"The Feng Shui Detective" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vittachi Nury)

1 Scarlet in a study

Recently, one thousand years ago, a sage lived on the Plain of Jars. His name was Lu Hsueh-an. He said, ‘The trappings of a man’s life are not his life. Yet the trappings of a man’s life are his life.’

Is this a contradiction? Yes but also no. Please consider this image.

It is a hot day. You sit under a very small tree. This is good. There is shade. You can see all around you. Nowhere can hide an interloper.

But there is shade for one person only. You have no visitors. You become lonely.

You move to a bigger tree. It has room for two-three guests to share the shade.

This is very nice. But the trunk is a little bit wide. There is a space behind you. You cannot see who is there.

Some of us we grow older. We move to much bigger trees.

You find a banyan tree so big that a whole village can sit in the shade. You have a very big world now. But there is danger. Behind you there is an unknown space as big as the space in front of you.

Some people never get to a large banyan tree. Others move from small to big worlds. But something in their lives shocks them. They go back to very small worlds.

Blade of Grass, when you meet someone you must silently ask them a question. How big is your world? This is one of the most important things you can know about a person.

There are times when you meet someone and you realise that your own world is not big enough to fit them. Then you have a decision. Do you say there is no room? Or do you move to a bigger tree?

Again Lu Hsueh-an said: ‘Do not ask the Immortals how big the world is. You make the world.’

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

by C F Wong, part 73.

C F Wong shut his inky journal and put it and his pen into the drawer. Then he flexed his fingers and stared out of the window. Although he affected the role of the wise old sage when he wrote, there was often a moment when he found himself helplessly transformed into the admonished pupil.

He felt his own world was big, but it was his office that was small. It was the second of these factors that he used to justify his immediate hostility to a request from a person who was above him, in the temporal, corporate sense.

Wong’s secretary and office administrator, Winnie Lim, had delivered the bad news in her broad Singapore-Hokkien accent. ‘One of Mr Pun’s contack, he wan’ a favour. M.C. Queeny or something. He wan’ you to fine a job for his son, you know already, is it?’

‘M.C. Queeny? I have never heard of him.’

‘M. C. Q. U. I. N. N. I. E. The boy’s name is Joe. His daddy is very good client of the company. Friend of Mr Pun. Mr Pun’s secretary, she phone me to tell me. You must give the boy a job for his school holiday, okay or not?’

He sighed. Incursions into his private space always caused discomfort. He knew it was extremely common in this city, as probably in most modern places, for persons in power to find jobs for each other’s sons. The phrase, he thought, was ‘Old Boys’ Network’, or was it ‘Young Boys’ Network’? He must look it up in his dictionary of English idioms. But his office was just two rooms, and his organization was small, consisting of himself, Winnie and occasionally an underemployed Chinese philosophy graduate who did part-time research. He had no budget, no spare desk and no inclination to help.

After a lengthy-for her-pause of three seconds, Winnie added her next bit of news: ‘Mr Pun tol’ me to tell you that he would be extremely pleased if you help. That’s what he said. Extremely pleased.’

This phrase caused a momentary flicker in Wong’s eyes. ‘Ah. I see.’

There was silence in the room as the brain activity of its two occupants switched to the left cerebrum, financial department.

‘How much you think?’

The geomancer pulled thoughtfully at the few straggly hairs on his chin. ‘When he says he is “happy”, it means a little bonus is in the oven. If he is “extremely pleased”, it might mean a pay rise is in the oven.’

‘In the oven?’

‘English colloquial usage. I heard it from Dilip. It means will soon happen.’

‘There is already a pay rise, but not for you-lah, for the office. Retainer is going to be raise’ to cover the boy’s wages.’

‘When?’

‘When he comes.’

‘No. When is he coming?’

‘Nex’ week. Monday.’

‘Oh. We can just give him some filing to do. Keep the child busy. Out of the street. That’s all he wants, really. Mo baan faat. What to do?’

The problem soon started to recede in Wong’s mind. He slowly let out his breath ch’i-gong style, and his fears were expelled with it. There was something about today that was preventing him getting worked up about anything. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it might be. He just seemed to be in the grip of a general feeling of wellbeing.

This positive feeling was more likely to come from inside than out, he knew. The offices of C F Wong amp; Associates were on the second floor of Wai-Wai Mansions, an old Chinese shophouse in a less fashionable quarter of Telok Ayer Street. The small road outside was becoming a busy thoroughfare, and the floor regularly shook as heavy vehicles rumbled past. This morning, traffic had been bad. Slow movement meant there was less rattling of the windows, but more horn-thumping by impatient commuters.

The feeling of calm certainly did not come from the environment of the main room itself, which was crowded with tables, cabinets, shelves and bookcases. It was a disgrace for a feng shui master to work in such a chaotic space, but Wong had long since given up any attempt to control the architectural decisions of Ms Lim. Many powerful business-people in Singapore would eagerly await his oracle-like pronouncements on how to order their offices, but he dared not proffer similar advice to Winnie. A fiery twenty-six-year old from a Kuching Chinese family, she believed that since she was the office administrator, all physical aspects of the office were hers to administrate. In reality, her principal daytime interest was to practise and refine the techniques of make-up and nail polish application.

Some four years ago, when the company had opened, one part of the single large room they had leased had been blocked off to make a separate room for the chief (and only) geomancer. Wong had initially tried to make it into a ch’ienergy-focusing workroom for himself, but it had proved too small and badly positioned.

In feng shui terms, following the School of the Eight Houses, the office was a Tui Kua dwelling, its back facing west and door facing east. His cubby-hole was between southwest (good-indicating blossoming health) and south (bad-the Location of the Five Ghosts), so he had had a lot of work to do to make it usable. Worse still, it was close to Winnie’s desk. The judicious positioning of a metal chime served to ward off the worst of her excess of fire ch’i.

Nevertheless, these days Wong worked in the main office at a desk at right angles to Winnie’s and used his room only for meditation, thinking, ancestor worship, auspicious-day rituals and afternoon naps.

