Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill Read Free Book Online Page B

ordering this tour but he knew these were early days in his climb to power. He was an outsider in this bureaucracy of old men and, as such, wasn’t particularly trusted by any of them. He had a good deal of favour currying to do before they’d accept him into their inner circle. And one thing Judge Haeng was good at, one might even say virtuoso, was kissing arse.
    December in the mountains of Xiang Khouang was too cold and high for mosquitoes. Siri slept in a hammock slung between two sturdy drooping breast-fruit trees. Wrapped in a blanket, he smiled up at the stars that extended from horizon to horizon. They shone brightly like sunlight squeezing in through nail holes in the atmosphere. He breathed in the scents: the night orchids that hid their beauty shyly during the day and blossomed under moonlight, the release sourness plants, and the sudden love vegetables. He listened to the jungle musical: the choir of birds and beasts that sang through the night. The air was so fresh he could feel his insides waking from a long polluted hibernation.
    Although not, as they say, in the flesh, the old lady was back. She sat in a most unladylike pose, with her phasin skirt above her knees, her arms folded across her chest, and her head nodding from side to side. Her mouth was a clot of unspat betel nut. She was with Siri often these days. She neither spoke nor gestured nor came nor went. She was there and then she wasn’t; The monk at Hay Sok Temple had suggested she could have been Siri’s mother – or could still be. Tenses were annoyingly unhelpful when it came to the afterlife. As Siri had been separated from his parents at an early age, there was no way to tell one way or the other, and she certainly wasn’t giving anything away.
    He fluttered his fingers at her. “Goodnight, Ma,” he said, and closed his eyes.
     
    Dtui sat in the cutting room with nothing to do but admire the smiles of the seven happy nurses and the scowl of the one malcontent in the Mahosot photographs. The auditors in the office had been buoyed by the news that Dr Siri wouldn’t be back for another few days. They’d been warned of his reputation and doubted he would welcome their intrusion. It was hard to believe the little morgue had enough paperwork to keep them engrossed but Dtui noted that their snouts were still dipped into the filing cabinets. Mr Geung was using a long-handled broom to sweep away the ceiling cobwebs and the spiders seemed to appreciate his lack of coordination.
    “I doubt those spiders have recovered from the laugh you gave them yesterday, brother Geung,” Dtui said.
    “A…a morgue c…can’t be too clean,” he told her, quoting Dr Siri.
    “You’re sweeping all the paint off the walls.”
    Geung, with his very personal sense of humour, found that comment hilarious. He almost choked behind his surgical mask. Dtui heard a loud cough from the office that presumably suggested that menial staff shouldn’t be having fun on the job. Geung leaned against the table while his friend slapped him between the shoulder blades. When his voice returned, he said, “I know who sh…she is.”
    He was looking at the photographs.
    “Yes, you do. They’re our new nurses,” Dtui reminded him.
    “No.” He picked up the photo of the nurses walking across the hospital compound. He pointed – not to the girls but to the patients who sat watching them pass. In particular he singled out one old lady in pyjamas sitting in a wheelchair.
    “You know her, do you, pal?” Dtui took a closer look: thin as a noodle strand, white haired, certainly ill.
    “No, Dtui. I don’t kn…know her. I just kn…know who she is. And you know t…too.”
    “Do I?” She looked again. “Give me a clue.”
    “On the the wall of the Bureau de P…Poste.”
    “The wall of the…? Oh, you aren’t thinking it’s – what’s her face?”
    “The Lizard.”
    “No way!”
    Dtui looked again, shaking her head. The Lizard? Her wanted poster had been on