Killman (16 page)

She remembered with envy the Roman Catholic Sister Conchita just before the dreadful storm at the feast of the Church of the Blessed Ark. Compact, attractive, self-possessed and comfortable with herself, the nun had seemed capable of talking to everyone she met without a trace of condescension. Compared with Conchita Florence guessed that she must have resembled a tongue-tied country cousin from a particularly remote village in the Ozarks. Still, the nun would probably not know too much about the critical theory of Theodor Adorno. Nor would she want to if she had any sense, thought Florence.

Again she wondered if she had made a mistake in embarking on such a speculative trip at short notice. It was true that she had been getting nowhere with her research on Malaita, but had her sense of desperation motivated her to jump out of the frying pan into the fire by coming to this lovely but isolated island? Back at the Department of Fine Arts at her university, it had seemed such a good idea when her trip to the Solomons had first been mooted. After all, how much was known at first hand about the music of the Pacific? Jane Freeman Moulin of the University of Hawaii had studied in the Marquesas, and David Fanshawe had used the University of the South Pacific as a base for his indigenous recordings in Fiji, but still there had seemed much more scope for study in the region.

That was before she had grown to appreciate the difficulties of communication among the islands, the vast distances to be travelled at a snail’s pace under the broiling sun and the constant damage caused by the heat and rapacious insects to her recording apparatus. As she checked that her tape recorder was at her feet with the rest of her baggage, a hand was placed on her shoulder. Florence looked up to see a tall, lean, grey-haired Tikopian standing next to her. He stooped and picked up her grips, walking off with them to the ship’s rail. Florence dithered and then scuttled helplessly after him.

‘I’m Dr Maddy,’ she gasped to the man’s back as he shouldered his way to the side of the vessel. ‘Have you come to meet me?’

The tall man did not answer. He dropped Florence’s baggage over the rail to a couple of islanders waiting below in a canoe at the side of the
Commissioner
. Then he gestured to the musicologist to climb down the rope ladder into the canoe, and followed her down into the swaying dugout.

As soon as Florence and the tall man reached the canoe, the other men started paddling towards the shore. They moved at an angle to most of the other canoes, which were heading for the nearest beach. Florence sat in the prow of the dugout, clutching the sides as the craft skimmed across the surface of the lagoon towards an expanse of white sand a mile or so to the west of the main landing area. Reaching their destination, the islanders who had been paddling dragged the canoe up on to the isolated shore. Florence climbed out uncertainly. The three islanders who had brought her ashore picked up her grips and gestured to her to follow them at a run across the beach.

They kept moving at a fast pace until they reached a group of trees at the edge of the sand. A group of four women wearing only tapa cloth skirts were waiting there. They took Florence’s bags from the men and hurried on ahead, while the three men fanned out watchfully as they loped through the undergrowth.

‘Where are you taking me?’ gasped Florence.

No one answered her until they reached a small village in a clearing. Without pausing, the group hurried towards a thatched hut at the end of the single row. The grey-haired man threw open the door and indicated that Florence should go inside.

‘Quick time!’ he urged.

Florence stumbled into the solitary room. The women put her bags on the floor and hurried out. The musicologist turned to ask the grey-haired man what was happening, but saw that the single room of the hut was now empty. She hurried towards the door. It swung shut on her. At the same time she heard a heavy bar being slotted into place across the entrance. In vain she tried to force the door open. It would not move.

Florence started to scream.

The moon was rising over the lagoon and the coastal fringe of mangroves with their tortured exposed roots on the main island of Malaita. The killman lay among the trees, his eyes fixed on his target. He could hear the bullfrogs croaking hoarsely in the undergrowth. He had been lying there for several hours on a patch of mauve and scarlet bougainvillaea, as the twilight had shaded into darkness. Now it was so cool that he was no longer sweating. Automatically he checked his weapons again: the bolt-operated Arisaka rifle loaded with a clip of five rounds and bearing the impression of the chrysanthemum with sixteen petals, the symbol of the emperor. Attached to his webbing belt he carried a Type 30 bayonet in a frayed scabbard, and four Type 97 hand grenades. Carefully wrapped in palm leaves in the canvas pack on his back were four sticks of dynamite.

