The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (14 page)

‘Oh, hi. He’s out. On a case. There’s this girl, someone I know, actually, who’s been kidnapped, possibly, and, believe it or not, one of the suspects is actually a pol—’ Joyce stopped abruptly. ‘Anyway, CF’s out.’

‘Hmm.’ The police officer wondered what to do. ‘He has got his mobile with him, is it?’

‘Er. He’s not using it at the moment. There was an accident this morning with it. It fell out of a window, sort of. Can I take a message? We’re expecting him back within an hour or so?’

‘Okay. He referred a woman to me yesterday. A woman called Tsai-Leibler.’

‘Yes, I know. It was her house which burned down in Ridley Park the other day?’

‘That’s right. Well, tell him that she came to see me this morning. Interesting case. But I have to tread carefully, because it is officially filed as an arson case, and I don’t want to tread on anyone else’s toes. You know, in the police business, turf is everything. Everyone got his own little area of responsibility, understand or not?’

‘Ah-huh.’

‘Anyway, I had a long chat with her, and then I went around to see the husband just after lunch. Had a long talk with Dr Leibler. Basically, it’s an interesting case, and I think CF should take it on. It’s quite unique.’

‘He didn’t seem very keen on it yesterday. I think he wanted Madame Xu to do most of it.’

‘Dr Leibler told me his partner—the other dentist—got a psychic. Two, I think. Didn’t work. Won’t try another. They need a different approach. Anyway, the most important thing is just to tell Wong that I’ve called a meeting of the committee tonight. At the night market at 7 p.m. sharp. Our usual table at Ah-Fat’s. I’ve already tried to call Madame Xu and Dilip Sinha. They seem to be out. And neither of them have answer-phones or mobile phones, damn them. But I’ve sent a courier around to each of their houses to drop a note telling them about the meeting. You can give him that message, is it?’

‘I’ll tell him.’

In his overly air conditioned office, Tan picked up a pen and sucked on it. The story that he had heard from Dr Gibson Leibler had been a real thriller, and he wanted to deliver it well. The police officer, son of a fruit and vegetable importer who married a Chinese opera singer, loved nothing better than a good, real-life drama. He often thought he should have been a reporter, or perhaps a barrister. Although he had studied geology and quantity surveying at university, he had put most of his emotional energy into the student drama club productions, for which he had written several well-received plays.

But that had been many years ago. Tan had performed various odd jobs in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore before joining the police force eleven years earlier at the age of twenty-seven— and had risen in the ranks very quickly, largely, he believed, because of his excellent verbal and presentation skills. He suspected he was too lazy to ever be the perfect detective. But no one could beat him when it came to delivering a slick-sounding summary of an investigation-in-progress to his superiors.

And his willingness to take offbeat assignments—no one else had wanted to liaise with the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics—had several times led him to stealing a march on colleagues who restricted themselves to more traditional types of police work. So what if the others laughed at him? Patience enough to listen to seemingly irrational allegations—such as the one about the ghost arsonist—gave him a side-entrance into some intriguing and satisfying cases. And this, he was convinced, was going to be another.

Wong returned to Telok Ayer Street to find that Joyce had a message for him, and Winnie Lim had fled. Gone to negotiate with the landlord for a replacement air conditioner, the geomancer hoped.

Joyce raised her hand to get his attention. ‘That police guy called? Mr Tan?’

‘Oh. What did he say?’

‘He’s called a meeting of the committee tonight. At the night market. At seven o’clock?’

‘Ah. About the dentist?’

‘Yep. The dentist’s wife went to see him this morning? Then he went to see the dentist. He said it was a very interesting case. He said it was hard for him to take on the case himself, but he thinks you should. He said, “Turf is everything.”’

‘Tough is everything.’

‘Not tough. Turf. Squares of grass.’

‘Oh. Turf is everything.’

‘Yeah. Like, little flat squares of grass.’

Deciding that he had already lost the thread of this particular conversation, the feng shui master thought it wise to drop it. He sat down heavily in his creaking, lopsided office chair and patted the sweat from his face with a folded tissue. ‘
Ho yiht
,’ he complained to himself. ‘Now where is paper?’

‘Newspaper?’ asked Joyce.

‘No. Paper in envelope this morning. Strange message. You see, I find out from Mr Mirpuri that his daughter, she used to do secretarial work for father and mother. It was she who used to send checks to me. That means she knows my address. Letter from her maybe.’

‘I threw it away,’ said the young woman. She leaned over to look at the wastepaper bin. ‘Gone. Winnie must have emptied it.’

Wong found this hard to believe for several reasons. First, it smacked of efficiency, a quality completely alien to his office administrator. Second, the timing was out. One would empty a bin at the end of a workday, not at the beginning.

‘Mrs Tong?’ suggested Joyce.

He nodded. ‘Mrs Tong. You call her please. She like you.

Don’t know why.’

Joyce dialled the number for the building’s caretaker’s office.

‘Hello? Mrs Tong? It’s Joyce. From upstairs. Fourth floor. Yeah.

