Killman (6 page)

The threat could hardly have been more explicit, but Kella did not bother to respond. In his time he had been menaced and even cursed by far more potent magic men than the civilized Buna. He allowed the politician to get clear of the administrative Secretariat building and then followed him out into the noon sunlight of Honiara, the small capital town on the island of Guadalcanal.

Mendana Avenue, the town’s single main street, named after the Spanish discoverer of the islands, was lined with flowering flame trees and frangipani. About three thousand people lived in the town, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of itinerant British, Australians, New Zealanders, Americans Chinese, Fijians and Solomon Islanders. On both sides of the street were shops and government offices. Many of the shops and the Point Cruz cinema were housed in old Quonset huts left behind by the Americans after the war. The office buildings, the two banks and the courthouse were of more recent stone construction. Inland, overlooking the town, lay a series of ridges containing the pleasant residences of government officers and their families. On the other side of the main road, behind the line of buildings, were the placid bay and the harbour. A few cars chugged along the dusty thoroughfare.

Kella’s mind was on other things. Before leaving Auki for his interview, he had gone through the files awaiting his attention on his desk. As usual, he had been left with the cases that no one else wanted to handle. An expatriate trader on Small Mala had made two claims over the last three years for vessels he insisted had been lost in bad seas. The Australian insurance company involved, too mean to send out a claims adjuster to such a remote and inhospitable area, wanted the local police to investigate the matter. Some Lau labourers at a logging camp were suspected of stealing dynamite from their employers to sell on for the purpose of stunning large quantities of fish in rivers. A bushman from Areare had thrown a spear at two saltwater fishermen from Alite in a dispute involving exchanging fish for taro at a neutral venue at the foot of Mount Tolon. One of the fishermen had been slightly wounded in the shoulder, while his friend had broken the spear into pieces in retaliation. There were threats of an inter-tribal vendetta.

Kella was passing the front of the Mendana Hotel when he heard his name being called. A bespectacled middle-aged Japanese in a smart safari suit hurried out of the foyer.

‘Excuse me,’ said the Japanese. ‘The waiter tells me that you are Sergeant Kella of the local police force. My name is Mayotishi. I wonder if I might have a word with you. It’s rather important.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kella, looking at his watch. ‘I have another appointment. I’m late already.’

‘It won’t take long,’ said Mayotishi.

‘I’m sorry,’ reiterated Kella, beginning to move off. ‘I really must go.’

‘Is it because I’m Japanese?’ asked Mayotishi. ‘I appreciate that you fought against my people during the war. Perhaps you still have feelings of animosity because of this.’

‘The war ended in the Solomons in 1943,’ said Kella. ‘It has nothing to do with that at all. If you want to get in touch with me, try the police headquarters building at Auki on Malaita. They usually know where I will be. Now you will have to excuse me. Good day, sir.’

‘Three deaths on Malaita, Sergeant Kella,’ the Japanese called after him. ‘You’re going to need all the help you can get to solve them! I can provide that assistance!’

Mayotishi was still standing outside the hotel as Kella continued his walk.

It had been a mistake to annoy the tourist. He recalled the basic rule of thumb inculcated into him on his attachment to a savage police force in the north of England.
Never mess with the middle classes
, he had been told. The same applied in spades to all overseas citizens in the Solomons, as far as indigenous officers were concerned.

He wondered if Mayotishi had been right in his accusation of prejudice. Was Kella biased against the Japanese? He did not think so, but after all, they had killed many of his friends, and had had a good go at killing him.

The policeman tried to concentrate his mind on his impending problem at the fishing village. At the same time, he could not help worrying how Mayotishi could possibly have heard about the murders on Malaita, when Kella had told no one in Honiara about them. And what had the Japanese meant by
three
deaths? So far, Kella had heard of only two.

It took Kella half an hour to walk through the town and over Matanikau Bridge to the Malaitan fishing village on the beach opposite the labour lines. As he passed the road leading down to the stores of Chinatown, two drunken middle-aged expatriates reeled out of one of the all-day bars and staggered convivially arm-in-arm in the direction of the Mendana hotel. Kella stood aside to let them pass. He recognized them both. One was Maywood, a forty-five-year-old New Zealander who owned a small business collecting and preparing the sea slugs known as
bech-de-mer
and selling them on to the Chinese to be turned into soup essence and herbs.

