Killman (31 page)

A quarter of a mile down the road, the car turned off and bumped its way up a wooded track leading to the foothills of the central mountain range. The track narrowed to a trail and then petered out into a well-trodden patch of bare ground outside a sagging wooden hut overlooking Honiara and the sea through the trees. Kella recognized the construction as a cheap Chinese restaurant serving basic meals of curry, rice and beer on paydays to workers from the labour lines, impoverished Voluntary Service Overseas cadets and itinerant visiting seamen who could not afford to eat in the town. A covered Bedford truck was parked outside the hut.

The three men pushed Kella into the restaurant and stood over him until he had sat down on a hard chair against one wall. It was a square room containing a dozen wooden tables with a long bar running the length of one side. Through an open door behind the bar Kella could see the kitchen. The proprietor, an elderly Chinaman, and his wife were standing disconsolately amid the pots and pans. When they saw the sergeant, the old man winced and shuffled over and shut the door, shrugging his narrow shoulders helplessly.

The three young men sat on a bench against one undecorated wooden wall, regarding Kella balefully. A few silent minutes later the outer door opened and Wainoni the Gammon Man came in. He sat at a table facing Kella, safely out of the sergeant’s reach.

‘Why?’ Kella asked at once. ‘It was all going so well for you. Why did you have to carry me off like this? You’ve probably got a boat stashed away somewhere to take you to Papua New Guinea as soon as night falls. Nobody would find you there.’

‘I had no option,’ said the Gammon Man. He was breathless. ‘Dr Maddy sought me out at the airport to say goodbye. Her conscience was troubling her. She confessed that she had told Sister Conchita that it was I who had sent her to Tikopia. Well, I ask you! Wherever Sister Conchita is during the investigation of a crime, Sergeant Kella is not far away. I had to remove you before she informed you and you started putting two and two together and came looking for me.’ He glanced disparagingly at his spartan surroundings. ‘It called for some rapid improvisation, I can tell you. Still, you’ll be safe enough here. I’ve done similar business with old Mr Ho and his lads before.’

‘Not kidnapping a police officer,’ said Kella. ‘This is serious. It’s all over. You don’t stand a chance.’ He realized to his annoyance that he was beginning to quote from low-budget movies without even thinking about it.

‘I like to think that I’ve planned it pretty well so far,’ said Wainoni. ‘I don’t believe my gods will desert me at this late stage. I suppose you’re wondering what all this has been about.’

‘I know what it’s about,’ Kella said. ‘Most of it, anyway. You’ve been carrying out payback.’

‘Ah,’ said Wainoni. ‘Now how did you know that? Are you going to surprise me yet again, Sergeant Kella?’

‘Ebury told me, just a few minutes ago.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Wainoni. ‘I thought he was too much of a piss-artist to remember anything these days. I should have dealt with him, but he was good to me once and I owed him.’

‘I suspected you before that, but I had no proof,’ Kella said. ‘It’s not as if revenge is so uncommon in the Solomons. We can be a vindictive lot when we’re roused. And you covered your tracks well.’ He thought of the eagle bearing the released soul of the old woman over Savo. ‘In fact, yours is the second case of mistaken identity I’ve dealt with this month. The first one was meant to alert me, but I was slow. Your mother comes from the western islands. Forty years ago she became the mistress of an American researcher called James Cardigan. After you were born, he returned home without making any provision for you or your mother. Not unnaturally, your mother resented this. As you grew up, she constantly dinned into you the perfidy of your father in abandoning you without making restitution to either of you.’

‘It wasn’t so much to ask,’ said the Gammon Man. ‘Other wealthy expatriates who had their fun with local girls gave them money afterwards. It was custom.’

‘But Cardigan ignored any letters that you sent him. He was too busy establishing his own career back in the USA. So you grew up with this festering sense of grievance that the expats owed you big time.’

‘One of them brought me into the world.’

‘True enough,’ said Kella. He tried to recall the details in the papers stuffed into his hand by Ebury at the airfield earlier that afternoon. ‘What I don’t understand is why you made an official demand for restitution to the British authorities in Tulagi. With respect, that was an unusual step for an islander back in 1940.’

