Devil-Devil (5 page)

6

LOFTY HERMAN

‘Kella wants a coffin,' said Inspector Lorrimer.

‘Surely not?' said Chief Superintendent Grice. ‘He can't be more than thirty. Years ahead of him yet. More's the pity.'

‘It's not for him,' said Lorrimer patiently. Grice sometimes overdid his bucolic act. ‘Apparently he's found a corpse on Malaita.'

‘So what else is new?' asked Grice dispiritedly.

The two men were in the chief superintendent's office on the second floor of the police headquarters building in Honiara. Lorrimer was standing at the window, looking down at the parade ground where a squad of recruits was being drilled noisily by an immaculate sergeant in a white
lap-lap
. On the other side of Mendana Avenue, which ran through the centre of the capital, were the white walls of the Guadalcanal Club, with its verandah running down to the beach behind and the slow, white-topped breakers of the deep-blue sea.

‘Why a coffin?' burst out Grice petulantly. ‘Doesn't Kella usually bury the people he kills in a hole in the ground and hope we don't hear about it?'

‘We've never been able to prove that he's killed anyone,' Lorrimer pointed out reasonably. It was a wonder they ever caught any criminals at all, he thought. There were only three hundred officers and men in a police force responsible for the hundreds of tropical islands extending across the Coral Sea for almost a thousand miles in the chain lying north-east of Australia.

‘Only because he's a little tin god on Malaita. What native is ever going to give evidence against a ju-ju man, for God's sake?'

‘He's an
aofia
,' Lorrimer corrected his senior officer. He had researched the subject while preparing the papers for Kella's court of inquiry the previous year. ‘It's a position peculiar to the Lau region of Malaita. Every few decades, a man of the line of chieftains appears who is of such probity and strength of character that he is appointed while he is still a child to maintain peace among all the people of the Lau region. It's a heavy responsibility. He's a sort of paramount chieftain.'

‘He's supposed to be a bloody policeman,' pointed out Grice violently.

‘Kella thinks he can be both.'

‘How the hell can Ben Kella be a peacemaker? He's as wild as an alley-cat sometimes.'

‘He doesn't have to be a pacifist to be an
aofia.
The reverse, sometimes. I agree it's not an easy concept to grasp.'

The two policemen were silent in a rare moment of concord. The atmosphere between them was usually one of armed neutrality. Grice was a permanent and pensionable officer, a member of what in its pomp had once been the Colonial Police Force, now better known locally as the African Retreads. Lorrimer was on a temporary secondment from the Metropolitan Police in London.

‘Kella could have had it all, you know,' Grice complained, almost sadly. ‘He's a Malaita man, so all the other islanders are scared shitless of him. He was the first native graduate to join the police force. He's been on half a dozen attachments to forces all over the world. If he would just keep his head down he could be the first Melanesian Commissioner of Police, when independence comes. But what does he want?'

‘Kella's his own man,' said Lorrimer.

‘He wants to be a bush policeman, that's what,' said Grice, ignoring his subordinate. ‘Spends half his time poking around the jungle. And look at the trouble that got him into.'

‘He got an official reprimand for it,' Lorrimer pointed out.

‘Bit of a mate of yours, isn't he?' sniffed the chief superintendent.

‘Kella's an interesting man,' said Lorrimer non-committally. ‘Honest, too. He could have lied his way out of trouble after that missionary was killed last year.'

And he knows the islands, he thought. He wished that Kella was back in Honiara. The case presently occupying Lorrimer concerned two feuding neighbouring villages on Choiseul in the Western District. The occupants of one village were Methodists and the other comprised Seventh Day Adventists. The dispute had originated over a garden plot situated between the villages and claimed by both. Trouble had escalated to such an extent that the Methodists were waiting until Saturday, the Adventist day of church worship, and then pillaging the SDA gardens. For their part, the Adventists were retaliating by raiding the Methodist gardens on Sundays while their owners were at church. Kella would know how to deal with such a situation.

‘If you'll take a word of advice,' said Grice portentously, ‘you won't get too close to the natives, Lorrimer. I've never forgiven Kella for the way he let me down over the rugby.'

‘Rugby?' asked Lorrimer. He was not interested in sport.

‘Best wing forward the Solomons team ever had.' Grice had the rapt look of a man who invested as much enthusiasm in rugby football as other men did in sin.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time the Solomons played Fiji?' he asked. He paid no attention to the other man's indifferent nod. ‘Never seen anything like it. Everyone thought that the Fijians would put sixty points past us. We had the usual rag-bag of a side. Half a dozen expats from the timber company, and then the usual mixture of odds and sods — Malaitans, Tikopians, a poofter British teacher from King George VI School, who was supposed to be captain.'

‘What happened?' asked Lorrimer, dutifully excavating his superior from the shallow grave of his reverie.

‘Kella was playing, that's what happened,' said Grice, looking almost happy for once. ‘Open-side wing forward. It was bloody marvellous. From the kick-off nobody paid any attention to the expat skipper. The whole team was looking to Kella for a lead. He didn't want it, anybody could see that, but the leadership was foisted upon him. They just knew he was their natural chief. We tonked 'em, 25–9. Kella led the team as if it was a war party. No prisoners. Then he let us all down.'

