The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (25 page)

‘And even their junior assistants,’ added Madame Xu, her pin-thin pencilled eyebrows arching a full centimetre upwards.

‘Remarkable.’

There was silence as this point was carefully considered.

‘I didn’t know you guys knew about her,’ said Joyce. ‘I really didn’t. How did you find out? I guess the urgent question is where is she? Where has she disappeared to?’

Sinha frowned. ‘Disappeared? I have heard nothing about that. She is staying with an aunt in an apartment in town while waiting for her fiancé to deal with some, er, other pressing matters, right? For the fact is, that she is quite unwell—seriously unwell, as I imagine you know.’

‘She’s sick?’

‘Not exactly sick. But in very real physical danger. As I presume you know. But tell me: what makes you think she has disappeared?’

‘Because I was up practically all night searching for her. Her domestic helper thought she was out clubbing. Her friends at the clubs thought she was at home. She’s vanished. I phoned around again this morning and no one has seen her. She’s not been home. I’m really worried about her. Maddy’s so worried about just staying alive at the moment. I mean, when she disappears like this—’ ‘Who’s Maddy?’

‘The Hong Kong girl. Madeleine Tsai?’

‘Oh. Perhaps we are talking about different young women. We were thinking of a young lady named Clara.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t know, though.’ Sinha was intrigued. ‘Tell us about your Maddy.’

‘She’s a little smaller than me; dark hair streaked with brown and gold; boyfriend called Ismail who is seriously weird—he comes from Malaysia and is into all this
bomoh
stuff; she went to Hong Kong International School for a while. She’s small but strong-looking. She was head of the school swimming team when she was thirteen—’

Sinha held up his hand, signaling her to pause. ‘It is the same girl. Definitely. Perhaps Madeleine is Clara’s middle name or something. Now listen carefully, girls. We’ve got to get CF interested in this case. We can’t do it ourselves. We need to work together on this one.’

The three of them huddled around the Chinese teapot and plotted.

This was the plan. As soon as Wong returned to the table, Madame Xu was going to coerce him to sit down next to her. He would be too gentlemanly to refuse. They would then corner him and refuse to allow him to leave the table until he had agreed to take on the girl’s case. Sinha, with his easy gift of eloquence in English, would present an impassioned plea for him to put all his energy into extricating Clara/Madeleine from the dire straits in which she found herself. Madame Xu would present a similar plea in Cantonese if necessary. Joyce, meanwhile, would head over and intercept Mrs Leong, who would be told that Mr Wong wanted to cancel the travel plans he had just made because an urgent assignment had just come up.

‘Here he comes,’ said Sinha, as Wong reappeared, strolling between the tables. ‘Off you go, Joyce.’

‘Go for it, guys,’ the young woman said, passing the geomancer and racing to find Mrs Leong’s table.

She quickly located a round table two dozen metres away, where a bespectacled Singaporean woman was discussing tariffs and surcharges with a large group of middle-aged people in business suits: a group of mostly female travel agents having a social lunch, she decided.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Leong?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m Joyce McQuinnie. I work with CF Wong. I think I’ve spoken to you on the phone before.’

‘You’re right,’ said the travel agent. ‘C F seems to have a secretary who is permanently unavailable to answer the phone.’

‘Well, he just asked you to book a ticket for him?’

‘Yes, a Dragonair flight to Guangdong, for tonight or tomorrow. I promised I’d do it as soon as I got back to the office. I told him I couldn’t guarantee him a seat at such short notice. But I can try.’

‘Well, I’ve just been sent over to tell you that he probably won’t need the ticket after all. Something came up.’

‘But he just asked me for the ticket a few minutes ago. A few
seconds.

’ ‘Something just came up, while he was talking to you.’

The travel agent looked at her suspiciously.

Joyce decided that she was sounding rather vague and had better deliver enough details to make her story sound authentic. ‘It’s something very urgent. You see, there’s this Hong Kong girl called Madeleine Tsai who has gone missing with her Malaysian boyfriend and we need—I mean, CF needs to find them urgently. Like today and tomorrow. This week, anyway. So there’s no hope of him taking a holiday for at least a couple of days until—’

‘Did you say Madeleine Tsai?’

Joyce looked around. The question had come from a small, rotund Malay woman with thick glasses sitting directly opposite Susan Leong.

‘Does she travel with a gentleman called Ismail?’ the woman continued.

‘Yes,’ said Joyce. ‘How did you—? I mean, do you know them?’

‘I booked a pair of tickets for them yesterday. The guy bought them. Paid cash. But those were the two names on the booking, Amran Ismail and Madeleine Tsai. He wanted the tickets issued right away.’

‘Where are they going?’

‘Where have they gone, you mean. They’re not in Singapore any more. They left on the evening flight to Sydney last night.’

Joyce headed back across the crowded restaurant slowly, much in thought. Had they lost the battle to find Maddy and help her? What should they do now? As she approached their table, she noticed that the other plotters had succeeded in pinning Wong down. She eavesdropped on them from behind. The geomancer slouched on a stool as he was assailed from both sides with demands that he abandon his silly idea of having a holiday until a missing young woman was found and relocated to a safe spot, and her imminent appointment with death postponed for at least fifty years.

She wondered whether the news she would bring—that Madeleine and her fiancé were no longer in Singapore—would make their mission unnecessary. Wong was hardly going to let himself be persuaded to go flying around the world to save someone he didn’t know, and who wasn’t paying him.

