Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill

Santiago, who seemed to have no idea what he'd just witnessed. She asked whether anything Siri had seen sounded familiar to him. He shrugged and opined that bushes and water could be anyplace.
    "All right. Let's start with bushes." Siri took control. "Is there anyone on staff who's lived here all their life?" After a consultation they came up with Nang, a jittery nursing orderly who still fainted from time to time at the sight of blood. She seemed delighted to discuss something that wasn't related to surgery. What Siri wanted to know about was fruit. He didn't have the sample with him but he was able to describe the berry he'd crushed in his room at the guesthouse. The others looked on, bemused, as they tried to give it a name.
    "Monkey ball plums," said the girl at last. "That's what you're talking about."
    "And where can they be found?" Siri asked.
    "All over if you know where to look. They grow on the karsts. At the market they pay well for this fruit, so a lot of village people go looking for it. More than a few people have been blown up while out scrounging for monkey ball plums."
    "Can you find them around here?"
    "Of course, at certain times of the year. All the mountains at Kilometer 8 have bushes where they grow."
    "Do you want to share what this is all about, Doc?" Dtui asked.
    "Clues," Siri told her. "We mustn't ignore any clues. Like the green door. Ask Santiago again if he remembers any green doors."
    She did just that and watched the Cuban flick mentally through all the doors he'd known in his life. At last he asked her whether she was sure it was green and not blue. Siri had no recollection at all of his vision and could not confirm the color.
    "If we say blue," Dtui asked, "would that make any difference?"
    Santiago told her that indeed it would. The bomb doors at the old hospital were heavy metal, and they were blue.
    "And where is the old hospital?"
    He pointed through the window to the black shape of the mountain. It stood out from the indigo sky, looming over them like a giant raven.
    She translated for Siri, who knew the hospital well. When they'd moved everything down from the original buildings, the old place was abandoned and closed up. There was no way in. The bombproof doors had been locked to keep out inquisitive children from the middle school down the hill. But in his mind all the pieces fit together: the berries, the doors, the water, and the concrete. "Who has the key?" he asked.
    Santiago took them to the administration office, unlocked the desk drawer, and rifled through the bunches of keys till he found the one that should have opened the old hospital main-door padlock. From the store cupboard he took a machete and three battery packs that powered headband-mounted lamps; their hands would be free. He led the way along the overgrown path that snaked up to the nearest entrance to the hospital. The door was nine inches thick and hadn't been opened for a few years. It took the combined effort of all three pulling on the handle to budge it enough to permit them to squeeze through the gap.
    A sad, musty odor escaped as they entered. The hidden vents that brought air from above were clogged with weeds, and the air they walked into was old and stale. The histories of the hospital's victims still clung to the place. But Siri recognized something else deep inside its unrelenting blackness--the smell of a recent death. Dtui took a little longer to identify the scent. She and Siri switched on their batteries, and the three headlight beams swept back and forth across twelve hundred square meters of gray stone. The old doctors had spent many hours inside this hidden chamber, so the only thing that surprised them was the absence of sound--no scurrying of animals, no chirping of bats. It was as if nature had been too afraid to take over the vacated premises.
    But Dtui stood open-mouthed at the sight before her, amazed that in wartime, under a barrage of bombing, such an incredible feat of construction had