Free The Feng Shui Detective Goes South by Nury Vittachi Page A

Chu-i.’
    He raced for the door.

Tuesday:
No such thing
as ghosts

The world was melting into sweat. There was salt in his eyes. His hair was wet. And now he had entered his office to find that even the walls of the office were perspiring. And something, somewhere, was ticking. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a drip of condensation running from the picture rail down the spongy wallpaper to the floor. It was hot.
    ‘Stolen,’ explained Winnie Lim, without looking up from the gossip magazine she was reading.
    The feng shui master, who was standing in the doorway, wondered for a moment what she was talking about—and then he glanced in the direction of the windows, where the air conditioner should have been. It was missing. Raw sunlight and furnace-like heat poured into the room through the missing pane where it had been. Not only had its absence turned his office into a sauna, but it had made the room unnaturally quiet without its brooding presence.
    Joyce, who had entered the room a few steps behind her employer, wiped the sweat from her upper lip with her thumb and forefinger. ‘Geez,’ she said. ‘ Killer heat. And what’s with the water running down the walls? Leak upstairs?’
    CF Wong was still looking at Winnie. ‘ Laang-hay-gei hai bindo?
    ’ She merely shrugged her shoulders without looking up, and turned the page of her magazine.
    He repeated his question in English with a sterner tone of voice: ‘Air conditioner: where is it?’
    ‘How do I know-lah?’ Winnie said, irritated. ‘Stolen.’
    ‘When?’
    She shrugged her shoulders again and looked at him crossly. ‘I come in, not here. This morning. Half hour ago, about.’
    ‘You call management? Police?’
    ‘Too busy-lah! So much work, see?’ She swept her hand over her desk to encompass the morning’s mail—four unexciting envelopes and a small package, all of which appeared to have been issued by machine.
    ‘Water on walls is humidity,’ Wong explained to Joyce. ‘Big problem in Singapore.’
    ‘Why doesn’t the electricity short out?’ Joyce asked, flipping on the light switch. There was a short, sharp fizzing noise as the overhead bulb flashed once and then went out.
    ‘Because we do not turn the light on,’ he said, his eyes closed. Why did the gods hate him so?
    ‘Oops. Sorry.’ The young woman, forgetting to flick the switch down again, walked over to the window to look for clues. Sticking her head out through the rusty hole in the window where the air conditioner had been, she looked down and gave a snort. ‘Hah! It’s not been stolen. It’s fallen out. It’s down there. Isn’t that our air conditioner? Look.’
    ‘Aiyeeaah! Very bad, very bad,’ said a worried Wong, moving swiftly to her side at the window to have a look. He abruptly took her shoulders and pushed her to one side before putting his own head through the hole. He winced in real pain as he looked down. ‘Eeee,’ he squealed between almost-closed teeth. There was a distorted cube of metal on the concrete floor outside.
    Pieces of twisted metal dangled out like ruptured organs. There was a blood-like puddle of dark liquid beneath the main casing.
    He breathed out noisily. ‘Aiyeeaah. Very bad.’
    ‘It’s not so bad. It never worked particularly well. And so noisy. It’ll be good to have a new one.’
    ‘No! Very bad that it falls down. Very illegal in Singapore for air conditioner to fall down. Big trouble. Jail, maybe.’ He turned his eyes to look at Winnie. ‘For relevant office manager.’
    Winnie ignored the implicit threat and pretended to busy herself with the envelopes on her desk. ‘Aiyeeaah,’ she said, staring at the letter she had just opened. ‘Someone write you letter in computer language. Cannot read-lah.’
    ‘Give to Joyce. She can read,’ said Wong, wiping the humidity from his desk with a tissue from Winnie’s box.
    ‘Sure,’ said Joyce. ‘Hand it over. But first I have to ask you a question. What does