The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (12 page)

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.

Geez. That’s like
so
amazing. Wait till I tell the gang.’

Wong, speaking in bursts between consuming large amounts of dim sum, explained that Mrs Mirpuri believed her daughter had been snatched by persons unknown on her way home from a shopping trip on Sunday evening. A ransom note had been delivered to the family home the following morning. But the mother did not think the kidnapping was particularly serious.

The crime may have been committed by a policeman friend of theirs, the mother had said. Danita had just announced her engagement and it might be some sort of jealousy problem.

‘Gotcha,’ said Joyce, nodding sagely. ‘It’s lurrve. That fits.

If I know Dani Mirpuri.’

‘Lerv?’ asked Wong, pausing with a chicken foot halfway to his mouth. ‘What means lerv?’

‘Lurrve is a type of love. If you love your mum or your dog or ’N Sync, that’s love. But if it’s like so heavy, you know, a big deal, with like drama and, and, you know the sort of thing, you want to kill yourself or something—like something in a movie—then it’s lurrve.’

‘I see.’

Joyce smiled. ‘That is
so
Dani. I only like really talked to her a few times, but both times she went on and on about the guys who were after her. There was one guy called Roger. I remember that, because I remember telling her that I thought it was a dorky name. Can’t remember what she said he did. And the other guy . . . there was a guy called Kinny she used to talk about. I think he was a policeman. Yes, that’s right, the policeman.’

Wong saw an opportunity to get a bit of peace and quiet so that he could enjoy his breakfast. ‘Idea,’ he said. ‘Why not this be your case? You can do main investigation. You know everybody. I can work on other case. House burning down case. Ridley Park. With Madame Xu.’

‘Really? Me do it? That would be like so cool.’

‘But you must be careful. Gather facts. Write down. Consider. Phone people.’

Joyce was thrilled. ‘This has gotta be my case, if you think about it. I know all the suspects and the victim and everything. I bet I can work it out. A kidnapping! But this is like
so
incredible. Totally.’

She pulled out the remains of the office mobile phone and started dialling her friends, while Wong gratefully devoted himself to the meal. He angled his seat slightly to one side, so he would not have to look at her.

Over the next ten minutes, Joyce had long, involved conversations with each of the members of her gang and several of their associates, making copious scribbled notes on pages of her Filofax. ‘He did what? And she’s like . . . ? Yeah. Gotcha. When? But what was he like? No, not what he looked like. What was he
like
? Nice guy type, evil kidnapper type, you know, what?’

They left the restaurant thirteen minutes later, and Joyce insisted on making a stop at Delifrance to have her own breakfast. Wong had an odd feeling that someone was watching them through the window—but when he turned to look, there was no one there.

As she wolfed down eggs, ham and croissants, she told her employer what she had learned. ‘There were basically three guys in Dani’s life. Ram was a geeky Indian kid who his parents wanted her to marry. Quite rich. But he had a beard which turned her off. Real scratchy. She was also going with this policeman called Kinny Mak, who was like totally besotted with her, you know? Then there was this other guy called Charles Something who she met at a club and really hit it off with.’

‘Hit what off with?’

‘Just
it.
It means, like, they were really in tune with each other.’

‘Karaoke?’

‘No, they just met at Dan’s. But Charles was like an investment banker or something like that. Pots of dosh. Or so he said. Nike reckons that she must’ve run off with him, because he was like the most exciting. But I dunno. If he had loadsa money, they wouldn’t need to do any sort of kidnap–ransom scam, would they? I think it’s more likely that she has run off with Kinny Mak. I mean, if he’s a policeman, he wouldn’t earn very much, so they would need to do some sort of scam to get some money out of her folks, right?’

‘But a policeman would not do a kidnap, I think.’

‘Normally, yes. But what if it’s lurrve? Lurrve makes people do strange things. That’s why they call it lurrve.’

Wong made a mental note to look that one up in his
Shorter
Oxford
when he returned to the office.

They sat on the top deck of the SBS bus, an odd couple, fascinated by each other, but without the slightest trace of romance. ‘I love travelling in the front seat of the top deck of the bus,’ said Madame Xu Chong Li. ‘One feels satisfyingly ahead of the crowd.’

‘Unfortunately that would also be true if the bus crashed and we were all flung headlong through the front window. We would take first place,’ Dilip Sinha replied.

‘What a morbid mind you have. All that time last year spent helping the homicide squad, I suppose.’

‘Possibly.’

‘It’s the view from here that’s nice.’

Just then, the bus pulled up right behind another, and some small boys sitting in the back seat of the vehicle in front pressed their noses against the glass, making faces at the couple.

‘The view is ever changing,’ said Sinha.

They conversed in a genial, relaxed fashion, but would sometimes go for several minutes without even a glance at each other. Instead, their eyes crawled over the city streets, collecting data and filing it away for future use.