‘How did he do that?'

‘With him in the team we could have won the South Pacific Cup that season. What does he do? I'll tell you. He goes off to Australia on a degree course, and while he's there he plays professional Rugby League, which meant he couldn't play Union again when he came back.'

‘Needed the money, I suppose.'

‘Don't you believe it. His family owns a copra plantation and I don't know what else on Malaita. No, he played League just to stick two fingers up at me.'

Grice sat simmering, the memories of a dozen similar betrayals of colonial benevolent paternalism in almost as many former colonial territories seething in his time-expired brain.

‘About Kella's corpse,' Lorrimer reminded the chief superintendent.

‘Forget it. It'll just be another inter-tribal feud.'

‘That's the point, sir. The corpse found by Kella is that of a murdered white man.'

Chief Superintendent Grice looked at the other officer beseechingly, mutely imploring him to retract the last sentence.

‘A white man?' he spluttered.

‘Kella believes that the body has been dead for some years. The skeleton is six and a half feet tall, much bigger than any islander.'

‘Six and a half feet?' said Grice. ‘I've never known an expatriate that tall, and I've served here for twelve years.'

‘I've looked it up in the files,' Lorrimer told him. ‘The only white man of that size known to have lived on Malaita was an Australian beachcomber called Lofty Herman. The drawback is that Herman disappeared eighteen years ago, back in 1942.'

The telephone rang. Not taking his eyes from the inspector's face Grice lifted the receiver and listened. His back stiffened. Without a word carefully he replaced the receiver, as if taking part in a laboratory experiment which required absolute precision.

‘That was the chief secretary,' he told his companion. ‘You'd better get yourself over to Malaita straight away and fetch Kella back. Apparently the silly sod's in trouble again!'

7

WHITE MAN'S WAYS

‘How did you know that Sister Conchita was going to bury a skeleton last night?' asked Father Pierre. The old priest was looking frail and small, as if physically reduced by the news the police sergeant had brought him.

They were sitting in the living room of the mission house. It was eight o'clock in the morning. Kella had been waiting patiently for the other two when they returned from celebrating Mass. Outside, the normal routine of the mission was being observed. Bare-breasted women in grass skirts were making their way up the wooded slopes on three sides of the compound to work in their gardens in the clearings. Men in loincloths were sitting outside their huts, mending fishing nets.

‘It seemed likely that there was a dead body on the station,' Kella replied.

He told them about finding the bone under the pile of stones in the neighbouring village. He described how Pazabosi, the old magic man, had pointed a bonito fish impaled on a bone at him, to warn the policeman that he would anger the spirits if he pursued his inquiry. He explained how the trader Mendana Gau had confirmed his suspicions.

‘How do you associate bones with an unexpected death?' asked an unusually subdued Sister Conchita.

‘Local tradition,' said Father Pierre automatically. ‘If a magic man brings a bone curse to an area, it means that there has been a strange death which will trigger off evil events, unless the
tabu
is observed and people keep away from the place where the death occurred.'

The old man was silent for a moment and then addressed Kella. ‘Do you think there could be a connection between the death in the village and the bones
tabu
placed on the mission station?'

Kella shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I also found a piece of ginger sprinkled with lime among the stones. That means that a separate curse had been placed on Senda Iabuli, the villager who died. You wouldn't have a lime curse and a bones
tabu
placed on the same corpse.'

‘I agree,' said the priest, nodding. ‘The two deaths weren't part of the same curse.'

‘The only connection between the two is the schoolboy Peter Oro,' said Kella. ‘I think he had been searching the hut for signs of a curse, but it hadn't occurred to him to look outside among the comfort stones.'

‘All this talk of magic!' burst out a scandalized Sister Conchita. ‘Surely you can't believe it! This is a Christian area.'

‘Part-Christian,' Father Pierre corrected her. ‘Much of the interior of Malaita is still pagan.' He cast an apologetic glance at the impassive sergeant. ‘I'm sorry, Ben. I meant that many people still worship in the old ways there.'

Sister Conchita restrained herself with an obvious effort. ‘All right,' she said to Kella. ‘So you worked out that something connected with a body was going on here at the mission. You still haven't told me why you were waiting at the cemetery.'

‘Last night Mendana Gau, the storekeeper, told me that the bones
tabu
would soon be over. That sort of curse usually ends when a body is reinterred. Gau also hinted that one of the expatriates on the station was involved — business bilong whitefella. With all respect, Father Pierre is a bit beyond grave digging, so I assumed it would be you. Especially as you seemed a bit upset yesterday afternoon when I arrived at the mission.'

‘So much for my careful dissembling,' said Sister Conchita.

‘Perhaps, sister, it is time for you to tell us how you came to be involved in this odd affair,' said Father Pierre.

The nun nodded, marshalled her thoughts and started to speak, gaining in confidence as she went.

‘It started a couple of days ago,' she told her listeners. ‘I was teaching at the mission school. A woman ran down from the gardens to tell me that a skeleton had been found at the foot of the cliff. By the time I got there a crowd of islanders were trying to carry it away.'

