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leaves. The plastic furniture was cracked and broken. The whole roof garden had an abandoned look about it, as if no one had been there for weeks. Well, this was something she could write about in her feng shui report, for a start. Pots full of dead flowers were a definite no-no, that was for sure.
    Joyce strolled over to the edge of the roof and looked over. She quickly found what she was looking for. There was a wide terrace running around the east side of the flat. She would be able to jump down to it without any danger. And even better, there were three windows facing the balcony. One was a set of French windows, and two were normal windows—one which was slightly open. Bingo! Breaking in might be surprisingly easy. Now this was showing initiative.
    The young woman carefully lowered herself off the edge of the roof and dropped lightly on to the terrace. She couldn’t see inside; heavy curtains blocked the view through the windows. But the lack of light escaping from the edges of the drapes suggested no one was home.
    The French windows were locked, so she used an empty plant pot on the balcony to climb up and get onto the sill of the open window.
    This is so easy, she thought to herself. She pictured herself reporting back to Wong. ‘Actually, Mr Tik was out and there was nobody there. But I managed to break in and feng shui -ed the house anyway.’ He would be like so impressed.
    Moments later, she was crouching with difficulty on the windowsill, trying to push the curtain obscuring her view to one side.
    Just then, her mobile phone started to ring in her left pocket. She awkwardly tried to reach it with her right hand. But the sill was slippery with some sort of lichen, and her right foot, which was bearing her weight, started to slide backwards. She reached out to grab the curtain, but it swung away as she attempted to get a grip on it.
    ‘Bugger,’ said Joyce as she fell forwards into the darkness and felt herself descending into tepid water. Her head hit something hard and cold and she blacked out. The last thing she remembered was the stench of fish.

    ‘Aiyeeah!’ said Wong, lowering the handset. ‘No answer.’
    He picked up his lo pan and put it into his battered case. He would have to go to the correct address and do Mr Tik’s apartment himself.
    At the door of his office, he turned back to face Winnie. ‘Phone Mr Tik. Tell him I am on the way. Little bit late.’
    ‘Later,’ Winnie mumbled, her mouth full of char siu so from Wong’s abandoned celebratory breakfast. ‘Eating, blind one you can’t see?’
    He was going to come up with a rude retort, but didn’t have the energy. What to do? He slammed the door on the way out and raced down the stairs, shaking his head at his ruined morning. Why did the gods hate him so?
    The feng shui master’s mouth dropped open as the taxi pulled up outside Mr Tik’s new residence. The businessman now lived in a duplex apartment on the top floors of a subdivided colonial house in Chatsworth Road. Definitely a notch up from the middle-class flat in Fort Canning. Mr Tik’s family business must be thriving. This was odd, because he was a commodity broker, and that industry had been in a nosedive for the past twelve months.
    Wong decided that he could definitely take some of the credit for the man’s rise. He would have to let people know that this particular client’s insistence on using a top-ranked not-at-all-cheap feng shui master was a key factor in his accumulation of riches against the odds.
    ‘Must take photo,’ the geomancer said to himself. He pictured a newspaper article in the Straits Times , with two images: a ‘before’ picture showing a humble Tik outside the crumbly block in Fort Canning, and an ‘after’ shot showing a wealthier-looking Tik leaning on a sports car outside his new mansion. The headline could be: BRILLIANT FENG SHUI MASTER TRANSFORMS SMALL BUSINESSMAN INTO WEALTHY TYCOON.
    The geomancer took an elevator to the third floor.