Killman (12 page)

Sometimes Father Kuyper had engaged in long, rambling discussions with the older priest, but more often, as Conchita had just witnessed, he seemed to welcome the opportunity to put his own thoughts in order as he talked quietly and insistently to himself in the comatose Father Pierre’s presence. She wondered if he had hoped for some sort of assistance or interjection from the older man, and whether she should pass on Father Pierre’s cryptic remark about the island of Tikopia being central to what was going on around them. She decided to wait until she had had a chance to talk to Father Pierre again.

‘You can’t mean that,’ she said weakly. ‘The church has been preaching the faith on Malaita for a century.’

‘And have we done more than scratch the surface?’ asked the priest, still looking out of the window. ‘Have any of the missions? Most islanders practise the Christian faith only in tandem with their old pagan beliefs. You have cause to know that better than most, Sister Conchita.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the nun,

‘It is well known within the faith that Father Pierre thinks so highly of your potential that he even encouraged you on one occasion to encounter the so-called Lau gods, to see how you would cope with the concept of many faiths in these islands. Whether he should have introduced someone so young in years and in the doctrine to such a complicated matter is another matter. However, it is certainly a sign of the regard in which he holds you.’

Sister Conchita thought back to the day many months before when Father Pierre had sent her on her own to the remote mountainous Lau settlement outside Honiara. Here she had encountered the girl known as the dream-maker who had enabled her to help Sergeant Kella. She had not known that any other expatriate was aware of that story. However, it was commonly acknowledged that Father Kuyper knew everything that happened relating to the Catholic Church in the Solomons, among its chain of a thousand islands.

‘Sergeant Kella is back on Malaita,’ she said. ‘He’ll be looking into the matter, I’m sure.’

‘Ben Kella is a very interesting man,’ said the priest. ‘He was head boy here at Ruvabi mission school some years ago, you know. He is a good detective and a dedicated pagan priest. But we must always remember that he no longer owes any duty to our faith. There is no reason for him to extend us any latitude in the course of his work. In that case he can hardly expect us to bother him with our doubts and fears at this stage. As you intimate, with his track record, Kella will probably discover everything that there is to know soon enough. Still, you’re aware of that. You know him better than I do.’ He paused. ‘Tell me, Sister, is it true that once in order to allow Sergeant Kella to escape from Point Cruz wharf, you created a diversion by taking a group of elderly nuns on to an American cruise ship?’

‘The story has grown in the telling,’ Conchita said.

‘Anyway,’ said the priest unexpectedly, ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Sister Conchita. Although from your name I was expecting, if I may say so, someone perhaps a little more . . . sultry.’

Sister Conchita felt herself blushing. Could the remote Father Kuyper actually be teasing her? Surely not! ‘An error of geography,’ she said stiffly. ‘When I finished my training I thought I was going to be sent to South America, so I selected a name that I thought would be more in keeping with my calling in that part of the world.’

‘But they sent you to the South Pacific instead,’ said Father Kuyper. ‘Fate can be cruel. Not that there’s anything wrong with the name Conchita,’ he added.

‘It’s just that you don’t expect it on an irascible Boston-Irish girl only three generations away from her shanty-town antecedents, I know,’ said Conchita, walking towards the door.

‘There is one thing,’ said the priest. ‘If it is decided that matters here are becoming unsafe, it might be necessary to send you back to Honiara, until the situation eases. I’m just giving you advance notice. Don’t worry. Something miraculous might occur and the trouble will all blow over.’

Sister Conchita resisted the impulse to argue. Was this the thin end of the wedge? Obedience, she told herself; obedience and humility.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Father, while we’re on the subject of miracles, I must attempt to see to the feeding of the five thousand.’

After he left Wainoni, the Gammon Man, it took Kella over an hour to reach the saltwater village of Tabuna. He paddled several miles down the Lau Lagoon, between the artificial islands, then made a detour and dragged his canoe up on to the beach a mile to the north of his destination. He hurried into the coastal fringe of trees, so that he would not be observed from the open sea.