‘My mother took the matter to Mr Ebury, who was the district officer at the time. He helped us make out our complaint and submit it officially.’

That explained a great deal, Kella thought. Ebury must have been an interesting man before the drink took hold of him. He wished that he had known him better. The young, idealistic and in those days sober official must have felt impelled to take up the abandoned Wainoni’s case. It would not have stood much chance in an old colonial court of law, even if it had got that far. Ebury probably would have had his knuckles rapped even for forwarding such a document, let alone helping to prepare it. Probably he would have had a black mark entered on his record at the same time.

‘What happened?’ Kella asked.

‘This was the early 1940s, just before Japani attacked the Solomons. Most of the expats ran away and didn’t come back after the war. Tulagi was bombed and shelled and all the government records were destroyed. My appeal would have been among them.’

‘So you stopped looking for payback through official channels. What about Ebury? He stayed on. Couldn’t you have taken your case up with him again?’

‘He was spoiled by then,’ said Wainoni simply, using the pidgin word for a man ruined beyond redemption. ‘Too much whisky.’

‘So the poor sod was already out of the running, and there was nobody else to remember the case. How old were you by then?’

‘Maybe twenty-five,’ said Wainoni.

‘And you spent the next fifteen years planning your revenge. You married a Lau girl after the war and moved to the artificial islands. There was a lot of movement around then. As long as you kept your head down and didn’t cause trouble, no one would pay much attention, or bother where you came from.’ Kella thought of the old Tolo woman who had lived anonymously in the Lau fishing village for so long. ‘Ironically you made a good living by guiding some of the very people you hated, the visiting whiteys from colleges. And all the time you were plotting to get your own back. You could move anywhere you liked on Malaita and no one would be surprised. What made you decide to start this killman stuff this year?’

‘Time,’ said Wainoni. ‘By then my quarrel was with the white authorities who wouldn’t give me justice, not with my so-called father. We’ll be kicking them out before long. It was time I did what I could to stir up trouble for them on Malaita before they left. One final boot up the backside for all their indifference and indolence.’

‘So you started a one-man reign of terror on the island to get everyone agitated. You pretended to be the killman, used the Church of the Blessed Ark as your base and killed Papa Noah and two of his members, to terrify people and make them believe that a religious war was about to start. You caused a panic all over Malaita. You even dressed up as a Japanese soldier to destroy the ark and confuse people more. All this just to make the government worried.’

‘And drowning people where there was no water, don’t forget that.’

‘I’d worked that one out,’ Kella told him. ‘I ran through a banana plantation in Kwaio country and found that I was soaked as a result. Bananas store water in their stems. Cut the top off one and within an hour or so the decapitated stem fills almost to the brim with pints of water. Then I remembered: you always carried at least one of those books you were so proud of on tour, to show would-be employers. You wrapped them up in plastic bags. When the right time came, you poured the water into a bag, knocked out the poor islanders, stuffed their faces in the bag and drowned them. Very clever! No wonder people started fleeing from their villages in panic.’

‘I wish I could have done the same with Papa Noah, but there wasn’t time. Still, I couldn’t pass up on a chance like that in all the confusion. I stayed on in the bush after I had dropped Dr Maddy off and walked up to the feast at the ark. I had to use the good old-fashioned method of drowning a man by sticking his head in a puddle. All the same, it was well enough thought out, until you started interfering. What put you on to me?’

‘I couldn’t understand how Florence Maddy came to be involved,’ Kella said. ‘She wasn’t an interfering sort. She wouldn’t have stirred up trouble on her own. Yet suddenly she goes off to Tikopia, an inoffensive woman like her. I guessed that she must have got in someone’s way. You were the only islander who had much to do with her, so I began thinking about you.’

‘I never did get all of that woman’s research grant money off her,’ said Wainoni regretfully.

‘You really needed a bit of peace and quiet to build on killing the two islanders and Papa Noah,’ said Kella. ‘You were planning to cause more trouble by raiding the ark dressed as a Japanese soldier and panic the islanders even further. You couldn’t risk her stumbling across anything, so you bribed Shem to persuade some of his Tikopian friends to take her home with them on the
Commissioner
and get her out of the way.’

