by Graeme Kent
Ha’a nodded to the nun and sketched a salute before scuttling off with relief to resume his perfunctory attempts at crowd control. Sister Conchita smiled at Florence.
‘How’s the music collection going?’ she asked.
‘Wonderfully,’ said Florence, uncharacteristically enthusiastic. ‘Johnny’s got such a collection of songs. It will take me weeks to sort them out when I get home.’
‘That’s good,’ said Sister Conchita. She decided to chance her luck. If Florence had transferred her allegiance to Sergeant Ha’a and was about to leave the Solomons, she might consider herself less securely bound to previous loyalties.
‘You know, there’s one thing I’ve been trying to work out,’ she said as casually as she could. ‘It wasn’t Shem who persuaded you to go to Tikopia, was it? There wouldn’t have been any point in it. He already had enough problems of his own.’
Florence hesitated, and then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It was Mr Wainoni. He practically insisted on it. He was sure that I’d find plenty of material on Tikopia. He was quite wrong, of course. I don’t know where he could have got that idea from! I didn’t tell anyone about it because I didn’t want to get him into trouble. I know that Sergeant Kella was cross because I’d gone to Tikopia. I really shouldn’t be telling you this now, but you’ve been very good to me.’ She looked at her watch. ‘In fact I must find Mr Wainoni to say goodbye. The plane leaves in an hour. Thank you for all your help, Sister.’
Florence eased her way through the crowd. Sister Conchita decided that she had better look for Sergeant Kella. Perhaps the information she had just garnered from the musicologist might be of use to the policeman.
Kella stood beside the outside-broadcasts van being used by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service and surveyed the crowd. A Melanesian commentator was standing on a box outside the van, describing the scene excitedly in pidgin. The fledgling local radio station seldom dipped a toe into the fraught technical waters of on-the-spot commentaries, because too much could and usually did go wrong, but this afternoon those outer islands in possession of radio sets that actually worked and had batteries would be tuning in to the great event.
The preoccupied and depressed Kella hardly noticed what was going on. For the great occasion he had been relegated to keeping a place free for the car bringing Mayotishi and his precious cargo from the Mendana hotel to the airport.
He had shared a farewell drink with the Japanese in the latter’s room at the hotel the previous evening. Both of them had ignored the baleful glares of the manager in the lounge. Mayotishi had produced a bottle of whisky and two glasses from a drawer.
‘Scotch, not Japanese,’ he had commented.
They had drunk mainly in silence, but just before Kella left, Mayotishi had shaken his hand.
‘Regard the next couple of years as an interim period,’ he had said. ‘The next time we meet, I suspect that we shall both be doing different jobs.’
Sergeant Ha’a gave up trying to marshal his section of the crowd and strolled over. ‘It’s all right for some,’ he said. ‘How come you get all the cushy jobs?’
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ said Kella, ushering a crowd of excited small boys out of the way. ‘This is the equivalent of being exiled to Elba.’
‘Whitey’s an ungrateful bastard all right; he expects a lot from poor sergeants for his thousand dollars a year,’ sighed Ha’a. He looked sideways at Kella. ‘Although it must help if you and your brothers own a copra plantation on Malaita that’s so big it takes a pigeon three days to fly across it.’
‘Could I have a word, Sergeant Kella?’ asked an incisive voice from behind them.
Ha’a faded into the crowd again at the first hint of a salvo from authority. Kella turned. For a moment he did not recognize the white man addressing him. Then he saw that it was Ebury, but an Ebury transformed almost beyond recognition. The former government officer had showered and shaved. He had plastered his hair close to his head with some sort of gel. He was wearing sharply pressed drill trousers and a spotless white shirt. On his shirt front was pinned a row of medals, among them the ornamental silver Military Cross. For the first time that Kella had seen him in the last decade he was erect and sober. Aware of the sergeant’s surprised scrutiny, the expatriate looked self-conscious.