No, the feeling of peace definitely came from within, he decided. It came from the good night’s sleep he had had. It came from the satisfying oil stick doughnut he had eaten at the breakfast noodle cafe on his way to work. It came from the cheery babbling of the kettle in the corner of the office. It came from the fact that today was his fifty-sixth birthday, although he had never celebrated birthdays, not even as a child. It was a good number, fifty-six, far better than the awful fifty-five, with its strongly negative numerological connotations. No, fifty-six was good, a number denoting age and maturity and statesmanship. A year of wisdom. A time when he surely had something worth saying, and ought to be listened to. He really must get that book of his finished.

With that thought, he pulled his journal out of a drawer and started to write again.

Monday dawned hot and hazy, with the air itself seeming tired and listless. The sun rose slowly and seemed to draw a curtain of opaque mist from the ground. Constellations of dust, lifted by the drifting air, spiralled upwards in the crisp white rays leaning through the windows. The neighbourhood was temporarily woken at seven o’clock by a minor emergency: a small fire in the building opposite, apparently caused by a joss stick falling out of a shrine dedicated to the God of Safety, according to the watchman. Sirens shook the buildings until a fireman arrived to find an elderly Buddhist nun had stamped out the fire with her bare feet-hard calloused hooves which were quite undamaged by the harsh usage.

Wong, who had already been to his first meeting of the day, arrived, sweating, at the door of his office at 9.30, and was greeted by a worried-looking Winnie nodding at a large figure sitting on his desk, reading a foreign magazine.

‘M.C. Queeny. She’s not a boy, you see,’ said Winnie.

‘Yes,’ he said, seeing.

Ms McQuinnie hopped off the desk, strode across the room in two steps and shook his hand firmly. Her name was not Joe, but Joyce, although her family called her Jo or Jojo. She was not interested in filing. She was in her gap year, whatever that was, and was doing a project about oriental geomancy with a private tutor as part of her application to get into an exclusive college. She wanted to spend some of her summer observing Wong and learning about the practice. She wanted to be his ‘shadow’, as she put it. She wanted to watch how he worked in the office and accompany him on field visits. She had been in Singapore three weeks. She emitted a torrent of words, but what language was it in?

‘I’m like, “So how am I going to become an instant feng shooee master, then?” And my dad’s like, “My mate Mr Pun’s got a real feng shooee master and you can work for him for three months.” And I’m like, “Wow.”’

Wong stared.

‘I’ll be like, totally quiet and stuff,’ she added with a laugh. ‘You won’t even know I’m here. Ha ha ha ha ha.’

Wong realised immediately that this person could not be quiet, even if she had her larynx surgically removed. Her look was not quiet. She was big. She wore bright colours. She was a Westerner. It would be as logical for a giraffe to say he is inconspicuous because he has no voice. Some people just don’t fit in some places. What was that English phrase in 500 English Idioms Explained about bulls? She was like a bull in China.

She laughed again, for no particular reason. Wong realised that it was a nervous laugh. They stared at each other for a moment, silenced. This is not going to work, he thought. Still, think of Mr Pun. Must make sure he gets positive feedback. ‘So you are interested in becoming a feng shui master yourself?’ Wong asked, forcing his cheeks to rise in a smile, and carefully enunciating the Chinese phrase for geomancy in his Guangdong accent as foong soi.

She roared with what the geomancer took to be scorn. ‘Me? No way! I wanna be rich. Where do I put my stuff?’

Winnie cleared one of the stock tables for Ms McQuinnie to use as a desk. The intruder immediately shoved her desk towards the window with one foot. ‘Better view,’ she explained, forgetting the insult implicit in her desire to rearrange furniture in a geomancer’s premises. After making herself comfortable-with her desk causing an awkward swirl of energy right towards the meditation area-she explained to Wong that she just wanted to write about feng shui from an academic point of view.

‘I mean, I dunno if I even believe in the stuff. I’m generally, pretty-you know-skeptical about any sort of like magic or mumbo-jumbo, not that I mean that your work is mumbo-jumbo, no way. But I might try and write it up in a sort of debunking way, because my tutor likes a bit of controversy.’

Wong was not sure what ‘mumbo-jumbo’ or ‘debunking’ meant, but he knew that he was not going to be comfortable with this young woman in his office. His observations over the next half hour confirmed this. She was too foreign, too young, too loud, too large and too curious about his work. She kept asking questions. She wrote down everything he said. She listened intently to all his phone conversations. He had to resort to Putonghua, Hakka, Hokkien and Cantonese with callers who shared those languages.

She then went out to a shop and returned with a big cardboard bucket of something she called Tall Skinny Latte, which smelt of bitter coffee and cow milk, and made him feel so sick that he was unable to finish the stewed colon he had picked up from a hawker for his lunch. She laughed like a braying donkey on the telephone to her friends, the way only men should laugh. Her squeals were so loud they could be heard by his friends on his phone, and he feared they would think he had moved his office to a slaughterhouse.

He examined her out of the corner of his eye as he prepared his reports that afternoon. Ms Joyce McQuinnie was somewhere between fourteen and thirty (Wong had always found it difficult to tell the age of Westerners), and she was highly social, spending a lot of time on the phone organising a get-together to celebrate her new ‘job’. She had been an inch or two taller than he when she had arrived in the office, but shrank to his size when she settled in, having removed her shoes. She had very pale skin with a light covering of freckles, and shaggy hair that was a slightly reddish shade of brown, like a squirrel-fur coat. She wore men’s work boots with thick rubber soles, above which he noticed dark tights, a short skirt and a large, shapeless sweater. She seemed to have five metal studs in one ear, and seven in the other. She wore no rings, but had giant Indian bangles on both wrists, which jangled as she moved, and threatened to tip her coffee over.

‘Is she pretty?’ asked a friend of his, on the phone from Kuala Lumpur.

‘She’s a mat salleh,’ Wong whispered.

But she made some effort to demonstrate an interest in her subject. The young woman spent the morning looking through books on feng shui, and the afternoon attempting to get to grips with the filing system-no easy task, since Winnie made it up as she went along, the main reason why she could not be replaced.

Wong just sighed and tried to focus on his work. Mo baan faat. What to do?

But as the afternoon wore on, the geomancer found himself starting to listen with interest to her phone conversations. He suddenly realised that his irritating new assistant might have a use after all. She was a free source of English conversation lessons, which were outrageously highly priced in Singapore.

