Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

Mot reached for the large scalpel and left Dtui with no choice. She stepped across him and grabbed his skinny wrist. She knew if it came to a fistfight she could take Mot but might have trouble with all three of them.

“What the…?” Mot was shocked.

“Nurse Dtui,” Suk shouted. “What on earth has come over you?”

“This body,” she said. “I think…”

“Well?”

“I think it might be booby-trapped.”

There were a few seconds of stunned silence before the three outsiders burst into laughter. Mot squirmed his hand free from the nurse’s grasp.

“It looks like somebody’s been sniffing the formaldehyde,” he laughed.

Unnoticed, Mr. Geung slipped into the storeroom, leaving Dtui without an ally.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Look there. You’re a doctor. What do you see at the side of his abdomen?”

“Do you suppose we could tell her to leave?” Mot pleaded. “I didn’t undergo six years of training by experts to come home and be lectured by a country girl. This job is difficult enough as it is.”

Dtui was red-faced with anger.

“I agree entirely,” said Suk. “I apologize. Nurse, kindly leave. I’ll see you in my office in the morni-”

But his train of thought was derailed by the sight of Mr. Geung emerging from the storeroom with an AK-47. It was pointed directly at the new surgeon, who fell backward against a chest of drawers.

“Y… you c… can’t laugh at Comrade Dt… Dt… ui,” Geung said. “Ih… ih… it isn’t nice at all.”

“Now, son,” Suk said, as if talking to a wild beast, “calm down. Don’t do anything…”

Geung swung the AK-47 in his direction and the director flattened himself against the wall like a layer of paint. Only the soldier remained passive. There might even have been a slight glimmer of a smile on his lips.

“Let the nurse say what she has to say,” he suggested.

“Well, thank you,” Dtui said, one wary eyebrow cocked in Mr. Geung’s direction. “What a girl has to do to get a word in these days.” She smoothed down her white uniform, which strained at the buttons when she pushed forward her ample chest.

“Dr. Mot,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it like this but, well, you just wouldn’t listen and it might very well be a matter of life and death. Admittedly it might also be a false alarm but no harm in being careful, I say. Don’t you agree?”

The gun swung back toward him and he nodded enthusiastically.

“Good, then perhaps you could tell us what you see there at the side of the abdomen.”

The surgeon stepped up to the body. “Of course, it’s a wound.”

“Excellent. And what type of a wound is it?”

“Apparently a new one. The stitches haven’t yet been removed.”

“Right. Now take a closer look at that wound, would you?

He leaned over it. “But it’s just a regu-Oh, my. That’s odd.”

“What is?” the soldier asked.

“There’s been no healing, there’s no scar tissue at all.”

“And that means?”

“That this incision was made postmortem,” Dtui cut in.

“Why would anyone want to open a corpse and sew it up again?” asked the soldier.

“Exactly. And there’s something else,” she said. “Feel this, Doctor.”

She gently guided the surgeon’s hand to a point just below the rib cage. “Don’t press too hard now.”

The doctor ran his finger back and forth.

“It feels like some kind of protrusion. A broken bone? No, it’s too narrow.”

“There’s one exactly the same on the other side,” she told him.

“Really? How peculiar.”

“My guess,” Dtui said, “is that something was put inside this fellow’s stomach after he died.”

“Whatever for?” Suk asked, scraping himself from the wall.

“If it’s a practical joke,” Dtui said, “it’s a very elaborate, even a sick, one. The only logical explanation I can see is that someone’s sent us an exploding corpse.”

“Oh, I say,” said Mot, taking a step back. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Someone who doesn’t like coroners,” Dtui guessed. “Or, more specifically, someone who isn’t fond of Dr. Siri. I’d guess they didn’t know he’d be off partying in the north.”

The soldier pushed past Geung and stepped up to the table. “If she’s right, your nurse here might just have saved our lives.”

“If ’ she’s right,” said Suk with one eye on the AK-47. “It sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

“There’s something else,” Dtui continued. The captain’s uniform jacket was hung over the back of a chair. She held it up and poked her finger through a small hole in the back. “Do you know any officers in peacetime who’d knowingly wear a jacket with a bullet hole in the back? There isn’t a corresponding hole in our corpse so I know it isn’t his.”

“You’re right,” said the soldier. “No commanding officer would let him walk around with a hole in his jacket. He might not even be military at all. Someone could have dressed up this body in an old army uniform.”

“Why?” Suk asked.

“Because they knew there wouldn’t be an autopsy otherwise,” Dtui supposed. “But if the corpse is a dead soldier, they knew we’d insist on one. What do you say, Doctor?”

Mot shook his head in bewilderment.

“I’d say nurses have come a long way since I went off to the Eastern Bloc.”

“We still can’t be certain,” Suk said. “We have to confirm this booby-trap theory or we’ll all look like fools. Look, can’t you get this idiot to put down his weapon?”

“It’s just a decoration, Director,” the soldier said. “No moving parts, I’d bet.”

“Well spotted,” Dtui laughed. “It was a prop in the Red Ballet. They came to give us a show last month and left it behind. Our Mr. Geung wouldn’t have dared pick it up if it was real. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body, do you, love?”

Geung smiled his gap-toothed grin and offered the stage prop to the director, who waved it away angrily.

“As for the bomb theory,” she continued. “We can’t be certain how sensitive it is. I suggest we carefully put him back in the freezer and ice him again. Once he’s good and hard we could pop him over to the X-ray Department and see what we’re dealing with.”

“Excellent idea,” said the soldier. “And in the meantime I’ll get in touch with our bomb-disposal people and have them standing by just in case. Very well done, lass. Very well done.”

It was almost midnight before everything was sorted out. It transpired that Dtui’s hunch had been spot-on. There was nothing subtle about the device in the captain’s stomach cavity. It consisted of a spring steel hacksaw blade bent around and fastened with fishing line like a very taut bow. Halfway down the bow was a hand grenade whose pin was attached by a second wire to the opposite side of the blade. The entire stomach sack had been removed, presumably to prevent leaking stomach acid from dissolving the wire prematurely. The device was placed in such a way as to leave the tips of the bow pressed against the abdomen wall. A normal Y incision as performed by even the most incompetent of coroners would have sliced through the fishing line. The bow would have sprung apart, thus removing both the pin from the grenade and the presiding pathologist from life on earth. Dr. Mot, Director Suk, Geung, and the unnamed soldier undoubtedly owed Dtui their lives.

Madame Daeng could only laugh when she discovered they’d been taking tea beside a booby-trapped corpse. Her reaction surprised Dtui no more than the old lady suggesting they warm up the body together in the first place. She’d been a resistance fighter, a saboteur, probably an assassin. What was one little bomb in one more dead body to Madame Daeng? Now troubled by arthritis and forced to wear glasses to read, she described herself as “just another old biddy.”