One Blood (22 page)

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ asked Imison.

‘I wanted to see what all the fuss was about,’ said Conchita, trying to sound casual. ‘I’ve heard so much about Kasolo that I asked Mr Russell to show it to me.’

‘They must have seen us,’ said one of the Americans, a slim man who looked as if he had to shave twice a day.

‘There was nothing to see,’ said Dontate quickly. ‘You came ashore in a properly constituted touring party, with a well-known local guide. What can anybody make out of that?’

‘Too many things are going wrong,’ said Imison. ‘We’re not tidying up as well as we’re supposed to. Maybe we should make a start.’

‘That would be overkill,’ said Dontate. ‘This is a small place. Things get noticed. Don’t do anything hasty.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said the dark-chinned American. His companion grunted assent.

‘Lot of things I don’t like,’ said Imison. ‘Being stuck with you two, for a start. Nothing I can do about it.’

‘Well, we’ve had our little excursion,’ said Sister Conchita as nonchalantly as she could. ‘I think we should be on our way now, Mr Russell. A lot of people are expecting us.’

‘Are they?’ asked Andy.

‘Oh, yes; I have to take a consignment of medicine back to the mission hospital, and the District Commissioner is waiting for you to get back from Honiara today. We’d both be missed. Very quickly, too.’

‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ said the VSO eagerly. ‘Yes, that’s right. A lot of people at the airstrip must have seen me get off the plane this morning.’

Imison gnawed at his lip, trying to come to a decision. Finally he nodded to Dontate.

‘Best be getting back to your fan clubs, then,’ said Dontate to Conchita and Andy. ‘We wouldn’t want any broken hearts on account of you being missing.’

The islander stood to one side to allow the nun and the VSO to walk away down to the beach. Imison and the other two Americans looked unhappy about the situation, but made no effort to prevent them from leaving.

Conchita said no more until she and Andy had pushed their canoe back into the water and she had started the outboard engine and was steering them back towards Gizo.

‘What was that all about?’ asked Andy.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Conchita.

‘It was almost like they were going to stop us leaving.’

‘Surely not,’ said the nun. It would not do to alarm the boy, but for a few moments back on the island it had looked to her as if Imison and his men had been contemplating killing the pair of them in case they had seen anything untoward. It was only Joe Dontate’s intervention that had saved them. Sister Conchita knew that inexorably she was getting out of her depth. It was time she brought in the bigger guns. She opened
the briefcase at her feet and took out the letter she had written at Munda. She handed the envelope to the VSO.

‘When you get back to Gizo, I’d like you to look for Sergeant Kella, the policeman. You’ll find him at the District Commissioner’s office tomorrow. Please give him this.’

KELLA COULD HEAR
the man’s voice raised in anger as he walked up from the beach towards the plantation house on the hill. He had seen the motorized barge at anchor some way out in the lagoon, and had guessed what was about to happen. He hoped that he had arrived in time to prevent bloodshed.

The path up from what was left of the wharf veered sharply. Round the bend, Kella saw an emaciated middle-aged man menacing with a shotgun two larger, younger and definitely uneasy white men.

‘Take it easy, Dad,’ said one of the younger men.

‘I’m not your dad,’ snarled the emaciated man. He lifted the shotgun, his finger curling speculatively round the trigger.

‘Easy!’ shouted Kella.

He reached the group and placed his hand on the barrel of the gun, forcing it down until it was pointing to the ground. At first the emaciated man struggled, but then he relaxed, the fight running out of him like sand in an egg timer.

‘The old bastard was going to shoot us!’ shouted one of the younger men, emboldened by the emaciated man’s obvious sense of defeat.

‘If he wanted to shoot you, you’d both be dead by now,’ Kella told him. He nodded to the older man. ‘Hello, Mr Hickey. Seeing off the scrappers again?’

‘Thieving sods,’ muttered the emaciated man. Suddenly he looked very tired.

‘I’m Sergeant Kella, Solomon Islands Police Force,’ Kella told the two younger men. ‘I take it you’re scrap-metal merchants from Brisbane?’

‘We came ashore to make the owner a genuine offer for his war relics,’ said the younger man who had done all the talking so far. ‘He charged out of the house and waved that bloody blunderbuss at us.’