The other man was ten years older and English. He was a broad-shouldered, pot-bellied, dishevelled former government officer called Ebury. Before the war he had served as an administrator in the districts and the government offices at Tulagi. He had stayed on during the fighting and served with some distinction as a coast-watcher on Vella Lavella in the western islands, where he was rumoured to have conducted a brave solitary vigil. Always a drinker, in the later years of his career, with the return of peace, he had taken to the bottle with so much enthusiasm that even the other expatriates had noticed. Five years earlier, after a number of public indiscretions, his contract had not been renewed. Having nowhere better to go, he had stayed on aimlessly in the islands, buying a shack on the beach near Visale ten miles outside the capital, where he existed in a state of semi-exile, shunned by his previous colleagues, ignored by the islanders and forced to seek the undiscriminating company of fellow topers like Maywood.

The Englishman glanced up as the two revellers passed Kella, but showed no signs of recognition. The sergeant continued on his way. A section of the main road to Henderson Field airport lay between the lines of dormitories housing government manual workers from various islands on one side of the road, and the collection of thatched huts on the shore. The village comprised emigrants from the Lau area who now earned their living by supplying fish to the market in Honiara. Kella had lived there with his
wantoks
for six months at the beginning of the year when he had been confined to a desk job in the capital after narrowly surviving a court of enquiry into his alleged misconduct concerning the murder of a missionary by the bushmen led by the old chief Pazabozi.

Most of the male adults of the village were already lined up apprehensively to greet him in the
sara
, the village square. The headman came forward to shake Kella’s hand. He was a worried-looking middle-aged man wearing a pair of old blue shorts. Kella knew that the man was a conscientious, fair-minded leader who took his duties seriously but could be easily overwhelmed by unexpected occurrences. From behind the closed doors of the huts emerged the constant monotonous shrieks of the unseen women and girls of the village. They would continue to keen in this fashion until all the mourners from afar had arrived to pay their respects to an old woman who had died a few days ago.

‘
Aofia,’
said the headman respectfully, using the Lau dialect. ‘We want to thank you for coming back to help us. We need you to say the sacred words taught to you by the custom priests to clear us of this dreadful visitation.’

‘Show me where you said your first prayers for the old woman’s soul,’ said Kella.

Obediently the other man conducted the sergeant through the huts to the shore, where the waves lapped indulgently against the pebbles. The other islanders followed them at a careful distance and formed a nervous semicircle on the beach as they regarded the uniformed police sergeant with awe and trepidation.

‘You’d better me all about it,’ said Kella.

The headman took a deep breath and embarked upon his story. As he spoke, the other men gathered ever closer around them. The tale took some time in the recounting because the leader took care to include the customary Melanesian ramblings, digressions and tenuous links with Lau legends and custom law. He also stopped every so often to argue with and then threaten some of the other men, who were inching forward with the intention of turning his monologue into the general village discussion with which they were all more familiar and comfortable. By dint of much concentration Kella emerged from the process with a headache and some sort of grasp of an outline of what had been happening among the exiles around him.

An old woman of the village, without any family remaining, had died. Everything that needed to be done had been carried out meticulously, according to custom. The body of the septuagenarian had been laid out in the women’s
beu
and after a few days would have been transported inland, to be buried secretly in the hills beyond the residential ridges. A shark priest had been called over from Malaita at considerable expense in cherished shell money to conduct the official farewell ceremony at the stone shrine, close to them now on the shore, known as the
bae’ana baekwa
, where sharks were known to bask, even among the busy shipping lanes off the shore of Honiara. The priest had come highly recommended and had presented an impressive appearance, with his hair falling down to his waist as, by virtue of his high office, no mortal was allowed to touch his head or cut his tresses.

