Killman (13 page)

‘Certainly not,’ said Kella. ‘As I said, you haven’t broken any laws yet, and will not have done so until you attempt to smuggle these bottles on board the
Commissioner
.’

Besides which, he thought, there could be another twenty bloody-minded Tikopians involved in the smuggling racket and spoiling for a fight waiting on board the government vessel outside the reef. There was no way in which a single policeman could assert any authority over such a potentially dangerous bunch.

‘What will happen to the whisky?’ asked a voice from the men from the ship.

‘That’s the first sensible question I’ve heard from you. I suggest that you leave it here in Tabuna until you sail back for your next logging job in six months’ time,’ Kella said. ‘You won’t make a fortune from it, but you can still have a hell of a party upon your return.’

The Tikopians and the two Melanesian seamen who had rowed them ashore conferred in undertones. The man who had done most of the talking so far stepped forward.

‘How do we know that the men of this village will not drink it first?’ he asked.

‘For two reasons,’ said Kella. ‘The first is that they are afraid of you Tikopians.’

‘And what is the second reason?’

‘They’re afraid of me, too.’

The Tikopian spoke quickly to the others again and then nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We trust you and will leave the matter with you, Sergeant.’

‘I’m glad that’s settled,’ Kella told them. ‘Now perhaps I can get on with my real work. I’m looking for the American woman who collects songs. Who can show me where she is?’

The relieved islanders conducted him back to the centre of the village, where the Tikopians and the seamen resumed filling the casks, moving much more swiftly this time. Kella wondered what the villagers had made of the musicologist with her tape recorder. On the whole, the islanders were accustomed to the apparent eccentricities of the occasional touring expatriates and paid little attention to them. In years past, one government geologist had been famed for his proclivity towards teaching bush schoolchildren to sing ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ in Esperanto, while a driven district administrator had spent years constructing a seaplane out of materials jettisoned by the Japanese. When after several attempts it had failed to take off in one of the bays, he had attacked it wildly with an axe and reduced it to matchwood.

Florence Maddy, wiry and alert, permanently ready to go on to the defensive, was standing outside one of the huts with a number of the village women. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She recognized the police sergeant without any obvious sign of warmth, brushing an errant strand of hair back from her face with a nervously trembling hand as she greeted him.

‘Sergeant Kella,’ she said with a slight nod. ‘I believe you’re looking for me again. What is it this time?’

The emphasis on the last two words indicated that their last encounter on her artificial island still loomed in her mind. Taking his cue from her brusque greeting Kella got straight down to business.

‘I’m investigating the death of the islander known as Papa Noah last week,’ he said. ‘I believe that you were present at the church feast by the waterfall. Can you tell me what you saw there?’

‘Nothing of any help to you in your official capacity, I’m sure,’ Florence said stiffly. ‘I attended the feast because I heard that the choir would be singing songs of interest to me in my research project. In fact they only sang one such song. Then the storm blew up and some of the women present helped me down the slope to shelter in the village.’

‘Did you see anything of Papa Noah during this time?’

‘I had spoken briefly to him earlier to express my disappointment that only one pidgin song had been sung, but he seemed preoccupied over some visitor he was expecting. Then the storm came and everything became chaotic. I could hardly see an inch in front of my nose. As I told you, at this juncture some of the local women bundled me away to safety through the storm, and that’s all I know.’

‘But who invited you to the feast in the first place?’ persisted Kella.

‘I really can’t remember,’ said the musicologist. ‘Does it matter? Excuse me, I have work to do.’

Reluctantly Kella turned aside. As he did so, he noticed a backpack and several suitcases inside the door of one of the adjacent huts. They were half hidden beneath a number of woven mats.

‘Are you going somewhere, Dr Maddy?’ he asked.

