by Graeme Kent
‘The authorities won’t like it if I conduct an investigation without informing them,’ he said.
‘Do the authorities matter?’ asked Mayotishi. ‘The British won’t be here much longer anyway. Soon an independent Solomon Islands will be dealing directly with Japan.’
‘You’re suggesting that I cut out the middleman,’ Kella said. ‘Some might consider that a touch premature.’
‘The decision is yours,’ said Mayotishi. ‘The general opinion is that you will be an important man on Malaita when the colonial era ends. That will entail making decisions. Why not get a little practice in now?’
‘Only when you start telling me the truth,’ said Kella. ‘You’re not a civil servant. You wouldn’t have access to the type of research that would identify me as the aofia, or the sort of money that could afford to charter this old tub.’
‘What am I, then?’ asked Mayotishi
‘Intelligence, I’d say,’ Kella said. ‘Either the Japanese Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office or the Public Security Intelligence Agency.’
‘You’re remarkably well informed, Sergeant Kella. I was told that you moved in a number of different worlds.’
‘Put it down to my diffuse training,’ Kella said. ‘These days I’m more of a professional student than a policeman. I imagine that you’ve been sent to keep things smooth in the Solomons. From what I hear, your country is trying to move in to the islands in a big way – fishing, canning, logging. You don’t want to run the risk of a half-crazed Japanese soldier running amok and spoiling negotiations. You want to find him and ship him home as quickly and as quietly as you can.’
‘No comment,’ said Mayotishi. He paused. ‘Are you going to report your suspicions to your superiors?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Kella said. ‘I’ve never been offered a whole boat as a bribe before. I must be moving up in the world.’ He stood up. You mentioned three deaths on my island,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Mayotishi. ‘There were the two villagers and Papa Noah himself.’
Kella hoped that his face was not betraying his feelings. If the head of the Church of the Blessed Ark had been killed as well, the possible repercussions were terrifying.
11
ANOTHER CANOE, ANOTHER SHORE
Sister Conchita cut out the engine of her canoe. She had not been the first to arrive for the funeral of Papa Noah. Already there were several hundred canoes in the lagoon ahead of her, all lying motionless. The armada varied from simple dugouts with a single occupant to large, plank-built craft containing whole families. Apart from the occasional cry of a baby there was no sound on the water. The eyes of all the islanders were on a small collection of rocks rising ahead of them among the larger artificial islands.
A single narrow channel of water had been left between the massed canoes. Sister Conchita paddled down it towards the tiny island known as Foubebe, where she had been told that the burial of Papa Noah was to take place. She could see only three islanders already crowded together on the normally uninhabited patch of rock. It was a few yards across in diameter and consisted of nothing but a small thatched hutch that served as an Anglican church. Two of the waiting men were wearing loincloths. A third, older man was clad in a ceremonial grass skirt, with markings in white lime drawn across his face and body. He was squatting cross-legged on the hard ground, apparently in a trance.
The nun brought her canoe alongside. The islanders on the rock ignored her, but as far as Sister Conchita could make out, they did not look actively hostile. No one offered to help her up on to the island, so she tethered her canoe to an outcrop and scrambled up as best she could, greeting the others as she took her place among them. Although they were pressed together like seeds in a pomegranate, no one bothered to reply. On the far side of the artificial island Sister Conchita could see even more canoes in the lagoon, forming a huge shifting carpet of brown and grey on the water for as far as the eye could make out.
The creepers covering the entrance to the church were brushed clumsily aside and a plump, worried face peered out of the hut. After a pause, unwillingly a fourth man emerged. With something approaching relief, Sister Conchita recognized the latest arrival as Brother Baddeley, a local Anglican pastor who sometimes assisted Brother John in his local missionary duties. He was a small, tubby, inoffensive Guadalcanal man, wearing a tattered brown cassock and carrying a well-used Bible. He nodded to the sister, looked apprehensively at the other hulking Melanesians and in silence led the watchful group in single file round to the back of the church.
