Devil-Devil (25 page)

‘Your turn, Hans,’ he invited his opponent.

The blond, good-looking German staggered forward
unsteadily
. He had been drinking ever since he had arrived at the club. He groped for one of the bottles. With trembling hands he reversed the label and threw the bottle up into the air. He misjudged the distance and the bottle fell back to the floor and shattered, its contents oozing into the large lake of beer already there.

‘One more for me,’ claimed Deacon. The Australian drained the bottle in his hand and made his way towards the waiting cask. Changing his mind, he veered away and weaved over to Hans Gunter, and stood swaying in front of the German, grinning inanely.

‘It was 1946, see,’ he slurred. ‘This British ship is sailing along, when up pops an old German U-boat. The German skipper comes up on to his conning-tower and shouts, “How is the war going?” The British captain shouts back, “It’s over. Your lot surrendered last year.” “Ach!” snaps the German skipper, going below. “Damn the Kaiser!”’

Some of the onlookers laughed. Others looked uneasily at the German logger. Hans Gunter frowned.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

Deacon leaned forward and waggled two fingers under Gunter’s nose. ‘Two, Hans,’ he said pityingly. ‘Your lot lost two wars, you cunt.’

‘Nutter,’ snarled the German, stalking towards the bar. ‘That’s all you are, Deacon, a bloody nutter.’

‘It takes one to know one,’ said the Australian. He gazed up at the ceiling and counted the labels. ‘Twenty-two,’ he boasted loudly. ‘The winner by default! Not bad. Before the war, I saw that Tazzy who became a film star, what’s-his-name, Errol Flynn, I saw him get thirty-six labels to stick to the ceiling in a Port Moresby bar, when he was managing a plantation in New Guinea. Now there was a real piss-artist!’

Lorrimer sat at a table in the corner and surveyed the others. Most of the expatriate inhabitants of the district station were present, government officers, doctors and nurses from the hospital, store-owners, technicians from the boat-building yard, and several Voluntary Service Overseas youngsters. There were also a number of planters and traders like Deacon and Gunter, who worked farther along the coast and had made the journey in by boat for a weekend’s drinking. The Auki Club was notorious for its wild parties and this one looked to be getting under way nicely.

Lorrimer stood up and edged through the crowd to the bar where he ordered a bottled beer from the Melanesian steward. Without apology Deacon pushed his way through the throng and stood by the inspector’s side. Although he had been drinking heavily for several hours the Australian seemed lucid enough. He extended a hand.

‘John Deacon,’ he said expansively. ‘You’ll be Inspector Lorrimer. You flew over from Honiara this morning.’ Lorrimer’s beer arrived. Deacon gestured for it to be put on his tab. ‘I hear you’re waiting for a boatload of police to arrive and then you’re going to look for the missing Yank in the high bush.’

‘Something like that,’ said Lorrimer non-committally, sipping his beer from the bottle. He had grown accustomed to the fact that there were few secrets in the Solomons.

‘Well, you take care of yourself, mate,’ said Deacon. ‘Old Pazabosi might be a bit past it, but he’s still capable of pulling a few strokes in the Kwaio country. The Brits wanted to pull him in after Marching Rule collapsed ten years ago, but they didn’t dare go up after him. And that was when they still had an empire and delusions of grandeur. You mark my words, if you go up into the interior with just a dozen Roviana coppers, you’ll be asking for trouble.’

‘I’ll just have to take my chances then, won’t I?’ said Lorrimer.

‘You’d be bit more worried than that if you’d seen what happened when the Marching Rule rebellion started. I know. I was here, mate. As soon as the locals saw the black Yanks, who’d been so good to them, sailing away, they took it as a sign to start trying to chuck the Brits out. They reckoned that the Yanks had gone to paradise, and would come back to fight along with them once the uprising started.’

 ‘What do you suggest I do?’ asked Lorrimer.

‘Leave it to Kella,’ said the plantation manager emphatically. ‘This is his island. He’ll sort things.’

Someone had put an LP on the Dansette record player. Men and women were beginning to dance to the sound of Dick Haymes singing ‘Little White Lies’. The music seemed to rejuvenate Deacon. Impulsively he burst away from the bar, gathered one of the Forestry Department’s typists in his arms and swept her away across the floor, his arms pumping vigorously.

