The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (6 page)

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.