‘Liars!’ snarled the middle-aged man. ‘They were walking straight past the house to start loading up without my say-so.’

‘When we saw the house, we thought it was abandoned, so we went on,’ said the younger man. ‘Well, look at the state of the place! It was a perfectly genuine mistake.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Kella. ‘This plantation belongs to Mr Hickey. Nothing on it is for sale. Go back to your barge and move on. And be careful how you behave in the lagoon. I shall be putting out a radio message warning people to keep an eye open for you.’

‘Sod him, he’s only a
kanaka
policeman,’ sneered the man who had not spoken so far.

‘That’s true,’ said Kella. ‘But I think you’ll find that this is a
kanaka
country, if you live long enough.’

The two men slouched away down the track to the beach. Hickey stooped and picked up his shotgun. He aimed it in the air and pulled the trigger. The noise of the explosion sent birds wheeling and screaming. The two scrap-metal dealers broke into an undignified run, sliding down the path to the beach. Hickey started to climb the steps into his house.

‘That’s telling ’em,’ he said. ‘Come inside, mate. Long time no see.’

They entered the living room of the planter’s house. The building was raised on top of four hardwood piles on the side of a hill five miles along the coast from Gizo. A large veranda occupied the front of the house, with a sweeping view of the sea below. The building had a galvanized-iron roof and large
windows with wooden shutters. Efforts had once been made to surround the house with a lawn, but it was now a neglected and overgrown sprawl of kunai grass and weeds.

‘You’ll probably remember this place when it was at its peak,’ said Hickey bitterly. ‘Changed a bit, hasn’t it? Drink?’

‘It’s a little early in the morning for me,’ said Kella.

‘It’s never too early,’ said Hickey, refilling his glass. He was a slight, narrow-shouldered man in his fifties, bare-chested and wearing long white shorts and scruffy sandals. He had not shaved for several days.

‘When were you last here?’ he asked.

‘Not since the war,’ said Kella. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’

‘You’re a bit young to be writing your memoirs,’ said Hickey. The planter was not drunk, but his speech was beginning to sound slurred. ‘Did you pick up any mail for me in Honiara?’

‘There wasn’t any.’

‘Sod it!’ Hickey indicated a bamboo table covered with handwritten sheets of paper. ‘You’d think that Government House would reply to at least one of my bloody letters.’

‘What are you writing to the High Commissioner about?’ asked Kella, although he already knew the answer to his question. Hickey’s vendetta with the government was common knowledge.

‘What the hell do you think I’m complaining about?’ said Hickey, indicating the view of his plantation through the open window with a sweep of his arm. ‘Compo, mate, that’s what I’m after, compo! I’m due a bagful and it’s well overdue. I’ve been asking for it for donkeys’ years. Do they pay me a blind bit of notice? Do they buggery?!’

‘Haven’t they paid you any compensation at all yet?’ asked Kella. ‘That’s bad.’

‘Bad, it’s a bloody tragedy! How am I expected to live? Planters in Papua New Guinea have been repaid in full for war
damage done to their estates. Those of us unlucky enough to live in the Solomons have had zilch! Come with me and I’ll show you the state the place is in.’

As they walked out of the room, Kella noticed a box containing half a dozen sticks of dynamite stored carelessly under the table. It was possible that the planter was using the explosive to make structural alterations to his grounds, but it was more likely that he was employing the sticks to stun dozens of fish at a time in a local river or lake and thus accumulate enough to send to the market at Gizo. Hickey followed his gaze.

‘Going to lock me up, Officer?’ he asked.

‘Not if you give me what I’ve come for,’ Kella said.

He followed the other man out of the house. It had been more than fifteen years since he had last visited Hickey’s home, but the change certainly was staggering. Once the Australian’s plantation had been a byword for order and efficiency. Regimented rows of carefully tended palms had been spaced with scientific precision to allow coconuts to be harvested and the copra extracted with a minimum of fuss. The drying sheds for the copra meat had been painted. Now the area was an expanse of raw and gutted wasteland. The trees had been felled and their roots torn out by bulldozers so that the whole area could be transformed into a Japanese army camp. The camp had gone in its turn, leaving only the debris of its former occupants.