‘Mastah,’ said the club steward warningly to Lorrimer, jerking his head towards the door. A uniformed police constable was standing in the entrance, beckoning urgently to the inspector. When Lorrimer walked over to him, the constable turned and led him outside.

‘What is it?’ asked Lorrimer.

‘Come long hospital quick time,’ urged the policeman. ‘Plenty big trouble!’

The police constable hurried Lorrimer along Loboi Avenue, the main street of the district station, to the concrete hospital. They went inside. In the reception area two scruffy islanders in dirty shorts and singlets were sitting sullenly on a bench, supervised by several constables.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Lorrimer.

The constable who had brought him from the club pointed to one of the doors leading from the hall. A cardboard sign attached to the wall read
Operating
Theatre
.

The two men sitting on the bench refused to meet Lorrimer’s gaze. The door of the theatre opened and a balding, middle-aged white doctor came out. He nodded when he saw the police inspector.

‘You must be Lorrimer,’ he said. ‘I heard there was a top cop on the station. We haven’t had a policeman with any authority on Malaita since you took Ben Kella away from us. My name’s Morgan, by the way.’

‘Dr Morgan,’ nodded Lorrimer. ‘What’s the problem?’

The doctor turned to the islanders on the bench and questioned them in a pidgin that was too fluent for Lorrimer’s grasp of the lingua franca. One of the islanders replied in guttural monosyllables. He and his companion still seemed to be in deep shock.

‘They’re still telling the same story, so it’s probably true,’ Morgan told Lorrimer. ‘They say they went into the Kwaio bush country to recover a box of artifacts they’d left up there.’

‘What sort of artifacts?’ asked Lorrimer.

The doctor questioned the two men again. The spokesman responded briefly.

‘Custom carvings,’ translated Dr Morgan. ‘Very old, by the sound of it. Their boss used to go round the villages buying them up in return for tobacco. Sometimes there would be too many carvings to get into their canoe to bring back down to Ruvabi. When that happened they would store the surplus carvings in a treehouse they had hired from a local man, and go back for them later. This time they had a large cache hidden away, and had returned for the box.’

‘Presumably to export from the Protectorate,’ said Lorrimer. ‘Very lucrative, and highly illegal. Sorry, doctor. Go on.’

‘They were attacked by a gang of bushmen. Their boss was hacked down. These two guys ran away into the bush and hid. When they came back later, their boss was still alive, but only just. They carried him to their canoe, which is equipped with an outboard engine, and brought him downriver and then along the coast here to the hospital.’

‘A nasty business,’ said Lorrimer.

‘It’ll be more than that when the expats here get to hear of it,’ predicted Dr Morgan grimly. ‘That’s how the Marching Rule uprising started on Malaita after the war. Groups of islanders started attacking traders and government district officers in the bush. It looks as if Pazabosi’s back on the warpath. When the news of this latest attack gets around, there’ll be a bloody panic among the whites in the Protectorate.’

‘What’s the name of the man who was attacked?’ asked Lorrimer.

‘Gau,’ said Morgan. ‘He’s a half-caste who owns the store at Ruvabi. His name is Mendana Gau.’

‘We may be on the way to eradicating malaria,’ sighed Father Benedini, ‘but hookworm, that’s a different deal altogether.’

He was standing with Sister Conchita in the square at Tinomeat on Gold Ridge, preparing to distribute measured doses of tetrachloroethylene to the children of the village. Earlier in the year a World Health Organization survey team had diagnosed a particularly virulent strain of the parasitical
Ancylostoma
duodenale
roundworms in the area. To her surprise the medical priest had asked Sister Conchita to accompany him on his tour to the interior, twenty miles south-east of Honiara.

The trek through the steep incline of the rain forest once they had left the road on foot had been the usual gruelling one. The nun had forced herself to concentrate on the narrow path ahead, knowing that if she looked to either side she could easily slip and fall down one of the steep slopes. She saw deadly snakes, centipedes, scorpions and regiments of ants moving quickly into the undergrowth in the gloom caused by the densely packed trees. She tried, sometimes in vain, to avoid the knee-high stinging nettles infesting the path.

