Devil-Devil (6 page)

‘I’ve looked it up in the files,’ Lorrimer told him. ‘The only white man of that size known to have lived on Malaita was an Australian beachcomber called Lofty Herman. The drawback is that Herman disappeared eighteen years ago, back in 1942.’

The telephone rang. Not taking his eyes from the inspector’s face Grice lifted the receiver and listened. His back stiffened. Without a word carefully he replaced the receiver, as if taking part in a laboratory experiment which required absolute precision.

‘That was the chief secretary,’ he told his companion. ‘You’d better get yourself over to Malaita straight away and fetch Kella back. Apparently the silly sod’s in trouble again!’

‘How did you know that Sister Conchita was going to bury a skeleton last night?’ asked Father Pierre. The old priest was looking frail and small, as if physically reduced by the news the police sergeant had brought him.

They were sitting in the living room of the mission house. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Kella had been waiting patiently for the other two when they returned from celebrating Mass. Outside, the normal routine of the mission was being observed. Bare-breasted women in grass skirts were making their way up the wooded slopes on three sides of the compound to work in their gardens in the clearings. Men in loincloths were sitting outside their huts, mending fishing nets.

‘It seemed likely that there was a dead body on the station,’ Kella replied.

He told them about finding the bone under the pile of stones in the neighbouring village. He described how Pazabosi, the old magic man, had pointed a bonito fish impaled on a bone at him, to warn the policeman that he would anger the spirits if he pursued his inquiry. He explained how the trader Mendana Gau had confirmed his suspicions.

‘How do you associate bones with an unexpected death?’ asked an unusually subdued Sister Conchita.

‘Local tradition,’ said Father Pierre automatically. ‘If a magic man brings a bone curse to an area, it means that there has been a strange death which will trigger off evil events, unless the
tabu
is observed and people keep away from the place where the death occurred.’

The old man was silent for a moment and then addressed Kella. ‘Do you think there could be a connection between the death in the village and the bones
tabu
placed on the mission station?’

Kella shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I also found a piece of ginger sprinkled with lime among the stones. That means that a separate curse had been placed on Senda Iabuli, the villager who died. You wouldn’t have a lime curse and a bones
tabu
placed on the same corpse.’

‘I agree,’ said the priest, nodding. ‘The two deaths weren’t part of the same curse.’

‘The only connection between the two is the schoolboy Peter Oro,’ said Kella. ‘I think he had been searching the hut for signs of a curse, but it hadn’t occurred to him to look outside among the comfort stones.’

‘All this talk of magic!’ burst out a scandalized Sister Conchita. ‘Surely you can’t believe it! This is a Christian area.’

‘Part-Christian,’ Father Pierre corrected her. ‘Much of the interior of Malaita is still pagan.’ He cast an apologetic glance at the impassive sergeant. ‘I’m sorry, Ben. I meant that many people still worship in the old ways there.’

Sister Conchita restrained herself with an obvious effort. ‘All right,’ she said to Kella. ‘So you worked out that something connected with a body was going on here at the mission. You still haven’t told me why you were waiting at the cemetery.’

‘Last night Mendana Gau, the storekeeper, told me that the bones
tabu
would soon be over. That sort of curse usually ends when a body is reinterred. Gau also hinted that one of the expatriates on the station was involved – business bilong whitefella. With all respect, Father Pierre is a bit beyond grave digging, so I assumed it would be you. Especially as you seemed a bit upset yesterday afternoon when I arrived at the mission.’

‘So much for my careful dissembling,’ said Sister Conchita.

‘Perhaps, sister, it is time for you to tell us how you came to be involved in this odd affair,’ said Father Pierre.

The nun nodded, marshalled her thoughts and started to speak, gaining in confidence as she went.

‘It started a couple of days ago,’ she told her listeners. ‘I was teaching at the mission school. A woman ran down from the gardens to tell me that a skeleton had been found at the foot of the cliff. By the time I got there a crowd of islanders were trying to carry it away.’

