioms
and tapped it. ‘Mr Tik, he does not speak your English. He speak
this
English: It is raining cats and dogs. The proof is in the pudding. Goodness what a palaver.’

‘Say
what?
’

‘Speak in simple way to him, please.’

‘No worries. I’m cool. This is so like groady to the max.’

He closed his eyes. A man could only pray.

Joyce gathered together all the papers, squashed them into her bag, and set off for the block on Fort Canning Road. The door slammed shut, the
shh-chka-shh-chka-shh-chka
noise vanished into the distance, and silence fell like a curtain.

Suddenly he was free of fishy Mr Tik, free of Joyce, and free of pressure. His secretary–administrator Winnie Lim had not turned up for work, so the stillness in the office was complete. It felt weird. It felt unfamiliar. It felt wonderful. He determined to attempt to arrange external assignments for Joyce on a daily basis, even if they were
pro bono
assignments.

Once more Wong started thinking of ways to celebrate. Singing and dancing were definitely out, he decided, but the second-breakfast idea was a winner. He picked up the phone and ordered a special delivery of dim sum.

Fu, the septuagenarian deliveryman, turned up twenty minutes later with three steaming bags. In traditional Shanghainese street-food style, the restaurant hadn’t bothered with polystyrene boxes. Staff had simply thrown the dim sum into translucent plastic bags and sprinkled them with soy sauce and chilli oil.

While waiting, Wong had made a pot of green tea. The deliveryman let himself in and carelessly dropped the bags on the table. One tipped over. A yellow pork siu mai rolled across the table, leaving a trail of oil across the papers.

‘Aiyeeah!’ shouted the
feng shui
master. ‘You nearly spoil cheque!’ He grabbed an envelope containing payment from a customer, kissed the oil off it, and tucked it into his inside pocket.

Excitedly, he opened one of the bags and the cloying aroma of sweet glutinous sauces filled his wide nostrils. ‘You have one,’ he said generously, holding the bag out to the old man.

‘Already got,’ Fu replied, pointing to his stuffed left cheek.

Wong counted the dumplings in his bag and realised that the deliveryman had helped himself to a significant proportion of the meal as commission for bringing it. This was outrageous, but the geomancer couldn’t bring himself to be in a bad mood today. He wiped up the oily residue from his desk with some tissues from a toilet roll in his bottom drawer and picked up a toothpick with which to stab the dumplings.

‘Mmm,
ho mei
,’ he mumbled to Fu’s retreating back as he placed a whole har gow between his yellowing teeth and an explosion of grease filled his mouth. Life was improving and could conceivably get better.

Which was the moment Winnie Lim arrived.

She pushed the door open with such force that it bounced off the wall.

He was about to scold her for being late, but she was faster off the mark. ‘Mean one you. Why you not share? Also I want,’ she said, staring at his steaming collection of plastic bags.

The secretary scraped her chair over to his desk and started transferring the dumplings to her mouth at a steady, machinelike pace. Wong lifted his own game to match. For several minutes, the only sounds in the office were sloppy, competitive chompings from Wong and Lim.

Then the geomancer looked up at his secretary, putting on his sternest
I-am-big-boss
voice. ‘Joyce this morning go to do Mr Tik. If no problem, then we give her plenty more assignment.’ He spoke with his mouth full, oil dribbling down his chin. ‘After a while, I do no work. Just count money. Ha ha.’

Winnie gave him a disapproving look and shook her head disdainfully.

He noticed her reaction with irritation and stopped chewing. ‘So? What?’

‘No good,’ the secretary mumbled, also speaking with her mouth full. ‘Joyce cannot do-ah. Bad idea.’

‘Can.’

‘Cannot. She mess up-lah. Joyce is foreigner. Everything also she do wrong.’

‘Easy job I give her. Apartment of Mr Tik very easy.’

Winnie added a third dumpling to the two already in her mouth and spoke indistinctly, spraying grey goo over the desk. ‘Not easy. She mess up. You see.’

He was angry. ‘So many times already I do it, this apartment! Four-five over times. Only need to count fish. What can she do wrong?’ He blinked crossly at her.

She shook her head and stabbed a toothpick violently into a chicken foot from another bag. ‘Sometimes you are a bit stupid boss. Mr Tik move house already. Las’ month. New house, very big. You don’t know?’

CF Wong’s mouth dropped open and a har gow dumpling rolled out, landing squarely in his bo’lei tea with a splash.

Joyce pressed the bell for a third time, and sighed. She told herself that she would patiently count to twenty and if there was still no reply, she would accept that no one was home.
One, two, three, four . . .
‘Bugger,’ she said. Losing patience, she depressed the bell a fourth time, her fingertip turning white with angry pressure.

