Solomons Seal (42 page)

The barman laughed, coming towards us and leaning his elbows on the counter again. ‘Same old story, is it? Can't get that bloody mine out of his head. Talks of going there, but never has. Lazy bastard.' He looked across at Lewis, smiling and tapping his forehead. ‘Yu longlong. That's Pidgin for crazy. Reck'n it was the war.' And without my asking he got another can of beer out of the fridge.

‘You mean he was wounded in the war?' I asked him.

‘That's right. Something I reck'n he didn't bargain for since he was in the Pioneer Corps. Got sent to Bougainville, an' the Black Dogs put a bullet through his neck. Got it through there, din't you, mate?' And he pointed a dirty finger at the old man's neck. ‘Well, never mind. Drink that.' And he put the can down in front of him.

Lewis filled his glass and drank half of it in a single swallow. Then, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he began telling me how he had found Black Holland working on a sugar plantation near the coast. His voice was already a little slurred, and it was difficult to follow, but I thought what he was saying was that this was the man who had shot him during the war. There was an argument over his father and who owned the Dog Weary mine, and Black Holland had suddenly drawn a knife. Then, quite clearly, he said there had been a fight, and in the struggle he had seized the knife and ripped the man's belly open with it.

‘When did this happen?' I asked.

It was the barman who answered. ‘A long time back. In 1952, and this murdering old bastard gets away with manslaughter.' The barman's face cracked in a grin that showed sharp brown-stained teeth. ‘The way he tells it you'd think the other fella started it. But I've heard it said it wasn't like that at all, and the old-timers here, they say it was pay-back, that after the war he went looking for Holland. That's right, ennit?' And he glanced along the counter to the old men drinking and listening, and they all nodded.

‘Because he was wounded in Kieta?' I asked.

‘No. Because of the mine and what happened to his father.'

It seemed incredible that this shrunken, wizened little black man should have gone looking for the man and killed him because of what happened out there on the edge of the Simpson so many years ago. ‘What happened to your father?' I asked him. ‘He's dead, isn't he? When did he die?'

The old man stared at me, and when I repeated the question, he buried his face in his beer and didn't answer.

‘Always the same,' the barman said. ‘Tells his story the way he wants, but start slinging a few questions at him and he shuts up.'

‘In July 1911,' I told him, ‘your father was in Sydney and signed on as a stoker on the
Holland Trader.
That's right, isn't it?' The old man nodded almost imperceptibly, but when I asked him what had happened to the
Holland Trader
, he just stood there
staring at me out of eyes that had suddenly become frightened, his black face puckered and worried. He knew I wasn't a tourist, and when I asked him about the letter his mother had received, at almost the very moment the
Holland Trader
had disappeared, he seemed to confuse it with the envelope, those blue eyes of his darting this way and that as he said, ‘Bilong me. Yu speak Father Matthew. He get stamp money and take forty dollar for the Mission.'

I tried again, explaining that I knew about the stamps and the money he had been paid, but what I wanted was the letter that had been inside the envelope. But all he said was, ‘Yu polis?' And he gulped down the rest of his beer like a man about to flee.

‘I told you,' the barman said with a grin. ‘Start asking him questions and he clams up.'

But I got it out of him in the end. I took him by the arm and more or less frog-marched him to a table; then I bought him another beer, sat him down opposite me and began talking to him, asking him the same questions over and over again. I wasn't police, but he must have thought I was giving a pretty good imitation. How did he know it was Red Holland who had been his father's partner? Had his mother told him, or was it in the letter? But hadn't she shown him the letter?

It was a silly question. He'd had to go to Father Matthew to have the letter about the stamps written, so it was obvious he couldn't read or write. ‘Were there any other letters from your father?'

He shook his head. ‘No. No more letters.'

‘So why did you kill Black Holland? He wasn't your father's partner. He had nothing to do with it. Why did you kill him?'

‘Him say things against my papa.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Bad things.'

