by Graeme Kent
‘Let’s say I made an anonymous donation to Shem’s church funds,’ Wainoni said. ‘He had no idea what I was going to do.’
‘There were too many other people blundering about in this case as well,’ Kella said. ‘That obscured the issue for me. Abalolo had come up from Tikopia to attempt to sort Shem out. Brother John was trying to look after him. You might have got away with it, but then Sister Conchita took a hand. She persuaded the Lau people to go back to their homes. That meant that the panic on Malaita was almost over. All your plans came to nothing.’
‘Who would have thought it?’ said Wainoni. ‘All that preparation, yet Praying Mary rounded them all like sheep and took them back to their pens.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘I must be leaving,’ he said. ‘The aircraft is due to take off in half an hour. I shouldn’t have come here, but I had to make certain that Mr Ho’s boys had done their job properly.’
For some time Kella had been aware of the comforting sound of voices coming from outside the restaurant. The three Chinese stood up with their leader. There was a hammering on the front door.
‘Open up! We want beer!’ came a shout.
‘Closed!’ snapped back one of the Chinese.
The shouts solidified into a chant: ‘Beer! Beer! Beer!’ One of the young Chinese men went to the front door and unlocked it, inching it open and hissing: ‘No beer! This place closed!’ He gave a startled yelp as the door crashed open in his face, sending him staggering back. Twenty or thirty islanders stampeded into the room, trampling on the man who had opened the door and hurtling into the main restaurant. One of the two remaining Chinamen managed to produce his knife but was overwhelmed and borne to the floor in the rush of whooping islanders. At the same time the back door was kicked in and more islanders hurtled into the kitchen.
Wainoni backed against a wall but made no further movement when he saw how many islanders were occupying the room already. His face was expressionless. The headman of the Lau fishing village outside the capital emerged from the main pack and stood by Kella, beaming.
‘I was worried when I saw you being taken away in a car,’ he chuckled. ‘But luckily, that meant that they had to stay on the road, and I’d placed men every two hundred yards along it into Honiara just in case. We were able to regroup at the bottom of the turn-off and come up on foot and break in, as you ordered.’ He looked at his prisoners. ‘What do you want done with these? It would be no trouble to slit their throats; they’re only Chinese. No one would miss them.’
‘Leave the old man and his wife alone,’ Kella ordered. ‘Take the other three to the village and keep them there until I come for them tonight.’ He had already decided that he would give the three younger men a choice. They could embark upon a new career path and work for him as informers in Chinatown, or face kidnapping charges.
The headman nodded. ‘What about the big man?’ he asked.
‘Send him with six of your strongest men to the police station in Honiara. Tell the sergeant on duty that he is to put the Gammon Man in a cell and keep him there until I arrive to prefer charges of murder. Before you go, search him and the others and bring me the car keys.’
The headman issued rapid instructions. Islanders escorted Wainoni and the three young Chinamen roughly outside. At the door, Wainoni looked back. Then he shook his head and allowed himself to be manhandled out of the restaurant. Kella was puzzled. He would have expected more emotion even from such a notoriously bland character as the Gammon Man. He and the headman followed the others out.
‘What made you ask us to watch your back the entire time you were at the airport?’ the headman asked.
‘I felt that something might happen,’ said Kella vaguely. In fact he had seldom had a stronger premonition. On the night before he had sailed from Malaita to Honiara, he had seen a cloud of fireflies and had later fallen asleep to the persistent clicking of cicadas, a sure omen of trouble to come and a warning to be on his guard.
‘I thought I’d ask you and your men to mingle in the crowd and keep an eye on me to be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘Actually, a dolphin priest gave me the idea. As a rule, you can never find the right people when you want to lay on a good ambush.’
The headman shook his head uncomprehendingly. One of his men handed Kella several rings of keys taken from the prisoners. Kella stood thinking. So far things had gone well but not perfectly. There were pieces of the jigsaw that had not yet fitted completely into place. The sergeant liked completion in all that he did. Wainoni’s plan had been well prepared, but it lacked a suitable climax. Surely the Gammon Man would not have been content merely with causing minor civic uprest on Malaita. His sense of drama would have demanded a much more effective resolution to all his efforts.
