Killman (4 page)

Kella was mystified. His information had seemed genuine enough at the time, but there was absolutely no sign of anyone being kept under duress on the tiny stone outcrop. Neither could he sense any aura of distress. The police sergeant padded round the hut towards the water trough.

He was greeted with a shrill scream. Standing in front of the basin was a slender white woman of about thirty. Presumably this was the overseas academic who had taken up residence on the island. Identification was difficult, because at the moment she was stark naked. She was holding a plastic bucket in her hand. Her dark hair was plastered close to her head where she had been emptying the contents over herself.

The woman shrieked again, threw the bucket viciously at Kella and turned and ran into her hut, slamming the door after her. The sergeant was conscious only of a fleeting pleasing glimpse of the pale bikini outline of her scrawny naked buttocks before she disappeared. He heard the sound of a heavy table being dragged across the floor of the hut and placed against the reinforced door.

‘It’s all right!’ he shouted, annoyed with himself for his clumsiness. ‘I mean you no harm! I’m a police officer.’

‘Oh yes?’ came a quavering American voice from behind the closed door. ‘Prove it!’

Kella became aware that he was wearing only his soaked khaki uniform shorts.

‘What would you like me to do?’ he asked. ‘Sing you a chorus of “The Bold Gendarmes”?’

There was a pause. ‘Stay there and don’t move,’ came the woman’s voice. ‘I’m coming out. I warn you, I’m armed!’

The table was pulled back, scudding across the earthen floor of the hut, and the door opened. The woman came out into the moonlight. She was wearing only a faded cotton skirt and was staring defiantly at Kella. Her small bare breasts were trembling. In her hand she was carrying a heavy kitchen knife. She waved it in uncertain arcs before her.

‘I’ll use this if I have to,’ she threatened.

She meant it too, thought Kella. The edgy woman might have too many barely concealed nerve-endings as well as currently too much exposed flesh for her own good, but there was no doubting her valour.

‘I’m sorry I frightened you,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back and explain when I’ve got more time. Right now I’ve got something else to attend to that won’t wait.’

‘Don’t bother!’ said the young woman vehemently. ‘Just stay away from me!’

‘I still owe you an explanation,’ persisted Kella, backing away. ‘I’ll come back. My name is Kella. Sergeant Kella.’

‘Kella?’ the girl said, her attitude changing reluctantly. ‘I’ve heard that name. Aren’t you the
aofia
, the law-bringer?’

Another whitey who had heard too much local gossip and did not understand any of it, thought Kella. Aloud he said: ‘I’m Sergeant Kella, the local police officer. I’ll come back and apologize properly as soon as I can. Believe me, you’re perfectly safe here.’

He turned and dived back into the water. Within minutes he had located his gently drifting canoe and was paddling it urgently towards Sulufou. He was burning with fury. Kella did not like being tricked, and he was sure that he had just been made the victim of a hoax. Almost certainly it was time for payback.

He tethered the dugout to the long, carefully maintained Sulufou jetty, shrugged into his shirt and sandals and started running past the huts towards the men’s longhouse at the far end of the village. There were four islanders on guard at the door, each carrying a club. Recognizing the unarmed scowling police sergeant and sensing his mood, they stood aside hastily to allow him to enter.

The interior was crammed with old men basking circumspectly under a transparent cloud of cigarette and tobacco pipe smoke. There were at least forty gaunt, gnarled veterans, clad in their workaday lap-laps, squatting in rows on the floor of the low-roofed building. Without appearing to look, Kella saw that every one of them was a custom chief and that, unusually in such a fiercely divided area, they came from all over the northern and central part of the island and even farther away. Such a multi-clan assembly among the island leaders was almost unheard of. There were shark-worshippers from his own coastal district of Lau, ancestor-venerating mountain-dwellers from the inaccessible flesh-eating region of Kwaio, custom priests of the Fataleka lowlands, where the gigantic knee-high orchids grew as profusely as grass, and other chiefs from the distant Christian areas of Mbaengguu, Doro and even Kwara’ae and Isabel.

