Devil-Devil (14 page)

‘Something wrong?' asked Kella. ‘Deacon can be on the sharp side with strangers.'

‘Everything's fine,' said Sister Conchita, not meeting his gaze. ‘You'll have to hurry if you want to see him. He told me that he was filling up with supplies and catching the night tide back to Lau tomorrow.'

‘Yes, Honiara will be a bit too respectable for John these days,' joked Kella. ‘Well, as long as you're all right . . .'

He turned and walked back through the building. Sister Conchita followed him. He had reached the front door when the sister called his name. He turned back. She was standing very straight, her fists clenched at her sides.

‘Why have you come here, Sergeant Kella?' she demanded, fighting back tears. ‘Was it to gloat?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' protested Kella.

‘If you had any animosity towards the mission because of your own schooldays there, you've certainly got your revenge now. In pidgin, they call it payback, don't they?'

‘I don't understand—'

‘Of course you understand!' blazed the sister. ‘You're a policeman. You know what's going on. They're bringing Father Pierre back to Honiara. They think he had something to do with the murder of Lofty Herman!'

19

CHINATOWN

Kella sat at his office desk ploughing through the paperwork that had been occupying him for most of the day. He opened the file on the sixth case submitted for his opinion. There was a dispute on Santa Isabel among the Bugotu people. A young man wanted to marry a girl within the same clan. This had been forbidden with horror by the girl's father, a strong follower of custom, which forbade marriages within the same tribe, as it led to poor stock. The youth had persisted in his attentions and had subsequently been beaten up by the girl's brothers. The case had come to the attention of a touring District Officer, who had reported the matter and optimistically requested a police investigation.

Kella sighed and on the paper before him scrawled the hieroglyphic indicating no official action to be taken. The battered youth would never give evidence against his putative in-laws. If he had any sense he would get his beloved pregnant as soon as possible and then offer a lavish retrospective bride price to her family. Before the war such an action would have resulted in both the youth and the besmirched girl being stoned to death, but even the most traditional of clan leaders were getting ever more philosophical about such transgressions, except on Malaita, where custom still ruled.

Kella closed the file and allowed his mind to return to Malaita and Father Pierre. He could hardly believe that the old priest was being brought into the capital for questioning about the murder of Lofty Herman. He had tried to find out more from the Catholic headquarters, but his telephone calls had met with obdurate stonewalling evasions. Both Chief Superintendent Grice and Inspector Lorrimer had been out for most of the day. No one else in the headquarters building seemed to know anything about the affair, or if they did they were not going to reveal anything to Kella.

He thought about the day that he had gone into the priest's study at the mission school. This had been in 1941, immediately before he was due to leave for his secondary education in Fiji. He had been twelve or thirteen, but already quite sure in his mind that the white man's religion was not for him. He had done his best to assimilate its tenets, but already he was sure that he would have to follow the custom way for the rest of his life. Father Pierre had heard him out in silence. To his surprise the priest had not been angry.

‘You must do what you think is right, Ben,' he had told the boy. ‘You have been brought up in the custom way for a special purpose, and one day your people will need you. If you truly believe that tradition makes you stronger than the way we have tried to teach you here, then you must follow that path. But don't disregard everything you have learnt here. Some of it will serve you well one day.'

Years later Kella had heard that the priest's attitude had got him into trouble with the church authorities. He had been told that it was his duty to dissuade his star pupil and ensure that he remained within the Church. Father Pierre, as usual, had been unrepentant.

‘Ben Kella has been shown his path,' he insisted. ‘Now he will follow it. It won't be easy for him. He is finding his way in two worlds. In the end that will make him strong and independent, but inevitably it will mean that he will suffer the occasional dark night of the soul. When he does, he will continue to need our help.'

Kella heard a vehicle pull up in the car park below. He walked over to the open window. Chief Superintendent Grice was getting out of his Volvo. Kella hurried to the door. He was waiting in the corridor outside the chief superintendent's office by the time Grice had stumbled up the stairs. The Englishman's eyes were glassy and he was moving with great care. When Kella walked forward to meet him he could smell the whisky on the senior police officer's breath. Grice must have been lunching at the Yacht Club again.

‘Could I have a word with you about Father Pierre, sir?' Kella asked humbly.

