The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (14 page)

Puk, a tired-looking man who seemed too heavy to be in his present profession, led them to a small office set into the ground floor of the car park building. While they were walking, he used his walkie-talkie to summon someone else. ‘Harris Wu there, is it? This is Puk. Could you get him to come over to my office? Tell him the
feng shui
people are here. Yah. Now. Over.’

They heard a roar as Dick Curdy drove his elegant, low-slung replica vintage car into the garage block. It made a purring noise that kept changing in tone as it drove up a network of ramps to the third storey.

Wong had already noticed that people on the site, like the ancient Israelites, refused to utter the name of their leader. He was referred to simply by the reverential pronoun ‘He’ — clearly spoken with a capital initial.

The three of them sat down at a desk in a tiny office.

‘The usual rules apply,’ Puk said. ‘You know already, is it?’

‘No,’ Joyce said.

‘Yes,’ Wong said. ‘You mean stuff is confidential?’

‘Yah, man.
Nutting
you say or hear while working on His premises can be pass’ on to anyone else—media or newspaper man, broadcaster, like that—and no photography or recording of any kind is allowed and all that stuff, et cetera, et cetera, you know? Just sign here.’

Puk made them both sign a privacy contract that was far too long and boring to read. Then he threw it carelessly into a filing cabinet.

Another man arrived, a tall, thin, bow-tied man with Shanghainese features and an educated Singaporean accent. He was wheeling an office chair in front of him. He squeezed through the doorway and handed his name card to the two visitors. ‘Harris Wu,’ he announced. ‘I’m the architect for all His Ridley Park buildings. You the
feng shui
consultants, is it?’

After they all shook hands, Wong aimed his attention back to the security officer. The sheer depth of the gloom emanating from the man drew his eyes like a magnet. The man was so filled with depression that he looked as if he might implode. ‘Okay. What do you need from us?’

Wong leaned forwards. ‘Is there specific problem? Or he just want general
feng shui
reading?’

For a few seconds, Puk did not answer. Then he tilted his head back and surveyed the ceiling. His expression changed slightly, from misery to irritation. ‘You mean He didn’t tell you?’

‘Tell what?’

‘There
is
something specific you have to handle.’ Puk clasped his hands together, suddenly serious. ‘I guess the Chairman want
me
to brief you only. Well, this may sound crazy, but . . .’ His voice trailed off and he turned to the window, as if the words he was seeking might be etched on the glass.

They waited.

He abruptly turned back. ‘Three cars have been stolen. He doesn’t like it when His cars are stolen. He doesn’t want any more cars to disappear. If more cars are stolen, He will be very, very angry. We do not want to see Him very, very angry. That’s the size of it, really.’

‘Ah. Stolen. Bad. Mr Au Yeung call police?’ Wong asked.

Puk nodded. ‘Oh yes, we did all the obvious stuff. We call police. We call private detectives even. And that’s after His own staff did a comprehensive check. The Chairman has His own police force, sort of thing, you know?’

‘Find anything?’

Puk looked uncomfortable again. ‘No. Couldn’t work out how it was done. How they were taken. All three cars disappear—poof—in broad daylight. We have security cameras at the only one exit-entry station, and yet we have no video record of cars being driven out. Somehow they were taken out of the building, but not through driveway.’

‘What cars was it?’ the
feng shui
master asked.

‘Jaguar XK160, 1930 Aston Martin and 132 Bugatti. All very rare one.’

‘What other ways are there out of the building?’ Joyce asked.

Architect Wu volunteered an answer: ‘There aren’t any. Well, there’s the fire stairs.’

‘But cars can’t go down the stairs.’

‘Correct.’

‘So how did the thieves get them out?’

Wu shrugged his shoulders. ‘We don’t know.’

Puk clasped his hands together again and gave the frozen smile of a man forced to speak nonsense. ‘They vanished into thin air.’ He clicked his sweaty fingers. ‘One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone. How did they do it? I don’t know. Ask David Copperfield. Maybe Mr Copperfield took them. For me, that’s the only sensible suggestion.’

‘So you contack this Mr Copperfield?’ Wong wanted to hear more about this suspect.

Joyce whispered much too loudly: ‘He’s joking. David Copperfield doesn’t nick cars. He just makes like aircraft disappear.’

