One Blood (6 page)

‘Then we mustn’t keep you,’ said Imison, nodding with obvious relief. ‘I’ll tell the others that you called when they come back from their trip.’

Joe Dontate walked back down the beach to Sister Conchita’s canoe with the nun. ‘See what I mean?’ he asked, not looking at her. ‘Tough cookies, all of them.’

‘They didn’t seem unduly disturbed by Mr Blamire’s murder,’ Sister Conchita admitted. ‘By the way, what happened to Mr Blamire’s body?’

‘I took it to the hospital at Gizo. The medical assistant there pronounced him dead. He thought that Blamire might have had a heart attack and fallen on to the flames. Perhaps the sight of the bonfire going up brought on the attack. Anyway, the corpse was taken over to Honiara for an autopsy.’

‘Perhaps I can find out the result from Central Hospital,’ Conchita said.

‘Whatever. You won’t be able to see the body, though. The tour operators contacted Blamire’s relatives and they had it flown back to the States for burial.’

‘That was quick!’

‘Bizness bilong whiteman,’ said Dontate, half mockingly. ‘You don’t leave bodies lying around for long in this climate.’

‘No, I suppose not. But nobody’s come over to the mission to investigate his death yet. That seems a little odd.’

‘Why should they? It was just a nasty accident. There’s one expatriate inspector and a local sergeant at the Gizo police station. At the moment they’re both on the other side of New Georgia investigating a custom killing. I imagine that, seeing a tourist is involved, they might send someone from Honiara to look into things at Marakosi eventually. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

‘I should hope so! It might be a bit late by then.’

‘Don’t worry; it will get sorted. You whiteys know how to look after your own in the islands. You’ve had plenty of practice. By the way, there’s one thing you can tell me while you’re here. Just who is John F. Kennedy?’

‘He’s the Democratic candidate for the presidency in the USA,’ said Sister Conchita, who came from Boston. ‘The elections back home are being held in a few weeks’ time. Mr Kennedy is running on the slogan
A Time for Greatness.
’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Dontate. ‘Apparently he served here in the war. Those three guys back there talk about him a lot. They’ve hired me to take them over to Kasolo, the island where Kennedy was stranded in 1943. It’s only a few miles across the lagoon.’

‘That was seventeen years ago.’

‘They seem interested,’ shrugged Dontate.

‘Do you like showing tourists around?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘It’s a job,’ said Dontate. ‘Did you know that as far back as 1910, Burns Philp ships were bringing American tourists to the Roviana Lagoon to see the headhunters? What goes around comes around.’

He gave the nun a hand pushing her canoe back into deeper water, then walked back to the shore. The engine started up at the first pull. Sister Conchita steered the vessel back towards the centre of the lagoon. As she did so, she thought about her encounter with the three Americans back in the rest-house. It was possible that Clark Imison might have served with the US Army in the Solomons as a very young man. He had certainly been quick enough, almost too quick, to recite the name of his supposed unit and commanding officer. But if his two companions had also been in the military, as Imison had claimed, then judging by their youthful appearance, they would not have been much more than fifteen at the time, a most unlikely state of affairs. Dontate had sensed something odd about the three men as well. If they were neither genuine tourists nor war veterans, what were they doing in the Roviana Lagoon? There was something wrong on the island of Munda, mused the sister, and if her instincts were to be trusted, it almost certainly had something to do with the death of Ed Blamire.

She looked back over her shoulder. Joe Dontate was standing on the beach. He was regarding the nun in her canoe with a particular intensity. It nagged at Sister Conchita that so little seemed to have been done to investigate Blamire’s death.
Mentally she began retracing her steps on the afternoon upon which she had met the tourist. Why had he seemed so worried, almost frightened? Had he had a premonition of his violent death? Could he have been fleeing from someone? And what had caused the signs of struggle in the church? Abruptly she tried to dismiss her thoughts. Even if the death had taken place on her station, it was not her duty to investigate. She was mindful of a second interview she had endured before leaving the Honiara mission headquarters. This time it had been with the venerable mother superior of the order in the capital. She too had been in a warning mode.

‘You have many admirable qualities, and life around you is seldom dull, Sister Conchita,’ she had told the young nun, her heavily lined face at odds with a slight twinkle in her eye. ‘But if I may say so, you sometimes experience a desire to explore matters that, strictly speaking, are none of your concern. It certainly enlivens whichever mission you happen to be in at the time, but it can have its repercussions among the older and more settled members of our order. Most of them have had enough excitement for one lifetime. Perhaps if you were to spend less time on your self-imposed investigations into the transgressions of others and more on developing the virtues of humility and obedience, it might be the better both for you and for our order as a whole. You are an exceptionally observant young woman. By all means continue to sum us all up, but perhaps it would be wiser to keep your conclusions to yourself.’

