101 Detectives

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‘Hey, Klopper, what’s a gonad?’

Klopper did not answer.

Tetrodotoxin. Bate turned the word over in his wounded mouth. It was found in the gonads of the fugu fish and a grain of it was enough to kill you. It paralysed the nervous system, shutting down your organs one by one, until you died a horrible death.

‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘The fugu fish is twenty-seven times more deadly than the green mamba. Incredible.’

The back of Klopper’s head bristled. Bate could imagine the morose expression on his face.

Bate was sitting on the bed reading a copy of the Reader’s Digest, which he’d carried away from his dentist’s waiting room the day before. He’d been halfway through the article on fugu fish when the nurse summoned him to the chair and so he’d slipped the magazine into his jacket pocket. This morning, when he put the jacket on again, there it was. A label stuck to the dog-eared cover read: ‘Please do not remove from the waiting room.’

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