Behind the hut lay the body of Papa Noah. His torso had been wrapped in talo bark and sago palm leaves roughly in the shape of a fish, leaving only his head and face exposed. A rectangle of rock on the ground, about six feet in length, had been excavated and replaced with sand to a depth of three or four feet. A hole had been dug in this sand and the loosened material had been placed in a mound running along the sides of the grave. Effortlessly the two younger Melanesians lifted the emaciated corpse and placed it at the bottom of the newly formed cavity. Brother Baddeley looked uneasily at the man daubed with lime, who gave no sign of recognition. The Anglican missionary cleared his throat and began rattling through the burial service.
‘I am the resurrection and the life . . .’ he gabbled in an unnaturally high-pitched tone.
Somehow the squat Guadalcanal man stumbled through the ceremony, looking up often to glance fearfully at the three islanders on the compacted rocks. Sister Conchita wondered why he was so frightened of the other men. She could only conclude that the painted older one was a custom priest and his burly companions were two of his acolytes. It was accepted that most of the older Solomon Islanders and many of the younger ones followed a tortuous mixture of Christianity and traditional pagan ancestor worship, but she had never before witnessed a funeral service in which both faiths were represented officially at the same time.
Was that why Brother John had asked her to attend? Perhaps he was worried that without an expatriate present, the custom priest would have taken advantage of Brother Baddeley’s manifest timidity.
‘Blessed be the name of the Lord,’ the Melanesian Mission representative gibbered to a conclusion. Almost before the words were out of his mouth the custom priest had shouldered the inoffensive Guadalcanal man out of his way. He picked up a length of taba wood lying at his feet and placed it over the body of Papa Noah.
‘Noni diena,’ he cried in a piercing eldritch screech heard right across the lagoon, peering into the grave. A collective sigh went up from the distant canoes.
Sister Conchita edged closer to the still petrified Brother Baddeley. ‘What does that mean?’ she whispered.
‘He is welcoming the dead man to the pagan paradise,’ muttered the missionary. ‘He is telling him that he will soon be going in another canoe to another shore.’
‘I thought that was our line,’ said Sister Conchita disapprovingly, deciding that it was not her place to interfere, much as she disapproved of the form the strange ceremony seemed to be taking. This was one of Brother John’s churches; he should be here to maintain a seemly form of order of service on the island.
Taking his time, the custom priest stepped aside disdainfully. His two followers each picked up a large clam shell from a heap placed by the side of the grave and started shovelling sand from the piles along the side back into the hole. Brother Baddeley made the sign of the cross in the air before him, and ineffectually tried to help, using his bare hands to move the sand. Within minutes the grave had been filled in, without any substantial aid from the Anglican cleric. The custom priest shouldered Brother Baddeley aside again, and the Anglican minister stumbled and almost fell. Sister Conchita changed her mind about interfering. Impetuously she stepped forward to the side of the grave and intoned the Latin prayer for the dead. The words rang out over the lagoon in her small, clear voice:
‘De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. Domine. Exaudi vocem meam.’
One of the large Mela
nesians started towards her, but the custom priest called him back. The old man stared hard at Sister Conchita. She met his gaze unflinchingly. God stay with me now; I know you will, she thought. The custom priest continued to regard her. A flicker of something shaded his rheumy eyes before he turned away. Surely it could not have been respect, thought the nun.
The custom priest leapt into a canoe, followed by the other two islanders, who picked up their paddles. Slowly the massed canoes began to disperse in the wake of the priest’s, their occupants paddling away in silence. Soon, as the logjam broke up, most of them were being propelled energetically across the lagoon back towards the main island. Only when the mourners were well away from the small artificial island did Brother Baddeley relax and take out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his glistening face.
‘What was that all about?’ asked Sister Conchita.
Baddeley shuddered. ‘Bad magic,’ he said fervently. The rotund man was beginning to recover from his fright. ‘All finished now,’ he said.
