The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  Wong returned, muttering. ‘No feng shui master in phone book,’ he grumbled. ‘Bad place. No wonder so many economy problems in Australia.’

  ‘There’s got to be feng shui people in Sydney,’ said Joyce, directing her questions to Brett. ‘Do you know any?’

  ‘Feng shui is a load of wallaby balls if you ask me. But my mum’s got this friend who is into weird new age stuff.

  She runs a new age shop just off Cleveland. Why don’t you phone her?’

  Eight minutes later, they had had a brief conversation with the proprietor of a new age shop, who had given them the name of two local practitioners of feng shui. The first number they called produced a disconnected line signal. The second was a wrong number. They called the new age shop again, and were given two more alternatives. The first of these produced a cheery female voice with an English accent. The woman introduced herself as Martina Bircka, Sydney feng shui specialist and interior decorator.

  When Wong asked her for help on the case on which he was working, she said she never did any work over the phone, and would only speak to them if they made a booking with her. ‘Fifty dollars a reading, paid in advance.’

  Joyce grabbed the phone. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Joyce McQuinnie. I’m working with Mr Wong—the guy you just talked to. Listen, we need some urgent information. This is police business.’ She paused to let that sink in.

  ‘Oh, I see. Right. Yes,’ said Mrs Bircka, suddenly formal. ‘What can I do for you, Miss, er, Officer?’

  ‘We have reliable information that a known baddie called Amran Ismail is in Sydney and is heading to the place in Sydney with the worst feng shui. He may be like contacting local feng shui masters to find out what that place is? Have you been consulted by anyone of that description in the past forty-eight hours?’

  ‘No. I haven’t been consulted by anyone in the past forty-eight days to be honest.’

  ‘Whatever. We’d like you to do two things for us. One is to tell Mr Wong, who is a feng shui consultant from Singapore, where you think the strongest negative feng shui force would be in this city. And the second is to help us make a list of feng shui people in Sydney so we can call them and find out if Mr Ismail has called any of them.’

  ‘Ooh, I don’t know all of them.’

  ‘Just as many as you can.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  They spent two hours at Susilla Kilington’s house, phoning every feng shui practitioner in Sydney. None of them admitted to having been consulted or called by anyone resembling Amran Ismail. By the end of this period, Wong felt that they had achieved nothing. They had to just get out on to the streets and start looking for the girl.

  But as they stepped out of the house into the warm sunshine, he realised that they had done one thing: they had convinced Joyce’s cousin that her seemingly wild story about saving a kidnap victim was true. It was clearly the biggest excitement he had had in years. He had immediately added himself to the operation.

  Joyce and her cousin—who was actually a fairly distant second cousin—had a long chat while CF was on the phone, during which she discovered some of their family history. Brett’s father was a man named Graeme Kilington, ‘a 52-year-old drunk’. But Kilington had lost touch with his wife and child twenty years earlier. Brett, who was born in Edinburgh, had been five years old on the day that he last saw his father.

  Graeme Kilington had promised faithfully to get home in time for Brett’s birthday party. He had failed. In a fit of anger, his mother Susilla Kilington packed up all her belongings and left the house immediately—moving across the world back to her native Brisbane with their only child. She left no forwarding address.

  Brett had grown up as an Australian. He went to school in Brisbane, eventually moving with his mother, who was a painter of medium skill, to Sydney. But money had been tight, and Susilla’s impulsive nature had not cut her out to be a good parent. He had not thrived at school, and had got a temporary job in his late teens as a clerk in a small organisation based at the Opera House. He had eventually given that up and had started a dot.com business, providing a site for rock-climbing hobbyists.

  ‘It didn’t work that well. Then, just for a laugh, I started a site with pictures of dead bodies. Corpses-R-Us.com.au. All of a sudden I was getting 400 000 hits a month. Real eyeballs.’ His eyes gleamed with pride. ‘I was a millionaire, sort of. Well, that was what my company was valued at by my mate who had a dot.com valuing company. But then it all went down the toilet,’ he said. ‘The newspapers sued me for nicking their pics. Corpses-R-Us went down. My mate’s company went down too. Bastard.’