As soon as he had rounded the headland in his canoe, he had noticed the government vessel at anchor outside the reef. From a distance it looked like the
Commissioner
, forty feet long, with six cabins and space for eighty deck passengers. Every three months it made a heavily subsidized seven-day trip to the tiny remote island of Tikopia, carrying essential supplies for the Polynesian inhabitants there. Throughout the Solomons, government vessels competed with commercial ones for freight cargoes, generally a source of dismay to the Chinese traders. However, no private vessels wanted the dangerous and unproductive Tikopian run.

A small dinghy, rowed by two Melanesian seamen and containing four bulky lighter-skinned Polynesians perched on top of a pile of casks, was nosing its way into the lagoon through a gap in the jagged coral wall of the reef. Presumably the six men were going to gather water for their long sea voyage, filling their casks from the river skirting the village of Tabuna. The Tikopians were probably passengers going home on holiday after a stint working as labourers on one of the logging plantations in the western islands.

Kella hurried bent double into the trees skirting the beach, hoping that he had not been seen from the rowing boat. He was wearing the red beret of his police uniform, and that was not always a symbol universally accepted by the notoriously rebellious and feckless Tikopians. He found and followed a trampled strand of track leading through the bush towards the collection of thatched huts.

It was strangely quiet among the trees. A narrow overgrown path had been worn away between the haphazard riot of coconut palms, banana plants, canarium and iron trees and the thousands of different weeds and brambles clutching haphazardly at one another and almost blotting out the sun in a great colourful dappled tapestry. Scarlet and yellow orchids sprayed from the branches. Fallen trees littered the path, lying across carpets of scarlet hibiscus flowers, their rotting wood almost obscured by thousands of disciplined marching red and black ants.

Dominating this part of the jungle were the mighty hardwood evergreen banyan trees with their red berries and drooping branches. When these branches touched the ground, they would often take root and form additional reinforcing trunks, so that the trees were growing horizontally as well as vertically in a series of great moss-covered hoops. Because of this constant renewal, the banyan trees were regarded as signs of eternal life. Wherever possible villagers would hold their meetings in their shadows, to guarantee wisdom for their deliberations. Today, however, there were none of the usual urgent hunting parties of men looking for wild pigs, no groups of cheerfully chattering women on the way to their gardens in the clearings along the jungle tracks. Even the birds and animals seemed subdued.

Closer to the houses he encountered a thick curtain of creepers hanging from the upper reaches of the trees. They fell to the mossy ground in great accumulations of green, brown and black. Something among the living trellis looked wrong. Kella stopped for a few moments and tugged thoughtfully at some of the long fronds, gazing up at the higher branches of the trees. After a few minutes he realized what was out of synchronization. Then he continued through the jungle.

He passed the outer circle of huts and emerged in the village square between two rows of thatched homes. Most of the villagers were looking on as a dozen young Melanesians surrounded the six men from the
Commissioner
. The four Polynesians and the two seamen from the government vessel were standing apprehensively shoulder to shoulder on the bank of the river where it widened and slowed down before disgorging its water into the lagoon.

‘Whichway now?’ Kella asked, using the standard pidgin form of initial police enquiry to ask what was going on. It was a long-held ambition of his to substitute this one day with the phrase ‘Hello, hello, hello’, which he had admired in the television reruns of
Dixon of Dock Green
on his visit to London.

One of the Tikopians recognized Kella’s uniform and cried out unconvincingly in English: ‘Help us, Sergeant! They will not let us take water from the river.’

‘They are thieves! They will not pay!’ shouted one of the village men.

‘Guard us while we fill our barrels, policeman,’ demanded the Tikopian who had spoken first.

Kella paused, while both groups looked at him waiting for his reaction. Finally the sergeant shrugged indifferently and turned away.

‘Beat the crap out of each other if you like,’ he said. ‘I don’t care.’

One of the villagers who could speak English translated for the benefit of his companions. The men around him grunted indignantly and broke into a dozen separate conversations.