‘After you left the other day, I started thinking about what you said about the Japanese officer’s remains being taken out of the Solomons,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Didn’t seem right that the Johnny should go out unrecognized, as it were, so I thought I’d better come and see him off.’ He looked around almost shyly. ‘I didn’t realize that it was going to be a scrum like this. Maybe I’m not needed after all. Best be getting back home perhaps.’
‘No!’ Kella heard his voice crackling with authority. He paused and went on apologetically. ‘I’m sure that Lieutenant Shimadu would have wanted you here today. You’ve more right than most.’ He beckoned to the lurking Sergeant Ha’a, who moved back over, crab-like with apprehension at his sudden proximity to a white man who might have the power to exert a deleterious influence on his future comfort and well-being.
‘Sergeant,’ Kella said, ‘I want you to take Major Ebury to the VIP stand and find him a space there. Is that clear?’
‘It’s clear enough,’ objected Ha’a, ‘but it’s not going to be easy. All the places there are reserved.’
Ebury’s broad shoulders went back an inch further. Thirty years seemed to have dropped off him since his recent encounter with Kella. ‘Just get me to the stand, Sergeant,’ he told Ha’a confidently. ‘I’ll find my own place in the sun when I reach it.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and produced a crumpled sheaf of handwritten papers. ‘By the way, you got me on something of a run down memory lane after we met. Sorry if I was a bit brusque at the time. I started thinking about what you said concerning civil cases brought by locals before the war. Actually there was something that might be relevant to your investigation. I had a personal link with it, actually. I must have been half asleep not to make the connection when you first brought it up at my place. Good day to you.’
Ebury nodded in response to Kella’s salute and followed Ha’a through the crowd into the airport building. Kella watched them go. You weren’t half asleep, he thought; you were stoned out of your mind. But you’ve come good when it matters. He started reading the papers. After the first few lines he stopped and started again. He walked away, totally absorbed, from the airport buildings across the uncultivated fields surrounding them. The grass grew longer here, covering the concrete foundations of the old hangars and huts of the wartime days. The mouths of the disused communications bunkers in the rows of hillocks were overgrown with creepers, like the dirty green webs of huge spiders.
Kella heard a car jolting across the field in his direction but did not look up at first. When he did, it was too late. A dusty 1949 Australian Holden sedan jolted to a halt and two young men leapt out. They were young Chinese in cheap suits. Kella clenched his fists, but forced himself to relax when he saw that both youths were carrying knives. One of them indicated the waiting car. Its engine was still running.
‘Inside!’ he shouted.
37
AN IDEA FROM THE DOLPHIN PRIEST
The two men hustled Kella into the back of the car and sat watchfully on either side of him. A third Chinaman, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, was sitting behind the wheel. He bounced the car back into life, the tyres shrieking across the field towards the main road to Honiara.
They rejoined the road a few hundred yards away from the airport and drove erratically in the direction of the capital. Kella could see that all three of the young men were strung out. For their day jobs they were probably hired by Chinese merchants as debt collectors and minders at floating games of pai gao and sic bo in Chinatown. Kidnapping a police officer would be a little above and beyond their normal call of duty, and it was showing. He tried to engage the nervous youths in reassuring conversation, but the three men
ignored his tentative overtures. He wondered, if he got out of this alive, whether he could suggest a new police manual to his superiors: 100 Ways to Conciliate Your Abductors.
A quarter of a mile down the road, the car turned off and bumped its way up a wooded track leading to the foothills of the central mountain range. The track narrowed to a trail and then petered out into a well-trodden patch of bare ground outside a sagging wooden hut overlooking Honiara and the sea through the trees. Kella recognized the construction as a cheap Chinese restaurant serving basic meals of curry, rice and beer on paydays to workers from the labour lines, impoverished Voluntary Service Overseas cadets and itinerant visiting seamen who could not afford to eat in the town. A covered Bedford truck was parked outside the hut.
