The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries)

by Colin Cotterill

  “Ms. A,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Did you or did you not make threats against Jimm Juree?”

  “Threats? No sir.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why would I make threats to her?”

  “That’s for you to tell me.”

  Chompu knew that Poirot would have had a tearful confession out of the girl by now. Fiction was so … convenient. She still wasn’t near to breaking point. He pushed a little.

  “So you didn’t write a threatening letter to Jimm Juree or try to poison her dogs?”

  “No … no, sir. I’m very fond of dogs, and…”

  “And what?”

  “I can’t write so well.”

  “You were a university graduate.”

  “I used to write, sir. I used to write a lot. But then this happened.”

  She rolled up her sleeve to reveal a wrist wound.

  “What’s that?”

  “A bullet, sir. We were passing through the no-go zone to get to the camps in Thailand. The Burmese military weren’t so strict back then. I imagine I was just unlucky. I was shooting practice for some bored army sentry. He hit me in the right wrist and severed a nerve. I can’t use the thumb on my right hand. But I can type.”

  “And you expect us to believe the Englishman hired you with a disability like that?” said Grandad.

  “I can do all the big jobs,” she said. “And the master’s very kind.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Grandad. “She’s got bullshit coming out of every orifice. Let me do this. I’ll show you what an interrogation looks like.”

  He stepped past Chompu and pointed his index finger in the maid’s face.

  “Girl,” he said, “what about your warning to Jimm when she came here. Are you going to tell us that didn’t happen either?”

  A was shaken. She looked at her boss and her husband/brother.

  “I … I did warn her,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I can’t … I can’t really tell you, sir.”

  “See, son,” said Grandad to Chompu. “That’s the way you do it. No need to pussyfoot around with these people. Go for the jugular.”

  A was translating but not for Coralbank. She was speaking Burmese with her brother. The writer continued to sit deaf and dumbfounded. If anyone looked guilty in that room it was him.

  “And while you’re at it,” said Grandad, “you can tell us why you thought it necessary to pretend this little midget here was your husband when in fact he’s your brother.”

  This really stunned the maid. She blushed and looked fleetingly at Coralbank, who didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

  “I would like to maintain my right to remain silent,” she said.

  Grandad laughed. “You’re Burmese, girl,” he said. “You don’t have any rights.”

  “That’s not strictly true,” said Chompu, “but I will take you to the police station if you refuse to answer those questions. And the first thing they’ll do is ask to see your papers.”

  “It’s not … I can’t, sir,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “We’ll lose our jobs here,” she said.

  “It’s that serious?”

  “Yes, sir. Please don’t make me.”

  “It’s simple,” said Grandad Jah. “You talk or you’re on the next armored police truck back to Burma.”

  There followed a few minutes of Burmese as A explained the situation to her brother. This gave Chompu time to glare angrily at the old policeman. Finally, A sat forward on her chair and said, “All right, sir. I’ll tell you everything.”

  16.

  Take Off Your Head

  (parking garage)

  I came round, not in a start as if from a bad dream, but in a gentle quandary. It took me some time to work out who I was and longer before I gave any thought at all to where. There were white tiles under my face. The smell of blood. Something sticky on my cheek. Who was I and why was I slumped on the ground like a sack of yams, soaked to the skin? I was woozy and having the worst hangover at the same time. Objects were passing in and out of focus. I couldn’t move, but I willed myself to concentrate. To match contradictory facts. There was a huge standing air conditioner, but the room was sweaty. I was thinking in Thai but hearing words in English. They were muffled and angry.

  But wait, I was me. Jimm. I was on a bicycle in the rain. A truck with no seatbelts. And … a glass of quick-acting sedative.

  I raised my head and saw only white walls. No windows. It was the bank of eight parallel fluorescent lights on the ceiling that reminded me I’d been here before. The floor tiles had been red then, and the equipment was still packed and covered in cellophane. But this was the new Lang Suan hospital operating theater. The Medley-sponsored facility with its spacious ante-room with an en-suite shower. The operating table leaned up against the far wall, waiting to be welded on to the four metal studs that protruded from the floor on either side of me. I was tied wrists and ankles to those studs. It was just as well the air conditioner wasn’t functioning because I suppose I should mention I was buck naked and face-up. It was odd because one of the early thoughts that entered my head was, when I wrote the screenplay of this, whether I should drape my character in a silk slip to avoid an R18 certification, or whether I should make it Indie and have this whole scene unashamedly nude. Europe would love it. I suppose the drug still had hold of me then. There would be time for terror later.

  If any of you are having unclean thoughts at this time, I suggest you move along to the S and M section of your public library and get your thrills there because there was nothing at all erotic about my predicament. The longer I lay there, once the drug had worn off, the more my mind gave vent to its imagination. You can only pretend to be brave at moments like that, and there was nobody to be fooled by my fake courage. The sound effects didn’t help. The angry English from not too far away was no encouragement at all. It was mostly “Bastard,” “You deserve this,” “How do you like that?” A woman’s voice accompanied by the thud of metal on metal. I knew something very nasty was going on just a short ways away.

