Devil-Devil (4 page)

Kella shrugged and headed for the mission house. It looked different. The verandah fence had been repaired since his last visit, and the front of the building was freshly painted. A sister in the white robes of the Marist mission came out on to the verandah and regarded him suspiciously. She was small and trim, attractive in a severe manner, in her mid-twenties. Her skin had the soft pallor of someone unaccustomed to the tropical sun. When she spoke, it was with an American accent.

‘Something I can do for you?’

‘I’ve come to see Father Pierre,’ said Kella.

‘He’s resting,’ said the sister, shaking her head. ‘He’s an old man. He needs his sleep.’

‘You’re new here,’ said Kella. ‘Who are you?’

‘Sister Conchita,’ said the nun, bridling slightly, as if not used to being challenged.

‘Conchita?’

For a moment the sister lost some of her assurance. She looked almost embarrassed.

‘When I finished my training, I thought I was going to be sent to South America. I took a name I thought would be appropriate there. Then I was posted to the Solomons instead.’ She stopped suddenly, flustered. ‘Now just why am I telling you all this?’ she wondered aloud.

‘It could have been worse,’ offered Kella. ‘If they told you that you were going to the South Pole you might have called yourself Sister Igloo or Sister Husky.’

There was a sound of shuffling footsteps and Father Pierre appeared from the interior of the house. He was in his eighties, wizened and bowed with a few wisps of white hair drawn across his scalp. Spectacles with bottle lenses were perched on his nose. He was wearing faded black shorts reaching to his knees and an old blue shirt. A small wooden cross, inlaid with shell, hung around his neck. When he saw the police sergeant his face lit up.

‘Ben!’ he said joyously. ‘I heard you were on the island. How are you?
E Diana asiana kufi riki oe lau
.’

‘I’m well, father,’ said Kella.

‘Well, don’t just stand there. Come in, come in.’ The old man looked at the disapproving Sister Conchita. ‘Ben’s an old friend,’ he explained. ‘He was a student here once. I hoped he would be the first Melanesian priest in charge of the mission, but it didn’t work out that way.’

The old priest took Kella through to the living room. Sister Conchita went into the kitchen, closing the door with a thud. The room had been renovated since Kella had last been in it. Most of the decrepit old furniture had been replaced and the wooden floorboards had been polished to a high sheen. Several open-topped crates of carvings from the school were in the process of being labelled before being dispatched to Honiara. One or two of the artefacts seemed to have been blackened with floor polish to give the carvings an aged effect.

Sister Conchita could be heard moving noisily about the kitchen. Father Pierre glanced in the direction of the sounds.

‘Nothing personal,’ he grinned. ‘She’s only been here a month and the girl’s genuinely concerned for my well-being, bless her.’

‘She’ll soon learn that you’re as tough as old boots,’ Kella assured him. ‘How many housekeepers have you seen off in the last forty years?’

‘Nine or ten,’ said the priest vaguely. ‘And five bishops. Don’t forget the bishops. They came and went with all the impact of the fluttering of butterfly wings. One of them wanted to move me out once.’ Father Pierre grinned with yellow-toothed relish. Sister Conchita came in, radiating disapproval and carrying a tray with two glasses of lime juice. She lowered the tray on to a table.

‘It was in 1942, eighteen years ago,’ went on the priest. ‘You know what it was like then. The Japanese were about to invade and everybody was panicking. The bishop wanted me to leave Malaita. Nonsense, of course. There was too much to do here. After all, the priest is responsible for the safety of everyone on the station.’

There was a clatter. Sister Conchita had upset one of the glasses. Red with embarrassment she muttered a word of apology and hurried out to return with a cloth with which to mop up the spilt lime juice.

‘Time for the radio sked,’ said Father Pierre, ignoring the disturbance. ‘Do you have any messages to send to Honiara?’

Kella shook his head. Father Pierre went over to the antiquated radio transmitter and receiver taking up most of one side of the room. He sat down and switched it on in time for the daily scheduled hour when the bishop in Honiara contacted all the mission stations in turn.

