The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  They were separated in the station. Joyce tried desperately to tell a senior officer a long and involved story about why the Muslim man should be detained. But she saw from the listener’s face that he felt the facts didn’t seem to fit the picture. She soon found herself being interviewed by the officer in a small room with a woman constable sitting nearby as chaperone.

  ‘So. You are saying that he intends to kill her.’ The interviewer was in his early 30s. He had a clear complexion and an upright stance, but he looked tired and never smiled. He had pale gray eyes and a jaw that was too large.

  ‘Yes. I keep saying.’

  ‘But you have no evidence of that.’

  ‘He’s taken out loads of life insurance on her life.’

  ‘My wife’s taken out life insurance on my life. So does that mean she is trying to kill me? I’d be a bit upset if she was.’

  ‘Of course not. But this is different. He’s a bad guy. He really is. I just know he is.’

  The officer, whose name was Denton Gallaher, and who had just been refused a promotion for the second time, sighed.

  His fingers tapped nervously on the desk, as if he were longing for a cigarette.

  ‘Okay, let’s go back a bit. How is he planning to kill her? I didn’t really understand that when you told it to me the first time. By supernatural means, right?’

  ‘He thinks she is going to die today. You see, he’s a bomoh. Like what you might call a fortune-teller sort of thing. He’s predicted that she will die today. So he’s just waiting for it to happen.’

  ‘But how has he predicted she is going to die? Will she be shot with a laser beam by some visiting aliens? Will she spontaneously combust? Will she be eaten by a giant shark leaping out of Sydney Harbour right to the top of the bridge? She’s hardly likely to die of old age, now is she?’

  ‘He didn’t say how she would die. He just said she would die. We don’t know how she will die. Someone might kill her.

  Or she might just . . . die.’

  ‘You believe him, do you?’

  ‘Well . . . yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure. Now you just said he was a bad guy. Why should you believe him? If he’s such a bad person, he may be lying, right?’

  ‘We had her fortune checked by a lot of different people.

  Including my boss. They all said the same thing.’

  ‘The old Chinese gent.’

  ‘Yes. They all agreed that this was a really bad day for her.’

  ‘Well they’re right. I’ll tell you something else, without a crystal ball, neither. This is a bloody bad day for me, too. We all have bad days. Or haven’t you noticed?’ Gallaher leaned back in his chair and toyed with a pen, clinking it against his shiny front teeth.

  ‘Look. I didn’t ask you to arrest him.’ Joyce was becoming irate.

  ‘Your cousin did.’

  ‘Yeah. Well it wasn’t my idea.’

  ‘So what do you think we should do?’

  ‘Let us go so that my boss can save the life of the girl.’

  ‘So you think I should just let everybody go?’

  ‘No. You need to detain the Malaysian guy. Amran Ismail. You have to lock him up. Just for one day, even. Just until the end of today. Then Maddy will be safe. The danger period will be past.’ Even as she said it, she realised just how stupid she sounded. She was amazed at herself. How had a sharp, sceptical, sassy teenager somehow been transformed into this pathetic creature who sounded like a gullible tea lady, running around trying to spread terror about what sounded like gypsy predictions?

  Gallaher leaned back in his chair. ‘Now come on, little lady. This is Australia. You say you lived here when you were a kid. In Australia we don’t lock people up without evidence, even if we think they are fishier than Sydney Fish Market at five o’clock on a Monday morning. That’s just the way we do things.’

  ‘So you are going to let him go free?’

  ‘I am almost certainly going to let him go. We’re running a few checks, but as far as we can tell, Mr Ismail and Ms Tsai are a legitimate pair of tourists who have come here for a legitimate purpose—to do some touristing. They have committed no crime, nor is there any evidence that they are in the process of committing any crime. They were visiting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which is a recommended activity for tourists, and boosts our economy. Indeed, it should be a compulsory activity for tourists, if it was up to me.’

  Joyce, unhappy and confused, looked around desperately for help. The room had no windows, but the door was slightly ajar, drawing her eye. No one passed by. She glanced to her right, where a woman police officer sat, quietly taking notes.

  The young woman was deeply frustrated with herself for being unable to communicate her fears intelligibly. Then the feeling suddenly changed to anger.

  ‘Okay, let him go then,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll regret it if you read in the Sydney Morning Post tomorrow that a young Chinese visitor was killed.’

  ‘Herald. Sydney Morning Herald. That would be a surprise, and yes, I guess I would rather not see that headline in that paper or any other. But I see no signs that Mr Amran Ismail is likely to do anything terrible to his young Chinese fiancée. He says so, and he seems to make sense—much more sense than you and Mr Wong do. The young woman herself is not talking very much, but it is clear that she seems to feel very unsafe whenever we take her away from Mr Ismail. And you and Mr Wong can only give me a wild story that some undefined supernatural destiny has decreed that she die today. And Mr Kilington is a bit of a bloody silly hoon who probably wears his Reg Grundys on his head when at home in my humble opinion. It’s not much to go on, now, is it?’