‘But why were they here?’ asked Sister Conchita. ‘Did Brother John know that they were going to try to hijack the funeral?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Brother Baddeley. ‘That’s why he wanted you to be here. Brother John knew that even the custom priest would not harm a neena under the protection of Sergeant Kella.’
Sister Conchita was aware of a pang of annoyance. She had hoped that she had been invited to the ceremony in her own right, not because the ubiquitous policeman seemed to have taken her under his wing.
‘Sergeant Kella has bigger magic than the custom priest,’ said Baddeley slightly desperately, as if trying to convince himself. ‘Bigger than anybody.’
Sister Conchita looked at the newly filled-in grave. ‘What happens now?’ she asked. ‘Will Papa Noah’s body remain here?’
Brother Baddeley shook his head. ‘They call this the Big Man’s Island,’ he told her. ‘If a great chief or priest of any tribe or religion dies in Lau, he is buried here on Foubebe. His body lies in the sand for six months. Then it will be dug up. After that his wantoks may collect his bones and take them back to bury them in his own village.’
‘I can’t get over the number of mourners here this morning,’ marvelled Sister Conchita.
‘They were members of the Lau Church of the Blessed Ark,’ Baddeley told her, his plump, guileless face creased with worry lines. ‘They were representing many more. It was just becoming an important religion when Papa Noah was killed. It is all very vexatious!’
He shook Sister Conchita’s hand and walked back into the church. Sister Conchita turned towards her canoe. She lifted her eyes to the cloudless sky.
‘I never doubted for a moment,’ she said.
12
THE GAMMON MAN
Carefully Kella steered his dugout towards the artificial island belonging to the Gammon Man. Most of those canoes that had been tethered off Foubebe for the burial of Papa Noah that morning were being paddled away. Across the lagoon he caught a glimpse of Sister Conchita crouched deep in thought over the outboard motor of her canoe as she headed back to Ruvabi, but he made no attempt to attract her attention. He wondered why Brother John had not been present at the ceremony. The Guadalcanal man had been pursuing his own secret agenda lately.
He tethered his dugout to the jetty and climbed up on to the carefully raked and weeded shingle. The island was a small one, designed and constructed for the needs of a single family.
The Gammon Man came out of his house yawning to greet Kella. He was squat, muscular and broad-shouldered, with a wide, bland face and shrewd eyes. He had a large but firm stomach, attached like an extra slab of muscle to his body. ‘You woke me up, Sergeant,’ he complained mildly. ‘What sort of time do you call this?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kella unrepentantly. ‘We can’t all work gentleman’s hours.’
The Gammon Man grunted, unimpressed, and led the sergeant back into the house. Inside it was divided by a partition into a living room and sleeping quarters. In the former there was a wooden table bearing an unlit oil lamp, and several basketwork chairs. There were piles of carefully dusted books, each wrapped in a large protective plastic bag, on mats covering the beaten-earth floor. Kella knew that most of them would contain acknowledgements to the Gammon Man, inscribed gratefully to him by their authors. Usually the islander would take several copies of these books in their transparent wrappings on his travels and display them proudly to all he met, especially expatriates who might be a source of employment.
The Gammon Man’s wife, a handsome Lau woman a decade younger than her husband, hurried out of the sleeping quarters. Sinuously she swayed her way to the kitchen attachment. She averted her gaze politely from the visitor as she passed.
‘A cup of tea?’ asked the Gammon Man. ‘Something to eat, maybe? My wife can cook an English breakfast if that’s what you’re used to these days. Ham and eggs, that sort of thing.’
‘No thanks,’ said Kella. ‘I tend to have my breakfast in the morning. I just want to ask you a few questions about the death of Papa Noah.’
The Gammon Man nodded and pointed to one of the chairs. He sat opposite Kella and regarded the policeman expressionlessly. The Gammon Man’s real name was Wainoni. He had received his nickname through his fluency in English, acquired at a mission school, an apparently built-in high degree of self-confidence in his dealings with expatriates, and a matchless ability to lie fluently and expressively about any local topics that interested foreign academic researchers visiting Malaita.