‘Accusations, lies, taunts – what? What sort of things?'

Those sapphire blue eyes were wide and staring. He was drunk now. He didn't care, and suddenly it all came out, the whole terrible story. It was pay-back and the avenger blown to pieces, obliterated, sunk by his own weapon of vengeance. And he hadn't got it from a letter or from his mother. He had got it direct from the drunken mouthings of Red Holland's illegitimate half-caste island son, the man who had become notorious during the war as one of the chief leaders of the Black Dogs of Kieta.

The way he told it I found great difficulty in piecing it together into a coherent story, but the first thing to emerge clearly confirmed that Carlos Holland and Red Holland were the same person. It was Carlos Holland who had left his partner to die on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It was Carlos who had formed a mining company and developed the Dog Weary mine, and with the money from that he had founded the Holland Line of schooners and made himself the uncrowned king of the islands around the Buka Passage. And in Sydney, in July 1911, the past had caught up with him, his one-time partner shipping as
stoker on his newly acquired vessel. Lewis was an experienced miner. He had time fuses and explosives concealed in his personal belongings, and with these he had mined the ship.

But it hadn't been his intention to blow it up. It was merely a threat, his son assured me, the means by which he hoped to force Carlos Holland to give him the compensation he had so far refused. Instead, Carlos Holland had drugged him and had him carried on board the
Holland Trader
as a drunk. He had put him in his own bunk, where he had smothered him with a pillow. He had then gone ashore again – ‘Him spik Kepten big bisnis in Port Moresby. After, ship sail and finish downbilow sea when bombs explode. All men die.'

When he said that, I knew it was true. It explained something that had been worrying me since Mac had described Colonel Holland's reaction to that letter we had found in the safe. If Carlos and Red Holland were one and the same person, Colonel Holland would have known it at once. After all, Carlos was his younger brother. He might pass himself off to the islanders as a distant cousin who bore a close family resemblance and who had inherited the Holland Line, but he couldn't possibly have fooled his brother, Lawrence. Presumably he had been able to produce some specious and very convincing reason for his behaviour – debts, for instance, something as impersonal as financial difficulties that would explain his leaving the
Holland Trader
at Port Moresby and assuming another identity. Colonel Holland may have had his suspicions, but
if he had, doubtless he had put them aside, making allowances for his brother and giving him the benefit of the doubt. But that night, when he had raided Madehas and opened the safe, reading the letter that had begun
Dear Red
and discovering for the first time that Carlos's wealth was built on the abandonment of his partner to a slow death, that he had lied and lied again, that he was a pitiless monster, that sudden opening of his eyes to what his brother was capable of doing had come as a great and appalling shock – shattering, Mac had called it. Not only had Carlos Holland killed Merlyn Lewis, his one-time partner, but he had sent the Captain and his entire crew to their deaths, and he had done it without pity, without a thought for their families. This was what his son, Hans, had had to live with ever since he opened the safe and found that letter, those sheets of stamps. Ever since then he had known his father was a pitiless murderer. And he had known, too, that the money he had inherited, the basis of his little fleet of RPLs, was blood money, stemming from those murderous actions.

It was then that an idea came to me – if I could show in a court of law that Hans Holland's assets were based on money his father had obtained from the sinking of the
Holland Trader
, then the insurance company, not the PNG government, would have the prior claim. At least it might delay things until after the stamps had been sold. Even if I could raise a loan, interest rates were high, and an extra £2,000 or £3,000 would make all the difference to our ability to keep the ship operational.

I wrote out a statement for Lewis to sign right there in the hotel, then took him along to a solicitor and had it typed, signed and witnessed as a statutory declaration. I think he was so frightened and confused that he barely knew what he was doing.

