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.
At the door of his office, he turned back to face Winnie. ‘Phone Mr Tik. Tell him I am on the way. Little bit late.’
‘Later,’ Winnie mumbled, her mouth full of char siu so from Wong’s abandoned celebratory breakfast. ‘Eating, blind one you can’t see?’
He was going to come up with a rude retort, but didn’t have the energy. What to do? He slammed the door on the way out and raced down the stairs, shaking his head at his ruined morning. Why did the gods hate him so?
The feng shui master’s mouth dropped open as the taxi pulled up outside Mr Tik’s new residence. The businessman now lived in a duplex apartment on the top floors of a subdivided colonial house in Chatsworth Road. Definitely a notch up from the middle-class flat in Fort Canning. Mr Tik’s family business must be thriving. This was odd, because he was a commodity broker, and that industry had been in a nosedive for the past twelve months.
Wong decided that he could definitely take some of the credit for the man’s rise. He would have to let people know that this particular client’s insistence on using a top-ranked not-at-all-cheap feng shui master was a key factor in his accumulation of riches against the odds.
‘Must take photo,’ the geomancer said to himself. He pictured a newspaper article in the Straits Times, with two images: a ‘before’ picture showing a humble Tik outside the crumbly block in Fort Canning, and an ‘after’ shot showing a wealthier-looking Tik leaning on a sports car outside his new mansion. The headline could be: BRILLIANT FENG SHUI MASTER TRANSFORMS SMALL BUSINESSMAN INTO WEALTHY TYCOON.
The geomancer took an elevator to the third floor. ‘Ah, Wong-saang, how are you?’ Tik Sin-cheung, a small man in his late fifties with a barrel-shaped body, stepped out of the oak-panelled front door and shook both Wong’s hands. ‘Glad you came. Like the new place?’
The feng shui master forgot all the apologies for lateness that he had been rehearsing in the taxi. ‘New place very nice. Very big. Very expensive.’
‘Business has been good,’ gushed Tik. ‘Come inside. There are lots of nice things to show you.’
Wong wandered dazed into the marble entrance hall. In his mind, he had begun rehearsing a speech in which he asked Mr Pun for a fat surcharge on his original quote for the assignment, since the new premises were considerably larger than the old one. And he was feeling positive for another reason— amazingly, he could not detect the slightest smell of fish.
The apartment had water features in many rooms—far too much water, he realised. But he knew it would not be smart to say anything negative just yet. ‘Ver’ nice. You did a good job with new home.’
‘I chose the colours and stuff myself,’ Tik said proudly, showing his visitor into a room in which pink furniture clashed dramatically with orange walls. The hues were all wrong. It was a southeast living room, and there was lively ch’i energy in it. The room needed pale purple or lilac to calm the energy down, matched with fittings in light green or pale blue. It was obvious that it needed vertical stripes of green to support the tree energy present. But Wong kept his mouth shut.
There were fish motifs everywhere, of course, and the geomancer counted three separate aquariums in the main living area alone. Thankfully, they were not particularly odorous, although Tik himself smelt rather high.
On the upper floor, the client’s homegrown colour-matching skills were again much in evidence. The master bedroom featured particularly dramatic hues. ‘I did it purple and red. The two colours go together very well, don’t they?’
‘Hmm,’ Wong replied. ‘Very, er, something.’
‘Yes, quite something, aren’t they?’
The bedroom was in the northwest, which was a good location for a master bedroom, with its mature and steady energy. However, the feng shui master knew that Tik was single and a bit of a playboy, so using a bedroom to the west would have been better for his love life. He would eventually get the householder to switch bedrooms and decorate them in more suitable ways: rounded patterns in bronze, grey or pink would maintain metal energy.
After a fifteen-minute tour, during which Tik pointed out a number of innovative features, such as a bathroom with hessian walls already starting to turn green-blue with fungus, they returned to the dining room (full of spiky plants—very negative), where the householder laid out copies of the floor plans he had obtained from his interior designer.
‘There. Now you can do your stuff. The first thing I want you to do, of course, is to look at the fish. I have fabulous new fish. I want you to check the security, too—especially of the fish on the terrace. You know there have been so many fish thefts in Singapore in the past few months. Any tea?’
‘Bo’lei, please,’ said Wong. As the client left his room, the feng shui master allowed himself the pleasure of a little cackle, and rubbed his hands together. He had completely forgotten
about his pestilent assistant.
