Devil-Devil (2 page)

‘Mind your own business!’ grunted Deacon. ‘Or …’

‘Or what, Mr Deacon?’ asked Sister Conchita, still standing her ground, although she was conscious that she was trembling. It had been a long time since she had been exposed to an example of such apparently uncontrollable wrath. With relief she realized that a group of village men, attracted by the altercation between the two expatriates, had abandoned the shark-calling ceremony temporarily and were hurrying along the jetty behind them.

‘This is a Catholic village, Mr Deacon,’ said Sister Conchita clearly. ‘I don’t think its inhabitants would take kindly to seeing a sister being manhandled.’

Deacon looked at the dozen or so men getting closer. With an impressive display of strength he hurled the sack into the bottom of the dinghy, scattering its consignment of shells.

‘I won’t forget this,’ he promised vehemently, glaring up as he cast off. ‘I’m not having some bit of a kid who hasn’t been in the islands five minutes telling me what to do.’

‘And another thing,’ the nun called after him. ‘Just in case you have any more illegal shells in that sack, I shall be asking the Customs Department in the capital to examine it when you get there.’

Deacon was already rowing the dinghy with vicious strokes back towards his small trading vessel. Sister Conchita turned with a grateful and rather tremulous smile to face the approaching islanders. She realized that, as usual, she had just insisted on having the last word. It was a failing she was well aware of and would have to take to confession yet again.

Sergeant Kella sat on the earthen floor of the
beu
, the men’s meeting-house, patiently waiting for the ghost-caller to bring back the dead.

Most of the men of the coastal village had managed to cram into the long, thatched building with its smoke-blackened bamboo walls. According to custom, a small wooden gong had been struck with a thick length of creeper to summon the assembly.

Kella could hear the women and children of the remote saltwater hamlet talking excitedly outside as they waited for news of the proceedings to filter from the hut. Most of the men were eyeing him with suspicion as he sat impassively among them. A touring police officer would not normally have been allowed inside the hut, but he was present in his capacity of
aofia
, the hereditary peacemaker of the Lau people.

Kella hoped that Chief Superintendent Grice would not hear about the detour he had made to this village. Back in Honiara his superior had been explicit in his instructions.

‘You’re going to Malaita for one reason only,’ he had told Kella. ‘You are to make inquiries about Dr Mallory, nothing else. After your last little episode over there, I said I’d never send you back. But you speak the language. I take it that you can ask a few simple questions and come back with the answers?’

Hurriedly Kella had assured the police chief that he could. After six months sitting behind a desk in the capital he would have promised almost anything to get out on tour again. Now here he was, only two days into his journey, and already he was disobeying instructions.

The village headman entered the hut. He was a plump, self-satisfied man clad in new shorts and singlet and exuding the confidence of someone who owned good land. With a few exceptions, the Lau area chieftains were not hereditary but were chosen for their conspicuous distribution of wealth. This man would have achieved his position for the number of feasts he had hosted, not for any fighting prowess.

The headman cleared his throat. ‘We are here to find out who killed Senda Iabuli,’ he muttered grudgingly in the local dialect. Plainly he had not wanted the meeting to take place. ‘To do this we have sent for the ghost-caller, the
ngwane
inala
. He will tell us who the killer is.’

The ghost-caller was sitting with his back to the wall, facing the other men. He was in his sixties, small and emaciated, his meagre frame racked periodically with hacking coughs. He wore only a brief thong about his loins. His face and body were criss-crossed with gaudy and intricate patterns painted on with the magic lime. Barely visible beneath the decorations on his face were a number of vertical scars, slashed there long ago when he first set out to learn the calling incantations. Laid out on the ground before him were two stringed hunting bows, some leaves of the red dracaena plant, a few coconuts and a carved wooden bowl containing trochus shells.

According to the gossip Kella had managed to pick up since his arrival at the village, the ghost-caller had been summoned to investigate the sudden death of Senda Iabuli, a perfectly undistinguished villager, an elderly widower with no surviving children.