Grice looked amiably perplexed. ‘Pierre?' he asked with clipped enunciation, giving the consonant a final polish before allowing it to emerge pristine and clear. He frowned. ‘Oh, the old priest! No need to bother, Kella. I'm dealing with that particular matter myself. Tricky situation, you see. Calls for tact and diplomacy.' Grice tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. ‘Political.'

Kella followed the chief superintendent uninvited into his office. ‘Perhaps I could help,' he persisted hopefully. ‘I know Father Pierre rather well.'

The official looked enraged by Kella's unexpected invasion of his territory. His air of bonhomie vanished as he swung violently into one of his mood changes. Suddenly his eyes were slitted with fury.

‘Help?' he choked. ‘I've had enough of your bloody help, thank you, Sergeant Kella. What you need to do is bugger off until we've sorted out your mess for you. Take some leave, or something. Just keep away from that priest! That's an order!'

Kella left the office without speaking. Grice slammed the door shut after him. As the sergeant walked dispiritedly along the corridor, Lorrimer came up the stairs. The inspector's uniform was dust-stained. He had left for Henderson Field, the small airport outside Honiara, that morning, to assist the Customs and Excise Department in a drugs operation connected with an incoming Heron aircraft on an Air Fiji flight from Nadi. He glanced briefly at the chief superintendent's door. It was still reverberating. Lorrimer raised an eyebrow at Kella.

‘I got the bum's rush,' explained the sergeant. ‘Don't ask! Never mind, I'm sure you can help me instead.'

‘Now why does my heart always sink when you say that?' asked Lorrimer without rancour.

In his office the inspector sank gratefully into the chair behind his desk. Kella sat on the chair opposite.

‘Have you had a chance to think about my Choiseul problem?' asked the inspector.

‘The garden raids? Leave it alone.'

‘But if I do it might lead to trouble.'

‘There will only be trouble if you interfere,' said Kella. ‘The Methodists and SDAs have been looting those gardens for years. The Methodists choose Saturdays because the SDAs are at church, and the SDAs attack on Sundays for the same reason. Each side knows they will never meet, so there will be no fighting. It's not much more than a game. It's not as if there's a lot to do on Choiseul.'

‘Okay,' nodded Lorrimer. ‘You know best.'

‘Any luck with the smuggling?' asked Kella.

Lorrimer shook his head. ‘Not a scrap,' he replied. ‘The plane was clean. It seemed a good tip-off from the Fijian police, too.'

‘I expect the smugglers offloaded the drugs at the stopover at Santo in the New Hebrides,' Kella told him. ‘Then they would have put them on a ship and landed them anywhere along the Guadalcanal coast that they fancied.'

‘Thank you for sharing that inspiring thought with me,' sighed Lorrimer. ‘It fills me with a burning determination to continue the good fight, secure in the knowledge that the good guys are bound to win. So what can I do for you?'

‘You can tell me about Father Pierre,' Kella told him. ‘And don't pretend you know nothing about him. You hinted to me yesterday that Grice was investigating the case on his own. I just didn't believe that he would be stupid enough to try to implicate the priest.'

‘I'm completely in the dark, old son,' said Lorrimer.

‘Don't give me that, whitey. You're a paid-up member of the expats' cosy club. What do you really know?'

‘All I've heard', said Lorrimer, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender, ‘is that Chief Superintendent Grice received information from somewhere that Father Pierre could have been implicated in the killing of Herman in 1942.'

‘Where did he get the information from?' asked Kella.

‘I don't know,' said Lorrimer. ‘Perhaps the Catholics shopped him.'

‘Not a chance,' scoffed Kella. ‘The mission hierarchy may regard Father Pierre as a maverick, but they look after their own. The old boy is a living legend on Malaita.'

‘We'll have to question him when he arrives,' said Lorrimer.

‘Don't hold your breath,' Kella told him, rising and going to the door. ‘The old man will come in his own good time. He'll deliberately miss the first couple of boats bound for Honiara, then he'll get one going the long way round Malaita. You'll be lucky to see him in a month.'

‘Side bilong big man-ia,' said Lorrimer in an unconvincing attempt at pidgin as Kella left.

If Lorrimer was right, thought Kella, descending the stairs, and all they had on Father Pierre was a raft of unsubstantiated allegations, from an anonymous witness, it did not seem to justify bringing such an old man all the way from Malaita. There must be more to it than that. Unless Grice was getting it all wrong, as usual.

