Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

They swung through the wealthy Joo Chiat neighbourhood, the favoured dwelling place of the old Eurasian and Straits Chinese communities. The houses here fascinated the geomancer. He particularly liked Mountbatten Road, with its grand bungalows in large grounds, some in the classical colonial style and others in bizarre modern designs.

Then the taxi arrived at a small, leafy, carefully isolated estate of detached houses. The taxi stopped at the main gate, the security guard looked at the occupants and quickly waved them through.

This is one purpose for which his Western assistant really proved useful, Wong mused. A wizened old Chinese gentleman with small wrinkled eyes and a down-turned mouth looked suspicious, and would do so even if he were in a Santa Claus suit. Yet there is something frightening about white females that terrifies Asian bureaucrats, whether they be doorkeepers or heads of state. He wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that they are so different from Asian females, definitely a separate and unrelated species. Western women were difficult, they were imposing, they were illogical, they lost their tempers so quickly and they screeched so readily. All these factors meant that one rather grumpy look from Joyce and the barriers were quickly raised, while Wong alone would have had to endure half a dozen questions and the production of some identification.

An Indonesian domestic helper opened the door of the whitewashed townhouse and led them to ma’am, who was standing in the back garden. ‘Ah! Come, come,’ Madam Fu said, beckoning them to follow her. ‘This, I am sure, is bad luck for me, and I want to know what you think.’

Wong trod with care through the untended long grass. He had stubbed his toe painfully on a previous trawl through her garden and was taking no chances this time. They came to a halt at the back of the garden, just by the rear fence. Madam Fu pointed down in the long grass.

‘There. What do you think?’

At her feet was a body. It was dead. It was wrapped in a raincoat with a dark stain on it. The flies buzzing on it suggested it had been there for at least half a day in the hot sun. It was a man with black hair. The eyes were open and unseeing.

Joyce screamed and put her fist to her mouth.

Wong breathed deeply. ‘Aiyeeaa! I think you are right, Madam Fu. This is big bad luck. Needs to be dealt with pretty sharpish and no misprint at all.’

‘I knew it,’ she said proudly. She turned to the maid. ‘Didn’t I say this was bad luck?’

Wong decided he would have to ask her the obvious question. ‘Terok-lah. Er. Can I ask… er? Did you do this?’

‘Certainly not. I don’t kill people in my own garden,’ she said, as if she regularly committed indiscriminate slaughter at other locations.

The geomancer immediately summoned the police, who took over the investigation. After all, Wong said to himself, this was probably a gangland murder of some sort. Besides, he had an important job to do, reorganising Madam Fu’s fortune. The correct icons at the back door, facing the spot where the body was found, an eight-sided ba gua mirror on the wall above her french windows-it was not a difficult task to deflect the evil. He mused that people don’t realise that a single bad incident, even one as great as the placing of a murdered body on one’s premises, is less trouble to counter than a long-term flow of negative forces, such as the placement of a home in the direct line of a burial site.

The homicide investigator, a detective by the name of Gilbert Kwa, found Madam Fu difficult to deal with. She was illogical, confused and constantly contradicted herself. Wong found himself increasingly called upon to interpret what she said.

Kwa quickly started using Wong as a go-between to speak for, or get information out of, Madam Fu-a role to which the geomancer did not object, since his usual curiosity in such cases was piqued.

Later that day, the officer asked Wong to visit the police station. He asked him about the history of objects being dumped in the old woman’s garden. Wong explained that it appeared to be a symptom of the geography of the area. ‘It looks like a rubbish dump. So people put rubbish there.’

‘A body is not rubbish.’

‘True. Confucius said how to treat a dead body was a conundrum. You treat it like a dead thing. People say you have no heart. You treat it like he-she still a live person. People say you have no brain. Cannot win. Confucius in the Li Chi-’

‘We discuss Confucius another day, okay?’

‘Okay. Are you soon fingering a suspect?’

‘This is Singapore. We do not do such things.’

‘No. This is colloquial English phrase. Means finding the miscreant.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, already we got him,’ said Kwa.

‘Wah. So soon? Very good.’

The officer explained the full story. The dead man was Carlton Semek, an Indonesian businessman who had moved to Singapore four years ago. His business partners had put him in the taxi on the corner of Tanglin Road after a meeting the night before his body was found.

His colleagues, a Singaporean named Emma Esther Sin and an American named Jeffrey Alabama Coles, said he was fine at the time they last saw him, except for having had a few drinks-not a huge amount, but perhaps three glasses of wine, which was enough to make him slightly tipsy. They put him into a taxi and waved goodbye. Both of them recalled that the taxi driver was an Indian-looking gentleman of indeterminate age. ‘He had black hair and a moustache,’ Emma Sin had said.

‘That narrowed it down to a shortlist of tens of thousands,’ Kwa said.

Fortunately, another part of the police team had been watching traffic and other security videos in the area, and came out with a number of vehicles which were in Katong and the Meyer Road area at the right time-including three taxis.

The drivers had been traced, and one appeared to fit the bill. Ms Sin and Mr Coles separately picked out the same photograph. The suspect’s log book showed a pick-up at the corner of Tanglin Road and Orchard Road at almost exactly the time when the murdered man’s colleagues said they put him into a taxi. The taxi driver was questioned by one of Mr Kwa’s colleagues and quickly confessed to dumping the body of the businessman over the wall of Mrs Fu’s house.

It sounded like a straightforward case. ‘Man gets in taxi alive,’ said Wong. ‘Man leaves taxi dead. Taxi driver killed him, right? Finish already.’

‘Ye-es,’ said the detective, and Wong heard the discomfort in his voice. ‘But not finished. It’s the details I need to wrap up. Contents of the man’s bag are gone. Money, yes, but also other stuff, scientific stuff he had on him. What did Motani-that’s the driver-do with that? How come got no murder weapon? We turned Motani’s flat upside down. Found nothing. Still long way to go before I close the book.’

‘Why so hurry?’

‘I like to get these things sorted out while a case is hot.’ He suddenly let his tense shoulders fall to a more comfortable position. ‘Also I’m supposed to be going on a golfing holiday, to Genting Highlands, at the weekend. Need to wrap up fast.’ He smiled.

‘Understand.’

‘My colleague Superintendent Tan tells me I should let you speak to the man. I’m inclined to do that. What do you think, Sifu?’

Wong knew this was as near as Gilbert Kwa would get to a direct plea for help, so he agreed to have an interview with the driver, a 27-year-old man named Nanda Motani, who had been working in the taxi business for a year.

‘I didn’t do it, I tell you I didn’t do it,’ said Motani with a pathetic note of pleading in his cracked and hoarse voice, even before Wong had sat down.