Devil-Devil (12 page)

17

MURDER TWICE OVER

Kella had been waiting fatalistically for almost an hour in the ante-room in the Secretariat, the administration building in Honiara. Chief Superintendent Grice and Inspector Lorrimer were already inside with the secretary for interior affairs.

The Guadalcanal girl sitting behind the receptionist's desk smiled across at him sympathetically, sensing an islander in trouble. Kella winked, but he was not feeling particularly jaunty.

He had arrived back at the capital from Malaita on a fast government vessel three hours ago. The previous day Lorrimer and his armed police officers had escorted him down to the coast from the Kwaio bush village. A waiting government speedboat had taken them round to the harbour at the Malaitan district station of Auki.

Kella sat immobile, trying to control his impatience. There was much to be done. He could not afford to waste time here. The door of the inner office opened. Lorrimer poked his head out.

‘Sergeant Kella, will you come in, please,' he asked.

The office was large and air-conditioned. On one wall was an official signed photograph of the queen and on another were two crossed Nigerian assegais. The secretary, spare, white-haired and bristling terrier-tenacious, sat behind the desk. Grice sat upright on a chair before him. Lorrimer resumed his seat next to the chief superintendent.

‘Sit down, Sergeant Kella,' invited the secretary.

The three men glared at Kella. The sergeant fixed his innocent gaze on the secretary. There was an extended silence. Kella resisted the temptation to look at his watch.

‘Well now,' said the secretary with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps you'd better tell me just what you've been doing on Malaita over the last week.'

At different times over the past twenty-four hours Kella had already told his story to Lorrimer, Grice and the commissioner of police, with increasing degrees of incredulity on the part of his listeners. He repeated his version to his latest audience. Chief Superintendent Grice rumbled in the background, like a freshly activated volcano, as a counterpoint to his account.

‘Extraordinary!' winced the secretary when Kella had finished. ‘Quite extraordinary! Let me see if I've picked up the salient points. Chief Superintendent Grice sent you to Malaita to inquire as to the present whereabouts of Professor Mallory. Mr Grice gave you specific orders that you were to limit your activities to this alone. Am I right?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Kella, sitting to attention.

‘Yet you flagrantly disobeyed these instructions.' The secretary ticked off the infringements on pink, stubby fingers. ‘On your own initiative you start an investigation into the custom killing of a villager. Then you discover a skeleton at a mission station and allege that it is that of a beachcomber who has been murdered. After that you become involved in a shooting incident with a Roman Catholic sister, and tell her that someone is trying to kill her. Finally you launch yourself on an expedition into the most dangerous area of Malaita. This time you encounter the corpse of a dead schoolboy. This drives you into a rage, which antagonizes the local people to such an extent that they were about to kill you when Inspector Lorrimer and his officers arrived providentially.'

Kella had to admit that put like that it did all sound unfortunate. Aloud he said, ‘Sir, I believed that all these events were connected. In one way or another they were all involved in the disappearance of the professor.'

‘How the hell do you make that out?' exploded Chief Superintendent Grice. He caught the secretary's baleful stare and subsided unwillingly.

‘In my culture we don't believe in coincidences,' Kella told him. ‘We consider that all things have meaning and are interlinked. I think that when the earthquake uncovered the skeleton of Lofty Herman at the mission, it gave rise to everything that followed. Pazabosi had been waiting for a sign to start a cargo uprising. Wittingly or unwittingly Senda Iabuli and his nephew Peter Oro became involved in the bones
tabu
that Pazabosi had placed on the area to stop people examining Herman's skeleton too closely. As a result, they were both killed.'

‘Then how did Sister Conchita become involved?' asked Lorrimer. ‘She's convinced that the man with the rifle was trying to kill her, not you.'

‘I don't know,' confessed Kella.

Disbelief hovered like a cloud of mosquitoes over the other three. The secretary cleared his throat fastidiously. He may have been one of the despised expatriate dregs of Empire, but he was determined to get at least one more promotion on some neglected rock before the few remaining British overseas dependencies dwindled away. To achieve that he intended to do everything by the book, carrying out the wishes of Whitehall without needlessly upsetting an increasingly restless local population.

