The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Read Online Free PDF Page B

this apartment! Four-five over times. Only need to count fish. What can she do wrong?’ He blinked crossly at her.
    She shook her head and stabbed a toothpick violently into a chicken foot from another bag. ‘Sometimes you are a bit stupid boss. Mr Tik move house already. Las’ month. New house, very big. You don’t know?’
    CF Wong’s mouth dropped open and a har gow dumpling rolled out, landing squarely in his bo’lei tea with a splash.

    Joyce pressed the bell for a third time, and sighed. She told herself that she would patiently count to twenty and if there was still no reply, she would accept that no one was home. One, two, three, four . . . ‘Bugger,’ she said. Losing patience, she depressed the bell a fourth time, her fingertip turning white with angry pressure.
    She was standing on the front step of an old, slightly crumbly block of pale green apartments on the southern side of a gently sloping road in Fort Canning. The address that Wong had given her indicated that Mr Tik lived in the penthouse flat on the fifteenth floor. But there was no answer. Either he was out, he was deaf, or the buzzer didn’t work.
    As she stood in a state of confusion on the front step, one of the other residents arrived, input a four-digit code to unlock the door, and strolled in. In typical self-absorbed Singaporean fashion, the man who had arrived gave no indication that he had even seen Joyce. She grabbed the door before it swung back into locked position and followed him in.
    The block was old, and there was no guard on the ground floor. Joyce summoned the elevator and was carried slowly and creakily up to the top floor.
    Arriving outside an apartment gated with a padlocked heavy steel shutter, she found herself stumped again. She rang the doorbell several times, but there was no response.
    The bloody man must have dropped dead, she thought with sudden bitterness. How inconsiderate. This was a rare example of her having been given an entire solo assignment, and it seemed cruel of fate to conspire to make her fail. But what could she do? If he wasn’t in, he wasn’t in. She thought about waiting, but there was no air in the corridor, the space was humid, and she was sweating. Worst of all, there was a nasty odour of fish. She turned away and started to walk back to the elevator.
    Then she stopped. Hang on! This was the penthouse. She knew that whoever rented the top flat in this sort of apartment block nearly always got the roof as well. And space being at such a premium in the city-state, residents inevitably made use of the extra space, turning it into a picnic area or roof garden or something. There must be stairs from the apartment level to the roof—and possibly internal access, perhaps a spiral staircase or terrace or something.
    ‘I’m gonna to do it,’ she said out loud, her hands clenching into determined fists. ‘I’m gonna bloody well get in and bloody well feng shui the place.’
    Behind the stairwell door she found stained concrete steps leading upwards. She scampered up them into an ill-lit upper landing. Pushing open a metal door, she stepped onto the roof.
    She shut her eyes against the glare—after the dark stairwell, the noonday sunshine was painfully bright. Squinting, she could immediately see that the roof space had been divided into three parts, each assigned to one of the three apartments on the top floor. The steps she had climbed opened into a small central area with a few structures that appeared to house electrical and mechanical installations for the whole building. But on each side were fenced-off roof gardens.
    Although the tall gate of the roof garden on the north— Mr Tik’s side—was locked, it was the work of a moment for the agile young woman to clamber over. She found herself on a pockmarked, clay-tiled surface irregularly covered with plant pots and plastic garden furniture. Most of the pots were empty and the few that still contained vegetation featured dry, papery brown