One Blood (30 page)

‘Why would the FBI be interested?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘It was not so much the organization as its director, Mr J. Edgar Hoover. Apparently Mr Hoover likes to keep tabs on all influential Americans, in case he may use that information to his advantage one day.’

‘Herbert’s secret files,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘I’ve read about those.’

A number of the crabs had discovered fallen coconuts lying on the ground. They bowled them over with their pincers,
looking for cracks in the husks that would enable them to gain a purchase on the nuts and tear them open with their claws.

‘It’s in all the newspapers,’ went on Conchita. ‘Apparently he even has ones on Albert Einstein and Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt. That’s not very nice. I can’t think why he does it.’

‘Simple,’ said Buna. ‘It makes him a very powerful man. It is said that none of the last four American presidents has dared sack him because he knows where too many bodies are buried. The same might have applied to Mr Kennedy if Hoover’s agents had been able to prove that he showed cowardice in action.’

‘Which they couldn’t,’ said Kella. ‘So you’re saying they deliberately planted evidence in the shape of the
knap knaps
? Incidentally, how do you know all this?’

‘The construction of the US government organization is not unlike like that of the feuding headhunting tribes of the nineteenth-century Solomon Islands,’ said Buna. ‘It is a matter of constantly shifting alliances and antagonisms. The FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the State Department and a dozen other agencies all live in a constant state of armed neutrality. As I understand it, I am employed by the State Department. This institution keeps a wary eye on the others. It heard that Mr Hoover was sending a small team to investigate John F. Kennedy just before the presidential election, and asked me to keep an eye on it when it arrived, and report back to my paymasters.’

Conchita noticed that already the crabs had denuded the ground and were lumbering back contentedly to their holes. They were confident in the knowledge that they had no natural predators on the islands and that at Marakosi Mission not even the humans bothered to hunt them. That’s the problem, she thought, we haven’t been proactive enough.

‘So you knew all about Imison’s schemes,’ said Sister Conchita.

Welchman Buna shook his head. ‘I had been briefed. I knew they were gathering information on Mr Kennedy, hoping to file it in case it came in useful for the FBI one day. I knew nothing about the
knap knap
scheme. You discovered that, Sister Conchita. The credit belongs to you. When Mary Gui arrived in Gizo yesterday and told the authorities about the murder of Dontate, it was plain that Imison and the other two would have to act quickly before leaving the Protectorate. While the District Commissioner waited for help from Honiara, I paddled a small canoe to Olasana and came ashore farther along the coast. I was alerted by the sound of rifles being fired and made my way to the hut in the dark. The rest you know.’

‘Thank goodness you did!’ said Sister Conchita.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Kella. ‘But where does Ed Blamire, the tourist who was murdered, come into this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Buna. ‘Perhaps my employers do, but they have not shared that information with me.’

‘Then why did Imison and the other Americans kill Mr Blamire at the mission on open day?’ asked Sister Conchita.

Welchman Buna looked surprised. ‘They didn’t,’ he said. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘The Americans certainly did not harm Mr Blamire,’ said Buna. ‘Acting on my instructions, I was watching Imison and the other FBI agents all the time that afternoon at the mission open day. None of them went anywhere near the church. You can take my word for it: they did not kill Ed Blamire!’

• • •

‘
AND I THOUGHT
we had solved the murder,’ sighed Sister Conchita unhappily.

An hour had passed. Welchman Buna had gone to his bed in the guest quarters of the mission, expressing profusely his courteous and pained regrets at having ruined their theories
about the murder of Ed Blamire. Sister Conchita had gone to the kitchen to prepare sweet potatoes for the next day’s main meal. Kella had followed and was helping her.

‘It looks as if we’re back to the beginning,’ he said.

‘Almost everybody in the district seems to have been at the open day,’ Conchita said. ‘Most of them had the opportunity to kill poor Mr Blamire.’

‘He knew somebody was after him,’ said Kella. ‘You saw him waiting in the church and sensed that he was worried about something … He couldn’t get off the island and was trapped there. He was expecting someone to kill him. He knew that he had antagonized someone dangerous.’

‘And he had claimed sanctuary in the mission church,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘That’s what grates on me.’