He could see no one, but he knew that the enemy lay before him. They were always there, pretending to go about their everyday business but constantly on the lookout for him. By ignoring him they hoped that he would go away, never to encroach upon their comfortable lives again. He would never do that. On Malaita he was as permanent as a conscience. What once had been for him little more than a task to be endured had developed over the years into a nurtured, hatred-fuelled and inescapable mission.

He checked again that he had done everything correctly. He had hidden his canoe securely in the undergrowth a hundred yards up the beach. He had skirted the still almost deserted village and had climbed the path to his target, stopping every few yards to ensure that he was alone. He had chosen his position among the trees and waited for several hours. In all that time no one had appeared within his line of vision. He had found his objective, conquered the terrain and outflanked the enemy. All that remained now was to breach and destroy the obstacle.

The killman decided that the time had come. In his mind he went over the three main duties of a lone infantry raider: to surprise and confuse the enemy, to ransack the location and to destroy goods. He wished, as he always did on such occasions, that he possessed the luxury of the firepower and personnel of a typical Japanese squad at its peak: the machine-gunner, the sniper and the light mortar carrier. He remembered the final instructions to any infantryman: to close with and destroy the enemy.

He muttered the mantra of the survivor – ‘You must leave your farms and become soldiers’ – then picked up his rifle and ran across the intervening ground towards his destination. He reached the building and kicked open the door. He paused, took out a torch, switched it on and placed his rifle against the wall. Then he removed the four sticks of dynamite from his backpack and deposited them along the length of the construction. He had visited it several weeks ago and knew exactly where to place them. He lit the fuses, retrieved his rifle and ran back towards the shelter of the trees.

The dynamite exploded as he reached the edge of the jungle. From some distance away he could hear the shouts of startled men and women in the village below. The killman leant his rifle against a tree and scooped up the first of the percussion-initiated grenades he had left there on the ground. He tapped it on the trunk of the tree and lobbed it across the intervening ground into the heart of the blazing construction. He followed it with the three remaining grenades, each delivered accurately and exploding with a yellow flash, adding to the general conflagration. Then he turned and hurried away through the trees.

Kella was waiting as darkness began to fall over the endless sea. He had been biding his time for the entire five days of the voyage, ever since
The Spirit of the Islands
had left Malaita. Casually he made a play of checking the fishing line he had cast over the bow of the cargo vessel, while his eyes raked the deck. He accepted that there were a few qualities that applied to both the
aofia
and a twentieth-century policeman. One of them was the ability to wait and then, at the right moment, to move, hopefully in the right direction. All his instincts, developed in both the worlds he inhabited, told him that the time to act decisively was almost upon him. His eyes searched for the sacred areca nut he had secured to the deck with gum at the beginning of the voyage. It was still in place and should guarantee them a safe landing. When the vessel returned to Malaita, Kella would retrieve the nut, give thanks and place it in the sacred
beu aabu
on his home island of Sulufou, as an offering to the gods.

Mayotishi had made no demur to taking his chartered vessel to Tikopia, once Kella had assured him that the origins of the killman’s activities might be found on the tiny island. The sergeant suspected that the Japanese was as much in thrall to his fates as Kella was to his. He had promised the fatalistic official that as soon as they returned to Malaita he would devote all his energies to tracking down the murderer and, in the process, ascertaining whether or not the man was a Japanese soldier.

After the attack on the track outside the mission, neither Brother John nor Shem had made any further objections to travelling to the relative safety of the remote eastern island. Indeed both men seemed quite relieved for the time being to be in a comparative limbo away from Malaita.

Earlier in the week, the vessel had put in at the islands of Utupua and Vanikoro to take on water and fresh fruit and vegetables. For the past three days it had been shuddering briskly across the open sea. So far the weather had been fine, except for a few refreshing squalls of rain. Mayotishi had recruited only a skeleton crew of half a dozen seamen, in addition to the bosun commanding the vessel, the engineer and a Chinese cook. Kella had approved. When he had supported Tottenham Hotspur during his sojourn at the London School of Economics, he had subscribed to the theory that in the same way that any good First Division side needed a spine of a striker, a centre half and a goalkeeper, so an inter-islands vessel in order to thrive required a steersman, a mechanic and a hash-slinger.