After the priest had roasted a pig and buried it, he had said the usual dignified prayers of the
lau agalo
for the dead before departing. That should have been an end to the subject. Soon afterwards, however, matters started to go wrong in the fishing village. Before the body could be smuggled out by night for its surreptitious inland burial on someone else’s land, various villagers had started meeting the ghost of the old woman around the village. She had been seen walking silently along the shore and coming out of her hut, among other places. Finally she seemed to have settled her domicile on a pile of torn and discarded fishing nets on a patch of sand several hundred yards from where they were now standing. Apart from a slight ethereal haziness around the edges of her body and an obdurate refusal to answer any greetings or even look up when addressed, she had appeared remarkably lifelike, perhaps even more so than during the closing years of her existence on earth.

Greatly daring, the headman and some of the elders had broken tribal law and peered into the women’s
beu
to see if, by some miraculous happenstance, the corpse had either recovered consciousness or come to life and departed. Unfortunately for their peace of mind, the old woman’s body had still been resting there on a pile of pandanus leaves. So, as a last resort, the village had sent for the
aofia
.

‘Do you want to see where the ghost walks?’ asked the headman when he had finished.

Kella shook his head. To have asked for proof in this matter would have been discourteous, implying that he had doubts about the veracity and judgement of his hosts. ‘Show me her body,’ he asked instead.

They walked back through the village to the long, low thatched hut that had been erected according to tradition for the domicile of women during their menstrual periods or before giving birth. As a priest of the highest rank, Kella alone among the men present had the undisputed right to enter this
beu
.

While the others waited outside, he bent over the body of the old woman. She was now lying on a bed of sago palm leaves replacing the old sun-bleached pandanus fronds, and was wearing a faded blue dress. Her face was calm and peaceful, the lines of seven decades almost entirely smoothed out in easeful death. Carefully the sergeant turned her over. In the Lau culture corpses were neither sacred nor
tabu
, so he was able to examine the woman closely without offending her gods or village decorum. He pulled down the back of her dress gently at the neck to reveal a whorl of ancient tattoos on her wrinkled flesh. They would have been incised with a bamboo splinter dipped in coconut juice and lime when she was very young and unlikely to feel the pain so much. There were circles representing the sun, chevrons indicating the tracks of the crab and many other time-encrypted impressions, all running into one another.

It took him some time to find what he had been looking for. The mark had almost been obscured by age and a pattern of a large star with a circle of rays emanating from it on the old woman’s skin. It was almost as if the constellation had been deliberately superimposed over a small inverted
w
shape. Kella grunted in triumph at the sight and knelt to examine the ancient scratch more closely. Then, satisfied, he pulled up the back of the dress and turned the old woman’s body back respectfully.

‘All right, Mother,’ he said gently. ‘I tell you, you will soon be free to leave us and travel to the island of Momolu, where the spirits of the dead assemble, to live happily among good gardens and be sheltered for ever in cool shade from the heat of the sun. I, Kella, the
aofia
, promise you this.’

The headman and the other men were waiting for him outside the
beu
. Kella nodded. ‘Let us release her spirit and send it on its journey,’ he said.

There was a murmur of relief and appreciation from the group. The headman turned to lead the way to the shark altar on the shore, but Kella restrained him. ‘Not by the sea,’ he said. ‘That’s where you made your mistake.’

He led the men inland a few yards until they were among the palm trees sheltering the village from the constant traffic on the main road.

‘I’m going to say the
manatai burina
here,’ he announced briefly.

A puzzled hum spread through the group of islanders, like a riff being played lightly on a guitar. The
manatai burina
was a general prayer of apology offered to the gods when they had been wronged or slighted. It was performed rarely, and then only by the most learned among the priests. Only a few of the oldest men present had even heard of it. Kella ignored them and threw back his head so that he was facing the white clouds scudding across the sky. He called upon all the gods of ancient Malaita to hear him. He begged them to accept the spirit of the old woman on Momolu. He chanted the
lau agalo
, asking the gods to forgive the people of the village for their earlier mistake, which had been made out of ignorance, not spite. He promised to slaughter another pig when he returned to the Lau Lagoon, one he had first blessed, making it special, and then offer it to all the gods in their retreats, as an appeasing
faamola
to make things right again. Finally he picked up a handful of sand and threw it into the air. It was all accomplished in a few minutes, a sign that the gods were listening on the wind.