The Feng Shui Detective Goes South by Nury Vittachi

contradicted it. It really seems as if nothing can be done about it. Shame, isn’t it? I mean, for a girl so young.’
    ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘A shame.’
    ‘Can we not put our heads together and get Wong in on this and come up with possible solutions to the problem?’
    ‘You promised Mr Ismail that you would not tell a soul about this.’
    ‘It’s true. But I haven’t told a soul about it. Your mind-reading powers extracted it from my mind. My mouth spilled no secrets. I am in the clear, as Inspector Tan would say.’
    ‘Superintendent.’
    ‘Yes, yes.’
    They travelled for another minute in silence.
    ‘Her prospects are astonishingly bad, aren’t they?’ said Sinha.
    ‘Yes,’ said Madame Xu. ‘Extraordinarily.’
    ‘Poor girl.’

    He smiled to himself as he walked into the dull, cracked-tile porch of an old commercial building on Perak Road. Now this was the sort of activity that made CF Wong happy. He had picked up his bag and taken a bus two kilometres north over the Singapore River to find the offices of Mirpuri Import–Export and Sundry Goods Pte.
    He had visited the Mirpuri home in a pleasant suburban street in Mount Faber Park several times. But he had never given the full feng shui treatment to the family business, which was spread over two floors of a rather run-down, mixed-use block on Perak Road, on the eastern edge of Little India. Of course, he hadn’t officially been commissioned to do a reading of the premises, but he knew he could spend a few hours doing what he did best, and slip it onto an invoice that Mrs Mirpuri would pay without reading.
    Although Danita Mirpuri was officially Joyce’s case, he had told her that he would have to do the feng shui examinations until her skills had reached a higher level. A thought had struck him. If his intern could be trained to do a range of useful work independently, she wouldn’t need to follow him around like a piece of gum on his shoe.
    Today, he would spend a few hours focusing on Danita Mirpuri’s office. Then he would devote the following morning to doing a reading of her bedroom at home. If she remained missing, he would return to the family office the following afternoon and do the entire premises. This could, quite possibly, be stretched out to two full days’ work, all charged at full rate time and a half, including the express service surcharge. He imagined that the so-called kidnapping—no doubt some sort of bizarre lovers’ game in disguise—would come to an end within a day or two. It was thus logical to maximise billable income by doing as much as possible as quickly as possible.
    A small, anemic elevator gave him a slow, rather claustrophobic ride to the sixteenth floor. There, it dropped him in an ill-lit corridor with three doors, none of which bore a name. Only by looking at small numbers on doorjambs could he work out which button to press.
    The doorbell played ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ in an excruciating monotone. He was greeted and ushered into the musty, wood-panelled reception by a Chinese secretary, who then summoned her boss, Mohan Mirpuri, a stout man of fifty-three with white, slicked-back hair. Although Wong knew the family had been in Singapore for more than twenty years, the patriarch still spoke English with a pronounced north Indian accent.
    ‘Mr Wong! I am tinking it has been more than one year over since we saw you before. In the house,’ the businessman gushed.
    ‘Yes. I think more than one year.’
    ‘Sooo sorry to be troubling you about my daughter but she is being a bit of a problem child from time to time, you know, ha ha?’
    ‘Yes. So sorry your daughter missing. Hope is nothing serious.’
    ‘Not very serious,’ said Mirpuri. ‘Only kidnapping I think. By one of the boyfriends. But which one? This is the question we are asking ourselves.’
    ‘May I see the office?’
    ‘You are very free to study the offices or our home, see if you can be picking up clues. Wark this way.’
    He took