Devil-Devil (22 page)

‘You know,’ said Brother John judiciously after a while, ‘you’re wrong to blame yourself for the death of Brother Leoni all those months ago.’

‘Who says I do blame myself?’

‘It’s obvious. The Brotherhood had observers at the white man’s court of inquiry. You took most of the blame on your own shoulders.’

‘So I should have. As a
neena
he was under my protection.’

‘I think not,’ said Brother John.

Kella stopped. ‘What do you know about it?’ he asked.

‘I knew Brother Leoni,’ said the big evangelist. ‘He was a good man, but he had one great fault. He liked to interfere. As a result, he was always turning up in places where he had no right to be. That was what was happening when you met him up in the bush that day, wasn’t it?’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Kella, starting to walk again.

Brother John caught up with the police sergeant with two enormous strides. ‘It does if you’re tearing yourself up inside about it,’ he said. ‘You may be the
aofia
but you can’t hold yourself responsible for every outsider who is killed on Malaita.’

‘Who says I do?’ asked Kella.

‘Do you know what I think happened on that day?’ asked Brother John.

‘I can’t stop you talking.’

‘I think’, went on the giant, ‘that Brother Leoni disobeyed the mission’s instructions and went up into the Kwaio high bush, preaching to the islanders. You heard that he was up there and you went after him, trying to get to him before he got into trouble with Pazabosi and his followers. Am I right so far?’

Kella looked straight ahead and said nothing. Brother John nodded and continued, unperturbed.

‘I think you found Leoni up at the waterfall by the killing ground. By that time he had infuriated the bushmen with his presence and they wanted to kill him.’

The memory of that dreadful morning, so long pushed to the back of the sergeant’s mind, emerged in all its stark terror once again. He had found the Melanesian missionary, bruised and cut, surrounded by a dozen armed bushmen. Kella had managed to persuade them to release their prisoner. It had been obvious that as soon as Leoni left the village they would pursue him and hunt him down like a wild animal.

Kella had ordered Leoni to make his way down to the comparative safety of the coastal strip. He had then remained with the furious bushmen, trying in vain to pacify them before he had gone in search of the Melanesian missionary, but he had been unable to find the stubborn proselytizer.

‘From what we’ve been able to piece together at the Melanesian mission,’ went on Brother John, ‘at some stage you and Brother Leoni became separated. Knowing him as I did, he probably deliberately gave you the slip and doubled back on you, and returned to the killing ground. Instead of making for the shore, he went the other way, up to the
faatai
maea
next to the waterfall.’

Kella suddenly found himself taking up the thread of the story as Brother John relapsed into a sympathetic silence.

‘Pazabosi was conducting a custom meeting there,’ the sergeant said, haltingly at first but then with increasing rapidity. ‘In the old man’s eyes Brother Leoni had committed sacrilege by entering the killing ground and attempting to preach there about the Christian God.’

‘He had a point,’ grunted Brother John. ‘So he and his men killed Brother Leoni and left his body as a warning to others. Is that what happened?’

‘Just about,’ nodded Kella. ‘By the time I got there, it was all over.’ Now that he had told someone it seemed as if a weight had been lifted from him.

‘Why didn’t you explain all this at your court of inquiry?’ demanded Brother John with exasperation. ‘That would have taken all the blame off you. You were a hero even going after Leoni.’

‘You know how it is,’ said Kella. ‘I couldn’t talk about custom ways at a white man’s court. How could I explain it to them? They know nothing of the islands.’

‘No,’ agreed Brother John. ‘They never have.’

‘Anyway,’ said Kella, ‘I deserved to be punished. I’m supposed to be the island peacemaker. I didn’t make much of a job of it with Leoni.’

‘That’s absolute nonsense!’ thundered the big evangelist, suddenly roused. ‘You can’t impose order over the whole of Malaita by yourself.’

‘I can try,’ said Kella.

They walked on for another hour until they reached a fork in the track.

‘This is where our ways divide,’ said Brother John. He placed a hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘Take care, my friend.’

There was an air of calm inevitability about the big man. Kella sensed that their meeting today had not been entirely accidental.

‘You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘You wanted to reassure me that Brother Leoni’s death wasn’t my fault.’