She was standing on the front step of an old, slightly crumbly block of pale green apartments on the southern side of a gently sloping road in Fort Canning. The address that Wong had given her indicated that Mr Tik lived in the penthouse flat on the fifteenth floor. But there was no answer. Either he was out, he was deaf, or the buzzer didn’t work.

As she stood in a state of confusion on the front step, one of the other residents arrived, input a four-digit code to unlock the door, and strolled in. In typical self-absorbed Singaporean fashion, the man who had arrived gave no indication that he had even seen Joyce. She grabbed the door before it swung back into locked position and followed him in.

The block was old, and there was no guard on the ground floor. Joyce summoned the elevator and was carried slowly and creakily up to the top floor.

Arriving outside an apartment gated with a padlocked heavy steel shutter, she found herself stumped again. She rang the doorbell several times, but there was no response.

The bloody man must have dropped dead, she thought with sudden bitterness. How inconsiderate. This was a rare example of her having been given an entire solo assignment, and it seemed cruel of fate to conspire to make her fail. But what could she do? If he wasn’t in, he wasn’t in. She thought about waiting, but there was no air in the corridor, the space was humid, and she was sweating. Worst of all, there was a nasty odour of fish. She turned away and started to walk back to the elevator.

Then she stopped. Hang on! This was the penthouse. She knew that whoever rented the top flat in this sort of apartment block nearly always got the roof as well. And space being at such a premium in the city-state, residents inevitably made use of the extra space, turning it into a picnic area or roof garden or something. There must be stairs from the apartment level to the roof—and possibly internal access, perhaps a spiral staircase or terrace or something.

‘I’m gonna to do it,’ she said out loud, her hands clenching into determined fists. ‘I’m gonna bloody well get in and bloody well
feng shui
the place.’

Behind the stairwell door she found stained concrete steps leading upwards. She scampered up them into an ill-lit upper landing. Pushing open a metal door, she stepped onto the roof.

She shut her eyes against the glare—after the dark stairwell, the noonday sunshine was painfully bright. Squinting, she could immediately see that the roof space had been divided into three parts, each assigned to one of the three apartments on the top floor. The steps she had climbed opened into a small central area with a few structures that appeared to house electrical and mechanical installations for the whole building. But on each side were fenced-off roof gardens.

Although the tall gate of the roof garden on the north— Mr Tik’s side—was locked, it was the work of a moment for the agile young woman to clamber over. She found herself on a pockmarked, clay-tiled surface irregularly covered with plant pots and plastic garden furniture. Most of the pots were empty and the few that still contained vegetation featured dry, papery brown leaves. The plastic furniture was cracked and broken. The whole roof garden had an abandoned look about it, as if no one had been there for weeks. Well, this was something she could write about in her
feng shui
report, for a start. Pots full of dead flowers were a definite no-no,
that
was for sure.

Joyce strolled over to the edge of the roof and looked over. She quickly found what she was looking for. There was a wide terrace running around the east side of the flat. She would be able to jump down to it without any danger. And even better, there were three windows facing the balcony. One was a set of French windows, and two were normal windows—one which was slightly open. Bingo! Breaking in might be surprisingly easy. Now
this
was showing initiative.

The young woman carefully lowered herself off the edge of the roof and dropped lightly on to the terrace. She couldn’t see inside; heavy curtains blocked the view through the windows. But the lack of light escaping from the edges of the drapes suggested no one was home.

The French windows were locked, so she used an empty plant pot on the balcony to climb up and get onto the sill of the open window.

This is so easy, she thought to herself. She pictured herself reporting back to Wong. ‘Actually, Mr Tik was out and there was nobody there. But I managed to break in and
feng shui
-ed the house anyway.’ He would be like
so
impressed.

Moments later, she was crouching with difficulty on the windowsill, trying to push the curtain obscuring her view to one side.

Just then, her mobile phone started to ring in her left pocket. She awkwardly tried to reach it with her right hand. But the sill was slippery with some sort of lichen, and her right foot, which was bearing her weight, started to slide backwards. She reached out to grab the curtain, but it swung away as she attempted to get a grip on it.

‘Bugger,’ said Joyce as she fell forwards into the darkness and felt herself descending into tepid water. Her head hit something hard and cold and she blacked out. The last thing she remembered was the stench of fish.

‘Aiyeeah!’ said Wong, lowering the handset. ‘No answer.’

He picked up his
lo pan
and put it into his battered case. He would have to go to the correct address and do Mr Tik’s apartment himself.