One Blood

by Graeme Kent

  ‘What boy?’ asked Conchita. She wondered where Sister Jean Francoise’s wandering mind had taken her on this occasion.

  ‘You know, the nice one you brought to the clinic a few days ago,’ said Sister Jean Francoise, dusting her hands on the front of her habit. ‘What do you call them—VSOs.’

  ‘Do you mean Andy Russell?’ asked Conchita. ‘What does he have to do with eating fish?’

  ‘That’s why you brought him to the hospital, wasn’t it?’ asked Sister Jean Francoise. ‘He’d made himself ill eating some dreamfish. I know the signs. I thought you realized.’

  ‘The gnarli fish?’ asked Kella, suddenly alert. ‘The boy had made himself ill by eating gnarli? Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Sister Jean Francoise. ‘I can recognize the symptoms of eating dreamfish when I see them. It was very naughty of the boy. I suppose some of the islanders told him about it. They picked the habit up from Japanese soldiers during the war, of course. Good night.’

  ‘What were you both talking about?’ asked Conchita after the other nun had left the kitchen. ‘And what does it have to do with Andy Russell?’

  ‘Let me try to get this straight,’ said Kella. ‘You didn’t know that Russell was suffering from food poisoning when you brought him to the mission from Kasolo?’

  ‘Why, no, I thought he’d been out in the sun for too long, left alone on the island like that. What is this dreamfish Sister Jean Francoise was talking about?’

  ‘The gnarli is a small fish with a stripe running along the side of its body. It’s not eaten in the Solomons because it doesn’t taste very nice. But if it’s cooked the right way, it causes hallucinations in the person eating it. The Japanese stationed in the West used to catch them for just that purpose. It was their equivalent of taking drugs, sitting around a campfire.’

  ‘Then Sister Jean Francoise was right. Andy was very naughty to experiment with such things, especially when he was all alone on the island,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘Perhaps it was all a mistake. He was hungry and might not have known the effects the dreamfish would have on him.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Kella. ‘You’ve got to cook and eat just the right amount of the gnarli to induce hallucinations. If you have too much, then you go into a coma that can last up to thirty-six hours.’

  ‘The poor boy,’ said Sister Conchita vaguely. ‘On top of everything else on that wretched island, he suffered from food poisoning as well.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Kella, ‘he did it on purpose.’

  ‘Surely not?’ said Sister Conchita. ‘Why on earth would he want to do that?’

  ‘To provide himself with an alibi,’ said Kella. He warmed to his proposition. ‘We’ve been discarding Andy as a suspect in the attacks on the logging camp because he was in a coma when you brought him to the hospital. Suppose it was a self-induced coma? He was on the island. He waited until the fishermen landed, then as a bonus you came by. He had already caught the dreamfish and recognized what they were, so he had cooked them in advance. Just before any visitors arrived, he ate them.’

  Sister Conchita remembered the remnants of charred fish on the fire by the VSO’s tent on Kasolo the day she had found him lying gibbering in his sleeping bag.

  ‘When I arrived, he was incoherent,’ she said.

  ‘That would be the first hallucinatory effects of eating the fish,’ said Kella excitedly. ‘But Russell had deliberately eaten too much. As you and the fishermen loaded him into the mission canoe, he went into the second stage—a deep coma. You assumed that he had been drifting in and out of unconsciousness for days and therefore couldn’t have left Kasolo, so he wasn’t a suspect in any wrongdoing. In reality, there had been nothing wrong with him until a few minutes before you arrived on the island.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Sister Conchita.

  Kella frowned. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘How could he have got off the island? He was stranded there.’

  Sister Conchita concentrated. Half-formed images of her two visits to Kasolo began to run jerkily though her mind, like an old and flickering film being exposed in slow motion.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said, racking her brain. ‘There were things that I noticed and stored but didn’t think about at the time.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ asked Kella.

  ‘The first time I visited the island, I followed the fishermen along a track to a clearing where Andy was lying.’