  I focused on the imaginable. The tangible. I had an itch. A really serious one beneath my left breast, and there was nothing I could do about it. Forget water-boarding. Just leave Al Qaeda naked and strapped to a mattress full of bedbugs. I also looked at the positives. There weren’t that many, but being flat on a hard floor was really good for my lower back twinges.

  Dr. June walked into the room wearing green scrubs with a shiny dark red motif. She had a visor pulled down over her face, and I couldn’t help noticing the axe in her hand. Both the visor and the axe were splattered with the same fresh crimson as the tunic. I didn’t think she’d been out playing paintball. With her looming over me and me spreadeagled on the floor, the left-tit itch seemed the least of my problems. She flipped open the visor like a welder, pleased with her latest exhaust pipe joint.

  “It appears to get better every time,” she said.

  She leaned her axe against the white wall tiles and sat on a plastic chair, catching her breath. Still sweating from her last kill.

  “It was better before they put the floor tiles down,” she said. “I didn’t have to be careful about breaking them. But they left this sheet of metal that’s just the right length for my purposes.”

  I’d read somewhere, hopefully not on the Internet, that it helped to engage homicidal maniacs in mundane conversations about personal matters that establish you as a human being with an identity.

  “Been killing someone?” I asked.

  She looked at me as if I’d spoiled her day.

  “That’s an awful lot of blood,” I continued. “Be a bugger to get that stain out. My mother, Mair, swears by Fab Extra. She says it can get out even the most stubborn stains.”

  I laughed, hoping to get a chuckle out of Dr. Doom.

  She glared.

  “Can I ask why you’re doing this?” I asked.
<
br />   She could probably tell I wasn’t wearing a wire. She swayed back and forth in her plastic chair.

  “You know? It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “I stumbled on it by accident. Murder, I mean. I’d been fascinated by death ever since medical school.”

  I hadn’t asked her for her résumé, but better yakking than hacking, that’s my philosophy. It was at that moment that I realized we were speaking to each other in English. I wondered why.

  “I suppose that’s why I naturally gravitated to a field that allowed me to study it,” she continued. “I’m something of an expert in child morbidity, you know. I’m invited to give papers on it. Yet the irony of it is that I never caused a death while I was practicing. Patients had died while I was treating them but not because of anything I did or did not do. It’s really not the same. And really, an injection? An overdose? Where’s the thrill in that?”

  My strings were tight. She’d used that annoying nylon twine that deteriorated rapidly once exposed to the elements but was like steel wire when it was fresh. If I had a cigarette lighter on me, I could have melted it in seconds. I wondered if she’d find it suspicious if I asked her for a light. Fortunately, I’d somehow pressed a “Play” button.

  “I suppose I’d been taught to prevent it,” she said. “But I had … well, not fantasies exactly, more like dreams. They disturbed me at first. What possessed me to have such dreams? Should I seek professional help? But the interesting thing is that I never saw them as nightmares. Do you know what I mean?”

  Time to bond.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said.

  “Don’t humor me.”

  “No, really. I have dreams like that all the time.”

  She stared at me doubtfully.

  “Describe one to me,” she said.

  “Really?”

  That put me on a spot. I needed a victim nobody would miss. One that would not be cursed by me telling the story. Someone who was already cursed.

  “It’s my grandad,” I said. “He’s always in a bathtub. Now that’s odd in itself as we’ve never owned a bathtub. The first time I used one was in Australia, and I almost drowned myself because I’d had a few tinnies of Victoria Bitter. That’s what they call them over there; tinnies. I never—”

  “The dream!”

  “Right. So I creep into the bathroom. He should have locked the bathroom door. I always tell him that. So I creep into the bathroom, and there he is, submerged. His skeletal frame thankfully concealed beneath a raft of red rose petals. I think that was a subliminal cinematic reference to American Beauty, the scene where Kevin Spacey has this erotic fantasy ab—”

  She reached for the axe.

  “All right. So I approach and I think he’s asleep, but when I reach out to him, his beady little old man eyes spring open and … and I panic. I grab his throat. I force him under the water. His talon-like fingers reach up to pull me on top of him. I mean, eeuuw. He tries to wrench my hands from his throat, but I’m too strong for him. I push with all my might. The last bubble of air rises to the surface. His wiry corpse is still and lifeless against the porcelain.”

  She took the axe in both hands. My story doubled in speed.

  “I lean back exhausted. I sigh. I have killed my grandfather. Now, at last, I have peace. Then, to my horror, the dead corpse of Grandad Jah bursts from the water and scratches at my face with his two-month untrimmed fingernails. How many times have I told him to trim those nails? Blood gushes from my cheeks.”

  She smiled.

  “Pouring from my skin like water through cracks in a dam. Spraying this way and that. Red. Bloody. Gushing. I plunge the knife into his chest, once, twice…”

  “The knife?”

  “It’s a dream. Four, five … eleven times. Slash, slash, slash. And, finally, he is quiet and completely dead. The bath is a vat of bubbling crimson.”