‘Let’s say I made an anonymous donation to Shem’s church funds,’ Wainoni said. ‘He had no idea what I was going to do.’

‘There were too many other people blundering about in this case as well,’ Kella said. ‘That obscured the issue for me. Abalolo had come up from Tikopia to attempt to sort Shem out. Brother John was trying to look after him. You might have got away with it, but then Sister Conchita took a hand. She persuaded the Lau people to go back to their homes. That meant that the panic on Malaita was almost over. All your plans came to nothing.’

‘Who would have thought it?’ said Wainoni. ‘All that preparation, yet Praying Mary rounded them all like sheep and took them back to their pens.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘I must be leaving,’ he said. ‘The aircraft is due to take off in half an hour. I shouldn’t have come here, but I had to make certain that Mr Ho’s boys had done their job properly.’

For some time Kella had been aware of the comforting sound of voices coming from outside the restaurant. The three Chinese stood up with their leader. There was a hammering on the front door.

‘Open up! We want beer!’ came a shout.

‘Closed!’ snapped back one of the Chinese.

The shouts solidified into a chant: ‘Beer! Beer! Beer!’ One of the young Chinese men went to the front door and unlocked it, inching it open and hissing: ‘No beer! This place closed!’ He gave a startled yelp as the door crashed open in his face, sending him staggering back. Twenty or thirty islanders stampeded into the room, trampling on the man who had opened the door and hurtling into the main restaurant. One of the two remaining Chinamen managed to produce his knife but was overwhelmed and borne to the floor in the rush of whooping islanders. At the same time the back door was kicked in and more islanders hurtled into the kitchen.

Wainoni backed against a wall but made no further movement when he saw how many islanders were occupying the room already. His face was expressionless. The headman of the Lau fishing village outside the capital emerged from the main pack and stood by Kella, beaming.

‘I was worried when I saw you being taken away in a car,’ he chuckled. ‘But luckily, that meant that they had to stay on the road, and I’d placed men every two hundred yards along it into Honiara just in case. We were able to regroup at the bottom of the turn-off and come up on foot and break in, as you ordered.’ He looked at his prisoners. ‘What do you want done with these? It would be no trouble to slit their throats; they’re only Chinese. No one would miss them.’

‘Leave the old man and his wife alone,’ Kella ordered. ‘Take the other three to the village and keep them there until I come for them tonight.’ He had already decided that he would give the three younger men a choice. They could embark upon a new career path and work for him as informers in Chinatown, or face kidnapping charges.

The headman nodded. ‘What about the big man?’ he asked.

‘Send him with six of your strongest men to the police station in Honiara. Tell the sergeant on duty that he is to put the Gammon Man in a cell and keep him there until I arrive to prefer charges of murder. Before you go, search him and the others and bring me the car keys.’

The headman issued rapid instructions. Islanders escorted Wainoni and the three young Chinamen roughly outside. At the door, Wainoni looked back. Then he shook his head and allowed himself to be manhandled out of the restaurant. Kella was puzzled. He would have expected more emotion even from such a notoriously bland character as the Gammon Man. He and the headman followed the others out.

‘What made you ask us to watch your back the entire time you were at the airport?’ the headman asked.

‘I felt that something might happen,’ said Kella vaguely. In fact he had seldom had a stronger premonition. On the night before he had sailed from Malaita to Honiara, he had seen a cloud of fireflies and had later fallen asleep to the persistent clicking of cicadas, a sure omen of trouble to come and a warning to be on his guard.

‘I thought I’d ask you and your men to mingle in the crowd and keep an eye on me to be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘Actually, a dolphin priest gave me the idea. As a rule, you can never find the right people when you want to lay on a good ambush.’

The headman shook his head uncomprehendingly. One of his men handed Kella several rings of keys taken from the prisoners. Kella stood thinking. So far things had gone well but not perfectly. There were pieces of the jigsaw that had not yet fitted completely into place. The sergeant liked completion in all that he did. Wainoni’s plan had been well prepared, but it lacked a suitable climax. Surely the Gammon Man would not have been content merely with causing minor civic uprest on Malaita. His sense of drama would have demanded a much more effective resolution to all his efforts.