Unbidden passages of conversation were passing through the sergeant’s mind in a continuous loop. He knew that somewhere in his memory lay stored the words that would explain most things, or at least lead to their explanation. A recollection of the woman among the bushes in the Kwaio country banana plantation clamoured to be attended to. What had she spat out when she had come across him after he had been looking at the grave of her former husband on top of the incline? Slowly the sentence reassembled itself in his mind: Plenty too much, plenty too much! No more come!
Musing on the phrase, Kella walked in the direction of the parked Bedford truck. What had it been about the Gammon Man’s reaction in the restaurant that had set off a tiny alarm bell in his mind? Suddenly Kella thought he knew.
He pulled aside the tarpaulin cover and climbed into the back of the truck. Inside the dark, enclosed space the stench of bananas greeted him like a nest of snakes. Then, utterly and completely, Kella knew what the Gammon Man’s dreadful climax was intended to be. He jumped out of the truck and hurried over to the sedan. In a minute he was accelerating down the track towards the main road.
One question reverberated in his mind. Why had Wainoni been so concerned about the time the Fokker Friendship took off? Had he wanted to watch it, perhaps from the vantage point of the old control tower next to the airport?
Why would anyone want to watch an aeroplane leaving the ground? Or perhaps it was never meant to take off.
38
AN ORDERLY WITHDRAWAL
Kella brought the sedan to a halt outside the airport with a squeal of brakes. The clock on the wall told him that there still remained another twenty minutes before the Fokker Friendship was due to take off. He forced himself to remain behind the wheel of the car, making sure that he had gone through everything in his mind at least twice.
Of course someone as malevolent as Wainoni would not have been satisfied with initiating a vague sequence of events merely to inconvenience the colonial authorities. He would have wanted to end his planning almost literally with a spectacular display of fireworks, and that would take place at the airport before one of the few major assemblages of the top brass to take place in the Solomons for years.
Where Kella had got it wrong was in thinking that Wainoni’s reinvention of a Japanese soldier in action had been just a ploy to add to the general confusion. Instead it had been central to the Gammon Man’s plans. By attracting the attention of the colonial administrators to the possible presence of a Japanese survivor on Malaita, he had ensured that a large-scale manhunt would be launched, allied to the promise of a reward for any islander finding a soldier still alive in the bush. It had also brought the wealth-distributing Mayotishi to the islands, with the full backing of the Japanese government.
Sometime in his travels though the high bush, Wainoni had come across the grave of Lieutenant Shimadu. The woman had as good as told Kella that when she had screamed ‘Plenty too much, plenty too much! No more come!’ at him. The phrase was open to several interpretations. Kella had assumed that it had meant that his arrival was proving too much for the woman and that he should leave and not return. In fact she was saying that someone else, presumably the Gammon Man, had visited the site before him and that she wanted no more strangers to
come.
Wainoni had known that sooner or later the search would lead to someone else coming across the remains of the officer, especially with Mayotishi willing to spend so much money on returning the ashes to Japan. Back at the restaurant the Gammon Man had evinced a desire to leave before the aircraft took off for Papua New Guinea. He probably wanted to watch its departure. And then there had been the reek of bananas in the back of the Bedford truck.
It was time to take action. Still Kella hesitated. If he should be wrong, his next actions would condemn him irretrievably in the eyes of his superiors. ‘So what else is new?’ he muttered, opening the door of the car and entering the airport, where the High Commissioner was in the act of shaking hands with Mayotishi before a beaming assemblage.
Aware of the murmurs of consternation coming from the august assembly behind him, Kella ran across the empty runway to the waiting aeroplane. The mobile rack of steps was in place and the door had been left open to admit air. Kella took the steps two at a time into the aircraft. A white-coated male flight attendant shouted at him angrily, but the policeman ignored him. He ran down the aisle to the cockpit and threw the door open. The captain and first officer were in their seats reading newspapers. They looked up as Kella burst in.