  Brett said that he had finally come into his own a year ago when he left Sydney and went to work as a bush guide, eventually becoming part of a travel company operating around Uluru in northern Australia. This had transformed him. He had become strong, independent, self-possessed and had developed specific skills—he was an expert climber and tracker.

  To Joyce, this mixed history solved a mystery, explaining why her newly discovered cousin had some of the characteristics of the nerd—such as an obvious lack of social skills and a languid sullenness—mixed with the classic Aussie outback characteristics of the slangy accent, outdoor clothes and bronzed muscles.

  After pausing to prepare and consume an enormous egg and bacon sandwich, Brett Kilington eventually let a further confession burst out: something that he had apparently been dying to tell someone. He had lost his job on Uluru—he called it The Rock—two months earlier, and had moved back to Sydney the previous week because he had been unable to find any further work. ‘My mum thinks I’m just bludging for a couple of weeks. Or taking a long sickie. Haven’t told her I lost my job. It’s hard, you know,’ he said. ‘She’d have a fit.’

  ‘Yeah. I can imagine.’

  ‘I was bloody upset when it happened. But I think I’m okay now. Kinda came good a day or so ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was just listening to Limp Bizkit and suddenly I thought bugger it. I’m not going to be bloody miserable for the rest of my life. I punched the wall—made a bloody great hole in the brickwork of my room. Wanna see it?’

  ‘Er, not now.’

  ‘But I also fractured the knuckle of my index finger. See?

  Had to go to the emergency. After that I was all right. Got it out of my system.’

  ‘No, I meant what happened on The Rock?’

  ‘Had a big row with the boss cocky. You know how it is.’ He gazed at the floor. ‘Trouble is there’s not much work in Sydney for mountain climbers. I’ve been looking at the classifieds in the Herald but can’t find anything. Funny, really.’

  ‘Yeah. Funny. Something will come up.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe someone will build a mountain in Kings Cross or something.’ He laughed nervously.

  ‘Something will come along eventually. Might take a while,’ said Joyce, gingerly putting her hand on his upper arm. It was like a boulder. He moved away, evidently suspicious of human contact.

  Looking at him, Joyce suddenly realised just how much she had changed. It seemed impossible to believe that just a few years ago, they were two kids playing on the floor of the same house.

  Now he was five feet eight inches of angry Australian machismo nicknamed ‘Killer’, while she was . . . what? A soft, lost creature, drifting and directionless, a citizen of everywhere and a citizen of nowhere. She realised that she no longer felt remotely Australian. For a start, his speech patterns now seemed odd and unfamiliar to her. She spoke international English, Americanised English— she’d noticed that she had at some point started saying ‘cookie’ instead of ‘biscuit’ and ‘Santa’ instead of ‘Father Christmas’. Yet she wasn’t British or American. And she certainly wasn’t a Hong Konger or a Singaporean. So what was she?

  CF entered the room and announced that he had finished studying the notes he had made from talking to local feng shui practitioners and was ready to hit the road.

  Brett leapt to his feet, knocking the t
able over. He was excited. ‘Where do we go first? Are we working with the Sydney police or what? Do we get a patrol car?’

  Neither of the visitors vouchsafed an answer. They just looked at each other.

  ‘How did you travel to our place?’ Brett asked.

  ‘Uh. A senior agent dropped us,’ Joyce said. Admitting that they had come by the Glebe shoppers’ bus would have been too disillusioning. ‘This is a top-secret mission. Most of the local cops know nothing about us. The contacts were made at top level. As far as the local officers go, we’re on our own. We’re kind of undercover if you know what I mean. Low key, like.’

  ‘Shall I bring a sambo in a placcy bag? Would you like one?’ He looked at Wong.

  ‘A sambo is what?’ asked the feng shui master.

  ‘A sarnie,’ explained Joyce.

  Wong was none the wiser.

  In the end, the three of them went in Brett’s aging, dented Mazda 323. ‘It’s low-key,’ Joyce said approvingly.

  After umming and ahhing for almost a quarter of an hour on the phone, Martina Bircka had told Wong that the most significant feng shui spot in the whole of Sydney was the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘It’s a big, arch-shaped thing. A lot of intensity, especially in the middle and underneath. And this great surge of energy as all those lanes of traffic go through the center of it. I mean, I don’t really know if it is good feng shui or bad feng shui, but it must be the most intense feng shui spot in the city.’