Wong had started to operate in English late in life, having lived most of his life in Guangdong, moving to Hong Kong ten years ago, and five years later being transferred to Singapore. He prided himself on his ability with languages (he could speak six Chinese dialects). Yet he had long struggled with English idioms which he nearly always found baffling and totally lacking in logic. Ms McQuinnie, perhaps because of her age, used a great many English slang expressions. He recognised several from the book he had been studying the week before: How’s Tricks? Colloquial English II. He was adamant that the next book he wrote would be in English (he had already written two feng shui books in Chinese) but felt his grasp of English was not firm enough. He was convinced that a knowledge of modern colloquialisms was the key to being considered a good writer.

He asked her the meaning of several of the strange words she used, and she watched as he wrote them down.

She immediately adopted the role of a harsh teacher, correcting his every utterance. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn,’ she said. His initial irritation started to dissolve when he learned that she generally explained things well, and could possibly enable him to impress his teacher and fellow students at the English Conversation Club.

Once, when she was on the phone to one of her friends, she came out with a string of terms which he did not understand at all. He jotted them down, and resolved to make enquiries later.

She said ‘cool’ all the time, which he knew. But she also said: ‘way’, ‘good fish’, ‘yo’, ‘hunky’, ‘ratted’, ‘soupy’, ‘pass the bucket’, ‘gloppy’, ‘wally’, ‘mega’ and ‘wowser’, none of which were in his textbooks. Her word for ‘yes’ appeared to be ‘whatever’.

He was furtively thumbing through a dictionary to translate something that sounded like ‘trip hop seedy’ when the phone rang. On the line was Laurence Leong, deputy chief executive of East Trade Industries.

‘I’m just sending you a fax,’ Leong said. ‘The brief, C F, is to give a swift opinion on an estate called Sun House, in a village just outside Melaka. The fax should be just coming through now.’ The machine next to Winnie’s elbow immediately began to growl.

Wong looked at the thin, curling papers for five minutes before phoning back. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a yin house. Very big problem. Very negative. Even if we really clean it up nice. People never forget. Very hard to re-sell. I recommend you not buy.’

Leong energetically attempted to change Wong’s mind. First, it had only been used as a mortuary for less than a year; some six to ten months, he said. Second, only two bodies had been dealt with at the building. Less than a month after the present tenants-a mature couple from Kuala Lumpur by the name of Wanedi-had bought the property, they had both fallen ill. ‘It was almost as if the building had bad feng shui before the morticians had moved in,’ he said.

‘Often this is true,’ said Wong.

Leong explained that the Wanedis’ ill health caused them to close the business-temporarily, they hoped. The local residents were pleased, as they had been uncomfortable with a funeral house so close to their village. The wife, whose money paid for the house and grounds (she had been a medium-sized heiress) had recovered, but her partner had not, and was continuing to be in extremely poor health. In other words, they were distressed sellers-always an attraction to property buyers.

‘The husband is at the door of death, in a figeral and literal sense,’ Wong had commented, delighted at being able to show off wordplay skills in English.

‘What? Oh yes, I see, that’s right,’ said Leong. ‘Listen, C F, I’d really like you to fly down and take a look at this. Mr P is really keen. The Wanedis are still really sick and last week made the decision to sell the place and go back to K L. That’s when our man in Melaka swooped. Hang on a minute, C F, I’ve got a call on the other line. Hel-?’ A monophonic tone played ‘Greensleeves’.

Wong knew the corporation would be more interested in the large plot of land surrounding the property than the house itself. The geomancer also knew that when they were dealing with a place of death, his services, normally seen as an optional extra, suddenly became essential. His mood brightened. He could claim to have a full schedule already booked, and charge a premium for an express reading.

And it might even be fun. Old Malaysian houses were often interesting from a feng shui point of view. It might be a Peranakan townhouse, or a Dutch colonial dwelling. Besides, he had a good friend in the area: Jhoti Sagwala, a former pupil of his who was now a senior police officer somewhere near Melaka. He thought about phoning to tell him to get the ingredients for banana-coconut curry-a dish for which Sagwala was justly famed.

‘Greensleeves’ stopped abruptly. ‘Wong, you still there?’ Laurence Leong’s voice was excited. ‘The old man’s died: Wanedi, the owner. That was our agent on the other line. The wife has agreed to let the surveyors and you visit the place, although the body may still be there.’

Wong nodded to himself, pleased that the corpse would be in place. Seeing precisely how and where the bodies were kept, and where the old man had died, would help with his reading and cleansing of the place. ‘Okay. I come.’

The following afternoon, C F Wong and Joyce McQuinnie found themselves in a rather run-down taxi, struggling up a hill near Melaka. Joyce had insisted on accompanying him, explaining that her daddy would pay her share. Although only a bridge away from Singapore, Wong felt that they were on a different planet, or at the very least, on the same planet in an earlier century. He looked out of the window and could not help but feel that the dazzling, mirror-glass skyscrapers of Singapore could not be the habitation of the same species which lived in this lush, green-brown land, pock-marked with a small number of charming old houses, a larger number of rather ramshackle huts, and a distressingly great number of small, new, ugly two- and three-storey blocks.

The geomancer gazed at the pestilence of new structures and despaired. Each was an identical rectangle, designed to squeeze into the ‘perch’ of the owner, and erected at high speed with no thought to feng shui or aesthetics. There was much pride in the speed of Malaysia ’s development, but he was worried that some intangible spirituality was being lost forever.

‘Like, so many new buildings going up everywhere,’ remarked Joyce. ‘There should be loadsa jobs for local feng shui men.’

‘Very sad, these are beyond hope, I think,’ replied the geomancer.

They had some difficulty locating Sun House, and their spirits were not helped by the building’s namesake being too much in evidence.

‘Phew, what a scorcher,’ remembered Wong.

Joyce chuckled.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Wong, insulted. ‘It means it is very hot.’