The musicologist flushed. Too late Kella heard someone walking up behind him. He half turned, instinctively raising his hands to protect himself. Something very hard descended with force upon the back of his head, and suddenly he seemed to be falling forward helplessly into a very deep, very dark and apparently endless chasm. Before he was completely enclosed in darkness, the sergeant thought how misguided he had been ever to turn his back on a group as temperamental as the Tikopians.

Kella wondered how long he had been unconscious. The sun was almost directly overhead, which meant that about an hour had passed since he had been attacked from behind. He heaved himself to his feet and limped down to the water’s edge. As he had expected, the
Commissioner
was no longer in sight. The government vessel must have weighed anchor and sailed round the headland while he was lying senseless on the ground. Apart from a few stops to take on water, the ship would be out of touch for the best part of a week on its way to Tikopia.

He turned back and searched the village. It was empty. The islanders would have fled to the safety of the bush after a police officer had been assaulted within its boundaries. It would be several days before they dared to return, if they came back at all. With rumours of the activities of the killman still percolating, many of them might choose the safety of one of the missions in the area. Kella bore them no animosity. None of them would have hit him. It would have been one of the irresponsible, heedless water-gathering Tikopians who would have struck the blow, before fleeing with the others for the safety of the ship, almost certainly taking Florence Maddy with them.

Dazedly Kella wondered what was happening. The musicologist must have gone with the Tikopians of her own free will, or the captain of the
Commissioner
would never have allowed her on board when she arrived with the returning water-gathering party. Anyway, she had packed enough bags for a long voyage, so she must have been expecting to be taken on board the
Commissioner
.

Why on earth would Dr Maddy have wanted to go to the remotest island in the group? The government vessel would not put in at any island containing a radio, so it would virtually be out of touch with the world until it reached its final destination. The ship would have a transceiver, but by the time Kella could get himself back to the police radio service in Auki, the
Commissioner
would have dropped its passengers off at Tikopia and would be making its way back to Honiara. There was no way in which he could get in contact with the ship or Florence Maddy in time to find out what was going on.

Kella tried to go through things in his mind. He had been set up, he was sure of that. All the events leading up to the attack pointed to that conclusion. For some reason of her own, Florence Maddy had made her way to Tabuna to pick up the
Commissioner
and sail on to Tikopia. The Tikopia passengers refilling the water casks at the river had been sent ashore to pick up the musicologist and take her out to the waiting government vessel. But by whom and for what reason? As a subsidiary money-making venture they had also hidden away a cache of whisky to smuggle down to Tikopia from the village of Tabuna. When they had seen Kella approaching, they must have thought quickly and made sure that the strand leading to the net containing the bottles was easy to spot in order to divert him from Florence Maddy. Kella had fallen for the trick and assembled everyone under the trees, thus wasting more time.

While he had been doing this, other islanders had been getting ready to smuggle Dr Maddy out to the waiting
Commissioner
. Unfortunately for them, and for himself as it had transpired, the sergeant had come back to the village too soon, before the musicologist had been able to leave. Someone, presumably one of the Tikopia, had knocked him unconscious, giving the others time to hurry the American academic out to the government vessel.

Kella walked into the jungle. His mind was made up. It was bad enough being fooled in his capacity of policeman; it was much worse seeing the role of the
aofia
being scorned and challenged in the manner that had just occurred, even by a bunch of irresponsible larrikins like the Tikopia. He owed it to the gods and to himself to see that there was payback, and that it was made in full.

He spent half an hour in a small glade, preparing for his next venture. First he said a prayer to the tree gods, before picking up a fallen branch to serve as his sacrificial offering. Then he smeared his face with white clay from the riverbank as a sign to any passers-by that he was about to commune with the spirits and must not be deflected from his purpose by anyone. When he was ready for his great encounter, he started to walk through the trees down to the beach.

On his way down he heard a
korokoro
bird singing up in the higher branches. He took this as a good sign. A single croak from the tiny bird indicated that it would be a bad time to start new ventures, but continual chattering meant that a long and dangerous journey might profitably be undertaken. Close to the shore, a ring of coral stones taken from the beach had been placed around a tree as a sign that a holy shrine lay close at hand on the reef.