‘It seems to me, Sergeant Kella,' he observed frostily, ‘that once again you have allowed yourself to become too closely involved with events on Malaita. Earlier this year you had to face a court of inquiry after the death of a missionary in the same area. At the time there was a strong feeling in the court that had you done your duty strictly as a police officer, instead of allowing, er, cultural considerations to prevail, that death might have been averted.'

‘I did what I believed to be right, under the circumstances,' said Kella.

‘Didn't do much for the poor bugger who got killed, though,' said Chief Superintendent Grice brusquely, shifting his pendulous bulk in his chair.

‘On this occasion,' went on the secretary equably, ignoring both interruptions, ‘Father Pierre at the mission and Mr Deacon, the plantation manager, both knew that you were going up to the waterfall in search of Professor Mallory. That enabled Inspector Lorrimer, very courageously, to take his squad through the bush after you.'

‘Why did you send Inspector Lorrimer to Malaita in the first place?' asked Kella. It was a matter that had been puzzling him.

‘We had reports from a number of mission stations that Pazabosi had been seen outside the Kwaio district, a very rare occurrence. We assumed that he was intent on stirring up unrest again. The situation on Malaita is always a volatile one. Under the circumstances, the last thing this Administration needs is a loose cannon like yourself careering all over the island.'

‘Pazabosi may have kidnapped Professor Mallory,' said Kella stubbornly. ‘I can do some good over there—'

‘You may rest assured, sir,' said Chief Superintendent Grice stiffly, ‘that Sergeant Kella will not be returning to Malaita in the foreseeable future.'

‘I'm glad to hear it,' nodded the senior official. He returned his attention to Kella. ‘I'm sure that there is plenty for you to do here in Honiara. After all, despite your rather chequered career, you are still our senior indigenous police officer, Kella. The Protectorate has invested a lot of time and money in your development. There's still time to put these matters behind you and make a career for yourself in the force. It's simply a matter of overcoming your more impulsive tendencies.' He rifled through some papers before him dismissively. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.'

Outside in the busy corridor Chief Superintendent Grice walked away without a word or a glance back. He was probably annoyed at having to start work so early that day, thought Kella. To his local staff Grice was known as Ten Fifteen, as that was the time he usually arrived at the office in the morning.

‘Want a lift back to HQ?' Lorrimer asked him.

‘No thanks, I've got things to do,' answered Kella. ‘You can drive me along the coast and drop me off at Domo, if you like.'

Lorrimer nodded. He hesitated and then lowered his voice. ‘Look, old son,' he murmured. ‘Don't push things too far, eh? They don't want to sack you because it would cause a stink getting rid of someone as well-known as you are, but if you force them into it they will, and then find another local heir-apparent. You can always do your celebrated tilting at windmills bit when you're the boss man here in the islands.'

‘I can't wait that long,' Kella told him, striding away down the corridor.

Outside the Secretariat building they walked in the 80 degree heat to the inspector's jeep. It was a hot, airless afternoon in the small town. Mendana Avenue, the capital's single main street, lined with flowering flame trees, was occupied on both sides by stores and office buildings. Many of the shops and the Point Cruz cinema were housed in old Quonset huts left standing by American troops when they abandoned the site in 1945. The office buildings, the two banks and the courthouse were of stone.

To one side of the main road, on the ridges above the town, were the residences of the government officials and their families. On the other side of the avenue, behind the row of buildings, were the placid bay and the harbour. About ten thousand people lived in and around Honiara. A tenth of them were expatriates — British, Australians, Americans, New Zealanders, Chinese and Fijians.

Lorrimer drove them out of town in silence. Normally he was friendly enough but this afternoon he seemed preoccupied. Kella knew that he was indebted to the other man for coming to his aid on Malaita. It would have taken courage for an expatriate with no knowledge of the island to lead his police squad up the forested mountains into Kwaio territory. The Englishman seemed a conscientious police officer and, as a temporary visitor, he had the advantage of not being an Old Colonial. For some time Kella had wondered if this was a rare white man who might be trusted.