  Brett had gone upstairs and found a postcard of the bridge to show Wong. ‘We call it The Coathanger,’ he had said.

  ‘D’you see why?’

  ‘Ah,’ Wong had replied. ‘Interesting. Certainly it must have a very great concentration of ch’i. There is no doubt about it.’

  Half an hour later, they arrived at the bridge.

  It was an awesome sight. It stood slightly too high above the general skyline of the city, a towering edifice linking two sides of a sprawling urban conurbation. There was a classic, almost Victorian grandeur about the massive buttresses of pale brown concrete and granite on either side, soaring ninety metres into the air. And this was dramatically contrasted with the relative modernity of the angled steel girders that looped gracefully between them. The heart of the bridge was teeming with traffic—eight lanes of cars and buses, plus two railway lines, a pedestrian footpath and a bicycle path.

  They drove around the roads on one side of the bridge, and then crossed it to prowl the streets on the other side. They crossed the bridge again back to the downtown area, before doing what Brett called ‘a sharp yewie’ to get back on to the bridge heading northwards.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ said Brett. ‘Are we just going to drive up and down the bridge all day?’

  ‘A Malaysian guy dragging around a girl aged nineteen? She’s Chinese but she’s got streaky hair, black, brown and reddish?’ Joyce sat in the passenger seat in the front of the car, watching everyone they passed on the left. Wong was in the back seat behind the driver, looking at people on the right. There was no sign of Madeleine Tsai.

  After a wasted half-hour driving up and down the bridge, Brett suddenly stopped the car abruptly. ‘Bugger me up the outhouse wall! I’ve got it. We’re looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘What you mean?’ asked Wong.

  ‘They’re not going to be at the bottom of the bridge. They’ll be at top. There’s walking tours over the top of the bridge. I bet he’ll have taken her up there.’

  Brett turned the car around and took it to a vantage point where they could see a point at the zenith of the south tower. ‘You go and meet the bridge climbing guides over there. Then they take you up. They guide you over the catwalks and up ladders and things. You have a special suit. It takes several hours. There’s railings to hold on to. All the touroids do it. I’ll take you to the bit where you have to sign in. I’ll bet they’ll be there.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Joyce. ‘It’s perfect. They can get up there and he can push her off. To her, like, you know . . . death.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper.

  ‘I think you have to wear a harness or something. It’s actually quite safe. Mum’s done it. On her fiftieth.’

  Wong nodded. ‘Joyce is right. He can put his arms around her. Open her harness. Or cut her rope. Push her. She falls. Dies. Everyone thinks is accident. Perfect murder.’

  ‘We’d better hurry. Lemme see. I think you have to book in advance really, but some people come and take a chance,’ said Brett. ‘We’ll just have to get in the queue.’

  He stopped the car at Harrington Street and then led the visitors to a Cumberland Street office emblazoned with the name BridgeClimb. Although there was a high wind blowing, the weather was warm and bright, and there was a string of tourists heading the same way.

  Joyce kept looking at her watch. ‘Geez. Friday is running out fast. I hope they’re here.’

  They were.

  The three searchers came upon a large gaggle of about forty or fifty people more or less in a line outside a doorway. Almost immediately, the young woman squealed. ‘There they are!

  There! CF. See?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Ya beaut, Killer. What did I tell you?’ said Brett, congratulating himself. ‘Where?’

  ‘There,’ said Joyce, pointing at a queue of tourists. Halfway down the line were a pair of East Asians, one of whom was stocky and bearded.

  They stood out from the crowd because of their posture.

  Neither looked like relaxed holiday makers waiting to see a national monument. Amran Ismail stood stiff and tense and excited, his chest rising and falling fast as the minutes ticked by on this long-awaited day. Madeleine Tsai, like a crumpled bird, pressed herself unhappily into his side under his left arm.

  Brett took a huge breath, flexing his pecs and biceps. ‘Are they dangerous? Is he armed? Shall I tackle him. That bloke is it?’ He looked at the Malaysian and quickly exhaled. ‘Bloody hell. He’s big, isn’t he? Bigger than me.’

  ‘He is big,’ agreed Joyce.