These were all genuine chieftains, noted Kella as he hurried through their ranks to the front of the
beu
, not government-appointed but ultimately powerless headmen who flattered expatriate government officials and impressed them with their mission-school-accumulated knowledge of English. The men assembled silently and coldly before him would never deign to address or even appear before a visiting white man, should one venture into their districts. These were influential warriors who controlled wide swathes of land and could, if the need arose, raise whole armies. Some he knew personally, others by reputation. There was the one-eyed and vicious Volomo, who as a young man in 1927 had taken part in the murder of District Officer Bell at Sinaranggo over a head-tax dispute and had survived the consequent bombardment of the coastal villages by an Australian gunship and the desecration of his tribal shrines by Christian native police patrols sent by the authorities from northern Malaita. Further down the hut squatted Dauara and Nakongo, as usual sullenly watchful. After the Second World War, each had served four years’ imprisonment at hard labour for their part in the abortive independence uprising known as Marching Rule. Sitting on his own was the remote and supercilious Basiana, the chieftain of Aiseni, who had the gift of being able to build and consecrate according to ancient rituals the holy dwelling known as a
beu aabu
on his own in a single day. He guarded his precious reputation so jealously that he seldom spoke to mere mortals, even others of chiefly rank.

Uneasily Kella realized that he had never before seen so many influential headmen gathered together in one spot. There were blood feuds represented in this
beu
that probably went back decades. One hasty word might bring a long-dormant vendetta back to life in an instant in the shape of a sudden fatal knife thrust between the ribs. Only an event of monumental importance could have persuaded the leaders of so many warring factions to declare a truce and assemble, no matter how warily, in this fashion. This truly was a
kibung
, a meeting of the mighty. The thought tempered the sergeant’s approach to the elderly clan commanders as he began to address them in an improvised amalgam of pidgin and dialect.

‘Mighty
fisi kwau
,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You did not have to trick me into meeting you here by pretending that the white woman had been taken.’

‘How else were we to be sure to get you back to Lau?’ gruffly demanded a clan leader from the Doro district. ‘These days you are spending all your time with the white men. How many times have you left Malaita already this year? On the other hand, how often have you visited our villages to make sure that there is peace among them?’

There was a general murmur of agreement from the wizened old men in the room. They had a point, thought Kella, although he was not about to admit it publicly. As usual, he had a balancing act to fulfil. Aloud he said mildly: ‘The government sends me abroad to learn more, so that I might become a better policeman.’

‘We are not interested in whitey’s law,’ said a chieftain from Kwara’ae. ‘You are the
aofia
, our peacemaker. The priests anointed you when you were small, and it is your job to make sure that no blood is spilt on Mala.’

‘These days you spend too much time as a black white man,’ said one of the four clan leaders of Sulufou witheringly. ‘You live in their houses and eat their
kai kai
. They say you even fornicate with their women, although I hope you have better taste than to do that. Tonight we thought that the only way to get you here to attend to our problems was by sending word that a white woman was in trouble. We could not be sure that you would return just for our humble and unimportant concerns here on Big Mala.’

The old men in the audience drummed their heels in agreement on the earthen floor of the men’s house. Matters were even worse than he had feared, decided Kella. He was being accused of disrespect.

‘How may I help, my chiefs?’ he asked humbly. There must be a series of particularly complex boundary disputes that he was going to be called upon to adjudicate, he assumed. Either that, or some bored and mischievous young bushmen had destroyed the canoes of a saltwater village once too often after the dugouts had been drawn up overnight above the high-water mark on an isolated shoreline.

He was not expecting the reply that came from the body of the room. With some difficulty, two younger islanders supported an elderly and emaciated chieftain to his feet. When he spoke, the shrivelled man’s voice was surprisingly firm.

‘There is a killman at work on Mala,’ declared the venerable chieftain briefly. ‘He is murdering our people!’

