Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

‘Do you really mean that?’ She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I’d rather stay, to be honest, C F, I mean, Mr Wong.’

‘You can call me C F.’

‘Thank you, C F. And you can call me J-M-small-C-big-Q.’

‘J… M…?’

‘I’m joking. Call me Jo.’

They chatted for a while, and he was guiltily pleased to hear her poke fun at her father’s friend Mr Pun, although he was careful not to add any negative comments himself. You never know what can get back to the boss. How strange people are. He recalled the words of one of the sages of the Blue Mountain: ‘ No lake in Heaven is as wide and deep as each man’s lake of dreams.’

The following day dawned warm again. The coolness of the Melaka morning was delicious, but Wong could feel it evaporating minute by minute. By six, he was breakfasting on fresh fruits on the tiny balcony of his room in the hotel. The sunrise was glorious. By seven he had been for his morning walk, and the pavements were becoming hot. He guessed Joyce was not an early riser, so he did not disturb her, but arranged for the driver to pick him up alone. By 8.15, he was grateful to enter the shady rooms of Sun House. On his arrival, he phoned the hotel to wake Joyce, and arranged for her to be in the foyer to be picked up by the driver at 8.45.

At 9 a.m., C F Wong phoned the police. ‘Chief Inspector Jhoti Sagwala? C F Wong here. I’m here in Sun House. Remember I said on the phone? I need you to come over. Quite urgently please.’

‘C F, how are you? So you are finally here. What a delight. When are you coming for a banana curry?’ the languid man replied. Wong could hear he was picking his teeth after his breakfast-probably his second.

‘I am very well, thank you, Jhoti,’ said Wong. ‘And I will certainly arrange to share a meal with you. But we have to get some small business out of the way. Then we can relax and eat rice. I want you to come quickly to Sun House. My driver and my assistant will pick you up. They are on the way to your office now.’

Wong heard the creak of a chair as Jhoti lifted himself out of his characteristic slouch. ‘What’s up? Why the excitement?’

‘It is Mrs Wanedi. She is dead.’

‘What? Mrs Wanedi? Dead you say?’

‘Dead, yes.’

The police officer gave a deep sigh-the unvoiced groan of a man who really does not like excitement of any kind. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Shall I bring an ambulance?’

‘Bring whatever you like. But it is too late to save her now. She has kicked her goose.’

Fifteen minutes later, the car slid to a halt in front of Sun House, sending leaves and gravel flying. Wong met the Chief Inspector, Joyce, and a female police doctor named Poon Bo Seng at the door. Joyce was weeping. ‘It’s awful,’ she said, wiping her red nose. ‘But I knew it would happen. I said last night. Poor woman. We should have stayed or made her come to our hotel or something. Oh, it’s so sad. I’ve never had dinner with a someone who committed…’

‘Never mind. Follow me,’ said Wong.

Dr Poon, an obese Chinese-Malay woman with a Foochow accent, marched rapidly alongside him. ‘So what? Suicide or natural? Could have died of grief or something, was it, maybe? Sometimes happens when a woman loses a husband after a long marriage.’

‘I do not know what it was. But it was not grief,’ the geomancer said, leading them down to the back of the house where the mortuary workshop was. ‘You are the doctor. I hope you will tell me soon.’

They marched down the silent dark corridors and entered the mortuary. Chief Inspector Sagwala gasped. ‘What is this?’ he said, looking at Mrs Wanedi, who was standing to attention, uncomfortably handcuffed to one of the timbers in the low ceiling. ‘She is not dead. What are you doing, C F? Have you gone mad?’

Joyce gasped and stared from Wong to Mrs Wanedi and back again.

‘Let me go, this mad man has attacked me,’ the figure shrieked.

Wong stepped quickly across the room and roughly ripped off the furious creature’s dress. It fell to the floor.

‘What’re you-’ said Joyce, her hand over her mouth.

‘Rape!’ screamed Mrs Wanedi. ‘Help me, help me. Don’t look, don’t look.’

The figure twisted until it had turned around, but not before they had seen the outline of male genitalia underneath an unsavoury pair of off-white underpants.

‘She’s a man,’ Sagwala said needlessly.

‘Yes. It is a sample of the male species,’ said Wong. He took the police doctor by the arm and guided her to the box on the far side of the room. She blinked at the corpse in the box, and Sagwala pushed past them to take a look-as did Joyce, more gingerly, afterwards.

‘Ms McQuinnie, Chief Inspector,’ said Wong. ‘Let us leave the room. The doctor will examine the body. She will tell us if this is Mrs Wanedi here in this box.’

He ushered them out of the room, and two minutes later Dr Poon called them back to inform them that the body in the box, despite the close-cropped hair and male clothes, was female. ‘No doubt,’ she said. ‘Is a woman.’

Over a meal of bak kut teh at Sun House (fetched from a village hawker by the driver), the feng shui master told Jhoti and Joyce how he came to believe a crime had been perpetrated. ‘This could have been a perfect crime. It was cleverly constructed. Like a well-oiled watch,’ he said.

‘Clock,’ corrected Joyce.

‘Same. Many men murder their wives. This is unfortunate. They murder them because they wish to run off with their secretaries or maids. They wish to take with them the properties of the wife. But murder is a messy business. Guns and knives leave holes and things. And murder will come out. Nowadays, all poisons can be detected. No, the murderer today has to be excessively smart. As smart as houses, as they say in England. He has to make sure that after the murder there must be no investigation into the cause of death.’

He looked around at his fellow diners, who had both stopped eating, spoons halfway to their mouths.

‘The simple way to do that is to be in charge of the body after the murder,’ the geomancer continued. ‘So Henry Wanedi moved to a place where he and his wife were completely not known. He opened a yin house. It meant he would get no visitors from people in the village. No one wants to visit a yin house household. You know how superstitious people are in Malaysia. So the Wanedis lived completely by themselves.

‘In his job, as a dead bodies person, he had lots of powders, things, strange yeuk to try out on the poor woman. She was an heiress-remember, Leong told us that? She became ill of course, with the bad medicine he gives her. He pretends to be ill also. When he is asked to do any real dead bodies he does them. It is good practice for the murder he is about to do. Finally, he kills her. He swaps clothes with her. He use her big bucks to buy this house. Now it is his. He is now in the funeral business. He can do everything with the body himself. No one will have any chance of finding out his crime. In this case, murder will not come out, so he thinks.’

Sagwala pulled at the tips of his black moustache, like a Victorian villain. ‘Clever, C F, very smart. But what gave her, I mean him, away?’

The geomancer wiped his mouth with a napkin. The hawker food was not bad, but he was eating sparingly, knowing that a banquet would be provided at the Sagwala household that night. ‘There were a number of things. I trod on an earring when I was reading the house. It had a pin and was an earring for ears with holes.’

‘Pierced ears,’ supplied Joyce.