  ‘So you’re not going to do anything? You’re just going to let everyone go?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said that I was going to let Mr Ismail go. And his fiancée. They have committed no crime. I’m rather sorry to have wasted their sightseeing time. They might, conceivably, sue the police for that. They’ve done no harm to anyone. But I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Mr Wong, Mr Kilington and your good self. You see, wasting police time is a very serious crime in Australia. It’s a particularly serious crime in my department, because we are criminally understaffed, thanks to the minginess of the government. And it is the most serious crime of all when I am the individual whose time is being wasted, because I am a bloody impatient bastard who doesn’t like being monkeyed around with by people playing silly buggers. Do you get my point?’ His voice had risen in pitch and volume throughout this speech and the last words were uttered in barely repressed fury.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joyce in a tiny voice, suddenly terrified. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else, but sat and squirmed. She waited for him to continue, but he held the moment, appearing to be enjoying her discomfort.

  He languidly rose to his feet and strolled around in a circle for two minutes before sitting down again.

  ‘Do you understand,’ he whispered, putting his face close to hers, ‘that I could lock you up and throw away the key for what you are doing?’

  ‘Ahem.’ The female officer coughed. She apparently did not approve of physical closeness between her boss and the young woman being questioned.

  ‘Gotta bad throat?’ Gallaher snapped at her.

  ‘She’s a minor,’ the woman said. ‘She’s under eighteen. Go easy. We should really have a social worker in here.’

  ‘This is unofficial. Just a little chat.’ Gallaher turned his face, back to Joyce’s. He continued to speak very quietly. ‘I’m going to go and have a cup of tea. And then I’m going to decide what to do. If I were you, I would be saying my prayers. I would be praying that nice officer Gallaher enjoys his cup of tea and that it leaves him in a good mood. Because if it fails to lift me out of the bad mood you have got me into, it could be very bad news indeed for you and Mr Wong and Mr Kilington.’

  He stormed out of the room.

  Joyce burst into tears. ‘I wanna go home,’ she wailed.

  The
woman constable handed her a tissue.

  Two hours later, C F Wong, Joyce McQuinnie and Brett Kilington were released. They were not charged. Nor were there any further interviews. The lengthy delay seemed designed merely to punish them for wasting police time. Gallaher had given them a severe lecture, telling them that if they stepped one inch out of line again—‘And that includes crossing the road one nanosecond after the green man has started flashing’—they would be hauled in and charged with a lengthy assortment of crimes which he, personally, would compose for the purpose.

  Wong took a long deep breath of cool, free Sydney air as he stepped out on to the street. In truth, he was astonished at how unviolent their experience in the police station had been. While Joyce—judging by her continuing sobs and sniffs—had found the session traumatising, the geomancer had found it fascinating and rather uplifting. Although he had spent many hours in the offices of police officers and detectives in Singapore, this was the first time for many years that he had been on the wrong side of an exchange with the law.

  Some thirty years ago he had spent several uncomfortable days negotiating with corrupt members of the Public Security Bureau in a town near Guangzhou after his parents had had a dispute with neighbours. He remembered none of the details— but he would never forget the feeling of utter powerlessness that the officers of the PSB had conjured up inside him. These men had the power to destroy people’s lives at a whim, and they went out of their way to demonstrate this to anyone who fell within their clutches. And it wasn’t just financial or social ruin that they could bring about. They were not above physically harming, maiming or killing individuals who did not do exactly what they wanted. But what was worst of all was the evil in their faces: the higher the rank of the officer, the less humanity in his eyes.

  What a contrast with the Australian constables. These men were large, firm, hard-nosed, and even menacing—but throughout the meeting, it was clear that they did everything according to the book. There was an underlying sense that they were working towards examining evidence and establishing the truth—two issues that simply were of no interest whatsoever to the mainland officers who had arrested him. And they had been polite, too: there was no hitting, no spitting, no cursing, no blood-curdling threats of torture and death. How on earth did they ever get confessions out of people in Australia?

  In contrast, the police with whom he had dealt in China almost never failed to get confessions—whether they had detained the right people or not. Nor did they care. Trials were quick and predictable in China. The lack of a proper legal system was the biggest single curse of the mainland, he decided. It spread corruption and fear. Again, he recalled the thin, piggy eyes of the chief PSB officer at that station in Guangzhou. Wong had never experienced such terrifying coldness from a human being again until some years later, during the time he lived in Hong Kong, when his small office had been visited by triads—but that brought up other painful memories.

  The geomancer shivered and made a conscious effort to change the flow of his thoughts. They had to rethink their mission.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Joyce asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong. That was the question. What did they do now?

  ‘I wanna go home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes were still wet and she had acquired a sniff that wouldn’t go away. ‘If you pay for the tickets, I’ll get Daddy to pay you back when we get back.’

  ‘Must think first.’

  ‘Naaah. You can’t go home now. We have a girl to rescue. Or did you forget?’ This was Brett. Unlike the two visitors from Singapore, he was still on a high. He had loved being the instrument of arrest at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, despite the fact that the police had unaccountably and immediately decided that the good guys were the bad guys and the bad guys were the good guys.