Some women from the artificial islands who had climbed the slope to work in their gardens on the mainland had left their canoes on the beach when Kella emerged from the fringe of trees. With one hand he dragged one of the dugouts down to the water and started paddling out into the lagoon.

Shore birds swooped around his dugout as he headed south – white cockatoos, black wagtails, sandpipers, fish hawks and others. They were sensible to spend so much of their time close to land, decided the sergeant. No sane animal or man would embark upon a long sea voyage in the perilous island waters without a strong motive. There were too many things that he still did not know. He would have to take advice from the highest possible source. He did not like bothering the sleeping souls of his ancestors in this fashion, but if a priest could not appeal to the gods, who could?

He paddled for half an hour, until he was approaching the southern end of the lagoon, away from the majority of the artificial islands. There were no other canoes in sight. This was a holy place. Unless an islander had urgent business here, he would pass the area as quickly as he could, averting his eyes from the rocks in the lagoon wall. Eventually Kella stopped paddling opposite a single jagged white rock protruding from the reef. He picked up the branch from the bottom of the dugout and threw it into the lagoon, and watched it float towards the white rock.

‘
Lau ann e doo!
’ he cried, begging the sacred spirits of the rock to catch his soul and nurture it. This was one of the Lau shrines to the shark gods. Tradition had it that beneath the surface of the water, on the seaward side of the shrine, there was a large cave where dwelt those famous ancestors of his clan who had been rewarded for their mighty deeds on earth by being turned into sharks when they died. No shark-worshipper had ever dared to dive beneath the waves to ascertain the truth of this belief, while any strangers who approached the reef would be killed at once, which was bad luck for anyone from other tribes whose canoes were overturned out at sea and who were swept ashore in the vicinity.

Kella waited for the shark god who supervised deep-sea journeys to faraway places to be roused in order to listen to the
aofia
’s plea. Passively he sat while the god found time to put aside other matters with which he was dealing. Then he implored the spirit to tell him if the gods wished him to travel to Tikopia and save the white woman he had seen leaving on the
Commissioner
. Apologetically he gave the silent, lowering unseen god some background on the case that had brought him into contact with the American musicologist.

‘It’s like this, Grandfather,’ he said humbly. ‘There have been three deaths on Malaita over the past few days. The leader of the Lau Church of the Blessed Ark has been murdered and two converts to the sect have also been found dead. Whatever is happening seems to be connected to Papa Noah’s breakaway church. The two men murdered in the bush had nothing in common except that they belonged to Papa Noah’s sect, and they both drowned in an area in which there was no supply of water. It’s all very puzzling. Oh yes, and I’ve also lost a white woman, a
neena
who should have been under my protection.’

Kella looked hopefully at the rock, waiting for an answer. None was forthcoming. Perhaps the notoriously demanding and indecisive god of the ocean wall needed more information before making up his mind. Kella did not blame him

‘The third murder was that of Papa Noah,’ he went on. ‘He was drowned as well, but in a more straightforward manner. He was knocked on the back of the head and then his face was held under the surface of a rock pool until he died. Did the same man murder Papa Noah who also killed the two men in the bush? Although all three drowned, Papa’s death was different because it had no element of magic about it. It was almost certainly improvised on the spot.’ Kella paused again. Still there was no response from the reef. The
aofia
decided that he had better keep talking. ‘The storm was so bad at the time of Papa Noah’s death’, he went on, ‘that no one could really see what was happening. Sister Conchita thinks that she saw a Tikopian in the ark. Before he died, Papa Noah said that he was waiting for an important visitor, someone who was coming from a long way away. He also said something about becoming rich soon. Oh yes, and as well as that, I’ve run across a Japanese official called Mayotishi, who wants me to search Malaita in case the killman might be a surviving Japanese soldier.’