Some hours after they had started their climb suddenly the landscape was transformed. The ground levelled out and there were large gaps where trees had been felled. Gaping pits had been dug and abandoned in the ground. Handmade water races meandered aimlessly from streams. The sides of a cliff were scarred and pitted. Sister Conchita wondered if the surface of the moon could look as ghastly as this.

‘Gold Ridge,’ explained Father Benedini. He was from Chicago, rotund, dishevelled and benign, wearing slacks and a tattered white shirt, with a crucifix around his neck. ‘There was a pretty slick alluvial mining operation here, until the Japanese invaded Guadalcanal. Half a dozen Europeans and around a hundred islanders from other parts of the Solomons extracted quite a lot of gold around this part of the island.’

‘What happened when the war broke out?’

‘They hightailed it away rapidly.’

‘Frightened of the Japanese?’

‘Scared of the locals, more likely. Relations between the miners and the villagers were strained, to put it mildly. This is a custom area. The villagers resented the presence of the miners, but the expats were too heavily armed. Once they fled to the coast to be evacuated, the locals destroyed the mine workings and made sure that the foreigners never came back after the war. The only thing left of the mining set-up is the names the miners gave to some of the local villages – Tinomeat, Old Case, Bagorice. For some reason those names stuck.’

His words struck a chord with the sister. Lofty Herman had been prospecting for gold when the Japanese had invaded the Solomons. Perhaps he had offended against local traditions as well. Could the local villagers have been emboldened by the thought of the government being in disarray? Perhaps they had exacted vengeance on the beachcomber before he could flee?

Sister Conchita tried to put the thought out of her mind. There would be time enough to ponder over that later. In the meantime they were approaching the outskirts of the village. Children were running out of the huts to meet them. She would need to concentrate on the task in hand.

‘Thank you for picking me to help you,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘It was no contest. You were the only one suitable for the job. Especially after you commandeered the clinic at Sulufou and dispensed the medicines there.’

‘I got into trouble for that.’

‘Quite right too,’ said Father Benedini, straight-faced. ‘Can’t have new sisters showing initiative and guts. I only hope I don’t suffer from guilt by association.’

Sister Conchita wondered if the priest was in earnest. Then she saw a grin playing around the corners of his mouth. She hurried after him as they entered the village. Her heart leapt at the thought that not everyone in the Church regarded her as an unmitigated nuisance. Somehow she thought that she was going to enjoy working with Father Benedini.

Kella found the remains of Lofty Herman’s leaf house on the river bank early the next morning. Time had erased all signs of any gold workings. The river ran smooth and sluggish through the trees under the cliff. He remembered from his time as a student at Ruvabi that Lofty Herman had installed a series of wooden barriers in the headwaters of the river, to cause the water to flow faster into the wooden aqueducts he had constructed. The resulting torrent had been connected to a fire hose that he had trained on to the cliff, sluicing soil and occasionally nuggets of gold into boxes at the bottom of the slope.

Only a white man would have built a house in such an unprepossessing place. It had once been a simple leaf hut, but over the years the undergrowth had secured a stranglehold over it, constricting and torturing the simple structure out of position. The roof had fallen in and the support posts had buckled, causing the remaining woven leaf sides to slip drunkenly out of shape. The police sergeant entered what was left of the leaf structure’s single room.

There was little to mark the fact that the place had once been inhabited. Vigorously Kella trampled on the undergrowth covering what once had been the wooden floor of the hut. His boot clinked against something. The police sergeant stooped and groped along the ground. After a minute or so, his hands closed over a rusty old cocoa tin. He wrenched off the lid. The tin was empty but a few traces of yellow dust remained at the bottom.

Carefully Kella scraped the dust out of the tin. He took a small cellophane bag from his pack and tipped the dust into it. He sealed the bag and replaced it in a pocket of his pack. It looked as if Lofty Herman had found the gold he had been searching for in the last days of his life.

The question was, what had happened to the rest of it? Could Andu the ghost-caller and Iabuli have buried it with the beachcomber’s body, after they had murdered Herman? They might have believed that the yellow dust had some religious significance for the dead Australian.