  Brett suddenly appeared to be looking for a way out. ‘I think we should call the police. That’s what we do in Australia, if we see a killer or anything. We call the police. We don’t tackle them ourselves. I think it is against the law to tackle them yourself, maybe.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Joyce said, discovering hidden reserves of energy at the sight of her friend. ‘She won’t know you guys from Adam. She knows me.’

  She raced towards her friend. ‘Maddy! Maddy, it’s me. It’s me.’

  Madeleine turned around. ‘Joyce?’ The young Hong Kong woman’s face broke into a puzzled smile. ‘What are you doing here? How did you find us?’

  She started to move towards Joyce, but Ismail grabbed her shoulders and held her back. ‘No! Don’t move,’ he said. ‘Alamak!

  ’ ‘She’s my friend. Her name’s Joyce. She’s from Singapore.’

  ‘No. She’s with them,’ he said. ‘With Big Brother.’

  ‘She’s my friend,’ Maddy repeated, but with less conviction.

  ‘She’s with your Big Brother. How else she can find you? They got people all over. Don’t go near.’ To Joyce, he shouted: ‘Stay away.’

  ‘Joyce! How did you find us?’ Maddy said.

  ‘I—’ ‘Big Brother told her,’ interrupted Ismail.

  ‘Maddy, don’t listen to him. He’s lying. We’re here to rescue you. Don’t trust that man. He’s lying. You’re in danger.’

  ‘Alamak! I told you already,’ spat Ismail. ‘She’s big trouble-lah. She’s trying to separate us. She’s with Jackie.’

  At the sound of that name, Maddy winced. She folded herself under his large arm. ‘I don’t want Jackie to find me.’

  CF Wong appeared behind Joyce.

  Ismail, looking alarmed, grabbed Maddy’s arm and abruptly pulled her out of the queue of tourists. He started marching her briskly to the exit.

  ‘Stop them,’ Joyce told Wong.

  The feng shui man merely looked at her. She compa
red the geomancer’s tiny skeletal frame with the bomoh’s broad one. ‘Okay, he’s big. But we have to do something. We can’t just stand here and watch them leave after coming all this way to find them.’

  ‘Mr Ismail. Need to talk to you,’ Wong called out. ‘About your predictions.’

  Ismail continued to walk away.

  ‘Can save Ms Tsai, if you want her to be saved,’ the geomancer added.

  At this, Madeleine turned around to look at Wong, but Ismail tightened her grip on her upper arm and yanked her violently along with him.

  As the tall Malaysian broke into a jog, there was an unexpected shout. ‘Halt!’ said the voice of Brett Kilington. ‘You’re under arrest. Sorry, mate.’

  McQuinnie and Wong watched with amazement as her Sydney relative cantered up to Ismail and Madeleine, followed by two police officers. ‘That’s the man, officer,’ said Brett to the taller of the men in uniform. ‘He’s kidnapped that girl. Arrest him. I would have done it myself, but I was worried that I might hurt him.’ He was trying to look cool and calm, but his face was glowing with pride at being part of a major disturbance, a public spectacle. ‘Those guys behind them, there—they have the evidence. They’re with me,’ he added.

  ‘Ohhh,’ said Wong. ‘I don’t think this is good idea.’

  He was right. It turned out not have been a good idea, Joyce decided quickly.

  The police had herded them all into a van and taken them for questioning. There was no immediate evidence that a crime was in the process of taking place, but that didn’t seem to worry the officers concerned. She realised that since the man making the accusations was an ordinary Sydney citizen, he inspired a degree of trust, while three out of the four other people involved were foreign, and all seemed rather odd to say the least.

  Arriving at the police station, Joyce was painfully aware of the suspicion in the eyes of the officers dealing with them. But she understood it. She was aware that the visitors, as a group, were bizarre enough to excite comment even without specific accusations of wrongdoing from a citizen. The young Chinese woman had visible scars on the inside of her arms—apparent evidence of drug-taking. The tall, dark-skinned man was menacing and vaguely resembled the Muslim militants one saw on television. And the little old Chinese man spoke broken English and didn’t seem to make much sense. Add in a lot of confused-sounding talk about imminent death at a major tourist landmark, and you had a recipe which got police officers very excited indeed.