‘Are you going to allow these strangers to invade our village?’ demanded their spokesman.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ yawned Kella. ‘All you’re doing is
biboimim
. If I want to see play-acting, I’ll go to the Point Cruz cinema and watch John Wayne at work on the screen. Come with me, all of you.’

He walked confidently back into the trees without looking round to see if he was being followed. When he reached the nest of overhanging creepers, he came to a halt. As he had hoped, the men from the ship and the villagers were all at his heels. Behind them most of the women and children from the village were also gathering hopefully, in case the latest visitor to their settlement was about to prove to be some sort of source of entertainment to break up the long, boring day for them.

Kella indicated one of the darker strands cascading to the ground. ‘Pull hard on the end of that,’ he said in the Lau dialect to the nearest villager, a young, broad-shouldered man. The islander looked frightened and eyed his companions furtively for guidance. Kella transferred his attention to the nearest Tikopian. ‘All right,’ he sighed, switching to English. ‘You do it, then.’ The Polynesian shook his head sullenly, his downcast eyes studying the ground with sudden interest. Kella nodded.

‘I thought not,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some sort of precious cargo stored away up there, haven’t you? Something that could break if it was brought down too violently. Bottles of hooch, perhaps? My guess would be Australian whisky from a Chinese store in Honiara. Am I right?’

No one answered. Kella reached out to give the strand a tug. There was a howl of anguished protest from the men in both groups. Kella let go of the creeper and stood back. He looked enquiringly at the group. One of the villagers shuffled forward.

‘Mefella fetchim,’ he muttered.

For the next quarter of an hour, three of the younger villagers went up the tree from various sides, climbing agilely hand over hand. Each returned from every journey with three bottles of Australian Sullivan’s Cove malt whisky cradled compassionately in his arms. After four trips for each man, Kella counted more than thirty full bottles on the ground before him. The villagers and visitors from the ship looked at him like errant schoolboys.

‘Let me guess,’ said the sergeant. ‘You Tikopians came to the end of your contracts as labourers in the Roviana Lagoon or somewhere like that, and invested a chunk of your savings in this whisky in Honiara. You then had it transported by truck along the road to this village, while you travelled down on the government ship. Am I right so far?’

‘We have not broken the law,’ growled one of the Tikopians.

‘Not yet,’ agreed Kella. ‘That was to come next. You knew that the
Commissioner
would put in here at Tabuna, so you came to an arrangement with the men of the village. They would hide the bottles until you arrived, for a price, and then hand them over to you. You bribed these two seamen from the
Commissioner
and volunteered to come ashore with them, ostensibly to fill the water casks from the river. In fact, of course, you were going to hide the whisky bottles in some of the barrels and smuggle them ashore when you arrived at Tikopia.
That
would be against the law, because the four hereditary chiefs of Tikopia have banned the import of alcohol to their island.’

‘You forget,’ offered one of the Tikopians hopefully. ‘The men of the village threatened to attack us when we arrived.’

‘No they didn’t,’ scoffed Kella. ‘Even the peace-loving men of Tabuna would have made a better job of an ambush than the pathetic attempt I just had the misfortune to witness. What really happened was that one of the villagers saw me heading for the village in my uniform and you all hastily concocted the attack story in the hope that I would be fooled and maintain the peace and look on while you loaded the whisky on to the ship.’

There was a pause.

‘How did you know about the whisky?’ asked the oldest villager.

‘Because your work was sloppy,’ said Kella. ‘You didn’t expect anyone in authority to turn up, so you just put the bottles in a fishing net and suspended it from the top branches of one of the trees. However, you had to make sure that you knew which was the right tree among all the others in this wilderness, so you dangled one of the strands of the net to the ground, among all the other creepers. As I walked through the bush, I saw that one of the strands was much darker than the other fronds. When I touched it, I could feel that it was manufactured from nylon, probably in Taiwan, and was not a real creeper. So I guessed that something was being hidden in a net above my head.’

‘Are you going to arrest us?’ asked one of the Tikopians uneasily.