‘It would almost be easier,’ said Kella, pursuing his line of thought, ‘to work out who
wasn’t
at the mission that afternoon.’

The door opened and Sister Jean Francoise came in. She was carrying several tuna fish wrapped in banana leaves.

‘I bought these from some fishermen who put in at the reef,’ she said. ‘I’ll store them in the fridge and we can eat them tomorrow.’

‘They look good,’ said Sister Conchita.

‘At least they’ll be better than the ones that poor boy ate,’ said Sister Jean Francoise, opening the door of the generator-powered refrigerator and depositing the tuna inside. She closed the door. ‘It’s a wonder he wasn’t poisoned.’

‘What boy?’ asked Conchita. She wondered where Sister Jean Francoise’s wandering mind had taken her on this occasion.

‘You know, the nice one you brought to the clinic a few days ago,’ said Sister Jean Francoise, dusting her hands on the front of her habit. ‘What do you call them—VSOs.’

‘Do you mean Andy Russell?’ asked Conchita. ‘What does he have to do with eating fish?’

‘That’s why you brought him to the hospital, wasn’t it?’ asked Sister Jean Francoise. ‘He’d made himself ill eating some dreamfish. I know the signs. I thought you realized.’

‘The
gnarli
fish?’ asked Kella, suddenly alert. ‘The boy had made himself ill by eating
gnarli
? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Sister Jean Francoise. ‘I can recognize the symptoms of eating dreamfish when I see them. It was very naughty of the boy. I suppose some of the islanders told him about it. They picked the habit up from Japanese soldiers during the war, of course. Good night.’

‘What were you both talking about?’ asked Conchita after the other nun had left the kitchen. ‘And what does it have to do with Andy Russell?’

‘Let me try to get this straight,’ said Kella. ‘You didn’t know that Russell was suffering from food poisoning when you brought him to the mission from Kasolo?’

‘Why, no, I thought he’d been out in the sun for too long, left alone on the island like that. What is this dreamfish Sister Jean Francoise was talking about?’

‘The
gnarli
is a small fish with a stripe running along the side of its body. It’s not eaten in the Solomons because it doesn’t taste very nice. But if it’s cooked the right way, it causes hallucinations in the person eating it. The Japanese stationed in the West used to catch them for just that purpose. It was their equivalent of taking drugs, sitting around a campfire.’

‘Then Sister Jean Francoise was right. Andy was very naughty to experiment with such things, especially when he was all alone on the island,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘Perhaps it was all a mistake. He was hungry and might not have known the effects the dreamfish would have on him.’

‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Kella. ‘You’ve got to cook and eat just the right amount of the
gnarli
to induce hallucinations. If you have too much, then you go into a coma that can last up to thirty-six hours.’

‘The poor boy,’ said Sister Conchita vaguely. ‘On top of everything else on that wretched island, he suffered from food poisoning as well.’

‘Unless,’ said Kella, ‘he did it on purpose.’

‘Surely not?’ said Sister Conchita. ‘Why on earth would he want to do that?’

‘To provide himself with an alibi,’ said Kella. He warmed to his proposition. ‘We’ve been discarding Andy as a suspect in the attacks on the logging camp because he was in a coma when you brought him to the hospital. Suppose it was a self-induced coma? He was on the island. He waited until the fishermen landed, then as a bonus you came by. He had already caught the dreamfish and recognized what they were, so he had cooked them in advance. Just before any visitors arrived, he ate them.’

Sister Conchita remembered the remnants of charred fish on the fire by the VSO’s tent on Kasolo the day she had found him lying gibbering in his sleeping bag.

‘When I arrived, he was incoherent,’ she said.

‘That would be the first hallucinatory effects of eating the fish,’ said Kella excitedly. ‘But Russell had deliberately eaten too much. As you and the fishermen loaded him into the mission canoe, he went into the second stage—a deep coma. You assumed that he had been drifting in and out of unconsciousness for days and therefore couldn’t have left Kasolo, so he wasn’t a suspect in any wrongdoing. In reality, there had been nothing wrong with him until a few minutes before you arrived on the island.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Sister Conchita.

Kella frowned. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘How could he have got off the island? He was stranded there.’