‘Presumably to hide it somewhere before I heard about the incident,' nodded the priest.

‘I told them that you would have to be informed,' said Sister Conchita. She dropped her head. Her hands trembled in her lap.

‘Then what?' prompted Kella.

Slowly the nun raised her head. ‘I've never seen the mission people like it,' she said. ‘Normally they're so happy and pleasant, but now they'd found the skeleton they were in a dreadful state.'

‘Presumably an aspect of their past had come back to revisit them,' said the priest. ‘I'm sorry. Please go on.'

‘I didn't know what to do,' confessed Sister Conchita. ‘I know I should have come to you, but the people seemed convinced that the body had something to do with you, and that you would be badly affected if you heard about it. I didn't want to risk upsetting you, especially as you hadn't been well lately. So I, well, I kind of took it upon myself to bury him.'

She looked across the room at the thoughtful Kella. ‘You guessed right. I couldn't bring myself to put the skeleton in unconsecrated ground, so I brought him to the cemetery last night.'

There was a long silence. Father Pierre closed his eyes. Sister Conchita stared at the floor. ‘I had better see this skeleton,' the priest said, his voice tired.

‘There's no need,' said Kella. ‘I used your radio last night to contact Honiara, while you were asleep. They'll ship the bones back there for examination, but I believe it's Lofty Herman.'

A sound, which was half a groan and half a sigh, escaped from the priest. Sister Conchita rose to minister to him but the old man waved her away.

‘The man was very tall,' Kella told him. ‘No islander was ever that size and very few whites. It has to be Herman.'

‘And he's been secretly buried on the mission station with a bullet in his head for all that time?' asked the priest.

‘It looks like it.' Kella rose and glanced at his watch. ‘I'd like you to show me where you first found the skeleton,' he informed the nun. ‘Say in thirty minutes? I'll come back for you after I've spoken to one or two people.'

After Kella had left the room, Sister Conchita approached Father Pierre. ‘I'm sorry,' she said in a small voice. ‘I reckon I don't come out too high on obedience or humility.'

‘You did what you thought was right,' said the priest. ‘That's important.'

‘Sergeant Kella seems to be on the ball,' ventured the sister. ‘Maybe he'll get to the bottom of things.'

‘That's what I'm afraid of,' said Father Pierre. He saw the surprise on her face. ‘Don't misunderstand me. If there's anything untoward going on at the station I want it investigated, and Ben Kella's the only man who could do it. But I'm afraid of the effect it might have on him if he gets dragged too far back into the past.'

‘He looks tough enough.'

‘None tougher.' The priest was making one of his increasingly frequent forays back into the past. ‘Ben was twelve when he first came to the mission school. We had a very aggressive bunch of Roviana lads ruling the roost here then. They picked on Kella as a Malaitan boy, from the start. At the end of his first week here six of them beat him up and left him unconscious in a ditch.'

‘What did he do?'

The priest smiled. ‘He picked them off, one by one,' he told her. ‘Stalked the mission like an avenging angel, or as he would probably have put it, a devil-devil. He caught the first alone in the bush, the second out on a reef, and so on. Waited for each one on a different night and then half-killed him.'

‘And you let this happen, father?' asked a shocked Sister Conchita.

‘Kella was different,' said the priest. ‘That was apparent from the beginning. I could see that he was working out his destiny. He came here to learn the white man's ways, but he had to develop the warrior bit, too. He's a Sulufou man. The Malaitans are the hardest men in the Solomons, and the ones from Sulufou are the pick of the bunch. They don't only build their own houses, they construct whole islands, stone by stone, out in the lagoon, when they're not fighting the bush people inland, or taking their canoes hundreds of miles out to sea. Once he had defeated the Roviana boys Ben could devote himself to his studies.'

‘I take it he was good at those, too?'

‘Oh yes. Brilliant. It was soon obvious that he was a man for the future. Unfortunately, we almost destroyed him in the process.'

‘How did that happen?' asked Sister Conchita.

Father Pierre looked unhappy. ‘By the time Kella came here he had already been picked out by the Lau people as their
aofia
, the hereditary bringer of justice to the island. The custom priests had trained him in their traditional ways. Then we tried to turn him into a good Catholic. It was too much of a burden for a young boy, expecting him to cope with two different faiths and philosophies. For a time he ended up pretty cynical about them both. That didn't stop him passing out at the top of his year at the secondary school and going on to university overseas. Then he came back and surprised everyone by joining the police force.'

‘Why did he do that?'

‘I think he wanted to be sent back over here to Malaita to sort things out. We're in a transitional state at the moment. One day the British will leave. What will happen when independence comes? On this one island alone we have thirteen different clans, each speaking its own language. It's a powder keg. Kella's trying to calm things down. As a policeman he can get out among the people and do his
aofia
peacekeeping. I thought he was getting things under control, until . . .'

‘Until what, father?'

‘Oh, he had some trouble six months ago,' said the old priest vaguely. ‘It set him back a little. I hope he's all right now. That boy is a lot more sensitive than he lets on. The last thing he needs now is to get mixed up in another controversy, especially if it's a custom murder.'