It wasn’t until they were a good twenty minutes into their journey to the Chettiar Temple at the junction of Tank Road and River Valley Road, next to Fort Canning Park, that Sinha realised that something was wrong. Madame Xu was preoccupied with something. The gaps between the bits of small talk were a fraction longer than they should have been. She cut from topic to topic much more often than normal. And her right hand was twitching restlessly, as she played incessantly with a heavy ring on her index finger.

He turned and looked at her face. There was an extra wrinkle between her eyebrows, a heaviness around her mouth. He was suddenly convinced: she was harbouring a worry that she had not shared with him. It was his duty as a friend, he decided, to see if there was anything he could do to help.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It may never happen.’

She turned to him in surprise. ‘You know?’ she said, astonished.

‘Of course I do. A man with my skills naturally has a sensitivity to disturbances such as the one that is currently causing you great concern. Worrying about something which may or may not happen is like paying rent on an apartment you may never need.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘Let us just say: it came to me.’

‘That’s remarkable.’ She was silent for a moment, apparently dealing with a new level of respect for her friend’s psychic ability. She turned to look him in the eye before speaking again.

‘How much do you know?’

‘Everything,’ he said, using his large hands to make an all-encompassing flourish. ‘I have been your friend for many years, after all. You have no secrets from me. I hate to see you repressing your unhappiness.’

The conversation stopped there for a pregnant pause. The bus continued on its way for another two minutes before they exchanged words again.

Madame Xu laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course!’

Sinha looked at her with a smile. ‘Returning to your normal self?’

‘I should have guessed,’ the fortune-teller said with breezy cheeriness. ‘When I swore to tell not a soul about it, I should have realised that my twin soul was an exception—had to be an exception.’

‘There can be no secrets between us.’

‘Exactly! How can two people who can read each other’s minds have secrets between them? It’s simply impossible. This is nothing to do with breaking pledges of secrecy. It is simply a fact of life for psychic people. Secrets cannot exist for us. He should know that. Being one himself.’

Sinha made a grunt of agreement, but wondered if he was losing the thread of the conversation. He imagined that secrets must be an awful thing for a person like Madame Xu to deal with. With her habit of uttering almost everything that floated through her mind, it would be difficult to keep one set of facts locked away.

The thought reminded him about the one secret he himself had promised to keep, the previous morning: the analysis he had shared of Ismail’s client Clara—she with the shocking astrological chart that descended into immediate oblivion. His instinct had been to race to consult experts, to work as a team to find ways of reinterpreting or reversing this awful fate, to look for remedies that would save her.

But the Malaysian
bomoh
had been adamant. He had revealed his secrets to him under pain of confidentiality unto death. Sinha had agreed to the conditions, and was ready to abide by them. Amran Ismail had said he needed to deal with the issue himself.

‘Secrets are heavy things,’ Sinha said philosophically to his companion on the bus. ‘Because they exist to us, yet they do not exist to the people around us. Thus the burden of carrying them cannot be shared. The loneliness of the mission appears to amplify the weight of the burden.’

‘It’s not being able to DO anything about it that makes it difficult for me,’ said Madame Xu. ‘As you know, I am no talker. I am a doer. Strong, silent type.’

‘Er, up to a point,’ Sinha said. ‘But you know, I feel exactly the same about the burdens I carry for clients and friends of clients. For how can one know about impending crises without acting upon them? Especially when the secret one is carrying is one with the gravest of repercussions for the person concerned.’

Madame Xu’s unexpected reaction to this statement was a broad smile. ‘You DO know. You really do,’ she trilled. ‘Well.

How remarkable.’ She shook her head in happy amazement. ‘I have long known that you and I have a spiritual connection, but I never realised that it is really true that we can have no secrets between us. Our ability to read each other’s minds make it quite impossible.’

Sinha gazed at her.

‘So what are we going to do about Clara?’ said Madame Xu.

‘We have to do something.’

Now it was Sinha’s turn to be amazed. She knew! ‘You know about that?’ he breathed.

‘This is what we are talking about, is it not?’ she asked.

‘Er, yes. It is. It is.’ Sinha put one hand on her shoulder.

‘Let’s get this straight. A Malaysian
bomoh
called Amran Ismail came to you, shared with you the details of a client for whom death is prophesied, and asked for you to confirm the prediction—is that what happened?’

‘It is.’

‘And he made you swear not to tell another living soul about it, upon pain of death?’

‘Correct.’

‘You swore on a chicken?’

‘I did.’

‘Fresh blood on your wrists?’

‘Gravy, really.’

‘Gravy? Curious. And your reading of the data of the young woman, whose name is Clara, confirms what his initial reading said: that she is going to die on a certain date in the very near future? Possibly even Friday this week?’