Devil-Devil (5 page)

‘Don’t you dare talk about the
aofia
, you miserable little man,’ Kella told the trader. ‘That name is for the Lau people only. You degrade it even by breathing its name.’

Gau looked genuinely frightened at the sudden change in the other man’s attitude. He scuttled as far away from Kella as he could, throwing up his thin arms in supplication.

‘Just ask me what you want to know,’ he snivelled. ‘Ask and get out!’

‘Bones,’ said Kella, half-ashamed of losing his temper. ‘That’s all I’ve been hearing today. What do you know about them?’

‘There’s a bones
tabu
on the station,’ said Gau cautiously. ‘So the old people say. It came about two days ago.’

‘Who is it from?’

‘I don’t know.’

Kella looked hard at the trader. Gau capitulated. ‘They say it is from Pazabosi, the old magic man,’ he said with a rush.

‘Is this bones
tabu
over yet?’

‘I don’t think so. Soon. Very soon.’

‘Who is mixed up in it?’

‘I don’t know. You can hit me if you like, but I still can’t tell you. Business bilong whitefella.’

Kella questioned the other man closely for another ten minutes, but it was evident that the resentful trader knew no more.

‘Very well,’ he said finally, walking towards the door. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Gau.’ Kella nodded at the weights he had discarded. ‘I’ll be checking those before I leave. If they still give false weight tomorrow I’ll tear your store down plank by plank.’

Afterwards he had dined on a roast chicken prepared by Bulko in his hut by the light of a battery-operated lamp over a substantial stove. They had eaten the meal in comfortable basket chairs while they listened to a Hank Williams LP on a portable record player. He had not bothered to question the headmaster. The Roviana man would never be told anything by the local islanders. Nor, with his attitude of benevolent self-interest, would Bulko want to know what was happening, unless it threatened his comfort or well-being.

Instead Kella had inquired about Peter Oro, the missing schoolboy. Bulko had been typically vague. Yes, the boy was away on personal leave to arrange the funeral of his grandfather. No, he did not know much about the pupil, except that he was both bright and rebellious, but who wasn’t at that age? Wearily the headmaster promised to make inquiries among the teachers who knew the boy.

Bulko was plainly less than enchanted with his charges. As he poured a beer for the sergeant he embarked upon a litany of complaints.

‘Just because they’ve been selected for higher education they think they need never get their hands dirty again,’ he grumbled. ‘They’ll do anything to avoid working in the gardens. They slope off into the trees and go walkabout, make up sob stories, go sick. Why, last week some of them even broke into the tool store and scattered the gardening equipment all over the place, just to avoid working on the land. We’re still looking for some of the missing stuff.’

‘What a shame,’ sympathized Kella. ‘Especially after the example of unrelenting manual work you set them.’

‘That’s different,’ said Bulko firmly. ‘They only think they’re special. I
am
special.’

After the meal, under the cover of darkness, Kella had gone to work, making his way by a circuitous route to the graveyard on the northern boundary of the station. Several hundred white wooden crosses extended over the well-tended ground leading into the trees. Kella crouched behind a bush. For several hours no one approached the cemetery. Even the converted islanders shared the Lau religion’s fear of death. Few would willingly come near the bone-yard after dark.

It was past midnight before Kella heard approaching footsteps and the creaking of wheels coming from the direction of the mission house. The sergeant shifted his position. He was feeling so stiff that he was sure that some of the corpses around him would be able to give him a start and beat him over a twenty yards sprint.

Three figures approached through the gloom. One was undoubtedly Sister Conchita in her white robes. She was accompanied by two frightened young island sisters wearing the blue habits of the Daughters of Melanesia. With some difficulty, the American nun was carrying three spades. The two island girls were pushing a wheelbarrow carrying something long and bulky encased in woven mats.

Kella looked on as the three women started inexpertly to dig a grave. For fifteen minutes they worked doggedly at their task. Maliciously Kella let them get a couple of feet down into the ground. He did not move until the sisters had lowered their spades and were lifting the bundle from the wheelbarrow. Then he stood up and walked quietly towards them. The Melanesians saw him first. They screamed, dropping the mats and their burden. The mats separated, dispersing their contents of darkened bones on the ground.