Wainoni had embarked upon what was to become an increasingly lucrative career soon after the war, when his fluency in English had led to his being recruited as a guide by a visiting professor of anthropology. After a cautious start, he had realized that the gullible Australian researcher was prepared to accept as the gospel truth almost everything his loquacious native escort told him, and that it was much easier to make up his own stories about the history and customs of the jungle around them than it was to go to the trouble of visiting inconvenient and possibly dangerous regions of the hinterland to find out the truth. In pidgin ‘gammon’ meant to lie fluently.
From this relatively inauspicious start, he soon found his reputation growing in the enclosed world of Melanesian scholarship. Soon he was being passed on reverently from one overseas scholar to another like a family heirloom, treated as a source of all indigenous knowledge, as well as being a willing, skilled and apparently fearless bush scout and counsellor.
Less articulate fellow islanders had looked on with increasing awe and wonder as Wainoni had parlayed his linguistic fluency, ingratiating manner and total disregard for the truth into a one-man business. Thesis after published thesis in Australasia, the USA and even parts of Europe owed their inception to his practised guiding hand and utter indifference to reality. No matter how wild or outlandish the theory being pursued by the latest grant-aided university visitor to Malaita, the Gammon Man could be relied upon, for a suitable fee, to provide the so-called facts that would eventually substantiate it in an eighty-thousand-word volume designed to languish neglected in some sunless college library.
‘You wouldn’t be thinking of spoiling things for me, would you, Sergeant?’ asked Wainoni, smiling thinly.
‘Hardly,’ said Kella with genuine respect. ‘You’re probably the only Solomon Islander ever to make a decent living out of whitey without actually stealing from him. We’ve all got to admire real talent when we see it in action.’
Wainoni relaxed perceptibly. ‘In that case, how may I help you?’ he asked.
‘Your latest protégée, or victim, Dr Maddy, was there when Papa Noah was killed outside the ark. How did she get there, and what was she supposed to be doing?’
‘That’s easy,’ the Gammon Man said promptly. ‘Dr Maddy is a musicologist. She’s come to make a study of pidgin songs about the Second World War.’
‘But the Americans and the Japanese hardly touched Malaita,’ said Kella. ‘Most of the fighting in 19
42 was done on Guadalcanal and in the west, hundreds of miles away.’
Wainoni regarded the policeman like a teacher dealing with an obtuse pupil. ‘You know that and I know that,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, Dr Maddy doesn’t know it – yet.’
‘But it’s a matter of record,’ Kella said, startled for once out of his equilibrium. ‘People have written whole books about the war in the islands.’
‘You mustn’t believe everything you read,’ said Wainoni sententiously. ‘That’s one of the first things I always tell my clients. Written history is bunk. The truth lies in industrious personal research on the part of conscientious scholars, preferably guided on a previously negotiated daily stipend by me.’
‘Of course,’ said Kella. ‘Forgive me for doubting you. I should have known that you would have given this matter deep and proper thought. So you’re helping this misguided young woman to conduct an investigation into something that never happened?’
‘Hardly. I’m helping Dr Maddy with her groundwork into the unknown. Isn’t that what scholarship is supposed to be about? Anyway, one or two Japanese are rumoured to have taken up residence in hiding on Malaita after the war.’
‘Perhaps, but I doubt very much if they had the time or the inclination to compose pidgin songs about their predicament.’
‘On the whole, I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said Wainoni judiciously, ‘but surely that’s the point of scientific investigation? Learned people must study these matters, and it is the duty of the less gifted among us to help and guide them according to our abilities.’
‘For a fee.’
‘Exactly, Sergeant Kella! The labourer is worthy of his hire. You display a unique gift for getting to the heart of a problem. I shall have to watch out. I sense a potential rival.’
‘Remind me never to buy Government House in Honiara from you, should you offer to sell it to me,’ said Kella. Negotiating with the Gammon Man was like wading through treacle. ‘All right, why did you arrange for Dr Maddy to attend the feast at the Lau Church of the Blessed Ark last week?’