‘Yeah. It does mean that. It’s just-it’s just funny to hear you say it.’ She could not explain why it was funny, and they lapsed into uneasy silence. He noticed her looking sidelong at him over the next few minutes, and he leaned slightly to one side, where he could study her expression in the driver’s mirror. Underneath the girl’s loud, relaxed air of self-confidence, there was an unsureness, a nervousness, a palpable sense of discomfort. He could see it in the way her eyebrows moved together when she spoke to him; she seemed to be straining to communicate. Her movements were slightly awkward, as if all her limbs were 2 or 3 centimetres longer than she expected them to be. He decided that she was younger than Winnie Lim, despite being taller.

As they topped the hill, a Chinese-tiled roof showed through the trees a kilometre down the road, the driver gave a yelp of triumph, and Wong knew they had arrived. As they approached, he saw stone walls surrounding the grounds, and realised Sun House was a relatively imposing residence. They turned in to gates which had been propped open, and pulled up outside a low but stately house, elderly rather than historic. It showed signs of having been recently spruced up, with several of the window frames looking new. He sighed. He could not help but feel sorry that his employer, as so often happens in the business world, was taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune. It must have cost money to convert this building (formerly a run-down farm) into a mortuary, and there was a poignant irony in the way that one of the very few bodies that the house had seen was its owner’s.

He ran his trained eyes over the facade. From the outside, the house was clearly built on the European model, although it had several features from the Peranakan terrace style. There were louvred window shutters, a design innovation originally introduced by the Portuguese, but adopted by the older generation of local builders. The house had pintu pagar, traditional Malaysian half-sized saloon gates, in front of wooden double-doors inscribed with Chinese couplets. It had a raised front porch that ran the length of the building, wood-clad sides, and a steeply sloping roof in dark red tiles. The upper windows, which were sharply arched, poked through this roof, slicing the ch’i. The curtains in all windows were shut. It appeared that no gardener was employed, as leaves littered the steps and the porch. However, there was a youngish man in work clothes visible near a shed on one side. He watched the arrivals with a blank expression, neither hostile nor welcoming, and then turned to enter the shed.

As Wong gazed at the house, the front door swung open and he became aware of a figure in the shadows. Mrs Elmeta Wanedi was a small, thin, fussy woman with a mass of untidy hair barely visible under a hood which formed a sort of nunlike mourning garb. Although he had been told she was a Roman Catholic, she looked more like her Muslim sisters, in her ground-length black mourning robes.

There was a certain fidgettiness about the way she stood, and this effect was redoubled when she spoke: ‘ Selamat tengah hari. Are you the East Trade people? Feng shui people? Come around the front here. No, let’s go through the back first-no, which do you want to see first?’ She spoke in a cultured, contralto voice, with an accent which was a mix of Malaysian and something else-Sri Lankan, perhaps? For the letters V and W she used a single sound somewhere between the two, giving the listener the impression that she used the wrong one in each instance. The words tumbled out so fast that Wong found her hard to understand. ‘What do you want to see? The section where the-the-the work is done, or the main body of the house?’

Wong was slightly thrown. ‘Er, I first want floor plan and deeds.’

Joyce stepped forwards. ‘Please accept our condolences on the loss of your husband. We’re like, really sorry and stuff.’

‘Oh, oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘The sooner you people do your checking and sign for the house so that we can get away, the better. The surveyors have been and gone. They told me you would take a day or so. Did I say “we”? Oh, I keep doing that. I can’t get used to “I”, oh dear.’

The widow shook her head and looked down, momentarily at a loss. Then she raised her eyes and smiled. ‘Saya minta ma’ af, I’m sorry, I am not behaving with the common courtesy here. I understand that you must have had a wery long journey, coming from Singapore. Please come in and have a cup of teh or kopi first, Ms…?’

‘My name’s Jo. This is Mr C F Wong. He’s like the real geomancer. I’m like, just his assistant, helping out, you know? Cool house.’

‘Joseph and Mr Wong.’ Without a further word she marched to the front of the house. Wong paused to tell the driver to take a few hours off but keep close to his phone.

Inside the gloomy, dusty house, the woman, who seemed to be about fifty, began to relax. At first Wong thought she must enjoy entertaining, because she energetically busied herself getting tea and teacups, quickly overcoming the lack of focus which had been so evident outside.

But she knocked over the teacups and splashed tea everywhere. She explained that she used to have a woman who doubled as cook and maid, but had dismissed her two days ago, on the morning that her husband had died. ‘It seemed ridiculous to have a cook when I didn’t feel like eating anything, ever again,’ she said. ‘And I needed quiet in this house. Ms Tong-that was her name-was a noisy soul, always banging away wit’ the pots and pans, you know?’

‘You have a servant outside?’ Wong asked.

‘What? Oh, that boy in the shed? That’s Ahmed Gangan. He’s from next door, a few miles. There’s a farm down the road and the Gangans asked if they could borrow the old trailer-what he meant was could they have it, now that the man of the house was… Of course, I told them to take it away and keep it.’

She made an extraordinarily bad cup of tea-amazingly, it tasted of wet goat-and then sat down opposite Wong, throwing herself back into an armchair in an inelegant way, almost as if she had been pushed.

Then she suddenly sat up. ‘Forgive me for my manner,’ she said. ‘But I am not myself these days. Hen-Hen-Henry and I did everything together and it is so hard to start again, when you have no one to help you.’ The utterance of her husband’s name had immediately caused her face to crumple and her voice to crack. She rubbed her eyes with a handkerchief and began to cry.

Joyce immediately went over and sat next to her, taking one of her hands and squeezing it. ‘Aww, don’t cry. It’s an awful thing to lose somebody. My mum left my sister and me when I was nine and I still cry for her. Losing a husband must be like, even worse.’

Mrs Wanedi nodded tearfully, but said nothing. She gripped Joyce’s hand tightly and then leaned over and put her sobbing head on the young woman’s shoulder. Wong watched with interest, noting with amazement how quickly women can conjure up intimate relationships.

‘This must be an awful time for you,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m sorry we have to like, intrude and all that. Do you have any family members here…?’

‘No, no, no,’ said the woman, suddenly ceasing to weep with a long, wet sniff. ‘I’m fine. I wept for two days solid and finish this morning. I couldn’t believe how much I could weep. I have eight blouses, all sodden wet with tears. Mr Wong, you would not believe how many tears there are in a wife’s body-are you married, Mr Wong?’