‘Presumably to hide it somewhere before I heard about the incident,’ nodded the priest.

‘I told them that you would have to be informed,’ said Sister Conchita. She dropped her head. Her hands trembled in her lap.

‘Then what?’ prompted Kella.

Slowly the nun raised her head. ‘I’ve never seen the mission people like it,’ she said. ‘Normally they’re so happy and pleasant, but now they’d found the skeleton they were in a dreadful state.’

‘Presumably an aspect of their past had come back to revisit them,’ said the priest. ‘I’m sorry. Please go on.’

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ confessed Sister Conchita. ‘I know I should have come to you, but the people seemed convinced that the body had something to do with you, and that you would be badly affected if you heard about it. I didn’t want to risk upsetting you, especially as you hadn’t been well lately. So I, well, I kind of took it upon myself to bury him.’

She looked across the room at the thoughtful Kella. ‘You guessed right. I couldn’t bring myself to put the skeleton in unconsecrated ground, so I brought him to the cemetery last night.’

There was a long silence. Father Pierre closed his eyes. Sister Conchita stared at the floor. ‘I had better see this skeleton,’ the priest said, his voice tired.

‘There’s no need,’ said Kella. ‘I used your radio last night to contact Honiara, while you were asleep. They’ll ship the bones back there for examination, but I believe it’s Lofty Herman.’

A sound, which was half a groan and half a sigh, escaped from the priest. Sister Conchita rose to minister to him but the old man waved her away.

‘The man was very tall,’ Kella told him. ‘No islander was ever that size and very few whites. It has to be Herman.’

‘And he’s been secretly buried on the mission station with a bullet in his head for all that time?’ asked the priest.

‘It looks like it.’ Kella rose and glanced at his watch. ‘I’d like you to show me where you first found the skeleton,’ he informed the nun. ‘Say in thirty minutes? I’ll come back for you after I’ve spoken to one or two people.’

After Kella had left the room, Sister Conchita approached Father Pierre. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I reckon I don’t come out too high on obedience or humility.’

‘You did what you thought was right,’ said the priest. ‘That’s important.’

‘Sergeant Kella seems to be on the ball,’ ventured the sister. ‘Maybe he’ll get to the bottom of things.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Father Pierre. He saw the surprise on her face. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. If there’s anything untoward going on at the station I want it investigated, and Ben Kella’s the only man who could do it. But I’m afraid of the effect it might have on him if he gets dragged too far back into the past.’

‘He looks tough enough.’

‘None tougher.’ The priest was making one of his increasingly frequent forays back into the past. ‘Ben was twelve when he first came to the mission school. We had a very aggressive bunch of Roviana lads ruling the roost here then. They picked on Kella as a Malaitan boy, from the start. At the end of his first week here six of them beat him up and left him unconscious in a ditch.’

‘What did he do?’

The priest smiled. ‘He picked them off, one by one,’ he told her. ‘Stalked the mission like an avenging angel, or as he would probably have put it, a devil-devil. He caught the first alone in the bush, the second out on a reef, and so on. Waited for each one on a different night and then half-killed him.’

‘And you let this happen, father?’ asked a shocked Sister Conchita.

‘Kella was different,’ said the priest. ‘That was apparent from the beginning. I could see that he was working out his destiny. He came here to learn the white man’s ways, but he had to develop the warrior bit, too. He’s a Sulufou man. The Malaitans are the hardest men in the Solomons, and the ones from Sulufou are the pick of the bunch. They don’t only build their own houses, they construct whole islands, stone by stone, out in the lagoon, when they’re not fighting the bush people inland, or taking their canoes hundreds of miles out to sea. Once he had defeated the Roviana boys Ben could devote himself to his studies.’

‘I take it he was good at those, too?’

‘Oh yes. Brilliant. It was soon obvious that he was a man for the future. Unfortunately, we almost destroyed him in the process.’

‘How did that happen?’ asked Sister Conchita.