Iabuli’s first and only claim to notoriety had occurred a month before. Early one morning he had been on his way to work in his garden on the side of a mountain just outside the village. He had, as always, crossed a ravine by way of a narrow swing bridge consisting of creepers and logs lashed together. As he had made his precarious way to the far side, a sudden gust of wind had caught the old man and sent him toppling helplessly hundreds of feet down into the valley below.

The event had been witnessed by a group of men hunting wild pigs. It had taken them most of the morning to descend the tree-covered slope into the ravine to recover the body of the old villager. To their amazement, they had discovered Senda Iabuli alive and well, if considerably shaken and winded. His fall had been broken by the leafy tops of the trees, from which he had slithered down to end up dazed and bruised on a pile of moss at the foot of a casuarina tree.

The old man had been helped back to the village, confused and shaking, but apparently none the worse for his experience. For several weeks he had resumed his customary innocuous existence. Then one morning he had been found dead in his hut.

Normally that would have been the end of the matter, but for some unfathomable reason a relative of Iabuli had demanded an investigation into his death. This was the family’s right by custom and had caused the headman to send for the ghost-caller. Kella had heard of the events and had invited himself to the ceremony.

The ghost-caller picked up one of the red dracaena leaves and split it down the middle. He wrapped one half around the other to strengthen it. Then he placed the reinforced leaf in the carved bowl. Next, he shuffled the two stringed bows on the ground before him. Each was a little less than full size, fashioned of palm wood, with strings of twisted red and yellow vegetable fibres. The bows represented two Lau ghosts, the spirits of men who had once walked the earth. The ghost-caller threw back his head and started to chant an incantation in a high-pitched, keening tone.

The calling went on for more than an hour as the caller begged the right spirits to enter the
beu
. They had a long way to come, for the souls of the dead resided on the island of Momulo, far away. Suddenly the chanting ended. The caller stiffened, his back rigid and his eyes closed.

‘The ghosts ride,’ murmured the headman, nodding sagely, as if these events were all his doing. Some of the elders nodded obsequious agreement. The custom man before them was now possessed of the spirits of the departed
agalo
.

‘Who comes?’ demanded the ghost-caller. Spasms racked his body. Voices began to emerge from his mouth. There were two of them, speaking in different pitches. Kella had been expecting them both. The ghost-caller had taken no chances, adhering to the main ancestral ghosts of the region, ones everyone present would know. He had selected Takilu, the war god, and Sina Kwao of the red hair, who had once killed the giant lizard which had threatened to devour all of Malaita. Only a ghost-caller was allowed to address these spirits by their names.

As each ghost spoke, the relevant bow quivered on the ground. The caller was good, thought Kella. The police sergeant had been watching the emaciated man closely, and was sure that there were no threads connecting the weapons to the
ghost-caller
, which could be twitched surreptitiously to make them flutter. He could only assume that the custom man was drumming on the ground with his iron-hard heels to set up the necessary vibrations.

‘Oh Takilu, can you tell us anything about the passing of Senda Iabuli?’ quavered the ghost-caller.

Neither bow moved. An audible sigh of relief went round the room. If the war god was not involved it probably meant that the old man’s death had been due to natural causes. Now there should be no internecine blood quarrels to divide the village.

‘Sina Kwao,’ resumed the ghost-caller in reverent tones, ‘can you tell us what happened to Senda Iabuli?’

The bow on the right quivered fiercely. A gasp went up from the assembled villagers. The ghost-caller pounced.

‘How did Senda Iabuli die?’ he asked. ‘Was he killed by a devil?’

The bow trembled once, a sign of assent. Awed and frightened cries filled the men’s house. Kella relaxed. All in all it was quite a good performance, he thought. The headman must have briefed the ghost-caller cleverly. By attributing the death to a devil, the relatives of Senda Iabuli would be mollified.

But the ghost-caller had not finished. His weary eyes flicked lizard-like across the room, catching and engaging Kella’s gaze. It was almost as if the old man could read the policeman’s thoughts.

‘Did the devil-devil use a man to carry out the murder?’ he asked.