‘Not married.’

‘Well, your ibu’s body, in that case. But this morning I woke up and I said, to myself, El-El-Elmeta, old woman, you have wept quite enough. Get up and do what you need to do. Sell up this old house and go back to the old kampong. And you, Mr-Mr-Mr-are part of what needs to be done, so your presence here is good. And you, dear, thank you for being so kind. I’m sorry about your ibu.’ Mrs Wanedi squeezed Joyce’s hand.

‘We’ll just be as quick as we can and then scram like sharpish,’ the young woman said, with a reassuring smile.

‘Yes, let us begin,’ Wong said, gratefully putting down his still-full teacup. ‘Do you have any papers on the house which we can see? Floor plans, ground plans, deeds and other things? Anything like that? I want to know the date it was built, so I can make a lo shu chart.’

The old woman retrieved a fat file and left the visitors looking at the papers in a stuffy, odorous drawing room. She told them to take as long as they needed, and to feel free to wander around the house to take measurements or photographs.

‘We don’t wanna disturb you,’ said Joyce.

‘You won’t. I’ll be in the front bedroom, packing suitcases.’

‘Do you want me to help?’

‘Thank you, dear, but no need. My niece is coming tomorrow to help me move the bags and boxes, and, and someone will take Henry away. I’ll be fine.’

She left the room with a curious noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

Wong looked at Joyce in a new light. She had been good, talking so nice-nice to the old lady, holding her hand and all that. Sort of thing he couldn’t do. Perhaps she could be useful in certain circumstances, as a sort of public-relations girl. He wondered whether he could send her out onto the streets of Singapore in a sandwich board or something to drum up business. She was certainly more polite than Ms Lim.

He turned to the plans and perused them with pleasure. The house, actually, was beautiful. It was a real find, with large rooms, big windows, and a natural flow of energy. It was a Hum Kua House, with its back to the east and full of water energy. The presence of so much wood ch’i in the walls of the building kept the water ch’i beautifully supported. The main problem was that its major living area, a large, open-plan room, was in the northwest, the direction of the six shars, leading to loss and delinquency, if the negative influences were not properly countermanded.

After drawing up a lo shu diagram following the Flying Star method, he found that the house was entering a positive phase, with a pair of sevens at the entrance. It was thus quite possible that it could be turned into a residence with highly positive feng shui, as long as its brief period as a yin house could be dealt with.

The plans showed it to be an unusually old structure, built internally in the Dutch style, with an open air-well section designed in the middle of the living area. This had since been roofed over, but something could be done with it, he was sure. The Dutch had always been his favourite of the European house builders. He believed there was such a thing as natural, instinctive feng shui, a basic, low-level skill which needs little teaching or training, and he thought several of the Dutch designers of the past centuries had it.

Nevertheless, he knew that the building’s age and design made it unlikely that East Trade would save it. Far more likely would be a quick razing, and then the erection of a block of flats on the spot. In this sort of situation, it was hard for Wong to decide what to do. Should he do a detailed analysis of all the rooms of the house, in the hopes that his report might inspire one of his corporate overlords to use the premises as they were? Or should he simply do his work more like a spiritual exorcist, help the company to get rid of any dark forces here, so that nothing negative would remain if the grounds were cleared and a new, inevitably uglier structure went up in the space?

There was no time to ponder such issues, and the presence of his impatient young assistant drove him to set to work, to do a reading of the house and grounds. The next few hours were spent drawing charts, taking compass readings, notes, measurements and photographs, watching the sun, studying the shadows, calculating the squares, and moving slowly from room to room.

Wong was not sure whether the householders had always been eccentric or whether the events of the recent past had unhinged Mrs Wanedi, because there were many signs of clutter and ill-organisation. In the corridor, he stepped on a sharp pin which painfully pierced the slippers he always carried to walk around other people’s homes. It turned out to be an earring. In the kitchen they found everything in disarray, with perishable food on the table and tinned meats in the cool box. The kettle which had produced their undrinkable tea was still boiling away in one corner, almost dry.

In the back bedroom, they found a used condom behind some furniture. The second door of this room led to a corridor which communicated directly with the passage leading to the kitchen. The finding suggested a reason why Ms Tong the cook might have been so noisy. ‘She was banging away with more than pots and pans,’ quipped Joyce, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the condom. Next to the kitchen the washroom was in an untidy state, with cosmetics and damp towels on the floor. ‘A guy’s been in here,’ said Joyce, lowering the toilet seat, and Wong had to agree. Clearly a male in the area-a servant or a neighbour-had recently visited the house. That Mr Gangan, perhaps?

In a room with a floral curtain, they found a pretty four-poster bed. ‘This is nice,’ said Joyce and then noticed that Wong was grimacing.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘This is where Henry Wanedi was, and where he died,’ the geomancer said. ‘The southwest corner of a Hum Kua House is the location of the force of death. Often you have bad health if you sleep in such a spot. And look, look here.’ He pointed to a jutting edge made by an extension that had been built on to the west of the house. ‘It points straight to the bed. Makes cutting ch’i right on the person in the bed. Very bad.’

‘Like, this would have made him ill?’

‘It would have made it hard to get better. And the ceiling. It slopes down here. Squashes the ch’i. Squash-squash. Very bad.’

Even without a technical knowledge of feng shui, Joyce evidently found the house oppressive, because she soon tired of her tour and went out for a breath of air in the garden.

It was late in the afternoon when Wong stepped into a room on the west of the house and found himself in a study which appeared to have been converted into a laboratory. The walls were scarlet. Bottles of chemicals filled shelves, and there were tins of powders and other technical equipment that he did not recognise. There were some large boxes on one side of the room, and some trestle tables in the centre. He assumed that this was a room where the corpses would be worked on-he never really knew what morticians did to bodies. He supposed they would beautify them, put powder on their faces and dress them, rather as a department store window dresser would clothe a mannequin. The walls were lined with an old-fashioned scarlet flock wallpaper, which introduced fire ch’i into a Li room, causing a disturbing, destructive clash between fire and metal energies.

‘Have you met my husband?’