‘Place im e fall down no good too mas,’ said Kella, making one of his infrequent forays into pidgin. He translated for the benefit of the astounded Sister Conchita. ‘This is a bad place for a man to fall down.’

The American recovered her self-possession quickly. ‘What is the meaning of this, Sergeant Kella?’ she demanded, in a voice that, for all her visible efforts, she was unable to prevent quavering. ‘You do realize that this is consecrated ground?’

‘An appropriate enough place for a skeleton,’ agreed Kella. He was on his hands and knees, reassembling the framework in some sort of rough order. Sister Conchita was silent for a moment.

‘How …’ she began uncertainly. ‘I mean …’

‘Bones,’ said Kella, not looking up, his fingers working busily. ‘Ever since I landed on the island two days ago I’ve been hearing nothing but bones. There was a suspicious death at a village near here after a bones curse had been placed on the dead man. A magic man came down from the high bush just to frighten me off with a bones
tabu
. When I reach the station I find that there are rumours that a bones curse has been put on something here as well. There’s only one place where a bones curse could really operate and that’s in a graveyard. So I decided to keep watch here for a couple of nights.’ He paused and then added, ‘Then there was the way you were behaving this afternoon.’

‘Me?’ asked Sister Conchita, startled.

‘You were apprehensive about something. You knocked over a glass when Father Pierre said that the priest was responsible for the safety of everyone on his station. When the father at the Santa Isabel mission spoke over the sked asking permission to bury a non-Christian in his cemetery, you looked really upset. That made me wonder whether you knew something about what was going on here.’

‘You’ve been very observant,’ said the nun in a small voice.

‘Believe me,’ said Kella grimly, ‘I haven’t even started yet.’

His groping hands had found the skull. Quickly he turned it in his hands. At the back of the cranium there was the unmistakable indentation of a bullet hole.

‘Kella wants a coffin,’ said Inspector Lorrimer.

‘Surely not?’ said Chief Superintendent Grice. ‘He can’t be more than thirty. Years ahead of him yet. More’s the pity.’

‘It’s not for him,’ said Lorrimer patiently. Grice sometimes overdid his bucolic act. ‘Apparently he’s found a corpse on Malaita.’

‘So what else is new?’ asked Grice dispiritedly.

The two men were in the chief superintendent’s office on the second floor of the police headquarters building in Honiara. Lorrimer was standing at the window, looking down at the parade ground where a squad of recruits was being drilled noisily by an immaculate sergeant in a white
lap-lap
. On the other side of Mendana Avenue, which ran through the centre of the capital, were the white walls of the Guadalcanal Club, with its verandah running down to the beach behind and the slow, white-topped breakers of the deep-blue sea.

‘Why a coffin?’ burst out Grice petulantly. ‘Doesn’t Kella usually bury the people he kills in a hole in the ground and hope we don’t hear about it?’

‘We’ve never been able to prove that he’s killed anyone,’ Lorrimer pointed out reasonably. It was a wonder they ever caught any criminals at all, he thought. There were only three hundred officers and men in a police force responsible for the hundreds of tropical islands extending across the Coral Sea for almost a thousand miles in the chain lying north-east of Australia.

‘Only because he’s a little tin god on Malaita. What native is ever going to give evidence against a ju-ju man, for God’s sake?’

‘He’s an
aofia
,’ Lorrimer corrected his senior officer. He had researched the subject while preparing the papers for Kella’s court of inquiry the previous year. ‘It’s a position peculiar to the Lau region of Malaita. Every few decades, a man of the line of chieftains appears who is of such probity and strength of character that he is appointed while he is still a child to maintain peace among all the people of the Lau region. It’s a heavy responsibility. He’s a sort of paramount chieftain.’

‘He’s supposed to be a bloody policeman,’ pointed out Grice violently.

‘Kella thinks he can be both.’

‘How the hell can Ben Kella be a peacemaker? He’s as wild as an alley-cat sometimes.’

‘He doesn’t have to be a pacifist to be an
aofia
. The reverse, sometimes. I agree it’s not an easy concept to grasp.’

