The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (29 page)

Sasha Briggs’ testimony had made it all perfectly clear.

But there were still several things about the case that puzzled him. Why had the teacher worked so hard to get her student into trouble? Why had the witnesses in the classroom lied? How on earth did Joyce work out what really happened from a set of playground conversations?

‘This case very difficult. No motives. People very crazy.’

‘Oh, CF, you are so slow on the uptake when it comes to like matters of the heart.’

‘Oh. So? What?’

Joyce stared out of the window into the middle distance, trying to work out how to explain it to him. ‘Well . . . I don’t know for sure what happened, CF. But I think I can guess. It’s all about . . .
lurrve.
’

‘Lirv?’

‘No, lurrve. That’s what I reckon, anyway.’

‘Who is Lirv?’ He vaguely remembered her using the phrase before.

‘Lurrve is a bit like love, but it is more dramatic sort of thing.
Heavy
romance.’

‘Ah.’ They were straying into territory unfamiliar to him.

Joyce turned to her boss. ‘You wanna know what I think? I think the headmaster was sort of flirting with Ms Ling and with Sasha. Two-timing them.’

‘Two time what?’

‘I reckon Ms Ling knew she couldn’t compete with Sasha. She’s ancient. She’s thirty-something. But Sasha’s even younger than me. But Ling knew there was one thing Old Waldo loved more than women: his beloved school.’

‘So?’

‘So she tried to make it seem that Sasha was destroying the name of his school. Pushing teachers out of windows is kinda not the done thing in good schools. She reckoned Waldo would drop Sasha like a hot brick.’

‘Oh.’ Wong still looked confused. ‘So that’s why Ms Ling started fight with crazy girl and jump out of window?’

‘Yes.’

‘But other children see it happen.’

‘Not really. They heard it happen. They heard Ms Ling saying: “Stop! Stop!” and they heard Sasha saying: “You’re bloody crazy”. Only one kid—Simone Waldo, the principal’s daughter—was sitting by the crack in the sliding wall and actually saw what happened. And she lied about it to make Sasha look bad.’

‘Ah.’

‘Why? Think about it. She’s in Sasha’s class. She probably knows that Sasha has hooked up with her dad. She wants Sasha to be in as much trouble as possible. I mean, wouldn’t you feel awful if a girl your age was trying to seduce your dad?’

‘My father dead.’

‘I know, but I was just
saying.
’

Wong was still having trouble trying to make sense of it all. ‘But Sasha—after all this happen, why she not tell the truth? Too stupid.’

Joyce shook her head. ‘Her mum’s a loony. If Sasha goes around telling people that she was alone in a room with a teacher who promptly jumped out of a window, everyone’s going to say she’s also loony.’

‘Her friends tell you this?’

‘I think Sasha only told one friend that her mum was a loony. This girl Becky. Becky promised never to tell anyone.’

The
feng shui
master shook his head. All this had clearly established the truth of one thing he had known for a long time—women are unfathomable, unpredictable and deeply dangerous creatures with which to become involved. And as Inspector Gilbert Tan unravelled this case in the courts of Singapore, school principal Lawrence Angwyn Waldo would start to discover the truth of this for himself.

Wong comforted himself with the thought that he was one of the last masters educated in the old, politically-incorrect school of
feng shui
, which specified that the yang principle meant strong, positive, life and male, while the yin principle meant weak, negative, death and female. The ancients knew what they were talking about.

6 The adventure
of the offstage actors

An ancient text from the Zen masters tells the story of a
man who climbed a holy mountain to talk to the hermit
who lived on top. The hermit was the number-one sword-fighter
in the world.

The student reached the peak and lay down at the feet
of the hermit. He said: ‘I must learn the art of sword
fighting. How long it will take?’

The hermit said: ‘It may take ten years.’

The student said: ‘I have many things to do back home. If I work two or three times harder than other students,
how long it will take?’

The hermit said: ‘Then it will take twenty years.’

