Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

have been. Except this one fought back. She refused to go quietly.”
    “I like her already.”
    They removed the épée and placed it with the other two. There was something different about it, lighter or…But Siri would get to that later. They undressed the young woman as Dtui made notes about the bloodstains on her skin and clothing. The victim was physically fit, with a well defined musculature. Unusual for a Lao woman. Probably an athlete. They took their allotted three photographs. They washed the corpse and noticed immediately that the Zorro brand on her thigh was deep, much deeper than those of her predecessors’.
    “In fact,” Dtui said, looking closely at the wound, “I’d say one of these cuts is deep enough to have sliced an artery. What do you think, Doctor?”
    When Dtui wasn’t breastfeeding or burping or lulling Malee to sleep, Siri liked to have her comment during autopsies. He still had hope she’d secure a scholarship in the Soviet bloc and study to take over from him at the morgue. She already showed more enthusiasm and acumen than Siri himself.
    “Let’s have a look,” Siri said, and leaned over the body.
    He cut gently at the flesh around the Z and worked his way inward towards the slashes. The cuts were wild, almost fanatical. Completely different from the carefully carved thigh of the second victim, Kiang. It was the cross cut, the axis of the Z, that had dug deepest and had, in fact, nicked the femoral artery.
    “Hmm. Now that’s interesting,” he said.
    “This is where all the blood came from,” Dtui decided.
    “And, if that’s the case…”
    “The Z had to have been cut before she was killed with the sword.”
    “Otherwise?”
    “Otherwise the wound wouldn’t have bled like the Nam Pou fountain. How did he keep her still enough to sign her thigh? It must have hurt like hell.”
    Siri thought about the bottle of medicine. If it had contained some kind of sedative, that might have been enough. The killer drugged the woman and was signing her thigh when she came round. All possible. Once they were done with the autopsy Siri would spend time with the bottle and its contents.
    “She might have been drugged,” he said. “In fact they all might have been drugged. Teacher Oum’s off at a mini re-education seminar and she’s the only one with the chemicals to find out what our three ladies had in their stomachs, we won’t know for sure until she gets back tomorrow. So, let’s keep delving.”
    The medic had been a well-endowed young lady and the sword had entered her left breast from the south-west. After his Y incision, Siri and Dtui set about tracing the path of the blade. They arrived at the point where it had passed through the rib cage. The bones were unmarked so they had to assume the sword passed between the ribs without touching them. Enter Mr Geung. He wielded his rib-cutters like a ferocious Greek warrior. If one were to ignore his perm he might have been taken for a middle-aged Achilles. Siri and Dtui stood back to admire his work.
    “You really have to stop treating our Mr Geung like a poodle, nurse,” whispered Siri.
    “I really don’t know what you mean,” she replied.
    “I think you do. And I’m serious. Enough’s enough.”
    Dtui adopted a Lao band-aid smile to cover her embarrassment. Within minutes, Geung’s work was done and they had access to the inner sanctum of organs. Siri stepped forward and began to probe. Then stood back in surprise.
    “Well, I’ll be…” he said.
    “What is it?” Dtui asked, and stepped up to the table. Her face dropped in astonishment. “She…”
    “I know,” Siri smiled. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t know.” Dtui shook her head and began to fumble around in the victim’s chest cavity. “Does the word ‘fascinating’ describe something that’s physically impossible? She hasn’t got a heart.”
    The lung was clearly visible but there was no heart nestled against it.
    “Nurse Dtui, surely your medical training would have told you we all have to have a heart in order to function. So, as we know this young lady was walking around just twenty-four hours ago, logic would dictate that she must have a heart. We just have to go looking for it.”
    He pulled back the flap of skin to the left of his incision and smiled.
    “There you are, you sneaky devil,” he smiled. The heart smiled back at him from beneath the medic’s right breast.
    “It’s on the wrong side, Doc,” Dtui said.
    “It