‘He is aircraft thief? Corporate jet of Mr Au Yeung?’

Puk stepped in. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have confused the issue. The jets are fine. Just the cars are gone. Three of them, anyway.’

Wong pulled at the little hairs on his chin. ‘Maybe someone tamper with video cameras?’

‘Naah,’ said Puk. ‘I thought of that. No one has tampered with those things. I check them myself every morning. Besides, there are human staff as well as cameras at the in-out ramp.’

Joyce excitedly turned to the architect and gestured with her hands as she spoke. ‘Maybe there’s a secret tunnel somewhere, and they drove the cars away down them. Or maybe someone lifted them off the roof with a helicopter.’

Harris Wu just stared at her. He seemed to be wondering whether to dignify her ideas with a reply. ‘I built this place,’ he said at last, an icy edge to his voice. ‘I think I would probably know if there were tunnels or helicopter landing pads.’ He closed his eyes and his lips thinned. His expression said: God give me patience to deal with fools.

She bit her bottom lip and nodded apologetically. ‘I guess so,’ she whispered, feeling one centimetre high. ‘Sorry.’

Wu opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He moved forwards and his office chair creaked. ‘It’s like this. We don’t know how the cars were spirited out of the building. Puk and I, we checked and re-checked every single possibility. So then . . .’ He looked to the security guard, unsure of how to continue.

‘Tell them,’ said Puk. It was not an instruction, but a challenge.

‘Okay, I will. You see, the Chairman’s, er, latest, er, wife, comes up with a new idea. She says they were stolen by mystical means. Black magic. Wacky stuff. Anyway, the amazing thing is that the Chairman takes it seriously. So He says He will sort it out by Himself. The next thing we know was half an hour ago, when the Chairman’s secretary calls me to tell me that some
feng
shui
masters are on their way. They’re going to solve the problem for us. That’s you guys. So go on then. You better get started.’

Wong was worried. He slowly shook his head. ‘Finding stolen cars is job for police, not for us.’ He was concerned that the outrageous fees he was planning to charge would become contingent on the cars being recovered—and finding stolen property was much harder than simply doing a reading of a car park.

Puk seemed to read his mind. He said: ‘We’re not expecting you to find the cars, I think. I think the Chairman is just covering His, er, just anxious to cover all possibilities. You just need to make sure that no more cars are stolen. If anyone tries to drive one out, I’ll stop them. But if anyone tries to take one out through, er, mystical means, that’s your job—to prevent it, I mean. To make sure that mystical means cannot be used to steal cars in the future? See what I mean?’

Wong felt reassured. His income, in that case, might be safe.

The heavy security guard rose awkwardly to his feet, signifying that their briefing was over. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you the tour.’

The four of them walked up the ramps that took the cars between the various levels. Puk explained that there was a staircase they could use, but they would get a better feel of the place by using the vehicle access routes.

It was immediately apparent that the garage was a hot and unpleasant place. There was no cooling system, although there were extractor vents that took some of the fumes out of the air. The place smelled of cars and gasoline, and you couldn’t spend five minutes there without feeling damp and uncomfortable.

As they slogged their way up the slopes, Wu gave them a run-down of how the garage worked. The three levels had different functions. The ground floor was used for the cars Nevis Au Yeung used most often—four or five luxury sedans, a stretch limo, a couple of sports utility vehicles and a few two-seater sports cars. The middle floor and half the upper floor were used for cars belonging to other members of his family, plus the staff cars and minivans. The rear half of the upper floor housed the tycoon’s collection of classic cars. On the east side of each floor, there was a cluster of rooms. The small ones on the ground floor were the car park management offices. The tiny, windowless ones on the middle floor were used for storage. And the large, sticking-out ones on the third floor were staff quarters for Allie Ng, the night guard, who was the only employee who lived on the site.

Wong wrote everything down in a notebook, and asked several questions about the flow of cars through the building.

Wu, surprised and thrilled to find someone interested in car park architecture, spoke at length about construction details, boasting about how the building had been completed in a record fifteen weeks. ‘When you build a car park, you start off with some basic questions. Do you want two-way flow or one-way flow?’