Joyce woke up. She was cold. She was wet. Her head hurt. It was dark. It was smelly. She appeared to be in a bath of some sort. There was something soft and spongy beneath her. Then something slimy and alive moved against her foot and she screamed.
‘Aaa!’ She reached for the edge of the bath, or whatever it was, and yanked herself out. She jumped onto the floor and stood shivering, miserable and wet on a hard wooden surface, trying to get her bearings. Water poured off her. What on earth was she doing, fast asleep, in the dark, in a cold bath? And the place stank of fish.
In seconds, it all came back to her. She had climbed through a window into Tik’s apartment and fallen into something cold and wet. She saw movement in the black water and a shiver of horror ran down her spine as she realised she may have landed on something alive and crushed it. What was that spongy thing she had been lying on?
As her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she noticed in the low glow from the edges of the curtains that she was in a large room, and there were many tubs across the floor. Splashing and slithering noises came from all directions. The room appeared to be filled with fish tanks of various sizes. It was like a nightmare.
She scanned the dark walls for a light switch, but then decided that it would be unsafe for her to touch anything electric, since she was soaked to the skin. Instead, she carefully walked between two tanks to the curtains, and drew them open.
She turned around and gasped. Wong had told her to expect a couple of fish tanks. But instead, there were at least a dozen, and each was filled with sea creatures—ranging from thrashing giant carp to shoals of brightly-coloured clown fish. There must have been hundreds of fish in the room. Eeew!
She looked with disgust at the tank she had fallen into and noticed that a large spotted fish half a metre long lay flat and lifeless on the bottom. She must have crushed it to death, she realised with a spasm of repulsion.
To distract herself from that unpleasant thought, she looked into the other tanks. Many contained beautiful creatures. On her right, she saw a group of luminous fish, glowing green as they darted between strands of seaweed. And to her left, she saw a tank of what looked like tiny sharks. In another tank, tiny orange-tinted turtles swam over glowing, waving blue anemones.
Something about the blue glow reminded her of the mobile phone in her pocket. She plucked it out and was dismayed to see that it was soaked and the screen was dark. Water dripped from inside the casing. Punching the buttons produced no effect.
‘Shoot. Oh well, one problem at a time,’ she said out loud. ‘I’ve got a job to do.’
The room was smelly but it was not cold. The air-conditioning was off. She was shivering from shock, not chills, she realised.
She took the lo pan out of her wet bag and carefully picked her way towards a flat surface. Although there was no furniture in the house, the kitchen counter would serve as a desk. She spread out her things upon it, and was glad to find that most of the stuff inside her bag was dry. At the bottom of her satchel, she found a pen that worked and some sheets of paper that were wet only on the edges, and started to work.
By 3 pm, Wong had done basic readings for most of the main rooms in Tik’s new residence. The colour scheme was disastrous and would have to be adjusted and most of the furniture would have to be changed too. It would take a great deal of work to get the house right, but the feng shui master was pleased at how things had turned out. He knew he would have to be subtle about persuading Tik to make the changes, and they would have to be stretched out over a long period. With a bit of luck, Wong would have repeat fees which would carry him along for weekly visits for three to four months, if not longer. And if the house did start to smell of fish, he could assign Joyce to do all the follow-up visits.
It was time to head back to the office to start filling slots into his work diary. He rubbed his hands together.
By late afternoon, Joyce McQuinnie had finished analysing the fish-filled apartment. It had taken her a long time, but she was generally satisfied with her work. There were neat pages of diagrams showing the orientation of each room and the main influences working on the various spaces.
The rather obvious over-supply of water influence in the rooms had caused her a major challenge, but one she felt she had coped with. She had a list of recommendations that introduced salt, metal, fire and other elements into significant spaces to balance the elements to some degree.
The apartment, her compass told her, was in the north of the building, and most of the large tanks were grouped in the north or northwest part of it. Her plan proposed that a large number of potted trees be brought into the apartment, to absorb some of the excess water ch’i energy. For the northwest room, she knew that metal ch’i energy would be the right solution. A display of silver objects in that corner would do it, she reckoned.
She had concluded that the overall influence of the rows of tanks could be made positive. After all, in feng shui terms water was related to money. Wong had taught her that money flowed through modern society in exactly the same way that in ancient times, streams flowed and water gourds were exchanged in well-laid out human settlements.