  ‘What did you notice?’ asked Kella, who had reason to have considerable faith in the nun’s powers of observation and retention.

  ‘The first time I was there, I noticed that the grass along one side of the track had recently been crushed flat by a heavy object about six feet long and half as wide.’

  ‘Like a canoe?’ asked Kella.

  ‘Exactly. Yet when I returned to Kasolo a few days later, and met Imison and Dontate, all the grass had sprung up again and there was no sign of any indentation.’

  ‘And your inference from this?’ prompted Kella.

  ‘That the grass sprang back into place quickly once any object placed on top of it was removed. Almost certainly the impression I saw on the grass earlier had been caused by a canoe only recently, although Andy claimed to have been stranded alone on the island with no form of transport for almost a month.’

  ‘It sounds as if young Mr Russell has been telling lies,’ said Kella.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘When I first saw Andy on Kasolo, he was at the hallucinatory stage after eating the dreamfish. He was rambling. He said something in pidgin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said painim aut. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means “to find out”,’ said the sergeant slowly. His eyes locked with Sister Conchita’s.

  ‘Somebody had discovered him and his canoe on the island, when he was supposed to be stranded there without transport,’ said the nun.

  ‘Ed Blamire?’ suggested Kella. ‘He borrowed a canoe and left Munda to look at the islands where Kennedy and his crew had hidden. Andy Russell knew that Blamire could break his alibi.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’ asked Sister Conchita.

  ‘I think the best thing would be to have a chat with the lad,’ said Sergeant Kella.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘WE’VE GOT TO find Andy Russell and Mary Gui,’ said Kella. ‘Andy no longer has an alibi to prove that he wasn’t at the mission open day, and I don’t think Mary has told us everything she knows.’

  ‘You find Andy while I look for Mary,’ said Sister Conchita.

  ‘Why that way round?’ asked Kella.

  ‘Because I don’t think you would be totally impartial if you were to question Mary,’ said Sister Conchita bravely. Oops, she could have put that better, she thought as she saw the sheepish expression on the sergeant’s face. She determined to stick to her guns. Knowing Kella, as she was beginning to, there was likely to be some sort of history between him and the attractive rest-house proprietor. She was aware of the sergeant’s reputation for fully appreciating the young women he met in the course of his official duties, and this particular Western girl was not only intelligent and sophisticated, but also very beautiful and spirited.

  ‘You don’t like Mary, do you?’ asked the sergeant unexpectedly.

  ‘She is one of God’s creatures and as such is to be cherished,’ replied the nun. Kella’s sceptical gaze did not leave her face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I believe Miss Gui has an eye to the main chance and that her ambition exceeds her regard for her fellow men and women. There, I’ve said it, and I’m not sorry!’

  ‘Hmm!’ said Kella drily. ‘Obviously I’ve seen another side of Miss Gui. However, speaking as a policeman, I have to admit that you’re right. Mary knows where she’s going, even if she’s not sure who’s going with her. Go ahead, see if you can find her.’

  They were standing on the wharf at Gizo in the early-morning sunshine
. They had dragged the mission canoe up on to the beach. It lay a few yards away from them, tilted on its side. Inland, the district centre looked as somnolent and neglected as usual. Those few islanders and expatriates who were already around were moving slowly and without any great sense of purpose. Kella nodded to the nun and started walking along the wharf, past the moored vessels.

  Sister Conchita was both shrewd and observant, he thought. She had certainly summed Mary up dispassionately. If he had not been so attracted to Mary, he wondered if he would even have liked her. Yes, he would, he told himself. That evening in the Mendana Hotel she had showed herself to be both brave and difficult to subdue, even by a gaggle of middle-class expatriate women. There was a lot to Mary Gui, and he was not thinking exclusively of her undeniable physical assets.