The bow flipped again briefly in assent and was still. Throughout the hut the men rose angrily to their feet, demanding to know who was the killer among them. The ghost-caller shuddered and slumped forward, his job done.

Kella hurried out of the
beu
. The ghost-caller most certainly had not kept to any pre-ordained script. As a result, there could now be a lot of trouble in the village, perhaps even the start of a blood feud.

Outside in the noon sun, the villagers gathered in animated and apprehensive knots, discussing what they had seen and heard inside the
beu
. Kella saw the headman complaining to the ghost-caller. He drifted over casually, in time to hear the headman refuse to pay the remainder of the custom man’s fee.

‘You’ve stirred up too much trouble,’ howled the headman. ‘You’ll get no more from me.’

‘I passed on the answers of the gods,’ replied the other man stubbornly. ‘A devil used a man from this village to kill Senda Iabuli.’ He could not possibly have heard Kella approaching, but still turned to face the sergeant. ‘It is not my fault if there are unbelievers present,’ he said pointedly.

Kella realized that all eyes were on him. Get out fast, he told himself. You caused enough trouble on Malaita last time. Your record won’t stand another court of inquiry. All the same he knew that he was not going to walk away while the village was still in such turmoil.

‘
Aarai
,’ he said quietly, using the Lau term of respect to the headman, ‘you must pay this man what he is owed.’

‘Who says that I must?’ asked the headman.

‘I do,’ said Kella. ‘I speak as the government’s policeman.’

A large crowd was gathering to see how the headman would deal with this threat to his authority. Several burly islanders began to shoulder their way through the throng towards the police sergeant. Kella knew that these were the headman’s bodyguards, paid monthly in valuable porpoise teeth and cans of beer to do his bidding about the village.

‘And’, the police sergeant added, raising his voice, ‘I speak as your
aofia
, directed by the spirits to keep the peace. If you shame the ghost-caller I shall call upon the shades for payback.’

Kella surveyed the crowd impassively. There were enough level-headed men and women present to accept what he said. Even the bodyguards looked uneasy and stopped pressing forward. The voice of tradition would often be heard when the white man’s law was ignored. With the antenna of a politician, the headman sensed the change in the atmosphere and responded swiftly but with ill grace.

‘I shall pay the fathom of shell money I promised the ghost-caller,’ he growled. ‘I am a true chief of my people and always keep my word. That is known among all the islands.’

The ghost-caller turned, satisfied, and walked towards the trees surrounding the village. Kella accompanied him, in case the bodyguards experienced a change of heart.

‘You shamed me in your thoughts,
aofia
,’ said the ghost-caller quietly as they walked. ‘You believed I had been bought by the headman and would only give him news he wanted to hear.’

‘I was wrong,’ acknowledged Kella. ‘I have been too long away overseas. Sometimes I lose touch with the old ways.’

The ghost-caller stopped and turned to face the sergeant. The old man’s red-rimmed eyes searched Kella’s face, as if looking for something. For a moment Kella sensed that the old man was going to confess something to him, but the moment passed.

‘You use the ghosts but do not always believe in them,’ said the ghost-caller. ‘You tread a dangerous path, peacemaker. Dangerous for others, and for yourself.’

‘Sometimes I don’t know what to believe,’ admitted Kella. ‘As for my path, others chose it for me when I was a child and I must follow it for as long as I can.’

The ghost-caller sighed. ‘Senda Iabuli and I were young together many years ago,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘We were friends. Like you, we did not always follow the appointed path. We did good things, but we also did bad things together. Now he is dead, and soon I shall follow him.’ The ghost-caller walked through the outer fringe of trees without looking back at the policeman. ‘Find your path,
aofia
,’ he called. ‘
O lelea vasi amiua.
Go your way, as it has been appointed.’

The villagers were still milling restlessly as Kella walked back to the huts.

‘Who is the closest living relative of Senda Iabuli?’ he asked, determined to sort the matter as quickly as possible.

‘I am,’ said a youth, coming forward warily. ‘I am Peter Oro. Senda Iabuli was my grandfather.’