Next day, in Sydney, I checked with the newspaper offices, but to turn up any story they might have run on the amount of the insurance paid out on the
Holland Trader
meant searching page by page through the file copies for the last months of 1911 and probably most of 1912 as well. They suggested I contact Lloyd's agents. This I did, and within the hour they phoned me back to confirm that the
Holland Trader
had been insured with a Lloyd's syndicate. The claim was for £8,900, and it had been met in full. Payment, however, had been delayed owing to the owner having been on board and the need to wait for his will to be proved. Settlement had finally been made on January 4, 1913. And they added that, since the ship was a total loss, the
Lutine
Bell had been rung for her.

I got the name of the Lloyd's syndicate from them and turned the whole thing over to the solicitors who were looking after the Munnobungle sale for me. The information was sufficient for them to get an injunction in the High Court in Port Moresby restraining the government from impounding any of Hans Holland's assets pending proof of ownership. That was on August 18, and two days later the LCT was loading copra off a beach in the north of Bougainville for delivery to Rabaul. She sailed with Mac as Master and Perenna on board to keep an eye on him.

It was, in fact, most fortunate that we were successful in freeing the vessel without immediate payment, for I had by then discovered that it was impossible for us as foreigners to obtain a loan in Australia. A few days later I had another piece of luck – quite by accident I was able to arrange a cargo for the ship at Rabaul, a consignment of road-building equipment urgently needed in Guadalcanal. If I hadn't been invited to the City Club sauna, I wouldn't have heard about that cargo, and it occurred to me then that Sydney was probably the key to the successful operation of an LCT in the South West Pacific. I rented a room in Strathfield, between the Parramatta Road and the Hume Highway, installed a telephone and within a week I was in business, booking cargoes forward.

Booking them was one thing; however, getting paid for them quite another, and it didn't take me long to realise we had a cash flow problem. Fuel bills and running costs had to be met, and by the end of September the ship was in Lae and unable to proceed to Madang for her next cargo because of an unpaid fuel bill. By reducing the freight charge, I was able to get payment in advance, but with legal charges to meet and the bank insisting we clear our overdraft, there was only one thing to do if the Holland Line was to survive. That was to return to England and sell everything we had. For Perenna it meant the wood carvings as well as the stamps, also a few other mementoes she had kept out of the Aldeburgh sale; for me it was my boat, my car, my own collection of stamps and the
Solomons Seal sheet I had taken from the safe at Madehas.

I had already been notified that Josh Keegan's big autumn stamp auction was fixed for the two days commencing October 24, and when I phoned him to say I now had a full sheet of sixty of the Solomons Seal ship labels, he said he would decide whether to include them in the auction when he had seen them; he advised me to bring them in my hand luggage, packed flat and in cellophane, and to take great care of them. He had sounded sufficiently interested for me to think we might just scrape together enough to give us the working capital we needed.

Perenna arrived in Sydney on October 20, the day before we were due to fly to England. Those few hours we had together should have been a carefree, happy interlude. The LCT was at sea, Mac was still sober and I had booked sufficient cargoes to keep the vessel going for three months. Also, Perenna had at last got some good news about Tim. The nursing home had written to say that he was much improved, had quite suddenly thrown off his lethargy and was now getting about with the aid of a frame support. But though we did our best, a sense of happy abandon was difficult to achieve, our mood overshadowed all the time by the knowledge that we were both of us putting everything into pawn for the sake of a single aged and rusting ship. We discussed it endlessly. We couldn't help ourselves.

To my surprise we were met at Heathrow by Tubby Sawyer. I didn't need to ask him why he was there.
Almost the first thing he asked me, after I had introduced him to Perenna and she had gone to phone the nursing home, was whether there were any more sheets of the Solomons Seal, and when I told him all the rest were burned, he said, ‘Marvellous! That's marvellous! You can tell me all about it as we drive down to the country. But first Josh wants to see you. He's made the sheet a separate lot and included it in the catalogue.'

Perenna came back radiant. ‘I spoke to him. He even came to the phone himself. He's so much better.' Tubby was leading us out to the car park. ‘I'm to ring up again this evening. They say I can see him tomorrow. And to think at one time I despaired of ever seeing him alive again!'