The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Read Online Free Page A

pressing down on him.
    The first was a troublesome client. He had many of these, but this one was especially noxious. His assignment for the day was to examine the residential premises of Mr Tik Sincheung, the junior non-executive director on the board of East Trade Industries.
    Mr Tik was a moderately successful broker with a medium-sized penthouse apartment in the Fort Canning area. Wong had been to the flat several times and each time almost nothing needed to be done. The businessman was highly conservative, and rarely altered anything. It was not impossible that he may have bought a new painting or a new bed. But even that was unlikely. The only changes between Wong’s previous visits were alterations in the number of fish he kept and the precise spot in which he kept them. Mr Tik last time had had eight rare giant carp in a pond with a fountain on his terrace and twelve rare angelfish in a water feature in the southwest corner of his living room.
    There was only one problem: the smell. The apartment stank of fish. Mr Tik stank of fish. Any unfortunate feng shui reader who had to spend more than an hour in the flat stank of fish. After Wong’s previous visit, he had carried the odour around with him for three days. Even the local durian seller had complained, and had banned him from the store.
    Wong, a life-long durian addict, had mentally sworn never to do Mr Tik’s flat again.
    The second cross was also supplied by the man who paid his retainer, property developer Mr Pun Chi-kin, chairman of East Trade Industries.
    Pun had forcibly added Joyce McQuinnie, a student of British and Australian parentage, to the one-man-and-a-secretary feng shui agency operating on Telok Ayer Street, just off the business district in Singapore. The daughter of one of Mr Pun’s property development associates, the young woman had initially been placed with CF Wong & Associates because she was writing a 10,000-word mini-thesis titled Feng Shui: Art or Science? But she had found her first few weeks so enjoyable (to her temporary employer’s amazement) that she had announced that she was going to spend her entire ‘gap year’— whatever that was—in the feng shui master’s office.
    In theory, having a free assistant (a nominal salary payment for her had been added to Wong’s monthly retainer) should have lightened his load. But she was too strange, too unpredictable, too gwaai to be of any use at all. Her thought processes worked in ways that baffled him, her manner was clumsy and insensitive, she knew nothing of the culture in which she worked, and to cap it all, she didn’t speak English— at least, no form of English he had ever encountered.
    The previous morning, she had burst into the office in a state of excitement at an article she had found in a glossy magazine. ‘Cheese!’ she had exclaimed.
    She showed him a photograph, not of a stinky yellow Western foodstuff, but of a group of drunken young people. ‘P Diddy’s skanky ex is going full-on with Justin from The Dopes,’ she explained. ‘Unreal, totally.’
    Wong nodded as if he had been about to say exactly the same thing. Yet there was not a single element of the sentence that had meant anything to him.
    ‘What could a major slice see in such a pit?’ the eighteen-year-old continued. ‘I mean. ’
    Wong had no idea how to respond, but it didn’t matter because she quickly supplied her own answer: ‘Duckets, that’s what, lucky bloody totty.’
    The geomancer considered reaching for his Dictionary of Contemporary English Idioms , but decided against it. The book, although purchased only last year, had proved infuriatingly useless in analysing Joyce’s speech. According to the text, she should be saying things like ‘It is raining cats and dogs’, ‘Goodness, what a palaver’, and ‘The proof is in the pudding’.
    When he was completely honest with himself (a rare event), he became dimly aware that there actually were some tiny-but-perceptible benefits of