Hi. You okay? Cool. Did you like come into our office this morning and empty the bins? What? Yeah. The AC? Oh. Yeah, air conditioner; that’s right, it’s just like
gone.
Weird, truly.

Yeah. Okay.’

She lowered the handset. ‘Winnie called her up here to show her the hole in the window where the air conditioner used to be. Mrs Tong is baffled as to how the thing could just fall out of the window. She says we have to clear it up because she can’t touch anything outside the building ’cause of her contract.’

‘But where is letter?’

‘Yeah, I’m coming to that. She was carrying a sack of rubbish, so she emptied our bins while she was in here. So I guess that bit of paper is gone forever.’

‘You go find, please.’

Her face fell. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.’

‘You go find,’ he barked.

Fifteen minutes later, Joyce was back in the office, having recovered the missing note. She hadn’t enjoyed the job, since the bin had contained several day-old meals. The last five of the fifteen minutes had been spent washing and rewashing her hands. ‘Yeeuuch,’ she said. ‘I stink of yesterday’s fried noodles.’

‘
Kelinga mee
,’ said Wong, who prided himself on the accuracy of his nose.

They both peered at the note.

Jr;[@@@@ O

Br nrrm lofms[[rf/ O
, om s fstl tpp, om s nio;fomh eoy j
{ptyihirdr=dyu;e g;ppts yjtrr pt gpit ,
omiyrd gtp, Jplorn Dytrry/ Gomf ,r/ Ithrmy@@@ Fsmo/

‘It looks like the sort of gibberish which comes out when your printer has gone wrong,’ she said. ‘But it’s written with a typewriter. I don’t think it could be from Dani. Must be from an old person. Who uses typewriters these days? I guess it could be a code. Did Dani ever write to you in code?’

‘No,’ said Wong. ‘Danita Mirpuri study typing in secretary school. Usually write very neat. Not like other secretaries who do not go to school, type very bad.’ He frowned in the direction of Winnie’s desk.

‘Maybe it is in code,’ said Joyce, excitedly. ‘I bet I could break the code. Let me study it for a while. I could probably set up a computer program to do it.’

Wong, who was forever looking for activities that would keep Joyce out of his hair, grunted his approval and picked his journal out of the desk.

She made a photocopy of the letter by running it through the fax machine, and then sat staring at it, a pencil between her teeth. ‘Unless it’s Enigma or something, codes are usually pretty easy to break. You just add one to each letter in the alphabet or take one off or something.’

She wrote out the alphabet twice on separate sheets of paper, and set them against each other in a variety of positions, in an attempt to make a key that would crack the code.

After a few minutes, the young woman decided to share her findings with her boss, who sat at his desk, unlistening. ‘It starts off with
J
and
r.
If you add one to the first letter, and take one from the second letter, you get I
s.
That’s a word. Although it’s an odd word to start a sentence with. But I don’t know what to do with the punctuation stuff that’s in the middle of the word.’

She champed her teeth on the pencil. ‘But there’s one thing I do know. This is something to do with the Internet. There are “at” symbols. This must be some sort of email address. Also there’re slashes. That’s very computer-ish.’

She started scribbling again. ‘I remember in Sherlock Holmes, it said you should start off by looking at the two- and three-letter words. Because, you see, two-letter words have to be
of
or
in
or
to
or something like that. If you can guess those, you can work backwards and work out all the rest. Now the two-letter words in this sentence are
Jr
,
om
and
pt.

’ She spent a further half an hour trying various per -mutations of letters to break the code, but got no further. ‘This sucks. None of the usual code-breaking methods work on this. It isn’t a displaced alphabet thing. And the two- and three-letter words don’t seem to follow any obvious pattern. I think it’s just rubbish.’ She pushed the scribble-covered sheets away from her in a display of rejection. ‘Think I’ll work on
my
case instead.’

Picking up the phone, she started dialling her friends again, to ask questions about Danita Mirpuri and her boyfriends. After ten minutes of gossip, Joyce had a big grin on her face. She phoned two more people. ‘This is so perfect,’ she trilled in Wong’s direction between calls. ‘I can spend ages on the phone asking my friends about who’s seeing who—and it still counts as work.’

Wong had also spent time staring at the piece of paper and had also failed to solve the puzzle. He had quickly given up trying and had decided to spend some time working on his book. The problem with the coded message had brought to mind a classic story about Zhu Gumin and the issues of communication and non-communication. Where had he read that? Was it in the
Zhinang
, the masterpiece written by Ming Dynasty scholar Feng Menglong? He decided to write it down from memory. He could check the facts afterwards.

In ancient times lived a man named Tang Sheng. He
considered himself a very wise man. He had heard that
the sage Zhu Gumin had great power with words.

He invited Zhu Gumin into his house. Tang Sheng
said: ‘I was told that you can use words in a clever way.
You can even lure a stranger out of his house. But I
think you could never get me out of my house.’

Zhu Gumin said: ‘It is winter. It is very cold outside.
I would rather use my skill to lure a person into a house.
I could describe the warmth and comfort of a house in
such a way that they cannot resist. They must come in
even if they want to stay outside.’