The day shift was just going off duty. There was considerable traffic in both directions on the stairs. Some of the passing indigenous officers stared at Kella. Ever since the news had spread that he had discovered Peter Oro's body in the same place that the missionary had been killed on Malaita, Kella knew that there had been gossip that he might even have been responsible for both deaths, perhaps as a matter of duty as the
aofia.

Few of the officers did more than nod awkwardly as he passed them. Some of them would be regarding him as inefficient. Others would attribute to him the much more dangerous trait of being unlucky.

Only Sergeant Ha'a stopped to talk to Kella, mainly because he needed the rest as he dragged his stubby, corpulent body up the stairs. He was from New Georgia in the Western Solomons. He was a rotund, cheerful extrovert, his glossy, jet-black features surmounted by a head of tight curls.

Ha'a was a skilful musician, adept on the guitar, and an efficient organizer. On his overseas police officers' course in Yorkshire, he had dragooned two Gold Coast inspectors and a sergeant from Northern Rhodesia into a money-making group he had called Curly Ha'a and his South Sea Island Hawaiians. They had raised a storm at working men's clubs all over the North of England, and had even appeared on television on
Opportunity Knocks.

‘Which way now, bigfella?' he asked, pumping for breath, with his hands on his knees.

‘Are you still on the student beat?' Kella asked, remembering something he had meant to find out.

Ha'a grimaced. ‘Too true! Bunch of over-educated, know-all bolshie gits. Want to swap jobs?'

‘Not on your life,' Kella assured him. There had been rumours of unrest among some of the older, politically conscious students at King George VI Secondary School out on the road to Henderson Field. For the last year Sergeant Ha'a had been deputed to keep an eye on all student activities among the islands. In the process he had built up an impressive if constantly shifting list of informants.

‘If I wanted to find out about a student from Father Pierre's school at Ruvabi, who would I need to see?' asked Kella.

‘Is this the boy who got murdered up in the killing ground?' asked Ha'a, who was much shrewder than he looked. ‘What's-his-name, Peter Oro? That was a bad business, bigfella. You must really be on whitey's shit-list, providing them with two corpses in six months.' He considered the question. ‘There wouldn't be much use asking his headmaster. Solomon Bulko's a good bloke, but bone idle. Anyway, you know that; he's a mate of yours.'

Ha'a screwed up his face in thought, then snapped his fingers. ‘As a matter of fact, there might be someone. Michael Rapasia only stopped teaching at Ruvabi last week.'

‘Rapasia?' asked Kella in surprise. ‘Is he still alive? He was teaching there when I was a student at Ruvabi. Guadalcanal man.'

‘That's right. Compulsorily retired by the mission authorities without a pension when he reached sixty. I saw him get off the plane at Henderson Field only a few days ago. I'm not saying that he's all that reliable, but he might be worth talking to. He's mightily pissed off with the mission for not letting him stay on. He might well be in the mood to dish some dirt.'

‘Where do I find him?'

‘He's on the loose. Spoiled. Got a drink problem. That's one of the reasons Father Pierre got rid of him. Rapasia's staying with different
wantoks
all over the place. Better be prepared to spend this evening looking round all the bars in Chinatown.'

‘It's a rough job,' said Kella, walking away, ‘but somebody's got to do it!'

It had gone five o'clock when Kella left the police headquarters building. Islanders were thronging along the pavements as he walked towards Matanikau Bridge at the western end of the town. The roads were crowded with the cars of the expatriates on their way home from the government buildings to their bungalows and duplexes on the ridges above the bay.

It took him a quarter of an hour to reach the bridge over the river running down to the sea. Once he had crossed it he had left the town behind him and was on the road leading out to the airport. On his right were the grey breeze-block dormitories of the Labour Lines, occupiedby islanders employed by the different government departments. To his left were the shore and the sea.

Twenty minutes later he reached the fishing village, a collection of huts under a clump of palm trees near the beach. These were the remains of a much larger pre-war community, still defying the ominous spread of the capital.

Kella was entitled to a room in the police barracks, but the prospect of living in the centre of the town was abhorrent to him. For some years he had rented a hut on the outskirts of the fishing village, on the understanding that he did not conduct his professional activities in the area and had nothing to do with any of the local women.

He entered his hut and strip-washed from the bucket of water he had drawn from the communal standpipe that morning. He changed into a shirt and a pair of slacks from a locked chest next to his sleeping mat. He opened a tin of corned beef and ate the contents with a wooden spoon, finishing with a Coke.