Precisely on the hour, the booming voice of the bishop forced its way through the crackling overlapping frequencies. Kella noticed that Sister Conchita was standing near the door, listening to the messages. The different missions began to call with their requests. From one transmitter on Guadalcanal came a
particularly
plaintive appeal, ‘My lord, we’re out of whisky and fags!’ A priest on Santa Isabel asked for permission to conduct the burial of a child from a non-Christian village who had died in the mission hospital. When she heard this request Sister Conchita shifted position abruptly.

Throughout Father Pierre sat huddled in evident pleasure over the radio, providing a running commentary on the incoming messages. ‘Father Joseph has been called to Honiara – he’s in trouble with the bishop! … Father Michael has been moved to another station – he can’t handle the people where he is!’ At one stage the old man bristled indignantly when the bishop broke into his native German to talk to a compatriot. ‘Secrets!’ spat Father Pierre with disgust.

Eventually came the call sign for Ruvabi. Father Pierre picked up the microphone and answered eagerly. ‘All present and correct, my lord! Sergeant Kella has just arrived.’

‘I expect he’s looking for Dr Mallory, the anthropologist,’ boomed the prelate. ‘Has he returned yet?’

‘Not yet, my lord. But if he is in the high bush Ben Kella is the right man to find him.’

‘Tell him to take care,’ warned the bishop. ‘There are rumours that Pazabosi is on the move again. It is important that no one disturbs him. I’m sure that the police commissioner will agree with me. Please pass my message on to Sergeant Kella. By the way, I hear there’s been an earthquake in your region. Any damage?’

‘Minimal, my lord. A few trees uprooted, some rocks disturbed. Nothing we can’t handle.’

A worried look had appeared on Sister Conchita’s face. The nun caught Kella’s inquiring gaze and looked away in annoyance.

‘How is Sister Conchita settling in?’ went on the bishop.

‘Very well. She’s cleaned places I didn’t even know we had. She’s looking after the native sisters, exports the carvings, keeps the books, supervises the medical centre, inspects schools and runs the farm. She is fully occupied.’

The bishop bade farewell to Ruvabi with a blessing. Father Pierre waited until the scheduled hour was over and then switched off the radio.

‘You will take care with Pazabosi, won’t you?’ he asked Kella, returning to his armchair. ‘He’s a vindictive fellow. Weren’t you friends once?’

‘In the war,’ Kella replied. ‘We were in the same patrol boat.’

‘Oh yes,’ chuckled the priest. ‘Deacon’s pirates.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Kella, ‘I ran into Pazabosi again this morning. He even placed a curse on me.’

He told the old man of his encounter with the magic man in the bush. Father Pierre rubbed his chin uneasily.

‘I don’t like the sound of this,’ he said. ‘Why has Pazabosi come down from the mountains? He hardly ever leaves his village these days.’

‘I can think of two possible reasons,’ said Kella. ‘One is that he’s putting another cargo cult uprising together.’

Sister Conchita was collecting their empty glasses. ‘Do you know what a cargo cult is, sister?’ Father Pierre asked her.

‘They sometimes occur when a tribal society comes into contact with a more affluent one,’ said the nun. ‘The local people become jealous of the possessions – the cargo – of their visitors. Sometimes they try to use custom magic to empower an uprising, believing that the cargo will then become theirs.’ She paused. ‘There was something like that on Malaita after the war, wasn’t there?’

‘Marching Rule,’ said Kella.

The sister nodded and went out.

‘What other reason do you think that Pazabosi might have to leave his village?’ asked Father Pierre.

‘He particularly doesn’t want me on Malaita. I’m the
aofia
and maybe Pazabosi doesn’t want a peacemaker on the island at the moment. I’ll keep my eyes open when I go up after Mallory tomorrow.’

Father Pierre looked alarmed. ‘Do you really think you should go into the mountains?’ he demurred. ‘After what happened last time—’

‘If that’s where Mallory is, I don’t have much choice,’ said Kella.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said the old man sadly. ‘But take care.’

Suddenly the priest looked tired. Within a few moments his chin was on his chest and he was breathing evenly as he slept.

Kella sat on in the living room, trying to put his thoughts in order. In the six months during which he had been banished from Malaita, too many things had been happening here for his liking. There was the strange custom death of Senda Iabuli, and the subsequent panic-stricken flight of Peter Oro to investigate. Were they linked to the sudden appearance of Pazabosi the magic man and his effort to deter Kella by placing a curse on him?