‘Your unfounded assumption of guilt has been worrying some of us in the Brotherhood for some time,’ acknowledged the giant. ‘I had to come out this way, anyhow. When I heard that you had returned to Malaita, I made it my business to find you. You’re a good man, Kella. You mustn’t take the guilt of the whole island on your shoulders. Good luck, sergeant, and may your gods go with you, whoever they may be!’

It was still raining heavily when Kella reached the Ruvabi mission complex soon after eleven o’clock that morning. The students were all crammed into their classrooms and the compound was empty as the police sergeant crossed it. When he reached the mission house, Father Pierre was sitting in an old basket chair on the verandah, staring abstractedly at the downpour. Even the sight of Kella caused him only to nod wearily.

‘You’re supposed to be on your way to Honiara,’ Kella told him, stepping on to the partial shelter of the verandah. ‘I suppose you’re waiting for a slow boat via China?’

‘That was the general idea,’ admitted the priest. ‘
Unfortunately
the bishop has taken a hand. I’m ordered to fly from Auki to Honiara tomorrow. Anyway, what are you doing back here, Ben?’

‘I’m looking for whoever killed Lofty Herman, Senda Iabuli and Peter Oro. It wasn’t necessarily the same person who did the three killings. In fact I’m sure of that. But I’m certain the deaths are connected somehow.’

‘Why come to me?’

‘Because I don’t believe for a moment that you had anything to do with Lofty Herman’s death. But I’m convinced that you know more about it than you’re letting on.’

‘What makes you believe that?’

‘Remember, I’d been a pupil here before the war, and I know what you were like then. In those days not a parrot farted on this station without you knowing about it.’

‘Unlike now, you mean?’ Calmly the priest waved aside the police sergeant’s embarrassed protestations. ‘No, you’re right, my boy. I’ve been here too long, and I’ve lost touch. I’ve got a lot more in common with Pazabosi than you might think. Two old men waiting for the end.’

‘How do you make that out?’ asked Kella. ‘He’s a crafty villain.’

‘He’s still given his life to Malaita, just as I’ve given most of mine. And now, probably, all that he wants to do is to rest, like me. If he is fermenting an uprising, you can be assured that it is against his will. All we both want now is a little time to reflect on the past and prepare for the future. Unfortunately, such a period of autumn rest, the
trochea
, is built into the bushmen’s religion, but not into mine.’

His words triggered off a warning at the back of Kella’s mind, but he could not think what conclusion they were supposed to lead him to. Doggedly he pressed on with his questioning.

‘When did you last see Lofty Herman?’ he asked.

‘It’s all a bit vague in my mind,’ shrugged the old priest. ‘As I told you, I was ill when the Japanese first came. I had a bad bout of malaria, and I had no idea what was going on at the mission for the best part of a month. By the time I’d recovered, Herman was no longer in the area. I assumed that he’d fled for his life from the Japanese. As it happened, they hardly touched Malaita, but Herman wasn’t to know that most of the fighting was going to take place over on Guadalcanal. He wasn’t the bravest of men, so I wasn’t surprised when he disappeared. After all, he and I and John Deacon were the only white men on the island, and Deacon was making plans to sail his vessel over to Guadalcanal to help with the fighting.’

‘Why would Herman be so worried?’ asked Kella.

‘He wasn’t a particularly nice man,’ said Father Pierre. ‘In fact, he was a drunken lout. He’d made a lot of enemies among the islanders. For years the islands had been controlled by white men like Herman. The invasion changed all that. Now, all over the Solomons, the whites were in a panic and it looked as if the Japanese were going to take their place. It was a very fraught situation; the established order was crumbling and everything was changing.’

‘What was Herman doing over here in the first place?’

‘Prospecting for gold along the river. He thought he’d found a large deposit at the base of the cliffs. He rigged up a strong hose pipe and trained it on the rocks to dislodge small particles, which he panned in the water as the river brought the rocks down with it.’

‘Where did this take place?’

‘On the Ulana river, half a mile west of the main track inland from Ruvabi.’

‘Did he find any gold?’