Standing water was yin, since it could so easily stagnate. But moving water was yang. Every one of these tanks was full of live creatures, and the water was clean and looked like it had been regularly changed, so that alleviated the negative yin effects to a great degree.
It was a pretty amazing way to use a flat, she decided. When Wong had told her that Tik was obsessed with fish, she had not realised how extreme a compulsion like that could get. For example, there was no bed in the bedroom, only large tanks with more fish. Did he sleep with them? Or had he given up his whole apartment for the fish and gone to camp in a hotel somewhere? Water features in a bedroom were a big no-no, but since none of the rooms actually featured a bed, she had to assume that there were no rooms used for that purpose.
To get dry, Joyce had removed most of her clothes, squeezed water out of them and then left them on the balcony. She had done most of the work in her underwear. In the intervening three hours, the Singapore heat had done its stuff, and she would soon have reasonably dry garments to put on. She decided she had done enough work here, over and above the call of duty, and it was time to head off back to Telok Ayer Street.
That’s when she discovered that she was locked in. Neither the front nor back door would open. Each was triple-locked. She recalled the padlock and chain on the gate outside the front door.
She was trapped. Her mobile phone still wasn’t working and there was no landline in the apartment. How was she going to get out? She went out onto the balcony and tried to climb back up onto the roof, to see if she could get out the way she had entered. But it was too high. There were no chairs or ladders in the apartment on which to stand. She tried clambering back onto the slippery windowsill, but there was an overhang above it that prevented her reaching up towards the edge of the roof.
Perhaps there was something else in the house which she could stand on? But no: there was nothing suitable—not one chair except the low stool on which she had sat to do her writing in the kitchen. She searched every inch of the house and peered out of every window but could find no way of escaping. She was well and truly stuck.
Joyce felt panic welling up inside her. But she took deep breaths and forced herself to remain rational. She was in no danger, she told herself. First, Wong and Winnie both knew where she was. They would come and get her. Second, Mr Tik would eventually have to turn up to feed his fish. Surely they had to be fed once a day or so? Besides, she wasn’t going to come to any harm through lack of food or water. The taps and electricity were still working. If she found herself actually starving, she could always find a cooking pan and eat one of the fish—if she could bring herself to do such a thing. No, there was no real danger. All she needed to do was stay alive until help came along.
But waiting to be rescued was boring. Watching exotic sea creatures go around in thei
r tanks quickly lost its allure. And the place was stinky. After four hours, she was feeling half-asphyxiated by the smell. She’d have to throw these clothes away.
Joyce decided she might as well try to make contact with people outside.
She went back out onto the balcony and called out to passers-by below.
‘Helloooooo,’ she yelled to people walking on the street below. ‘Heeeeeyyyy.’
No one looked up. She was fifteen floors above them, and her voice was drowned out by traffic that roared from a major road some 75 metres to the southwest of the block.
She wondered whether she should write a help message and send it down to ground level. But who would find a piece of paper on the ground and read it? It would probably be kicked into the gutter or get run over by a vehicle. It might not be read for hours, or days, if ever.
No. She needed something more creative. Perhaps she could lower something distinctive that would make people look up? She thought for a moment about throwing rainbow fish down until someone looked up, but then remembered that Wong had said the fish were very valuable and expensive. He might take it out of her pay.
Joyce went back into the apartment and walked around again, looking for something long and thin that would stretch fifteen storeys to reach the ground. What she needed was a really long rope or something that she could use to lower a message to ground level. In the movies people knotted sheets together, but there were no beds. What could she find to use as a rope?
She opened a cabinet under the sink in the bathroom and found two old rolls of toilet tissue. ‘Got it,’ she exclaimed.
She wrote a message on the first few sheets of paper: HELP, CALL FENG SHUI MASTER CF WONG TELL HIM TO COME TO THIS ADDRESS, URGENT, OR POLICE.
Then she added the office phone number, attached a pen to the sheet to give it weight and gently lowered the long line of toilet tissue out of the window. Fortunately, it was a still afternoon and there was little breeze. Although it made her dizzy to hang over the balcony and watch the paper descending, she was pleased to see that a single roll of toilet paper took her message about two-thirds of the way down the building. She carefully knotted the last few sheets to the first sheets of a second roll and continued to lower the message.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 4