Wong turned suddenly to see Mrs Wanedi looking at him from a door on the far side of the room. Her silent arrival had taken him by surprise, but he tried to smile and look composed. ‘I hope I do not disturb you,’ he said.

‘Not at all. This is where the dead bodies were handled, so you being a feng shui man, it stands to reason that this is the room which you will have to check out most carefully. It used to be the study. Have you met my husband?’

She was looking at a large box on one side of the room and he noticed that it was open-topped. He peered in to see a dead body in the shadows. It gave him an involuntary shiver, which he hoped did not show. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I did not know this was the room in which the dearly departed is staying.’

‘Oh, I should have put him in the living room for a proper wake, if we knew anyone here, but we don’t. All our people are dead or emigrated, except for my niece from overseas. There wasn’t any point in laying him out for wiewing. After all, who is there to wiew him? So my own dear Henry is here, where I can work on him.’

He was listening for a hint of madness in her voice, but found none. She spoke calmly, and with a clearly detectable vein of affection.

‘Henry loved his work, and although we did not do much business here, he enjoyed setting up this room. We did a couple of funerals for people nearby, before he became ill. It seems fitting that Henry himself should be dealt with in the facilities he set up.’

‘Are you going to, er…?’

‘Am I handling it myself? Yes of course. I was always his assistant. We had a young man working for us when we first came. Sam Ram something, we brought him from K L, like Ms Tong. But when it became clear that business was going to be slow, he left to do something more exciting or interesting. I assume he went to Singapore. But Henry said that I could be the assistant. I’ve been his unofficial assistant many, many times.’

She moved over to the box and gazed down with loving eyes at the shadowy corpse inside. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone else do you, darling Henry,’ she said.

Wong felt he should have guessed that the corpse was in the room: it was air-conditioned to a temperature noticeably colder than any other room in the house. ‘I will go?’ Wong asked, and started to move towards the door.

‘No. You don’t have to go. Let me ask you a favour. Saya hendak ke… I need to go down to the shop to get some things, and I am scared of driving. Can you lend me your driver?’

‘Yes, of course. It is time we go too. Joyce and me will take you where you want to go. I just call my driver. We come back tomorrow, is it okay?’

‘Yes, of course. Come any time after eight. My niece will be here to take me away at lunch time. And she’s arranged for someone to take my dear Henry. I hope you can be finished by then. If not, I am leaving the keys with the property agent. The removal wan will come for the furniture probably the next day.’

‘Yes, madam,’ said Wong.

A twilight breeze caused the palm trees to wave slowly at the car, as the geomancer, his assistant and their new friend rolled down the peaceful country roads, past small houses with yellow-lit windows, each containing a little scene of a family eating its evening rice. The night was cool, and Wong kept his window rolled down. The two women sat in the back, chatting quietly, while the geomancer studied lo shu diagrams on the house’s birth in the front passenger seat. But he found it difficult to focus in the gathering darkness, and slipped his papers into his bag.

Dusk in the Malaysian countryside is always enchanting. Wong had always felt the country to be vastly underappreciated in terms of its physical beauty. In many ways, its vistas were as striking as those of Thailand or Indonesia, and its general efficiency level, he felt, was considerably higher than those two countries. Night fell quickly, as if a giant hand was turning a dimmer switch. Invisible cicadas raised a sound like static, and a night-caller in a forest nearby could be heard making its characteristic tooee-tooee-tooee cry. There was a smell of frying in the air.

Mrs Wanedi talked a little, and then fell silent, and then got out her handkerchief and wept, and then started prattling again. It became clear that what she wanted was food. After two days with nothing to eat, she needed nourishment, but could not face tackling Ms Tong’s abandoned oven to cook anything.

Wong immediately offered to buy her a meal at any eating house in the area.

‘There’s only one,’ she said in eager reply. ‘Henry and I went a couple of times when we were first looking at this place, a long time ago, but we never got into the habit of socialising here. We thought we would fix up Sun House, get the business going, and then there would be plenty of time to get to know the neighbours. Henry was a friendly man. He would be sad to know that he would… before he would get a chance…’

She buried her head in her wet handkerchief and started sobbing again, and then, with a watery sniff, jerked upright and took hold of herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m all right, really. It’s just that… Well, this whole episode here has been strange for me. I guess, in a way, I am glad we weren’t wery sociable to the neighbours. It meant that I could have him all to myself for these final months.’

In a neighbouring village, they found Chin’s Chicken Kitchen, a small tongue-twister of a restaurant with round tables and uncomfortable stools. It was busy, but a table was found for the party towards the back. Chin’s was a noisy place where diners gorged on kari ayam goreng and mosquitoes gorged on diners. Mrs Wanedi tried to keep in control of herself, but found it difficult. She ate a large amount of plain noodles, but could not touch any of the main dishes she had asked for. Her earring fell off her left lobe and landed in her soy sauce dish. She kicked off her shoes under the table and then couldn’t find them. Joyce had to get on her hands and knees to retrieve them.

‘Excuse, I must make a little visit to the ketandas,’ Mrs Wanedi sniffed, and left the table. A few moments later, she was back, having lost her way, and then started to move in the opposite direction. Joyce leapt up and did her gallant young person bit, taking her arm and guiding her to the ladies’ room.

The young woman returned with a grim expression. ‘I wonder if, like…’

‘Yes?’ enquired Wong.

Joyce looked at him with sadness in her eyes. ‘She says she’s fine. But I think she is in a bad way. Like, totally. She was leaning so hard on me I was practically carrying her. You don’t think she would like, top herself? I mean, is it all right for her to be alone in that house?’

Wong nodded. ‘I agree. She is a strange mix of the strong and the weak,’ he said.

After a quiet, low-key meal, the driver dropped Mrs Wanedi off at her lonely dark house-and that corpse in a box-while Wong and his assistant headed back to their hotel on a coastal road in Melaka.

‘I think it’s a horrible house and I think that Mrs Wanedi is mad. If she wasn’t mad before, I think she definitely would be after living there. Brrr,’ Joyce said, giving a shiver of horror. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be like cruel and stuff. She may have just been driven crazy by losing her husband. I mean, it must be so awful to have nobody to talk to. How long were they married?’