The
feng shui
man nodded. ‘Same with
ch’i.
Flow very important.’

‘People assume that straight lines, quick in and out, is the best. But in fact, that would result in the vehicles moving too fast. Quite dangerous. So we actually deliberately build in a few twists and turns to slow people down.’

‘Movement of
ch’i
energy just the same. Must flow, but not too fast. Just the same.’

‘How interesting. Another issue is the angle of the actual car park lots. There has been a big fashion for angled spaces, but as you can see, I’ve opted for ninety-degree spaces in this car park. I find that angled spaces confuse drivers, and if you go for a one-way flow, you can’t risk that. Someone drives the wrong way around a one-way system and—crash!’ He clapped his hands together for effect. The sound echoed in the hard-surfaced space.

Warming to his subject, Wu spoke in detail about the particular challenges of accommodating his employer’s car collection. ‘In the old days, car parks were for junior architects. Every slot was 2.4 metres by 4.8 metres. A monkey could do it. But these days . . .’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You wouldn’t believe how complicated it can be. The traditional luxury car, like a 230 Mercedes-Benz, would just about fit into a standard slot. But now His children keep buying these fancy four-wheel drive cars—you know what I mean?— which are almost two metres wide. Stick two of them next to each other and neither can open their doors. And the Chairman bought a Jaguar XJ8 last year. It’s even wider than an SUV and has a turning circle of 11.5 metres. That means a major change in the way we design the ramp entry points.’

‘Flow at corners very important,’ Wong agreed.

‘Two-way flow systems achieve more turnover, but turnover was not my prime interest with this particular project. My dream was to achieve the most flexible car park possible within the limitations set.’ Wu’s eyes filled with passion as he spoke.

Joyce watched the two men with wide eyes. She found it astonishing that people could possibly become so enthusiastic about anything as boring as a car park.

Fortunately for her, an exhaustive tour didn’t take long. On the ground floor and the middle one, there was not much to see—after all, a car park was a car park. But then they reached the top floor, and could feel both Puk and Wu start to become tense.

‘And here we have His pride and joy,’ said Puk. ‘The classic collection and the vintage collection.’

Before them were more than a dozen cars which looked like they had come straight out of a museum. There were boxy vehicles on thin, spindly wheels from the beginning of the 20th century. There were curved, gangsterish cars from the 1930s. And there were over-sized, angular sedans that evoked America in the 1950s.

‘Phoo! These are
sooo
cool,’ the young woman said.

‘Yeah. And wait till you see the last one,’ said Harris Wu. ‘It’s fabulous. It was built before 1920. A royal blue Alfa Romeo 24. Gorgeous.’ He pointed to an enclosed area with a heavy metal shutter lowered over the entrance—a garage within a garage. ‘It’s in there. I’m sure the Curdy boys won’t mind. It’s a dust-free climate-controlled area. Probably the most hi-tech garage in Singapore.’

Security guard Puk held up his hand. ‘No. The Alfa 24 is a very valuable car. We keep a record of every time that door is open and closed. We can’t just open and close it when we feel like, just to show visitors. I think —’

Wu threw up his fingers in surrender. ‘Hey. I’m cool. You can see it another time. Perhaps when the Curdys are finished for the day.’

The dispute, although trivial, somehow raised the level of tension in the group. The thread of the conversation broken, the sound of the birds outside and the scraping of the cicadas suddenly seemed curiously loud.

Joyce decided to break the awkward silence. ‘These ancient cars are like so amazing. I mean, do they like actually
work
? Does old Nevis, I mean, your chairman-geezer, drive around in them?’

Wu thought about this. ‘Well . . . yes, they do work, but, no, He doesn’t drive around in them. He used to. Usually what happens is that He gets one, and He’s very excited, and drives around in it for a day or so, and then He puts it in here and more or less forgets about it. Then He goes off on his travels, and gets busy with other stuff.’

‘What a waste.’

‘Yeah. But when He’s in town, or has guests, He likes to come up here and look at the cars. He strokes their hoods. He talks to them. They’re nice to have. And they’re an investment. They accumulate value. The cars in this building are worth almost as much as a decent-sized skyscraper.’

Wong was prowling around the floor. ‘What are in those rooms?’ He pointed to the doors on the east side of the building.