The student said: ‘I do not understand. Why it will
take longer if I work harder? I am eager to learn. What if
I work night and day and holidays too?’

The hermit said: ‘Then it will take thirty years.’

The fastest way to do anything, Blade of Grass, is the correct
way. If you do something in a hurried way, it will take
longer.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 24.

CF Wong read through his story one last time, tweaked a few words here and there, and closed his book with a thud. He picked up his battered briefcase and slid the tattered volume into it. Then he placed the bag with tender care—since it contained his most valuable possession—between his shins, and went to sleep. Ah! The satisfying, easy slumber of the hardworking man who has done his work, done it well, and been generously tipped for it.

The massive kid-leather marshmallow chair in the lobby of the Bangkok Oriental Plaza gently drew his body into it as the Jacuzzi in his suite had done earlier. He felt himself descending fast, tumbling head over heels into a state of happy oblivion. The buzz of hotel business around him faded fast, and he only half-heard, as if at a great distance, the whir of multiple wheels as luggage trolleys trundled across marble floors and thick Persian rugs. The air-conditioning, as is usual in hotel lobbies, was set at flash-freeze. But the frequent blasts of super-heated air coming from the main entrance doors compensated for the chill.

This particular job, Wong dreamily mused, had been particularly successful. By which he meant they had done enough to justify their payment from Mr Pun, and gathered a nice, fat tip as well—and all for a minimal amount of work.

He and his assistant had been assigned to do what Joyce called ‘a parachute job’—flying in to a new country to do a quick survey for a member of Mr Pun’s board, and then getting out fast. The task had been to check the
feng shui
characteristics of the star dressing room at a swanky new auditorium in Bangkok. The man due to use it was Khoon Boontawee, a Thai movie star who had appeared in thirty-six movies, in every one of which he played a good guy with a naughty streak, or a naughty guy with a streak of goodness. Tonight was the premiere of his new movie,
Street Fighting
Dragon
, in which he played the golden-hearted son of an evil gangster leader. The date, the Friday of a holiday weekend, had been selected by the star’s manager to maximise income, although it was an inauspicious day on the star’s own calendar. So Khoon Boontawee’s mother, who was half-Chinese, had insisted that a genuine Hong Kong
feng shui
master be imported to alleviate any negative influences.

And the job had turned out to be easy. He and Joyce had been flown in on the Thursday night and been booked into the Plaza. After a huge buffet breakfast on Friday morning, they had been whisked to the theatre. The negative influences had turned out to be obvious to identify.

Khoon Boontawee was born under the sign of the thunder tree in May of 1951 with green as his colour and three as his number. By moving to the new auditorium, he was unfortunately travelling in the direction of his own key number, which was like trying to squeeze magnets of the same pole together. The dressing room itself had an over-abundance of southern energy, giving rise to a risk of the user suffering from emotional swings and an excess of passion—not something that actors generally lacked.

The remedies were simple to organise. Wong had arranged for Khoon’s costumes and personal effects (and the truck which carried them) to travel in a different direction for an hour and approach the hall from a more suitable direction in the early afternoon.

And he had assigned a team of staff to swiftly make changes to the huge dressing room to soften the energy. Southern
ch’i
, if correctly tempered, was associated with public recognition and fame, which would be ideal for a star. Six potted plants were arranged in the room so that tree energy could support Khoon’s fire energy, and the fibreglass chairs were replaced with bamboo and wicker furniture. Drapes, throw rugs and tablecloths of red and green were added to complete the happy marriage between fire and forest influences. Khoon, he was sure, would walk straight in and feel happy and relaxed.

By six o’clock that evening, everything was complete. It had been a busy few hours, but the work had been straightforward, the theatre staff efficient, and the whole exercise satisfying. Especially now that a tip of one thousand US dollars in a red envelope was in Wong’s inside breast pocket, courtesy of Thai media tycoon Pansak Jermkhunthod, who was on the board of East Trade Industries in Singapore and chairman of Star City Ventures.