‘I think twenty years. Perhaps she does not want to talk to anyone. She had Ms Tong to talk to, remember? She got rid of her. And that neighbour is there. Gangan.’

‘Wonder why she got rid of the cook? You’d think she’d be dying for some company, you know. And that young guy, he looks as weird as… I dunno.’

They arrived at the hotel at 9 p.m. and stopped in the coffee shop for a nightcap. The geomancer had a cup of green tea. His assistant had a mochaccino, which turned out to be a dangerously over-filled cup of what Wong was convinced was shaving cream.

The hotel was quiet. ‘You don’t like me, do you, Mr Wong?’ Joyce said suddenly.

Wong did not know what to say. ‘No, no. Not so.’

‘Be honest. I get up your nose.’

‘No, you don’t get up me at all. But we are quite different. It is not too easy to… talk. I think maybe you are a bit yang.’

‘I’m seventeen. That’s not young.’

‘Not young, yang.’

‘Oh, I see. Yeah. I guess I am a bit yang. I reckon Asian men often find Western women a bit yang, but I have a yin side as well. But never mind, I’ll try and be less yang, if it helps.’

She took a long slurp of her drink and expertly licked the foam off her upper lip. ‘You know, my dad was like, “Mr Wong’s gotta vacancy for an assistant this summer,” and I was like, “Great.” But it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t really want anyone, did you? I can disappear, you know. Just say so. There are other ways I can spend my time. I could just do the research in libraries, or I could apply to some other feng shui masters. There are lots in Singapore these days, and they even have them in New York and London now.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Wong. ‘It is my pleasure to have you accompanying me this summer, Ms McQuinnie. Please stay.’

‘Do you really mean that?’ She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I’d rather stay, to be honest, C F, I mean, Mr Wong.’

‘You can call me C F.’

‘Thank you, C F. And you can call me J-M-small-C-big-Q.’

‘J… M…?’

‘I’m joking. Call me Jo.’

They chatted for a while, and he was guiltily pleased to hear her poke fun at her father’s friend Mr Pun, although he was careful not to add any negative comments himself. You never know what can get back to the boss. How strange people are. He recalled the words of one of the sages of the Blue Mountain: ‘ No lake in Heaven is as wide and deep as each man’s lake of dreams.’

The following day dawned warm again. The coolness of the Melaka morning was delicious, but Wong could feel it evaporating minute by minute. By six, he was breakfasting on fresh fruits on the tiny balcony of his room in the hotel. The sunrise was glorious. By seven he had been for his morning walk, and the pavements were becoming hot. He guessed Joyce was not an early riser, so he did not disturb her, but arranged for the driver to pick him up alone. By 8.15, he was grateful to enter the shady rooms of Sun House. On his arrival, he phoned the hotel to wake Joyce, and arranged for her to be in the foyer to be picked up by the driver at 8.45.

At 9 a.m., C F Wong phoned the police. ‘Chief Inspector Jhoti Sagwala? C F Wong here. I’m here in Sun House. Remember I said on the phone? I need you to come over. Quite urgently please.’

‘C F, how are you? So you are finally here. What a delight. When are you coming for a banana curry?’ the languid man replied. Wong could hear he was picking his teeth after his breakfast-probably his second.

‘I am very well, thank you, Jhoti,’ said Wong. ‘And I will certainly arrange to share a meal with you. But we have to get some small business out of the way. Then we can relax and eat rice. I want you to come quickly to Sun House. My driver and my assistant will pick you up. They are on the way to your office now.’

Wong heard the creak of a chair as Jhoti lifted himself out of his characteristic slouch. ‘What’s up? Why the excitement?’

‘It is Mrs Wanedi. She is dead.’

‘What? Mrs Wanedi? Dead you say?’

‘Dead, yes.’

The police officer gave a deep sigh-the unvoiced groan of a man who really does not like excitement of any kind. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Shall I bring an ambulance?’

‘Bring whatever you like. But it is too late to save her now. She has kicked her goose.’

Fifteen minutes later, the car slid to a halt in front of Sun House, sending leaves and gravel flying. Wong met the Chief Inspector, Joyce, and a female police doctor named Poon Bo Seng at the door. Joyce was weeping. ‘It’s awful,’ she said, wiping her red nose. ‘But I knew it would happen. I said last night. Poor woman. We should have stayed or made her come to our hotel or something. Oh, it’s so sad. I’ve never had dinner with a someone who committed…’

‘Never mind. Follow me,’ said Wong.

Dr Poon, an obese Chinese-Malay woman with a Foochow accent, marched rapidly alongside him. ‘So what? Suicide or natural? Could have died of grief or something, was it, maybe? Sometimes happens when a woman loses a husband after a long marriage.’

‘I do not know what it was. But it was not grief,’ the geomancer said, leading them down to the back of the house where the mortuary workshop was. ‘You are the doctor. I hope you will tell me soon.’

They marched down the silent dark corridors and entered the mortuary. Chief Inspector Sagwala gasped. ‘What is this?’ he said, looking at Mrs Wanedi, who was standing to attention, uncomfortably handcuffed to one of the timbers in the low ceiling. ‘She is not dead. What are you doing, C F? Have you gone mad?’

Joyce gasped and stared from Wong to Mrs Wanedi and back again.

‘Let me go, this mad man has attacked me,’ the figure shrieked.

Wong stepped quickly across the room and roughly ripped off the furious creature’s dress. It fell to the floor.

‘What’re you-’ said Joyce, her hand over her mouth.

‘Rape!’ screamed Mrs Wanedi. ‘Help me, help me. Don’t look, don’t look.’

The figure twisted until it had turned around, but not before they had seen the outline of male genitalia underneath an unsavoury pair of off-white underpants.

‘She’s a man,’ Sagwala said needlessly.

‘Yes. It is a sample of the male species,’ said Wong. He took the police doctor by the arm and guided her to the box on the far side of the room. She blinked at the corpse in the box, and Sagwala pushed past them to take a look-as did Joyce, more gingerly, afterwards.

‘Ms McQuinnie, Chief Inspector,’ said Wong. ‘Let us leave the room. The doctor will examine the body. She will tell us if this is Mrs Wanedi here in this box.’