The three men pushed Kella into the restaurant and stood over him until he had sat down on a hard chair against one wall. It was a square room containing a dozen wooden tables with a long bar running the length of one side. Through an open door behind the bar Kella could see the kitchen. The proprietor, an elderly Chinaman, and his wife were standing disconsolately amid the pots and pans. When they saw the sergeant, the old man winced and shuffled over and shut the door, shrugging his narrow shoulders helplessly.
The three young men sat on a bench against one undecorated wooden wall, regarding Kella balefully. A few silent minutes later the outer door opened and Wainoni the Gammon Man came in. He sat at a table facing Kella, safely out of the sergeant’s reach.
‘Why?’ Kella asked at once. ‘It was all going so well for you. Why did you have to carry me off like this? You’ve probably got a boat stashed away somewhere to take you to Papua New Guinea as soon as night falls. Nobody would find you there.’
‘I had no option,’ said the Gammon Man. He was breathless. ‘Dr Maddy sought me out at the airport to say goodbye. Her conscience was troubling her. She confessed that she had told Sister Conchita that it was I who had sent her to Tikopia. Well, I ask you! Wherever Sister Conchita is during the investigation of a crime, Sergeant Kella is not far away. I had to remove you before she informed you and you started putting two and two together and came looking for me.’ He glanced disparagingly at his spartan surroundings. ‘It called for some rapid improvisation, I can tell you. Still, you’ll be safe enough here. I’ve done similar business with old Mr Ho and his lads before.’
‘Not kidnapping a police officer,’ said Kella. ‘This is serious. It’s all over. You don’t stand a chance.’ He realized to his annoyance that he was beginning to quote from low-budget movies without even thinking about it.
‘I like to think that I’ve planned it pretty well so far,’ said Wainoni. ‘I don’t believe my gods will desert me at this late stage. I suppose you’re wondering what all this has been about.’
‘I know what it’s about,’ Kella said. ‘Most of it, anyway. You’ve been carrying out payback.’
‘Ah,’ said Wainoni. ‘Now how did you know that? Are you going to surprise me yet again, Sergeant Kella?’
‘Ebury told me, just a few minutes ago.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Wainoni. ‘I thought he was too much of a piss-artist to remember anything these days. I should have dealt with him, but he was good to me once and I owed him.’
‘I suspected you before that, but I had no proof,’ Kella said. ‘It’s not as if revenge is so uncommon in the Solomons. We can be a vindictive lot when we’re roused. And you covered your tracks well.’ He thought of the eagle bearing the released soul of the old woman over Savo. ‘In fact, yours is the second case of mistaken identity I’ve dealt with this month. The first one was meant to alert me, but I was slow. Your mother comes from the western islands. Forty years ago she became the mistress of an American researcher called James Cardigan. After you were born, he returned home without making any provision for you or your mother. Not unnaturally, your mother resented this. As you grew up, she constantly dinned into you the perfidy of your father in abandoning you without making restitution to either of you.’
‘It wasn’t so much to ask,’ said the Gammon Man. ‘Other wealthy expatriates who had their fun with local girls gave them money afterwards. It was custom.’
‘But Cardigan ignored any letters that you sent him. He was too busy establishing his own career back in the USA. So you grew up with this festering sense of grievance that the expats owed you big time.’
‘One of them brought me into the world.’
‘True enough,’ said Kella. He tried to recall the details in the papers stuffed into his hand by Ebury at the airfield earlier that afternoon. ‘What I don’t understand is why you made an official demand for restitution to the British authorities in Tulagi. With respect, that was an unusual step for an islander back in 1940.’
‘My mother took the matter to Mr Ebury, who was the district officer at the time. He helped us make out our complaint and submit it officially.’