They soon left the houses behind them. On their right, along the winding, pitted coastal road, were the smooth waters of Ironbottom Sound, so-called because of the number of Allied vessels which had been sunk off the coast during the war. On their left, palm trees gave way to the wooded foothills, which in turn climbed gradually to the central mountain range of the island of Guadalcanal.

‘No chance of your telling me what you're going to do, I suppose?' asked Lorrimer resignedly.

‘Believe me,' Kella assured him, ‘best you don't know.'

The inspector tried again. ‘Then at least tell me this. Why do you think that the killings of Senda Iabuli and Peter Oro are linked? Apart from the fact that the two islanders were related.'

‘They were both custom killings,' said Kella. ‘They're very rare. It's most unlikely that there would be two separate murders in such a short time. I'm sure the deaths were combined. And there's something else.'

‘What's that?'

‘I think', said Kella carefully, deciding after much thought to share his thoughts with someone for once, ‘that Senda Iabuli might have been murdered twice.'

Carefully Lorrimer pulled into the side of the dusty road and stopped the jeep. He switched off the ignition and turned to face Kella.

‘All right,' he said, ‘I'll buy it. What was that supposed to mean? How could anyone be killed twice?'

‘You see,' explained Kella, ‘when I made my first investigation into the death of Senda Iabuli, I suspected that he had been killed by the other people in his village.'

‘Why on earth would they want to do that?'

‘Because of Iabuli's miraculous escape from death. Think about it. To take the fall that he did, and survive, seems impossible. How could he possibly have escaped death?'

‘Are you saying that Senda Iabuli didn't fall from that bridge? There were witnesses—'

‘Oh, he fell all right. Hundreds of feet. I went to the ravine and looked for myself. Iabuli had a simply miraculous escape from death. And by doing that he ensured that he would die.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' demanded Lorrimer.

‘The people of the village could only have come to one logical conclusion when they found Senda Iabuli still alive. They would have believed that the old man had entered into a pact with a devil, who had saved his life.'

‘Oh, come on,' said Lorrimer.

‘Trust me,' said Kella. ‘I'm a witch doctor. I know these things. According to custom, it was the only thing they
could
think.'

‘Do you really believe that?'

‘Never mind what I believe. I'm telling you the way it was in that village. The people there couldn't have someone wandering about who was in cahoots with a devil. It would be far too dangerous. They would have gone to the headman and demanded that Senda Iabuli be killed before he could harm anyone.'

‘So the headman killed him?'

‘Or had him killed. If the headman wanted to remain in charge he would have had Senda Iabuli poisoned. Peter Oro, the old man's grandson, remembered enough about the custom ways to guess that. That's why he insisted on the ghost-caller being summoned to find out the truth. Which he did, in a way.'

‘Believe me,' said Lorrimer dazedly, ‘murder inquiries were never like this at West End Central. How do you mean ‘‘in a way''?'

‘Somehow or other,' said Kella, following the thread unravelling in his mind, ‘Iabuli had also upset Pazabosi, the old bush magic man. I know that because I found a sign of the bones
tabu
outside Iabuli's house. That meant that Pazabosi had put it where Iabuli would have found it when he was getting the comfort stones to put under his bed.'

‘You mean this was separate from anything the headman might have done?'

‘Oh, yes,' said Kella. ‘No doubt about it.'

‘A bit like being slipped the black spot,' ruminated Lorrimer. ‘So the poor old sod was being targeted by both the headman and by Pazabosi?'

‘Not the luckiest of guys, was he? I don't know which of them got to him first, the headman or Pazabosi. Perhaps they both did it. That's what I meant when I said he may have been murdered twice.'

‘Exactly how was Senda Iabuli killed?' asked Lorrimer. ‘That might help us find out who the murderer was.'

‘I don't know,' admitted Kella. ‘Iabuli had already received a custom burial by the time I arrived at the village. Even the
aofia
couldn't insist on the body being dug up, supposing I could have discovered his grave. He was probably poisoned or suffocated. Perhaps both if my theory is correct. Somebody could have smothered Iabuli after he had been drugged.'