Father Pierre looked unhappy. ‘By the time Kella came here he had already been picked out by the Lau people as their
aofia
, the hereditary bringer of justice to the island. The custom priests had trained him in their traditional ways. Then we tried to turn him into a good Catholic. It was too much of a burden for a young boy, expecting him to cope with two different faiths and philosophies. For a time he ended up pretty cynical about them both. That didn’t stop him passing out at the top of his year at the secondary school and going on to university overseas. Then he came back and surprised everyone by joining the police force.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘I think he wanted to be sent back over here to Malaita to sort things out. We’re in a transitional state at the moment. One day the British will leave. What will happen when independence comes? On this one island alone we have thirteen different clans, each speaking its own language. It’s a powder keg. Kella’s trying to calm things down. As a policeman he can get out among the people and do his
aofia
peacekeeping. I thought he was getting things under control, until …’

‘Until what, father?’

‘Oh, he had some trouble six months ago,’ said the old priest vaguely. ‘It set him back a little. I hope he’s all right now. That boy is a lot more sensitive than he lets on. The last thing he needs now is to get mixed up in another controversy, especially if it’s a custom murder.’

Kella met Sister Conchita outside the mission house. He noticed without surprise that she was looking at him with renewed curiosity. Father Pierre would have been telling her about him.

He wondered how much the priest knew about what was going on. The old man was losing his grip on the station, there was no doubt about that, but he was still held in high regard by the islanders.

Doggedly Kella had questioned one or two of his
wantoks
about the discovery of the skeleton. All they knew was that the earthquake had driven the bones to the surface. The older men had remembered that this was supposed to be an act of custom magic, said to presage some great happening. They had persuaded the new white sister to rebury the body secretly, so that the bones
tabu
on the area would be lifted and life could go back to normal.

They had told her that Father Pierre would be upset should he be informed of the situation. This had only been a ruse on their part to get the body safely under ground again. The old priest, even in his present distracted state, would have insisted on making inquiries about Lofty Herman. This would have entailed the continued presence of the skeleton above the ground and the prolonging of the bones curse.

Sister Conchita led the way through the station to the school compound.

‘I’m sure that Father Pierre will be all right,’ Kella started to say.

‘If you don’t mind, Sergeant Kella, I’d just as soon you didn’t patronize me,’ said the nun, staring ahead. ‘I know when I’ve screwed up big-time.’

They passed the trading store. Mendana Gau and several villainous-looking Santa Cruz men were stacking crates of Australian 4X beer against the side of the ramshackle building. The trader directed a malevolent glare at the police sergeant and snarled something in low tones to one of his helpers. The labourer sneered briefly and spat on the ground when he saw Kella looking at him.

Sister Conchita and Kella scrambled down the steep path leading to the broad, fast-flowing river cutting its way through the densely packed trees below the mission. Half a dozen canoes belonging to staff and pupils were stored on one bank in an
obala
, four poles supporting a thatched roof with no sides.

Most of the canoes were simple dugouts, but one was more substantial. It had been carefully constructed, with two long twelve-foot planks forming the bottom, and two more for the sides. The planks had been waterproofed with gum from the putty-nut tree and lashed together securely with pliable bamboo. Smaller pieces of wood had been used for the panels in the raised bow and stern. Fitted cross-planes reinforced the body of the craft. The exterior was decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl shell, shaped into outlines of frigate birds.

‘Just who was this Lofty Herman anyway?’ Sister Conchita asked. She spoke unwillingly, as if the words were being chiselled out of her, syllable by syllable.

‘He was an Australian beachcomber who lived here before the war,’ Kella told her. ‘I was only a boy then, and I don’t remember much about him, apart from his height. He went missing before the Japanese landed in 1942. Everyone assumed he must have been killed by a Japanese patrol in the bush.’

‘Perhaps he was,’ said the nun, a breath of hope stirring in her dejected tone.

Kella shook his head, not wanting to give the nun false hopes. Lofty Herman had been murdered, he was certain of that. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘For one thing, why would the Japanese have bothered to bury him? And if any of the islanders had found his body, they would have brought it back to Father Pierre for a proper burial.’