  What’s more, he had been thrilled to have spent almost three hours in the police station. Important people in uniform were taking note of what he was saying. Sometimes they were literally jotting down his words of wisdom as he uttered them.

  And not just any old cop shop, but a police station at The Rocks, in the heart of Sydney. He had become a part of a human drama. It was so refreshing to belong again after two months of unemployment.

  ‘So what do we do now? We get them ourselves, right, mate? The police won’t get them so we have to arrest them ourselves and take them into custody. And then get some evidence. Right?’ he asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘No. I’m tired,’ said Joyce, who was still weepy. ‘I wanna go home.’

  ‘I guess I’m a bit hungry too,’ said Brett. ‘Wish I’d bought those sambos. Fancy getting a feed or something? Chips? Snags?’

  ‘The snagging room,’ the geomancer recalled from somewhere.

  ‘Let’s go and have a nice cup of tea,’ said Joyce. ‘I think that’s what we need. That’s what I need. Somewhere quiet and far away from any bad guys.’

  ‘Cuppa tea sounds fine,’ said Brett. ‘After all, we are rels.’

  He slung his thick arm around Joyce’s shoulders. Her eyes widened with alarm.

  The two of them headed to a café on George Street. Wong said he wanted to go for a walk, promising to return in half an hour. He took Brett’s mobile phone. ‘You have any problem, you call me. I come back quick,’ he said.

  The geomancer decided to walk back to a little garden he had seen on his walk early that morning. He thought he could locate it from where he stood. But after walking for seven minutes and failing to find it, he decided to look for another spot in which he could sit and think.

  A few minutes later, he found the perfect place: a grassy knoll under a tree in the middle of a nearby park signposted The Domain. The roads were reasonably distant, and formed an embracing road that pulled energy towards the spot, but without swamping it completely: an ideal place to make a decision.

  Should they go home to Singapore or should they stay? Wong knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to race to the airport and get on the first plane back to safe, boring, secure Singapore. Australia was all too dramatic for him—there were too many unpredictable, difficult things needing to be dealt with at once: a young woman with a terrible clash in her pillars of destiny who had to be helped against her will, a giant bomoh who had to be found and restrained, a traumatised intern who needed to be sent back to her father, a group of murderous Hong Kong triads who had to be avoided at all costs. These all added up to one thing: serious bad fortune. Logically, they should leave at once.

  He recalled the wonderful lesson in the Book of Chuang Tzu on the importance of non-involvement. Fire, the sage wrote, is its own enemy. It destroys itself. Similarly, the cinnamon tree grows into such a delicious spice that it must be chopped down and consumed. The sage Chuang Tzu, while thinking on these things, was saddened by the way that powerful things contained the seeds of their own destruction. But that night, in a dream, he saw a Chinese sacred oak, the wood of which is not good for carpentry and is never used for building. The tree said to the sage in the dream that it had spent thousands of years acquiring the ability to be entirely useless. ‘Now all the other trees in the forest are regularly chopped down but I am not,’ the tree said. ‘When danger is all around, becoming entirely useless becomes the only condition which is of any use at all.’

  The lesson was clear: if preserving life is the end goal, you must be neither greatly evil nor greatly good. The evil soon come to a bad end—but heroes also often come to a bad end. Better to be neither.

  So why did he not immediately agree to go to the airport when Joyce had suggested it? He tried to locate, within himself, the precise emotion that was preventing him from taking that step. ‘It’s because I know,’ he said out loud. ‘Because I know what the bomoh will do. I know where he will go.’

  His mind went back to the trip in the back of the police van from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the police station. As the vehicle had moved along the roads, Wong had noticed that something outside had suddenly c
aught Amran Ismail’s eye. The tall man’s head had jerked to one side and stopped moving. Wong had followed the direction Ismail’s eyes were facing, and then he had seen it too.

  Both mystics were transfixed.

  There, in the distance, was a structure that had an extraordinary amount of ch’i: And it was all bad. ‘Waaah,’ Wong had breathed to himself.

  It was a massive building on a platform that seemed to cut into the water. He had noticed it vaguely an hour earlier as they had crossed the bridge. But now he got better look at it. Clearly it was built on some sort of plinth that jutted into the harbour. Somehow, it appeared to be falling over. He had never seen anything like it: it was like a huge pile of massive bowls that had tumbled down—and then been frozen at the point at which they smashed into the floor. Huge, curved, shell-shaped walls jutted almost vertically into the sky. They were arranged in series, as if the pile of bowls had shifted to one side, each bowl moving individually, before the whole pile crashed.

  As a building, it would be totally impractical. The sharp curves would create enormous problems with shaping the rooms in the upper stories. Further, the walls had no windows—whoever was inside had a prime waterfront property, but seemed to have no means of enjoying the view.

  But the worst thing of all was the cutting ch’i. It was a feng shui master’s worst nightmare. A series of angles cut deep into the central area of the structure—it would be like a series of chopping blades, or axe-heads pointed at whoever was in the middle. The feng shui of the building must be atrocious. There was no doubt at all in Wong’s mind that anyone who spent much time in that building would suffer enormous upheavals, arguments, fights, and possibly sickness or death.