Sister Conchita concentrated. Half-formed images of her two visits to Kasolo began to run jerkily though her mind, like an old and flickering film being exposed in slow motion.

‘Not necessarily,’ she said, racking her brain. ‘There were things that I noticed and stored but didn’t think about at the time.’

‘What sort of things?’ asked Kella.

‘The first time I visited the island, I followed the fishermen along a track to a clearing where Andy was lying.’

‘What did you notice?’ asked Kella, who had reason to have considerable faith in the nun’s powers of observation and retention.

‘The first time I was there, I noticed that the grass along one side of the track had recently been crushed flat by a heavy object about six feet long and half as wide.’

‘Like a canoe?’ asked Kella.

‘Exactly. Yet when I returned to Kasolo a few days later, and met Imison and Dontate, all the grass had sprung up again and there was no sign of any indentation.’

‘And your inference from this?’ prompted Kella.

‘That the grass sprang back into place quickly once any object placed on top of it was removed. Almost certainly the impression I saw on the grass earlier had been caused by a canoe only recently, although Andy claimed to have been stranded alone on the island with no form of transport for almost a month.’

‘It sounds as if young Mr Russell has been telling lies,’ said Kella.

‘There’s something else,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘When I first saw Andy on Kasolo, he was at the hallucinatory stage after eating the dreamfish. He was rambling. He said something in pidgin.’

‘What?’

‘He said
painim aut
. What does that mean?’

‘It means “to find out”,’ said the sergeant slowly. His eyes locked with Sister Conchita’s.

‘Somebody had discovered him and his canoe on the island,
when he was supposed to be stranded there without transport,’ said the nun.

‘Ed Blamire?’ suggested Kella. ‘He borrowed a canoe and left Munda to look at the islands where Kennedy and his crew had hidden. Andy Russell knew that Blamire could break his alibi.’

‘What are we going to do about it?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘I think the best thing would be to have a chat with the lad,’ said Sergeant Kella.

‘
WE’VE GOT TO
find Andy Russell and Mary Gui,’ said Kella. ‘Andy no longer has an alibi to prove that he wasn’t at the mission open day, and I don’t think Mary has told us everything she knows.’

‘You find Andy while I look for Mary,’ said Sister Conchita.

‘Why that way round?’ asked Kella.

‘Because I don’t think you would be totally impartial if you were to question Mary,’ said Sister Conchita bravely. Oops, she could have put that better, she thought as she saw the sheepish expression on the sergeant’s face. She determined to stick to her guns. Knowing Kella, as she was beginning to, there was likely to be some sort of history between him and the attractive rest-house proprietor. She was aware of the sergeant’s reputation for fully appreciating the young women he met in the course of his official duties, and this particular Western girl was not only intelligent and sophisticated, but also very beautiful and spirited.

‘You don’t like Mary, do you?’ asked the sergeant unexpectedly.

‘She is one of God’s creatures and as such is to be cherished,’ replied the nun. Kella’s sceptical gaze did not leave her face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I believe Miss Gui has an eye to the main chance and that her ambition exceeds her regard for her fellow men and women. There, I’ve said it, and I’m not sorry!’

‘Hmm!’ said Kella drily. ‘Obviously I’ve seen another side of Miss Gui. However, speaking as a policeman, I have to admit that you’re right. Mary knows where she’s going, even if she’s not sure who’s going with her. Go ahead, see if you can find her.’

They were standing on the wharf at Gizo in the early-morning sunshine. They had dragged the mission canoe up on to the beach. It lay a few yards away from them, tilted on its side. Inland, the district centre looked as somnolent and neglected as usual. Those few islanders and expatriates who were already around were moving slowly and without any great sense of purpose. Kella nodded to the nun and started walking along the wharf, past the moored vessels.

Sister Conchita was both shrewd and observant, he thought. She had certainly summed Mary up dispassionately. If he had not been so attracted to Mary, he wondered if he would even have liked her. Yes, he would, he told himself. That evening in the Mendana Hotel she had showed herself to be both brave and difficult to subdue, even by a gaggle of middle-class expatriate women. There was a lot to Mary Gui, and he was not thinking exclusively of her undeniable physical assets.