He ushered them out of the room, and two minutes later Dr Poon called them back to inform them that the body in the box, despite the close-cropped hair and male clothes, was female. ‘No doubt,’ she said. ‘Is a woman.’

Over a meal of bak kut teh at Sun House (fetched from a village hawker by the driver), the feng shui master told Jhoti and Joyce how he came to believe a crime had been perpetrated. ‘This could have been a perfect crime. It was cleverly constructed. Like a well-oiled watch,’ he said.

‘Clock,’ corrected Joyce.

‘Same. Many men murder their wives. This is unfortunate. They murder them because they wish to run off with their secretaries or maids. They wish to take with them the properties of the wife. But murder is a messy business. Guns and knives leave holes and things. And murder will come out. Nowadays, all poisons can be detected. No, the murderer today has to be excessively smart. As smart as houses, as they say in England. He has to make sure that after the murder there must be no investigation into the cause of death.’

He looked around at his fellow diners, who had both stopped eating, spoons halfway to their mouths.

‘The simple way to do that is to be in charge of the body after the murder,’ the geomancer continued. ‘So Henry Wanedi moved to a place where he and his wife were completely not known. He opened a yin house. It meant he would get no visitors from people in the village. No one wants to visit a yin house household. You know how superstitious people are in Malaysia. So the Wanedis lived completely by themselves.

‘In his job, as a dead bodies person, he had lots of powders, things, strange yeuk to try out on the poor woman. She was an heiress-remember, Leong told us that? She became ill of course, with the bad medicine he gives her. He pretends to be ill also. When he is asked to do any real dead bodies he does them. It is good practice for the murder he is about to do. Finally, he kills her. He swaps clothes with her. He use her big bucks to buy this house. Now it is his. He is now in the funeral business. He can do everything with the body himself. No one will have any chance of finding out his crime. In this case, murder will not come out, so he thinks.’

Sagwala pulled at the tips of his black moustache, like a Victorian villain. ‘Clever, C F, very smart. But what gave her, I mean him, away?’

The geomancer wiped his mouth with a napkin. The hawker food was not bad, but he was eating sparingly, knowing that a banquet would be provided at the Sagwala household that night. ‘There were a number of things. I trod on an earring when I was reading the house. It had a pin and was an earring for ears with holes.’

‘Pierced ears,’ supplied Joyce.

‘Yes. Yet the earring of the Mrs Wanedi we met was not the same. It fell off in the restaurant. Do you remember, Joyce? What sort of earrings slide off your ears? Clip-on earrings. Designed for people who are not having pierced ears. So I thought the earrings in the house did not belong to the person sitting with us in the restaurant. It was easy to take the next two steps to check what I thought. I look at the earlobes of the person who says she is Mrs Wanedi. And I look at the person in the box. The live one has no holes in her ears. The dead one does.

‘She went to the toilet in the restaurant with us. She went the wrong way. She went to the men’s toilet. Then she came back. You showed her where the women’s toilet was. But she said earlier that she and Mr Wanedi had already been to the restaurant. She should know where the ladies’ room was. It was a small but interesting mistake. Once I began to think maybe she was a man I just watch. I see how she moves. How she sits. How she walks. Definitely a man. Also, there was the bathroom in the house itself. No one who had been a woman for fifty years could make such a mess in the bathroom. Even if she had lost her domestic servant. It was a male bathroom, as Joyce said.’

‘Of course. The seat was up-the toilet seat,’ the young woman exclaimed.

‘Yes. Even when he was disguised as a woman, he still did his pee-pee standing up. He forgot to put the seat down afterwards. Some habits you don’t think about. So you cannot fix them. “The trappings of a man’s life are his life,” said the sage Lu. He may try to leave them behind. But they will follow.’

‘And the room with the bad energy…’ said Joyce.

‘The cutting ch’i.’

‘Yeah. It was a woman’s room, all flowers and stuff,’ said the young woman. ‘It was the real Mrs Wanedi who had a bad time with the illness, not Henry. Like, wow. He killed her and then switched clothes. That is so totally, utterly evil.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘She, I mean he, was a good actress. I mean, all that crying and stuff. It isn’t easy to produce real tears when you’re not really sad. I know, I’ve tried a few times.’

‘It is if you have help,’ said Wong. ‘Did you notice she always put the handkerchief to her eyes just before she cried. Not after? A little laat jeiu jau- what is it in English?’

‘Fresh chilli oil,’ said Sagwala.

‘Yes, fresh chilli oil in the handkerchief would make your eyes red and crying and make your nose pouring.’

‘Running,’ said Joyce. ‘Your nose runs. Not pours. Well I suppose it could pour…’

Sagwala leaned forwards. ‘What a long, slow, cruel, calculated crime, C F. The man must have been really very, very strong-willed to restructure both their lives in this way, over a period of what? A year or so? Purely for the purpose of getting rid of his own beloved wife and stealing her money.’

Wong nodded. ‘Anyone who can have a red-colour study… they can do any evil, I think.’

Joyce’s eyes suddenly widened. ‘Yeuccch. Now I know why she, I mean he, kept leaning on me. On my left boob mainly.’

‘There’s one more thing,’ said Wong. ‘Maybe he was not by himself. I don’t know but I think maybe he had what is called a partner in crime. Ms Tong the cook was with them before they came to here. She stayed in the house all the time. She was the only person with them. I think maybe she plans to meet Henry Wanedi. Maybe she will help him spend the cash from the sale of the house.’

‘The niece from overseas,’ said Joyce. ‘Ms Tong could have been his secret lover, and would return today and tell us she is the niece from overseas.’

‘Maybe so. Or maybe some other accomplice,’ the geomancer said. ‘There is a female involved, I think. She is coming. This is why I say we must stay here and eat. The niece is coming at lunch time today, remember? That’s why I ask driver to bring enough food for four, her also.’ Wong lowered his spoon and wiped his mouth.

For several minutes, there was no sound except that of Chief Inspector Sagwala tucking his fourth plateful into his cavernous mouth.

Then the doorbell rang. The police officer rose reluctantly to his feet, aware that duty was again calling. ‘That’ll be her now. You coming with me?’

But C F Wong had slipped away to another table and was busy scribbling in his journal.