And there was something badly wrong at the mission too, he thought. He wondered why Sister Conchita was so uneasy. She was as jumpy as a three-week-old kitten, yet Kella could have sworn that normally the nun was a most self-composed young woman.

In fact, the whole area seemed in a state of disarray. His superior Chief Superintendent Grice might not like it, but Kella would have to stay and investigate.

Kella had been lying for several hours in the dark behind the clump of ngali nut trees at the side of the graveyard. The oppressive night was humming with mosquitoes. Fireflies darted in vicious groups, like tracer bullets. He could hear the swelling chorus of cicadas and hunting owls. Squads of the fruit bats known as flying foxes headed aggressively through the air for their feeding grounds.

Kella prepared for a long stay. After he had left the sleeping priest that afternoon, he had made a tour of the huts on the station, pursuing the elders among his
wantoks
, those people on the mission who shared his language. Because the station was so close to Kella’s home among the artificial islands, most of the local islanders were members of his clan and owed him both hospitality and the truth. Even so, there had been an unusual number of shifty silences and uncomfortable evasions from the old men and women he had encountered.

Kella suspected that most of the elders knew that something of moment was occurring but were not sure of the details. His feeling had been reinforced when he showed the islanders the carved bone he had found under the comfort stones in the neighbouring village. They admitted that it was a bones
tabu
, issued by a magic man to a potential victim, but claimed to have no knowledge of Senda Iabuli or the dead villager’s grandson Peter Oro.

Of all people, Mendana Gau had taken him closest to a solution. Gau was a scruffy, middle-aged entrepreneur from the Santa Cruz island group. For a number of years he had lived by his wits on the mission station, mainly by acting as the local agent for a Chinese trader in the capital. Gau ran a small store on the edge of the station, selling tinned rice and meat. Sometimes he would go on mysterious and probably illegal trading trips into the interior of the island.

Kella had run Gau down in the back room of his store, first brushing by the truculent but suddenly circumspect islander who was serving behind the counter. The sergeant found Gau engaged in easing the metal casing of a wartime shell into a large sack of copra amid a pile awaiting collection by the next boat. The trader’s instinctive malevolent glare changed to a look of worried servility when he recognized the policeman.

‘Sergeant Kella,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘What a pleasant surprise!’

‘You really should move with the times,’ Kella told him, indicating the reinforced sack of copra. ‘Even the Brits open the sacks and check the contents before they weigh them these days.’

‘Ballast for the boat,’ muttered Gau. He was small and rat-like, wearing dirty khaki shorts and a tattered T-shirt revealing a substantial beer belly. A cigarette end dangled constantly from his lower lip. His flickering red-rimmed eyes met Kella’s sceptical gaze. He shrugged. ‘If the Customs officials are busy they don’t always open the sacks at the wharf,’ he explained.

‘Gau, your whole career of petty robbery has been a triumph of optimism over bitter experience,’ Kella told him, sitting on the edge of a rickety table. ‘I’m here because I want some information from you.’

‘I know nothing,’ said the trader humbly. ‘I am a mere outcast here, a poor itinerant exile from the Eastern islands.’

‘And rightly so,’ agreed Kella, ‘because without a doubt you are also the biggest thief and liar on the station. However, on this occasion you might be of use to me. What do you know of the bones
tabu
?’ From his pocket he produced the carved and polished bone he had found among the heating stones.

‘Nothing,’ whined Gau. ‘These things are of the Lau culture.’

Kella stood up. The trader flinched and cringed away. Ignoring him, Kella walked over to the rusty weighing scales in a corner. He picked up four of the heavy metal counterweights lying on the floor.

‘I wonder what would happen if I took these back to Honiara to be checked?’ he mused aloud. ‘If they proved to be wrong you would lose your licence.’

A spasm of fury contorted Gau’s unshaven face. As if by accident he knocked a tin of corned beef off the table. It fell to the floor with a clatter.

‘If that’s supposed to be a signal to your hard man out there, don’t bother,’ said Kella mildly. ‘He’ll be long gone by now. He is of the Afena Kwai tribe on the foothills above Gwau Rate. Good enough for bullying women and children who complain about your prices, but I doubt if he’ll stand up to a Sulufou man.’

‘There would be no question of opposing the law in this establishment,’ Gau said hastily. ‘Especially when that law is also the
aofia
.’