That explained a great deal, Kella thought. Ebury must have been an interesting man before the drink took hold of him. He wished that he had known him better. The young, idealistic and in those days sober official must have felt impelled to take up the abandoned Wainoni’s case. It would not have stood much chance in an old colonial court of law, even if it had got that far. Ebury probably would have had his knuckles rapped even for forwarding such a document, let alone helping to prepare it. Probably he would have had a black mark entered on his record at the same time.
‘What happened?’ Kella asked.
‘This was the early 1940s, just before Japani attacked the Solomons. Most of the expats ran away and didn’t come back after the war. Tulagi was bombed and shelled and all the government records were destroyed. My appeal would have been among them.’
‘So you stopped looking for payback through official channels. What about Ebury? He stayed on. Couldn’t you have taken your case up with him again?’
‘He was spoiled by then,’ said Wainoni simply, using the pidgin word for a man ruined beyond redemption. ‘Too much whisky.’
‘So the poor sod was already out of the running, and there was nobody else to remember the case. How old were you by then?’
‘Maybe twenty-five,’ said Wainoni.
‘And you spent the next fifteen years planning your revenge. You married a Lau girl after the war and moved to the artificial islands. There was a lot of movement around then. As long as you kept your head down and didn’t cause trouble, no one would pay much attention, or bother where you came from.’ Kella thought of the old Tolo woman who had lived anonymously in the Lau fishing village for so long. ‘Ironically you made a good living by guiding some of the very people you hated, the visiting whiteys from colleges. And all the time you were plotting to get your own back. You could move anywhere you liked on Malaita and no one would be surprised. What made you decide to start this killman stuff this year?’
‘Time,’ said Wainoni. ‘By then my quarrel was with the white authorities who wouldn’t give me justice, not with my so-called father. We’ll be kicking them out before long. It was time I did what I could to stir up trouble for them on Malaita before they left. One final boot up the backside for all their indifference and indolence.’
‘So you started a one-man reign of terror on the island to get everyone agitated. You pretended to be the killman, used the Church of the Blessed Ark as your base and killed Papa Noah and two of his members, to terrify people and make them believe that a religious war was about to start. You caused a panic all over Malaita. You even dressed up as a Japanese soldier to destroy the ark and confuse people more. All this just to make the government worried.’
‘And drowning people where there was no water, don’t forget that.’
‘I’d worked that one out,’ Kella told him. ‘I ran through a banana plantation in Kwaio country and found that I was soaked as a result. Bananas store water in their stems. Cut the top off one and within an hour or so the decapitated stem fills almost to the brim with pints of water. Then I remembered: you always carried at least one of those b
ooks you were so proud of on tour, to show would-be employers. You wrapped them up in plastic bags. When the right time came, you poured the water into a bag, knocked out the poor islanders, stuffed their faces in the bag and drowned them. Very clever! No wonder people started fleeing from their villages in panic.’
‘I wish I could have done the same with Papa Noah, but there wasn’t time. Still, I couldn’t pass up on a chance like that in all the confusion. I stayed on in the bush after I had dropped Dr Maddy off and walked up to the feast at the ark. I had to use the good old-fashioned method of drowning a man by sticking his head in a puddle. All the same, it was well enough thought out, until you started interfering. What put you on to me?’
‘I couldn’t understand how Florence Maddy came to be involved,’ Kella said. ‘She wasn’t an interfering sort. She wouldn’t have stirred up trouble on her own. Yet suddenly she goes off to Tikopia, an inoffensive woman like her. I guessed that she must have got in someone’s way. You were the only islander who had much to do with her, so I began thinking about you.’
‘I never did get all of that woman’s research grant money off her,’ said Wainoni regretfully.
‘You really needed a bit of peace and quiet to build on killing the two islanders and Papa Noah,’ said Kella. ‘You were planning to cause more trouble by raiding the ark dressed as a Japanese soldier and panic the islanders even further. You couldn’t risk her stumbling across anything, so you bribed Shem to persuade some of his Tikopian friends to take her home with them on the Commissioner and get her out of the way.’