Devil-Devil (9 page)

‘Looks like you boys have the district pretty much sewn up between you.’

‘We try. It’s all a matter of line.’ The young sister looked blank.

‘Family,’ Kella explained. ‘My bloodline owns most of this island and some land on the coast. One way or another, I’m related to just about everyone in the lagoon and the saltwater villages along the shore.’

‘Great,’ said Sister Conchita resignedly. ‘I’ve teamed up with the Melanesian mafia.’

She shaded her eyes and looked out over the lagoon. The fish-laden canoes were on their way back to the island with swimming escorts of noisy children. Women were beginning to paddle dugouts over from the mainland, their craft heaped with supplies of taro and sweet potatoes.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘Sure,’ said Kella. ‘I know just the place. I wanted to show it to you anyway.’

He conducted her across the public dancing ground and past a
bisi
, one of the houses in which women remained for thirty days after they had delivered their babies. Kella untied a canoe from the jetty and paddled the nun out towards the reef.

They passed over coral gardens, beautifully designed fragile shapes and patterns shimmering at the bottom of the pellucid water. Kella used the short period of calm to consider some of the problems that had been brought to him as the
aofia
, since he had regained consciousness.

A palm tree had been toppled in a garden on the mainland after the recent earth tremor. During its lifetime the tree had belonged to one family, the nuts to another and the land upon which it had stood to a third. All three families had requested him to give judgement as to the disposition of the tree, its roots and fruit.

In another case, a young man from Sulufou was in dispute with the family of a girl he wanted to marry, about the amount of bride price he would have to pay for her. There were also complaints from one of the coastal villagers that the aged hereditary tree-shouter had lost his
mana
. For decades if a tree had proved too big to be felled by hand, islanders had approached the shouter and begged him to hurl incantations at it. Generally within a month the tree would begin to lose its leaves and branches and then die. Now it appeared that the old man had lost his powers. The villagers wanted him replaced. Kella would have to give rulings on these matters, and several others, before he left the lagoon to resume his police duties.

He stopped paddling and steadied the canoe against a ridge of stones. They had reached a small deserted artificial island, close to the outer reef. So far it was little more than an extended pile of rocks. Kella held the craft firmly while Sister Conchita stepped gingerly ashore. He tied the craft to one of the outcrops of coral and followed her on to the baking stones of the artificial island.

‘Who lives here?’ asked Sister Conchita, looking around.

‘I will one day, when it’s finished,’ Kella told her. ‘I’m building it myself. I get a little help, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ said Sister Conchita, ‘What with you being so well connected and all.’

He led her to the solitary makeshift thatched hut on his island. The roof was supported on poles and there were no walls. They sat facing one another on rush mats in the shade.

‘Right,’ said Sister Conchita with a dogged resolve to get at the truth. ‘That guy with the rifle who you frightened off in the mangrove swamp – it was me he was trying to kill, wasn’t it?’

‘What makes you think that?’ asked Kella cautiously.

Sister Conchita gestured impatiently. ‘Because I am neither blind nor stupid, Sergeant Kella! You deliberately tried to draw him away from me. As soon as he saw that I wasn’t with you, he turned back and came gunning for me again. He would have got me, too, if you hadn’t slowed him up by making him shoot at you.’

‘It’s hard to be sure—’ began Kella, but by now the sister was in full spate.

‘Afterwards,’ she went on, ‘you suspected that I might still be in danger. So you concocted that cock-and-bull story about being afraid of custom medicine, whereas really all you wanted was to keep me safely on Sulufou until you were better. Am I right, sergeant?’

‘Possibly,’ said Kella, wondering how much he could tell the nun without frightening her.

‘Of course I’m right!’ snapped Sister Conchita, reverting for a moment to a trace of her former impatient self. She stopped and controlled herself with an effort. ‘I’m sorry. I’m grateful, I really am. It’s just that I can’t imagine who could want to harm me. Well, apart from a few senior priests, and maybe a church administrator or two, and perhaps some of the instructors at the seminary.’

‘Hardly anybody at all,’ agreed Kella. ‘What did you do with your Novice of the Year plaque?’