They had nothing to do but lounge in the lobby and wait for their car to take them to the airport. Joyce had gone to the hotel shop to buy souvenirs, leaving her boss to doze in the voluptuously over-soft chair. He was soon snoring.

‘Mr Wong. Mr Wong.’

He opened one eye. A silhouette was standing over him, its back to the evening light glowing through the hotel’s glass doors.

‘Unh? You are taxi driver?’

‘No, it’s me. Suchada Kamchoroen. Deputy manager from Star City Ventures. We met this morning?’

Wong failed to recognise the woman, but assumed she was one of the executives to whom he had been introduced at the theatre that morning. He tried to struggle to his feet but his old bones failed him. ‘Ah, yes, Ms Such—er. Very nice you come to say goodbye. Your theatre very nice. Dressing room all fixed. I think you will have plenty good luck no problem now on.’

The manageress, an angular dark-brown woman in her late thirties, squatted down to his level so that he wouldn’t have to stand up. ‘Mr Wong, I think we have a problem. I want to ask your advice.’

‘Yes, of course. You want me to check your office? We have taxi coming to take us to airport, so maybe not too much time. Maybe next time I come to Bangkok I check your office.’

She shook her head. ‘A problem has come up at the theatre. I need to talk to you urgently.’

‘But we have taxi coming, flight tonight —’

‘Don’t worry about your flight. Our staff can look after you, take you to the airport. We can put you on a later flight, or a flight tomorrow if need be. It’s a—a serious problem. We were told that you have become quite famous in Singapore for solving, er, difficult problems. We’ve got a real difficulty here, and the police aren’t being much help. We will pay you extra, of course. We’ll pay you anything you ask.’

That last sentence filled the
feng shui
master with a bottomless well of sympathy for whatever new problem had arisen at the theatre. He suddenly sat up straight, his eyes wide open. ‘Too bad. Sit down. Tell me the problem. We can delay flight. I can fix, I’m sure.’ A vision of himself scribbling a figure with many zeroes into his invoice book appeared in his mind.

She delicately lowered her silk-clad body (two-tone red and gold Jim Thompson shot silk cut in Dolce & Gabbana business-suit style) onto the sofa next to him, but before she could speak, Joyce arrived.

‘Oh hi, Kam. Did you come to say bye? Look what I got.’

She hoisted three shopping bags into the air, not without difficulty. ‘
Loadsa
cool stuff. You wouldn’t
believe —
’ ‘Hi, Joyce. I’m glad you’ve done some good shopping. But I’m here on serious business. We have a really big problem at the theatre and I need your help.’

The young woman quickly wiped the smile off her face. ‘Oh dear. Yeah, right, fine. Anything we can do, just ask.’ She draped her shopping bags around her feet and dropped heavily into the chair opposite, trying to compose her features into an expression of intense concern.

Suchada Kamchoroen spoke quietly: ‘Khoon has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared,’ Wong echoed.

‘I mean, like
completely
disappeared. We don’t know where he is. We think something bad may have happened.’

‘Ooh. Maybe he’s just late,’ Joyce said brightly. ‘Some people are like that. I’m late for
everything.
And I’m not even a movie star. It’s, it’s . . . it’s just my way,’ she finished, rather lamely. ‘Besides, it’s only ten past six. When does the premiere begin? Like eight or something, right?’

The auditorium manageress nodded. ‘It begins at 7:50. But Khoon was due to arrive at the theatre at 4:30 for a half-hour press conference, along with two of the other actors. They never made it. None of them. Khoon was due to do a series of three ten-minute one-to-one interviews, from 5:15 to 5:45. He missed those, too. There’s a pre-show cocktail party about to begin, at which he is supposed to be guest of honour.’

‘Hmm.’ Joyce screwed up her lips in thought. ‘Maybe he forgot. People do that, too. A lot. I forgot a really
really
important exam once —’