But then she decided to wait until the discussion was over. One thing at a time. It would just be adding a needless complication if she immediately announced that the person they wanted to find was lost not in Singapore but in Sydney. She dawdled for ten minutes, listening in from a few metres away.

Joyce found herself becoming increasingly amazed, as Madame Xu and Dilip Sinha told Wong an extraordinary story that she had not heard: about how every type of predictive mystical art available in Malaysia and Singapore had confirmed and reconfirmed that Madeleine (whom they referred to as Clara) was facing an unspecified but near-term death, and would almost definitely have expired by the end of the following day.

Wong had seemed highly sceptical at first, but appeared to become more and more interested as details flowed. When Sinha opened his bag and took out the paperwork he had on Clara/Madeleine, Wong quickly started flicking through it.

‘Unusual,’ he said. ‘Very unusual. Never seen case like this. Of course, is impossible to predict time of death precisely like this. Very silly and impossible.’

‘Exactly my initial reaction,’ said Sinha. ‘But look at the facts.’

‘It seems strange, but all signals point to this week,’ said Madame Xu. ‘For her to expire.’

Joyce quietly rejoined the table and made her own contribution. ‘She’s a really, really nice girl. She doesn’t deserve to die. You understand what’s going on, don’t you, CF? The insurance thing that I told you about?’

The geomancer looked up and nodded. ‘Understand,’ he said. ‘This man Ismail, he finds that girl is due to die on a certain day. The stars say which day. Then he gets engaged to her and takes out big life insurance on her: millions of ringgit. But he is nervous or something, so he goes to other
bomohs
, other fortune-tellers, who confirm that prediction is correct. Like you two.’

‘How do you know he’s bought life insurance on her?’ asked Sinha, surprised.

‘Actually, I delivered that piece of information,’ Joyce declared smugly. ‘That Ismail guy has taken out like at least three separate insurance polices on her life. I found out from Maddy—er, Clara.’

‘I can’t believe that,’ said Madame Xu, genuinely shocked. ‘He can’t be doing all this for money. I thought he was such a nice young man. And so in love with her.’

‘In love with her insurance policies you mean,’ sneered Joyce. ‘He’s evil. She found the documents hidden in his room.’

‘If it’s true . . . what a cad,’ said Madame Xu.

‘The bounder,’ said Dilip Sinha.

The geomancer pulled at the hairs on his chin. ‘So he is going to wait for her to die of natural causes, as predicted, very soon or even tomorrow, and then collect the money: clever plan,’ said Wong. ‘Very clever. He gets rich. But no murder committed.’

He shuffled the papers into a neat pile and then pushed them back towards Sinha.

‘What are you doing?’ said the Indian astrologer.

‘Holiday,’ said Wong. ‘I told you.’

‘You can’t go on holiday. We have to save this unfortunate girl.’

‘Yes,’ Joyce added. ‘She’s my friend.’

‘A gentleman known as the Great Bomoh said that she would die by the end of tomorrow—by five o’clock. My own work confirms that she will be dead very soon, as does the work of many lesser mystics,’ said Madame Xu. ‘If you go on holiday, by the time you get back, it will all be over.’

‘This is not the normal business of a feng shui master,’ said Wong. ‘We do not interfere with predictions of other people.

Some predictions are right, some are wrong. Even if it is right, we do not try to stop death. The gods give life, the gods give death. It is not for us to change anything. We cannot change anything.’

‘Wong, for pity’s sake, please just read through the birth charts and at least look at her earthy pillars of destiny for us,’ said Sinha. ‘That’s something none of us know how to do. So we can advise them on where to go to maximise their safety tomorrow, during the danger hours.’

‘Okay, Dilip,’ said Wong. ‘But then I go on holiday. Already booked. Mrs Leong is getting me a ticket to my
heung ha
to leave tonight. On Dragonair.’

Joyce’s head retreated into her shoulders with guilt.

Wong spent the following half hour carefully going through all the papers, and scribbling on charts and diagrams. He also read the notes provided by Amran Ismail and listened to accounts of meetings from both Madame Xu and Sinha. Joyce sat at a distance, watching all this, and shooting up prayers that Wong would take the case seriously.

After his tenth cup of
bo-leih
tea, Wong pushed back the papers and his cup. He’d finished his studies. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘If these dates are correct, the client enters very negative phase tomorrow. Her earthly branch is fire and it is interrupted by a powerful influence of metal and water tomorrow afternoon. Very negative.’

‘Enough to kill her?’ This was Joyce.

‘Feng shui does not show that. It only shows positive and negative. Not facts and details. What we do know is that tomorrow is very negative. But when we put it together with other findings . . .’

‘Then . . . ?’

‘Then it looks very bad. And certainly when you add findings of other mystics, it looks worse and worse.’

‘So you believe it? She really is due to like actually
die
tomorrow?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But it is not as bad as it could be. It is what I might say, only ninety-five per cent bad.’

Madame Xu interrupted. ‘Not as bad as it could be? What’s good about it?’

‘Location is not the worst,’ said Wong. ‘Look at this chart here. Stars are unfavourable. But not the worst. Now if she was locate elsewhere, could be much worse.’

‘What do you mean located elsewhere?’

‘If she was in southern hemisphere. Like South America. Or Australia. Then death might even be one hundred per cent certain. My opinion only.’

‘Australia?’ said Joyce. ‘Excuse me. I have something to say . . .’