Father Pierre shrugged. ‘There were rumours that he’d been lucky, but if he was, nobody ever found his cache. Maybe his assistant made off with it. As I said, it was a pretty confused time in May of 1942.’

‘His assistant?’ asked Kella sharply. ‘Who was working with him?’

‘It was Mendana Gau, that Santa Cruz man who owns the station trading store.’

‘Gau?’ repeated Kella. More pieces of the jigsaw were somehow slotting into place. ‘Yes, I suppose he has been here a long time.’

‘Gau was little more than a labourer until the war. In fact, come to think of it, he disappeared from the district at about the same time that Herman did. But so did a lot of other frightened people, when they first saw the Japanese warships off the coast. Then, after the war, Gau reappeared. He seemed to have done quite well for himself in the interim. He certainly had sufficient money to open his store. But we never saw Lofty Herman again until that earthquake disturbed his grave.’

‘It must have been a heck of a tremor to roll back all the heavy rocks which had been over the top of his skeleton.’

‘No stronger than many others we’ve had here over the years,’ said Father Pierre dismissively. ‘I could tell you about
earthquakes
—’ He stopped himself and looked resignedly at Kella over his half-moon glasses. ‘You’re not going to let go of any of this, are you?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got my job to do,’ said Kella.

‘Which job – as
aofia
or a policeman?’

‘A little of both, I fancy. So Herman and Gau worked the gold mine between them. Just the two of them?’

‘No, there were three,’ said Father Pierre. ‘Didn’t you know? Back then Herman was in partnership with John Deacon.’

‘Herman got around.’

‘He was quite unusual. I got to know him well before the war. He would drop into the mission for a drink and a chat from time to time. He was not a good man but he was a character. He had a fund of good stories and he knew how to tell them. He made me laugh. After he’d gone I missed him. I felt – still feel – responsible for his death.’

‘How could that be? Herman was a rolling stone. He was bound to get into trouble one day.’

‘I know. For a man of his experience Herman was curiously naive. He was always ready to link up with anyone who promised him a quick dollar. I worried when he went into partnership with Deacon and Gau. They were both much harder men. In any association Herman was always going to be the one who suffered. I should have warned him off.’

‘Would he have paid any attention to you?’

Father Pierre sighed and shook his head. ‘Probably not. All the same, I should have made more of an effort. But the war came, and then it was too late.’

After a few more words Kella left the old priest sitting hunched on the verandah with his memories, and crossed the mission towards Gau’s trading store. As long as he had known the Santa Cruz man the storekeeper had been a crook. If the trader had been associated with Lofty Herman before the war, perhaps he was also a murderer. Herman and Gau could have fallen out over something, thought Kella, hurrying through the rain. The Santa Cruz man might have killed the Australian and buried his body. If Herman had discovered gold in the river, Gau might have murdered him for that. And where did Deacon fit into the equation?Could the Australian have stolen Herman’s gold perhaps, and used it later to lease his plantation?

Then there was the matter of the man who had tried to kill Sister Conchita as they had fled across the swamp. The stalker had seemed to make heavy weather of the task, indicating that he was either handicapped or unaccustomed to strenuous activity. The pot-bellied, sedentary trader would certainly come into the second category, and so would the crippled Deacon.

But why would anyone want to kill the young nun? It looked very much as if Sister Conchita was in possession of information that would incriminate Gau, or someone else on the mission, even if she was not aware of what this was.

That was the hard part of the investigation, thought Kella. The fact that a white woman was involved put everything else out of kilter. If his investigation had concerned Melanesians alone, he would have had the custom knowledge to work out what had happened and what was likely to follow. For someone trained from childhood to assess and investigate traditional matters, everything should be assuming a logical pattern now, but it most emphatically was not.

The door of the trading store was open. Kella went inside. Two muscular Santa Cruz men in dirty shorts and singlets were sitting idly on the counter, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They recognized Kella without apparent joy.

‘Where’s Gau?’ asked the sergeant.

‘We don’t know,’ said one of the men truculently. ‘Fuck off, black whiteman.’

Over the last five days Kella had been reprimanded, insulted, lied to and beaten up. With a certain grim satisfaction he realized that he had had enough. The Santa Cruz man standing before him became the unfortunate recipient of his wrath.