‘You’re not allowed in here, mate,’ said the captain mildly. The irate attendant appeared at the sergeant’s shoulder.
‘I tried to tell him,’ he said.
Kella ignored both men. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, gasping for breath, ‘you must deal with this information as you see fit, of course, but I thought you’d like to know that there’s an explosive device on board, probably timed to detonate when the aircraft takes off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must share this information with the proper authorities.’
‘Bloody hell!’ said the flight attendant.
Kella ran back down the aisle, aware of the clattering feet of the crew members gaining on him with every stride. As he emerged from the aircraft, the heat greeted him like a blast from a furnace. He hurried back down the steps, aware of the startled, indignant and in some cases scandalized gazes of hundreds of the Protectorate’s leading citizens in their serried ranks. Fortunately Kella was seldom shy. He ran towards them, waving his arms like a windmill.
‘Bomb!’ he shouted. ‘There’s a bomb on board! Get away from the airport at once, before it goes off!’
Silence fell over the crowd. There was no panic and at first very little movement. All eyes went to the High Commissioner, whose face, as sharp as a honed hatchet, betrayed no emotion. His aide-de-camp, a young flight lieutenant on secondment from the Royal Air Force, whispered into his ear. The High Commissioner nodded.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Just in case there’s something in it, see to the women first.’
The young officer ran to the seated section and started ushering the unruffled wives out of the airport. Within a few moments the government officials were streaming in their wake with well-drilled nonchalance.
Sergeant Ha’a walked out of the crowd and stood at Kella’s shoulder. He watched the dignified, straight-backed mass retreat of the old colonials with something between wonder and admiration. Soon the spectators’ area had emptied as the expatriates reassembled in restrained decorous groups according to rank in an adjacent car park. Ha’a turned his attention to the deserted airstrip. A few discarded paper cartons blew across the tarmac in the light breeze. It was a peaceful scene. The fat sergeant sucked his teeth judiciously and placed an arm like a flipper around his fellow policeman’s shoulder.
‘For your sake, I hope you’ve got this one right, old son,’ he said.
39
REPORT OF THE BISHOP’S VISITOR
The farewell ceremony for the bishop’s visitor at Ruvabi was over. As such events went, it had been an oddly restrained affair. The local sisters had sung a Malaitan lullaby and a slightly overambitious version of ‘Ave Maria’ that had foundered bravely on several of the high notes. As Sister Conchita watched the rows of demure young sisters in their long blue robes, she thought of the cheerfully naked choristers of the Church of the Blessed Ark singing ‘Japani Ha Ha!’ a few weeks ago. The matter of Papa Noah’s death could be said to have started with one anthem and finished with another, but under very different circumstances. In a way, that seemed to sum up the cheerful dichotomy of her life in the Solomons.
After the farewell, there had been a simple feast of taro and pineapples. An unemotional Father Kuyper had made a brief anodyne speech about nothing in particular and had then left Ruvabi amid a flurry of cursory handshakes to walk to the roadhead, where a truck should be waiting to take him to Auki and passage on a vessel back to Guadalcanal.
Before he had made his departure, Father Kuyper had walked round the mission compound saying his individual farewells. Sister Conchita had been disappointed with their fleeting final encounter, which consisted of several half-heard sentences. The man had even avoided eye contact with her, she thought. Did that mean that his official report to the bishop was going to be even worse than she had feared?
She looked around the compound before starting to help the local sisters clear up. There had been a surprisingly good turnout for the feast. Father Pierre was sitting in a basket chair on the veranda talking to an attentive Sergeant Kella towering over him. There was an old shawl around the priest’s shoulders and he looked pale and drawn, but he was definitely on the mend. Thanks be to God, thought the nun.
Brother John and Abalolo walked over to her. Both men were in the uniforms of the Melanesian Mission and carrying packs on their backs. They were smiling.