  There were a few battered trading vessels with shallow draughts moored to the wharf, taking on board cargoes of copra and fruit and vegetables, as well as tins of diesel fuel. They were made to appear almost spanking new by a decrepit private yacht lying next to them, with several rake-thin, sun-blackened, heavily bearded expatriates sprawled exhaustedly on its deck. Probably another would-be round-the-world effort in the throes of disintegration, thought Kella. It would come to an end as soon as the disillusioned young crew abandoned the effort and wired home for money, or sank ignominiously and ingloriously among the reefs somewhere offshore.

  He continued his progress along the wharf. With half a dozen inter-island trading vessels waiting to leave, the odds were that at least half of them would be crewed by Malaita men, and of these crews, a large proportion would come from the Lau area. He found who he had been looking for two-thirds of the way along the jetty. As it happened, they were not seamen. A wizened elderly islander was sitting on an upturned box, smoking a clay pipe. There were half a dozen other Malaitans around him, all stevedores living in Gizo, whose job it was to load and unload visiting vessels. Kella could see from the tribal markings on the old man’s face that he came from the Lau lagoon area. The policeman nodded respectfully and squatted on the deck next to the old man, politely making sure, as a sign of the deference due to age, that he was at a lower level than the other islander.

  ‘Maani koba ana uta,’ he said. ‘May you be warmed by the sun.’

  The old islander nodded. He took his pipe from his mouth and gave the traditional title of respect to the aofia. ‘Lau talo inao. The first to take up a shield in battle.’

  ‘I am looking for a young white man,’ went on Kella in Lau after a further leisurely exchange of compliments. ‘His name is Andy Russell. He is tall and thin and does odd jobs for the government. Do you know him?’

  The old man pointed with the stem of his pipe. ‘Sometimes he works at the canoe village, half an hour’s walk along the beach,’ he said.

  It was a pleasant morning as Kella left Gizo and walked in the direction indicated by the old wharf labourer. The sand was warm beneath his feet. Small hermit crabs, alarmed by his approach, scuttled out from beneath the shells littering the beach and ran in all directions. It did not take long to leave the district centre behind him. When he reached it, the canoe village was no more than a hamlet of four huts clustered a hundred yards in from the beach, on the bank of a stream running down to the sea. On the sand between the huts and the beach were a number of canoes in various stages of construction. They ranged from simple dugouts to a half-completed ornate replica of a war canoe, complete with a fierce Nguzunguzu figurehead representing the god of war. Isolated pieces of half-completed hand-carved accoutrements lay scattered on the ground waiting to be fitted into place, including outlines of ribs, gunnels, thwarts and stem pieces. A fire containing burning tongs had been kept alight so that the interiors of some of the canoes could be burnt out when the time came.

  Next to the canoes on the sand were thirty or forty wet logs drying in the morning heat, each about twenty feet long, of good-quality wood, already stripped of their branches and planed to a rough finish.

  Four men were working on the canoes. They toiled with the confident air of men comfortable in their own physicality and secure in the knowledge that they were good at the work they did. One was in his fifties. The other three were younger, presumably the sons of the older man. They looked at Kella with hostility, but did not at once stop working. Finally one of the younger men put down his adze and walked over to the sergeant. He was slight but muscular, with the bunched shoulder muscles of a paddler. He was not overtly aggressive, but neither was there any trace of humility in his attitude.

  ‘What does the white man’s policeman want here?’ he said in good English. ‘We keep the law and mind our own business.’

  ‘I’m looking for the young white man called Andy,’ said Kella. ‘He is a VSO. I am told that he works here.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the islander. ‘He is not here today.’

  ‘How does he help you?’ asked Kella.

  ‘We are teaching him to become a canoe-maker,’ said the islander. ‘The whiteys give him nothing to do and he is bored.’

  Kella nodded. ‘Is that the only way that he helps you?’ he asked.

  The young islander did not answer. His brothers and father had stopped working and were looking on suspiciously. Kella ignored them and walked past the canoes under construction to the line of logs just above the high-water mark on the beach. He examined the tree trunks, taking his time, aware of the gaze of the canoe-building family. The work on the canoes was of good quality. The men of the village were craftsmen and so would be doing very nicely for themselves at a time when the prices of canoes ranged from a few Australian dollars for a simple dugout to ten times that amount for one seating six people.