  She shuddered. It might have been an orgasm. She nodded slowly.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what it’s like.”

  “We are one,” I said, hopefully.

  “No,” she said. “We are not.”

  Bummer.

  “I graduated. I moved on to reality. You will never kill your grandfather.”

  “I could. Just give me a chance. Give me a couple of hours.”

  “A medical doctor with twenty years of experience does not suddenly become a fool in moments of heightened arousal.”

  “No?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “In that case, can you grant me just one last wish? In fact … two.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to ask, but you have a few minutes to amuse me. I’m still exhausted from my exertions in the next room. This is going to be an enormous night. I’m in no hurry.”

  “Good. Okay. Second one first. Would you mind scratching below my left breast. Mosquito bite. It’s killing me.”

  To my surprise, she put down the axe, knelt beside me, and scratched the red welt. It was heaven until her hand began to wander.

  “Better?” she asked, stroking my breast.

  “A little, thanks. Although both you and I know only too well that scratching a mosquito bite rarely improves the situation. Much better to leave it alone and imagine it doesn’t itch. But I’ve never been Buddhist enough to get away with that.”

  She was at my other breast.

  “What is your other desire, my darling?” she asked.

  “All right. Things aren’t looking that good for me right now,” I said. “But I’d hate to go without knowing what happened to Dr. Somluk.”

  She gave me a disgusted look and returned to her chair. That was a relief.

  “Your last wish and that’s the best you can do?”

  “It was my last story. My last case. I’m a journalist. We don’t like to leave stones unturned.”

  Again, to my utter surprise, she stood, carried her chair to the far wall, stepped onto it, and started to remove the plastic wrapping from the air conditioner. What a dedicated hospital-administrator-cum-axe-murderer she was.

  “She worked here with me, as you know,” said Dr. June. “She was competent, good company, attractive, I suppose, more to a woman than to a man, and we became close.”

  “Lovers?”

  “Don’t interrupt.”

  “Sorry.”

  “As a journalist, you probably know already that I have a reputation in the province. I have made things happen. There are royal awards for medicine, and I am in line for one. I have been offered senior administrative positions at major hospitals up and down the country. There has been talk of a seat for me on the Thai Medical Council.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. At first, Dr. Somluk showed respect both for my work and to me. We were a good team. Partners. Yes, partners. I’m happy to call it that. Given the limited budget we receive from the provincial medical administrators, she was curious as to how I could organize so many conferences, pay so many per diems for special projects. How I could pay … for this.”

  She swept her hand around to draw my attention to the room just in case I hadn’t seen it already. She stepped down from her chair, went to a small cabinet not yet screwed to the wall, and took out a scalpel.

  “It really is a lovely facility,” I said, fearing I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm. But the doctor returned to the chair and used the scalpel to cut through the tape that held the plastic.

  “In this country,” she said, “you have to balance your government budget with what’s available from the private sector. Neither education nor medicine can survive on what we get from the coffers of government after the crooks in parliament have had their share of it. You’d be surprised how many inappropriate sponsors there are lining up to fund worthwhile causes. The sports drinks people. The brewers. My goodness, even the tobacco companies. But not me. I drew my lines. I selected my sponsors ethically.”

  “Medley?”

  “A great provider of health-giving milk products and a
benevolent donor. Without them, medical services for children in the south would be back in the Dark Ages.”

  “When women suckled their own children,” I said.

  She looked down at me.

  “Careful now,” she snarled. “You’re sounding like her.”

  “Dr. Somluk obviously didn’t share your enthusiasm for Medley.”

  “She was so blinded by the Internet anarchists that she ignored the scientific evidence. She openly insulted rural women by suggesting they couldn’t make rational decisions about the health of their own children. Saying they were too stupid to use the product safely.”

  “So you fired her.”

  “If she’d merely stated her opinion, I would certainly have respected it. A relationship thrives on differences. But she started the campaign. She became an Internet renegade. She dared to contradict me in public. After all I did for her. All I’ve done for this province.”

  She was shredding the shit out of the plastic.

  “So you killed her.”

  Dr. June stopped slashing and became calm, as a result of my apparently cathartic observation. She looked up at the fluorescent lights as if they were heaven.

  “It wasn’t quite as … cut and dried as that,” she said. “I’d had instructions from Europe to negate the propaganda Dr. Somluk was spreading on the net. To make her less of a threat to the well-being of health care. She had a contract and I couldn’t fire her until the Rights Committee saw fair cause for her dismissal. So I put her in a little clinic in the wilds. And still she ranted. She had crossed over from friend to enemy in a comparatively short space of time.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “She’d pushed me just a wee bit too far,” she said. “The display in the Novotel was the last straw. I calmed her down that afternoon, convinced her that my car wouldn’t start, and she drove me back here. I told her that I was prepared to look into the practices of Medley. That her passion had made me think differently about things. In fact, I was about to present her with a folder I’d received from Switzerland. It cited fourteen malpractice complaints made by her former patients. Some leading to death.”