The two policemen were silent in a rare moment of concord. The atmosphere between them was usually one of armed neutrality. Grice was a permanent and pensionable officer, a member of what in its pomp had once been the Colonial Police Force, now better known locally as the African Retreads. Lorrimer was on a temporary secondment from the
Metropolitan
Police in London.

‘Kella could have had it all, you know,’ Grice complained, almost sadly. ‘He’s a Malaita man, so all the other islanders are scared shitless of him. He was the first native graduate to join the police force. He’s been on half a dozen attachments to forces all over the world. If he would just keep his head down he could be the first Melanesian Commissioner of Police, when
independence
comes. But what does he want?’

‘Kella’s his own man,’ said Lorrimer.

‘He wants to be a bush policeman, that’s what,’ said Grice, ignoring his subordinate. ‘Spends half his time poking around the jungle. And look at the trouble that got him into.’

‘He got an official reprimand for it,’ Lorrimer pointed out.

‘Bit of a mate of yours, isn’t he?’ sniffed the chief
superintendent
.

‘Kella’s an interesting man,’ said Lorrimer non-committally. ‘Honest, too. He could have lied his way out of trouble after that missionary was killed last year.’

And he knows the islands, he thought. He wished that Kella was back in Honiara. The case presently occupying Lorrimer concerned two feuding neighbouring villages on Choiseul in the Western District. The occupants of one village were Methodists and the other comprised Seventh Day Adventists. The dispute had originated over a garden plot situated between the villages and claimed by both. Trouble had escalated to such an extent that the Methodists were waiting until Saturday, the Adventist day of church worship, and then pillaging the SDA gardens. For their part, the Adventists were retaliating by raiding the Methodist gardens on Sundays while their owners were at church. Kella would know how to deal with such a situation.

‘If you’ll take a word of advice,’ said Grice portentously, ‘you won’t get too close to the natives, Lorrimer. I’ve never forgiven Kella for the way he let me down over the rugby.’

‘Rugby?’ asked Lorrimer. He was not interested in sport.

‘Best wing forward the Solomons team ever had.’ Grice had the rapt look of a man who invested as much enthusiasm in rugby football as other men did in sin.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time the Solomons played Fiji?’ he asked. He paid no attention to the other man’s indifferent nod. ‘Never seen anything like it. Everyone thought that the Fijians would put sixty points past us. We had the usual rag-bag of a side. Half a dozen expats from the timber company, and then the usual mixture of odds and sods – Malaitans, Tikopians, a poofter British teacher from King George VI School, who was supposed to be captain.’

‘What happened?’ asked Lorrimer, dutifully excavating his superior from the shallow grave of his reverie.

‘Kella was playing, that’s what happened,’ said Grice, looking almost happy for once. ‘Open-side wing forward. It was bloody marvellous. From the kick-off nobody paid any attention to the expat skipper. The whole team was looking to Kella for a lead. He didn’t want it, anybody could see that, but the leadership was foisted upon him. They just knew he was their natural chief. We tonked ’em, 25–9. Kella led the team as if it was a war party. No prisoners. Then he let us all down.’

‘How did he do that?’

‘With him in the team we could have won the South Pacific Cup that season. What does he do? I’ll tell you. He goes off to Australia on a degree course, and while he’s there he plays professional Rugby League, which meant he couldn’t play Union again when he came back.’

‘Needed the money, I suppose.’

‘Don’t you believe it. His family owns a copra plantation and I don’t know what else on Malaita. No, he played League just to stick two fingers up at me.’

Grice sat simmering, the memories of a dozen similar betrayals of colonial benevolent paternalism in almost as many former colonial territories seething in his time-expired brain.

‘About Kella’s corpse,’ Lorrimer reminded the chief
superintendent
.

‘Forget it. It’ll just be another inter-tribal feud.’

‘That’s the point, sir. The corpse found by Kella is that of a murdered white man.’

Chief Superintendent Grice looked at the other officer beseechingly, mutely imploring him to retract the last sentence.

‘A white man?’ he spluttered.

‘Kella believes that the body has been dead for some years. The skeleton is six and a half feet tall, much bigger than any islander.’

‘Six and a half feet?’ said Grice. ‘I’ve never known an expatriate that tall, and I’ve served here for twelve years.’