The sister laughed in spite of herself. ‘All right, all right, so I can be a pain in the butt. However, not to the extent of making anyone want to hire a hit-man to dispose of me. They’d be too cheap to spend the money, apart from the ones who would prefer to do it themselves.’

‘Perhaps you’ve discovered something that you shouldn’t have,’ suggested Kella. It was a thought he had been mulling over during his periods of consciousness during the past few days.

‘What? So far I’ve been moved from one dull job to another – administration, archives, comparative religions, you name it, I’ve done it. If you ever want to know anything about ancestor worship and pagan ceremonies, just come to me. I’m practically an expert on the recondite.’

‘Have you upset anyone on the mission station?’

‘Even
I
haven’t been there long enough for that,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘I’ve had two weeks in Honiara, and now less than a month with Father Pierre at the Ruvabi mission. I’d really have to try hard to make someone want to kill me in that short period of time.’

Behind her flippant attitude Kella could sense that the sister was worried. That made it easier for him to broach the next subject. ‘I’d like you to go back to Honiara for a while,’ he told her. ‘You’ll be safe at the mission headquarters in the capital.’

‘No way,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘No one’s chasing me off with my tail between my legs. I’m going back to the mission, where I belong. I’ve got work to do there.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about you,’ Kella told her. ‘I’m worrying about Father Pierre. He’s too old to look after you, and as long as you’re on his station you’ll be a liability. He deserves better than that.’

The nun looked horror-stricken. ‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ she confessed. ‘I was too busy giving my impression of a hot-shot, I guess.’ She considered the matter, her head bowed. Finally she nodded. ‘All right, Sergeant Kella, you win.’ She looked appealingly at him. ‘Will you be coming back with me to Honiara?’

Kella shook his head. ‘It’s my job to find out who was shooting at us,’ he said. ‘One of my jobs, anyway. I’ll get a friend to take you back to Guadalcanal, maybe tomorrow.’

The sister looked across the lagoon at the mainland. Dark clouds were forming over the forested mountain range which formed the spine of the island. Despite the heat she shivered.

‘I don’t envy you on your own over there,’ she said with feeling.

Kella followed her gaze. ‘That’s not the hard part,’ he said.

‘What is then?’

‘The fact that you’re involved,’ Kella told her frankly. ‘We don’t often get expats involved in island problems. When they do, it gets complicated. I’m telling you this because I want you to be on your guard, even in Honiara.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the sister fervently. ‘After that night in the swamp, I’ll make sure of that. How about you? It can’t be easy for you, representing the police force and trying to be the
aofia
as well. Father Pierre said that because you’ve rejected parts of both worlds you’ll always be on your own.’

‘I’ve still got a job to do,’ said Kella, shying away from the probing intimacy of her remark. ‘That reminds me. What can you tell me about the American anthropologist, Professor Mallory? I’ve been sent to Malaita to look for him.’

And that’s all I’m supposed to be doing, he thought. If Chief Superintendent Grice found out that he was meddling in so many other inquiries as well, his superior officer would have apoplexy. That was just too bad. He had to search for Peter Oro. Solomon Bulko had sent a message from Ruvabi by canoe saying that the schoolboy still had not returned.

‘I hardly know him,’ answered Sister Conchita. ‘When he was at the mission he spent most of his time with Father Pierre.’ She hesitated. ‘It seemed to me that he was always pumping the priest for information.’

‘What sort of information?’

Sister Conchita shook her head. ‘I don’t know. When the professor discovered that I was new here, he lost interest pretty quickly.’

‘There must have been something he wanted,’ said Kella. ‘Think!’

The sister looked surprised at the sudden urgency in the police sergeant’s tone, but she closed her eyes in concentration.

‘I believe,’ she said, opening her eyes again, ‘that he wanted to know about something called a
havu
.’ She looked at Kella. ‘What’s that?’

Kella did not answer at once. It had never occurred to him that Mallory would be moving in that direction. Yet now it all seemed so simple. He would have to find the anthropologist quickly, before the American got into serious trouble. He realized that Sister Conchita was speaking again.

‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,’ she said humbly, ‘especially with you going to so much trouble to look after me.’

‘I must,’ said Kella. ‘I have no choice. You are one of the
neena
, the unprotected. As long as you’re in the Lau area, it is the duty of the
aofia
to see that you come to no harm.’

‘Well, after all, I have my own God to do that,’ said the nun calmly. ‘But the way things are going, I don’t want to be too picky. I guess I’ll take all the help I can get.’

‘Good! Now you’re talking sense,’ said Kella. ‘I’m sorry you’re going to have to be on your own here for the next couple of days, but I’ve got to arrange your transportation back to the capital.’

‘No problem,’ said the nun. ‘I’ll find something to do.’

They stood up. Kella beckoned to one of the passing fishing canoes. Immediately it pulled in to the side of the island. The islanders on board helped Sister Conchita down into the craft. Before it had pulled away she was already enthusing over their catch in halting pidgin.

Kella walked round his island, ostensibly checking on its development, as he tried to marshal his thoughts. He had started building his new home three years ago. First he had hammered four tall, sharpened guide-posts into the corners of the site. Then he had felled tree trunks on the mainland to make a raft. Loosening large boulders on the coral reef, enduring the huge pounding waves that sometimes drove him into the sea, he had loaded them on to the raft, a few at a time, and poled them over to the site he had marked out, and dropped them into the water between the four posts. When the rocks had reached the level of the waterline he had started to mould his island into shape, staggering across the surface with more boulders in his hands.

After the rocks had emerged from the lagoon to a height of six feet he had ferried huge quantities of sand from the beach and poured the sand between the gaps in the rocks as they shifted and settled into position. Now that the boulders and water had soaked up the sand he could start building a thatched house and plant alu trees for shade and palm trees for their fruit. And then, perhaps, he would find a wife.

But not just yet, he thought, staring out beyond the reef to the rolling open sea. He had other work to do first. Too many things were suddenly going wrong in his area. If he did not do something about them no one else would.

His first task would be to find out what had happened to Mallory. If the foolish American had gone in search of the
havu
, he would have climbed into the almost impenetrable high bush of the Kwaio area in the central mountain range, a dangerous journey for any man, let alone a middle-aged white academic.

Kella decided to send a message back to Honiara that he had gone in pursuit of the anthropologist. That should keep Chief Superintendent Grice off his back for another week or two. It would also give Kella time to investigate the spate of other crimes in the vicinity.

There was the matter of the skeleton of Lofty Herman, found with a bullet hole in its skull. Almost certainly that was a crime committed eighteen years before, when the Japanese had invaded the Solomons in 1942.

Of more immediate concern were the attempts on the life of Sister Conchita. What had the sister done or seen in the short time she had been on the mission station to impel someone to strike out at her, even when she was under the protection of the
aofia
?

Kella turned and stared over at the dark mass of the mainland. There was also the matter of the unexplained death of the old man Senda Iabuli in the saltwater village and the sudden flight of the dead man’s grandson Peter Oro into the bush. That had been precipitated, he was certain, by Kella’s discovery of the bones
tabu
and the subsequent placing of a curse on the police sergeant by Pazabosi, the magic man.

Pazabosi was also the paramount chieftain of the Kwaio bush, the area into which Mallory had been blundering. Kella unhitched his canoe. Matters were assuming an ominous shape, like one of Malaita’s constantly changing but always threatening rain clouds. The discovery of Herman’s skeleton had led to Pazabosi placing his bones curse on the mission station. Pazabosi had left his bush home to make an almost unprecedented visit to the saltwater area. Almost at once, someone had tried to kill Sister Conchita.

Kella slipped into his canoe and began paddling it reflectively back towards Sulufou. The answer to many of his problems undoubtedly lay in Pazabosi’s remote Kwaio district. That was where he would have to go next, even if the magic man had placed a bones curse on him. Kella had no fear of any incantation laid against him in the saltwater Lau region. Here his
mana
was strong. However, in the mountainous bush of Kwaio, all the magic would belong to Pazabosi. There he would find the devil-devils.