  ‘You do good work,’ he said, walking back to the group of men. ‘But you are lucky to find such fine-quality wood on an island like this.’

  ‘It is driftwood,’ said the young islander quickly. ‘We find it floating in the sea after storms and drag it ashore.’

  ‘Driftwood consisting of the finest kauri trees, ready-trimmed to be sent to factories in Australia?’ asked Kella, raising a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Truly the sea gods have been good to you and your line, canoe-maker. You do not need to pray when you are so well treated by the sacred ones.’

  ‘That’s just the way it happened,’ said the young islander sulkily.

  ‘I wish I could believe you,’ said Kella. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t. Nobody could be that lucky. Do you know what I think has happened? I think somebody has visited the logging camp at Alvaro when it was dark. That somebody removed the wooden boom from a pool of treated logs in the lagoon, waiting for the next transport ship to be sent overseas. With the boom gone, the logs floated out into the main lagoon. There were people waiting in canoes in the dark for that to happen, people from a family of canoe-builders, perhaps. These men steered as many logs as they could back to their village on Gizo island and pulled them ashore. Then, if anyone asked, they could say that the logs were driftwood, saved from the sea. But we know better, don’t we, brother? We also know that it’s illegal. The whitey in charge at Alvaro will surely bring the police in if he finds out that someone has been stealing his best wood. Perhaps someone will tell him this.’

  ‘You would betray another islander to a whitey?’

  ‘I would do my duty as a police officer,’ said Kella.

  Without another word, the young islander turned and walked back to his waiting father and brothers. He spoke urgently to them. They replied at length in undertones in their own language. He nodded and walked back to Kella. Kella guessed that he had received permission from his family to talk freely. After all, the canoe-builders owed no loyalty to the white youth. He was right.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ the young islander asked resignedly.

  • • •

  JOE DONTATE’S HOME village was a series of hovels on one of the foothills behind Gizo. The hamlet was too close to the district centre to be more than a caricature of an island community. It looked as if most of the detrit
us from Gizo had been hurled contemptuously up the hill by giant hands and had come to rest among the squalid assemblage of thatched huts. Scattered about the village square were discarded iron baths, the chassis of an ancient truck, holed pots and saucepans and various items of shattered furniture, suitable only for firewood. Scrawny chickens pecked their way amid the rubbish, and dogs yapped mournfully. No wonder Joe Dontate had been willing to take up the hardest sport of all if it had presented the opportunity of fighting his way out of this squalor, thought Sister Conchita.

  Some flustered young island sisters of the Roman Catholic church, in the district centre, surprised to see the white nun, had told her that Dontate’s pathway-sending was to be held in his village that morning, and that Mary Gui had announced her intention of attending. It was a sign of the lack of character of the village that it did not even have a name. It had taken Conchita forty-five minutes to climb the hill. Behind her sprawled the dull vista of Gizo itself, and then the beautiful languid lagoon dotted with islets. On the far side of the village, the rate of ascent grew steeper. The central hills of the island suddenly rose starkly against the cloudless sky like alarmed sentinels called to arms.

  Conchita could not help comparing the tawdry nature of her surroundings with the loveliness of the mission she had just left. She felt a sense of despair. Perhaps Marakosi was too beautiful. It represented a shelter, which its sisters were unwilling to leave. Had she done anything in the month she had been there to bring them closer to reality? Was she the right person to try? Had she failed in the project handed to her by the order? She had certainly made a complete muddle of her investigation into the death of Ed Blamire in the mission church. All that she had emerged with was a suspicion that a nice, apparently ingenuous young VSO had been deceiving her. Andy Russell could have been present at Marakosi at the mission open day, and if he had a canoe, he could also have made the attacks on the Alvaro logging camp at night and returned before dawn. But why would he do such things? It seemed out of character with his affable personality. Surely the boy was not a murderer?