‘Going already?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘We thought it might be only sensible to slip away before Sergeant Kella has time to catch up with us,’ said Brother John. ‘He might be a little annoyed because I wasn’t always frank with him about all aspects of the Church of the Blessed Ark, and the fact that I knew that Brother Abalolo had left Tikopia and was in hiding on Malaita waiting for a chance to reclaim Papa Noah’s sect for Christianity.’
‘That might not be such a bad idea,’ agreed the nun. She shook the hands of both men. ‘Where are you going now?’
‘I’m going back home to reopen my church,’ said Abalolo in one of his rare incursions into speech. ‘Brother John has offered to come with me for the first few months.’
‘Won’t that be dangerous?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘No more than usual,’ shrugged Brother John. ‘There are four kingdoms on Tikopia. Three of them are still Christian. That only leaves Chief Atanga’s province as a pagan one, and the old man won’t live eternally. Without an heir, the old beliefs will die out when Atanga goes. If we’ve re-established the faith in the other three areas by then, we can move back into his.’
‘Don’t forget how the remaining Christians helped Dr Maddy when she arrived,’ said Abalolo proudly. ‘That took courage and faith.’ The shy pastor seemed determined to set a new record for loquacity, thought Conchita.
‘Well, good luck to both of you,’ she said, but the two missionaries had espied Sergeant Kella walking across the compound towards them and had made their departures, moving remarkably quickly for men carrying heavy packs.
‘I wanted a word with those two,’ said Kella, arriving too late.
‘Somehow I don’t think it was mutual,’ said Sister Conchita. She changed the subject quickly. ‘Was there a bomb on the plane at Henderson Field? There’s been no more news about it on the radio.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kella. ‘It was inside one of Wainoni’s banana crates. He used half a dozen sticks of dynamite he’d had stolen to order from one of the logging camps. There were also a couple of primer caps, a timer and a six-volt battery, all held together by binding cord. Apparently it was a rough-and-ready job but effective enough. It was timed to go off before the aircraft left the ground. The device would have been powerful enough to destroy the aeroplane and most of the spectators in the stands. Luckily Makepiece, the army warrant officer who’s defu
sing bombs in the bush, was in the crowd. He managed to render the bomb harmless. They say he may get a medal.’
‘And this was all for revenge,’ said Sister Conchita.
‘It seems so,’ said Kella. His eyes went round the compound, measuring and assessing as usual. ‘What still puzzles me is line,’ he said.
‘Line? Oh, you mean relationships?’
Kella nodded. ‘I thought that Wainoni couldn’t have been descended from an expatriate,’ he said. ‘That would make him a half-caste, but he’s darker than I am.’
Sister Conchita’s mind went back to the day on the artificial island when she had introduced Ha’a to Florence Maddy. ‘I think I can help you there,’ she said. ‘Dr Maddy happened to mention that Professor Cardigan was a pioneer who had to overcome a great deal of prejudice in his time.’
‘So?’ asked Kella.
‘Prejudice – that usually only refers to one thing. If we look him up in the appropriate record books, I believe we’ll find that Professor Cardigan was black,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘That would explain why Wainoni passed as an ordinary Solomon Islander.’
‘Like the Tolo woman who was accepted as a Lau for most of her life,’ said Kella. Everything seemed to keep coming back to the exorcism of the old eagle-worshipper. Had that been designated by the gods as his entry into the solving of the case?
‘Come again?’
‘That’s another story,’ said the sergeant. ‘Remind me on a particularly long sea voyage to tell you of the time that I carried out the manatai burina ceremony at the Guadalcanal fishing village.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘But there is something you can tell me now. What made Wainoni suspect that you were on to him, so that he had you abducted?’
Because you got it out of Florence Maddy and in turn she told the Gammon Man, thought Kella. He shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’ Before the nun could say anything, he went on: ‘There was something else I wanted to see you about. Did you arrange for my posting to Alaska to be cancelled?’