It was as if a dam had been breached. Suddenly a dozen of the leaders were talking at once, arguing with one another and demanding the right to be heard. Some of them started pushing their neighbours in their eagerness to speak. A stunned Kella tried to think on his feet. This was the last thing he had expected. Killman was the pidgin name for the old-style professional killer whose kind had once flourished on Malaita. The last time the sergeant had heard of such a hired warrior being in action had been in the 1920s, long before his birth. Surely some terrifying, ill-founded rumour must have got out of hand.

‘Has anyone seen this killman?’ he asked, trying to keep the note of scepticism out of his voice.

‘I have seen the results of his actions,’ said Nakongo, the Marching Rule veteran, rising. His teeth were stained red from constant use of the narcotic betel nut. ‘One of my young men foolishly went hunting for wild boar on his own. We found his dead body by the side of the track.’

‘An Aiseni man was slain while he was clearing a space for a new garden,’ growled Basiana. ‘What killman would dare enter my territory?’

‘I expect he knew that you were busy building another holy dwelling at the time,’ sneered a chieftain from a bush village.

The chieftains were now in full spate. The incensed district leaders were on their feet, howling at Kella from all over the hut, demanding retribution before the assassin struck in their areas, spitting deadly insults at one another. As the row reverberated around him, the sergeant tried to work out the essence of what they were saying. As far as he could judge, two men, each from a different district in the north and central regions of Malaita, had been murdered recently while they had been on their own, occupied on mundane tasks, in unfrequented parts of the island. Both deaths had occurred along the coastal, saltwater strip of the district. The two killings had been many miles apart. The men and women of the vast area were now panic-stricken and demanding that their chieftains put a stop to the apparently random slaughter before the killman struck again, hence this hastily constructed meeting. It also appeared as if both the deadly assaults had taken place over the last six weeks, while Kella had been on secondment to Hong Kong.

‘Has anyone seen this killman?’ he asked desperately. He did not expect anyone to answer. To his surprise, Chief Basiana stood up, brandishing above his head something wrapped in pandanus leaves and secured with bush twine. ‘One of my men found this beside the body of the dead man in his garden,’ he said. ‘The killman must have dropped it.’

The chieftain passed the package to Kella at the front of the
beu
. Kella undid the wrapping and took out a rusty blade about twenty inches long. He recognized the type of weapon immediately. He had seen a number of them when he had been working as a twelve-year-old scout with a coast-watchers’ raiding party against the Japanese in the Roviana Lagoon in 1942, eighteen years earlier. It was a Japanese Type 30 bayonet for a Meiji 38 rifle. The blade was straight, and it had a quillon cross-piece hand-guard that also made it suitable for stabbing purposes.

‘
Bilong Japani,’
grunted a chieftain in the front row.

‘The Japanese left hundreds of these behind after the war,’ Kella told him. ‘Anyone could have found such a blade and used it to kill an innocent man, or even two of them.’

The room was suddenly silent with the unvoiced scepticism of the elderly islanders present. Kella wondered what he could have said to affect the tough old chiefs so palpably. The oldest man in the room indicated that he wished to be helped to his feet again. As he stood tottering between two younger leaders, his quavering voice could be heard clearly.

‘Neither man was killed with a knife,’ he said briefly, hawking up a globule of phlegm.

‘How did they die, then?’ Kella asked.

‘They both drowned,’ said the old man. He paused and took a deep breath. The veteran of a dozen battles was actually trembling with apprehension. ‘And there was no water near either of them. Take my word for it, the evil spirits are playing jokes on us through this killman!’

His words were a signal for a precipitous jostling exodus on the part of the assembled chiefs as they made their way out of the meeting hut back to their waiting canoes. They had presented the
aofia
with their problem. How he dealt with it was now up to him. Kella decided that he would start his journey to the sites of the two reported killings at first light in the morning.

One of the older chieftains paused in front of the sergeant on his way out. Covering his face and upper body were the tribal markings of a leader from Santa Isabel.

‘There is another thing,’ he said. ‘The two men who were killed both belonged to the Church of the Blessed Ark.’ He looked at the police sergeant almost with pity. When he spoke again, it was in the local Bugotu dialect.

‘
Vautuutuni oka!
’ he muttered.