To one side of the campsite extended an airstrip of crushed coral, running the entire length of the plantation. The rest of the ground area was covered with flat concrete slabs, which had formed the bases for barrack rooms and administrative buildings. The few palm trees that had been left around the fringes of the camp had been neglected. Coconuts had been allowed to fall from the trees and lie in rotting piles on the ground.

‘The Yanks didn’t even bother to invade the place in 1943,’ said Hickey. ‘They just bombed it to smithereens and then starved the Japs out over a period of months. This is what they left—the few who were still alive.’

Scattered over the ground were the rusted, twisted remains of military hardware. There were rusted shell casings, searchlights, barbed wire, bloated rubber wheels and gas cylinders. They had all been crudely hacked with saws and axes so that the more valuable parts of the metal could be wrenched off and loaded on to barges.

‘The Japanese didn’t leave much of any use to you,’ said Kella.

‘That wasn’t the Japs, that was the bloody scrappers,’ said Hickey. ‘As soon as the war ended, they sailed up from Australia and swarmed over the place like vultures. By the time I got back here, all the good stuff had been loaded and taken, and I was left with this useless rubbish.’

Hickey plodded on ahead, shaking his head at every fresh piece of evidence of depravations to his estate. He had had an eventful war. When the fighting had reached the Western Solomons in 1942, he had climbed into the hills behind Gizo. From there he had reported on Japanese troop, ship and aircraft movements over a cumbersome three-hundred-pound teleradio, operated by storage batteries but capable of transmitting for a range of four hundred miles. He had been so good at his job that he had been smuggled out to Townsville in Queensland to monitor and correlate all the incoming coast-watchers’ reports from the Solomon Islands. After that he had joined the Australian army and served as an infantry officer in New Guinea. He had not returned to his plantation for two years, by which time it had been reduced to its dilapidated present condition. He had been affected so deeply that he had made no effort to return his grounds to their previous effective state. Kella had no idea how he had been scraping a living ever since.

‘Anyway, what did you want to know?’ Hickey asked, examining the shattered fuselage of a Japanese floatplane.

‘I want to know what really happened in the search for the crew of PT-109,’ said Kella. ‘You know better than anybody what went on.’

‘What are you asking me for? You were here at the time.’

‘Not in August,’ said Kella. ‘We were looking for a Japanese landing barge off Rendova for the first two weeks.’

‘Deacon and the rest of you ragged-arsed cutthroats always were a law unto yourselves,’ said Hickey. ‘We never had any idea where you were.’

‘We weren’t too sure ourselves half the time.’

‘You went ashore with the Marines at Segi, didn’t you? That was a bloodbath.’

‘My sense of self-preservation kicked in,’ said Kella. ‘By the time it was over, I was running faster than the bullets they were firing at me. What can you tell me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hickey doubtfully. He turned over the remains of a searchlight with his foot. ‘There’s the Official Secrets Act to consider,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I signed it.’

‘When the new Legislative Council meets for the first time, the elected members will have a great deal of power,’ said Kella. ‘Personally I think they should take up the matter of compensation to planters for war damage.’

‘Are you pulling my pisser?’ asked Hickey, hope flickering in his eyes.

‘I’m not promising anything, but I’ll talk about your plantation to some of the politicians I know,’ said Kella.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Hickey, trying not to display his elation. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ He started walking across the littered terrain again, a little faster this time. The endless hunks of abandoned metal before him made the landscape look like the aftermath of a battle between robots on some distant planet.

‘Kennedy’s disappearance caused a right shebang,’ he went
on. ‘Those PT boat captains were the elite, a bit like the Prussian cavalry. They were only young sprogs, but many of them were Harvard or Cornell graduates. That meant that their families had influence. And young Kennedy had more influence than most. I’ll say he did! His daddy was old Joe Kennedy, for God’s sake; one-time ambassador to England and as rich as Croesus. Mind you, he blotted his copybook a bit early on when he told Franklin D. that Britain had no chance of winning the war.’

‘So your orders were to find young Kennedy quickly?’

‘It was a case of panic stations. Only it wasn’t as easy as that. At the time, the Yanks had invaded New Georgia and were in the process of taking five thousand casualties. In the week that Kennedy went missing, the Yanks attacked and took Munda from the Japs. In response, the Japanese from Rabaul were bombing the coast-watchers on top of the volcano on Kolombangara and everything else they could see that moved in the Roviana Lagoon.’