He had been further heartened to discover that the bosun, a grizzled, uncommunicative middle-aged man, was a
wantok
from the Lau district, as was the young, cheerful and decidedly friskier engineer.

The vessel, without a cargo and with only a few tons of rusted pig iron as ballast, bobbed easily enough on the surface of the water. Below deck, one of the two small, airless cabins was occupied by Mayotishi, and the other by Sister Conchita. Kella and Brother John were sleeping on mattresses on the deck, moving into the stateroom when it rained. Shem was sleeping in the crew’s quarters. That evening they had dined off bonito fish and taro in the stateroom, and now most of the passengers and crew were scattered about the vessel, enjoying the serene night air before it was time to sleep.

Mayotishi was sitting under a canvas awning, reading a book by the light of a hurricane lamp placed on a small table next to him. Rimless spectacles perched on his nose gave him the appearance of a studious weasel. The last Kella had seen of Sister Conchita, she had been saying her evening prayers in her cabin. Brother John was performing effortless push-ups next to the enclosed wheelhouse. At the wheel, the bosun was peering anxiously at the magnetic compass. This was situated on the roof above his head, free from the influence of any magnetic materials on the ship. Its location was commonly referred to as the monkey island. The helmsman was able to study the compass through a twisted periscope coiling up before him. Like all Melanesian navigators, he would much rather steer towards a fixed secure point close to the horizon, but this far out at sea, such an option was denied him. If the vessel should overshoot the tiny speck of an island they were heading for, the next landfall would not be until the coast of the New Hebrides group was reached, by which time
The Spirit of the Islands
’ supplies of water and fuel would have been used up long ago and its crew and passengers would almost certainly have died of thirst.

Kella studied the sea with a wary eye. There were signs of an approaching black squall. The waves breaking against the bows of the vessel were growing more and more phosphorescent, and he could see in the sky six of the
togo o ni
, the group of maidens that the white people called the Pleiades cluster. He caught the helmsman’s eye. The bosun shook his head resignedly.

Not far from Kella, most of the crew members had been gambling and squabbling noisily for the last hour over an oilskin crown-and-anchor chart on the deck. Shem, the Tikopian, was prominent among them. So far he had kept to himself on the voyage, but tonight he had joined the Melanesians in their gaming, like an indolent, lazily smiling shark that had been following a shoal of small fish hungrily for days. The seamen around him cursed and cheered alternately as the dice were propelled from the shaker and the stakeholder raked in the money and paid out the winners. As Kella watched, the game broke up in some dissension. He was at Shem’s side almost before the Polynesian had got to his feet.

‘Did you win?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Against Melanesians? What do you think?’ grinned Shem evilly, opening and closing a callused fist to reveal a fleeting glimpse of a wad of crumpled Australian dollars.

‘Congratulations! Have you thought any more about the time when Papa Noah was killed?’

Shem sighed, but answered readily enough. ‘Oh, that! I’ve told you all I know. There was a big storm. Everything grew so dark and the rain came down so hard that you could hardly see anything. I did what I could to get people away from the exposed feast ground and down to the shelter of the village. By the time I came back up again, Sister Conchita was trying to revive Papa Noah. I helped her, but it was too late. Papa was dead.’ The Tikopian stared defiantly at the policeman. ‘Are you satisfied now?’ he asked truculently.

‘Not yet,’ said Kella. ‘Now I want to go back a while. Tell me about the feast. What was it being held for?’

The Tikopian sighed, but surprised Kella by giving a fairly comprehensive answer to his question. The feast had been Papa Noah’s idea from the start, to mark the first anniversary of the dream in which he had been told to build his ark. The old man had left the actual organization of the celebration to his acolytes, but had personally invited the guests by walking many miles into the bush and along the shore and reefs to summon the converts to his cult living in the villages along his route. He had also invited Sister Conchita and Brother John, although Shem did not know why. Neither did the Tikopian have any idea who the mysterious guest referred to by the old man could have been.