‘Yes, Reverend Mother,’ Conchita had replied contritely, resolving yet again to try to make herself a more conforming member of the organisation. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘As for Marakosi Mission,’ went on the mother superior, ‘it was once a byword for activity in the Roviana Lagoon. Father Karl and the sisters toiled, literally, for many years in the heat of the sun. However, for some time they have withdrawn behind their walls. See if you can reintroduce them to
the world around them. It will be good for them—but be tactful!’

It was up the authorities to enquire into the bizarre death of Ed Blamire, decided Sister Conchita. But there were no authorities in the area. She had just been told that Inspector Lammond, the Western District police officer, and his sergeant were enquiring into a crime on the other side of the lagoon. It could be weeks before they returned. In the meantime, who was there to discover the truth? Certainly not her; her natural curiosity had got her into trouble with the islands’ church leaders before, and had even, on one not-to-be-repeated occasion, drawn upon her head the opprobrium of the Bishop himself.

But why had Clark Imison and the other tourists in the rest-house seemed so unconcerned about the death? Or were they unconcerned? They had certainly been arguing about some letters when she had entered the lounge. There was plenty to think about. Fortunately she had time on her hands before she reached her next destination. She set her course for Gizo and gentled her canoe across the lagoon as the sun climbed to its apex in the cloudless sky.

An hour later, she was only four miles from her destination. She was passing one of the many small and apparently uninhabited islands in the lagoon. It was about a hundred yards wide by seventy yards long, with a ring of white sandy beach and a profusion of the spiky green foliage of the tall casuarina trees covering its centre. Beautiful coral shoals surrounded the beach. Frigate birds made languorous circles in the sun. Behind the atoll were several others, equally minute, apparently joined by a coral causeway.

At the sound of her outboard motor, two islanders ran down from the fringe of trees, shouting and gesturing to her across the turquoise water. Instinctively the young nun cut out her engine and headed for the shore. Gradually she drifted closer to the two men waiting on the beach. They were young,
fiercely muscled and clad only in loincloths. She could see their dugout canoe already drawn up on the sand. Presumably they had landed on what seemed to be a deserted island to fish from the reefs. Something there had alarmed them greatly.

The two men splashed out into the shallow water and pulled Sister Conchita and her canoe up on to the beach, assisting her out.

‘Quick time,’ urged one of them worriedly. ‘Whitefella, himi sick too much!’

Sister Conchita hurried through the trees. As she moved over the rough scrub underfoot, her brain reacted like a camera, automatically taking snapshots of the bush area. She passed hibiscus bushes with scarlet and white flowers, giant ferns and tiny orchids. Coarse spiky grass grew everywhere to a height of several feet. She noticed one patch, a few yards long, which had been flattened, presumably by the weight of a canoe dragged up from the shore. They crossed several rock pools of rainwater.

The nun followed the men to a clearing among the trees a few yards inland. There the scream of cicadas sounded like humans in pain. The open area seemed to have been used as a camp. A one-man tent was pitched in the centre. There was a scoured petrol can three-quarters full of rainwater. The ashes of a wood fire smouldered close by. She noticed the charred remnants of several gutted small fish discarded among the embers. On the ground lay a long sapling fishing rod.

Sister Conchita hurried over to a sleeping bag outside the tent. A white youth lay inside it. He was perspiring freely and thrashing around, muttering incoherently, in the grip of a fierce hallucination. She heard him say ‘
Painim aut! Painim aut!
’ and then he was silent. She leant over the boy, wondering if he was dying.

KELLA STOPPED PADDLING
and looked ahead at the ruined logging island of Alvaro rising jaggedly out of the sea ahead of him. This is what
suulana ano asa
must be like, he thought with a shudder. The notorious bottom of the pool into which the souls of the dead sank was reputed to be a place of fire and torment where unmentionable practices were carried out and the forsaken ghosts of the dead wandered screaming in torment among the fires of the eternally damned.

The last time he had seen Alvaro had been during the war. Then it had been as beautiful as any of the other atolls in the Roviana Lagoon, and it had remained a tranquil haven for its inhabitants throughout the fighting, even if it had lain on a dangerous route, where for the best part of a year Japanese destroyers cut through the surrounding water and Mitsubishi G4M3 bombers soared vengefully overhead, seeking the small scouting American PT boats. The passage of a decade and a half had certainly changed that. Now the island was little more than a tortured scar, suppurating on the surface of the lagoon. The coral reef that had once surrounded it had been torn from the seabed, leaving only a few jagged, blackened stumps. The water surrounding them had been transformed into a slurping cauldron of hollowed-out oil-stained debris and floating mangled logs and rubbish. The narrow strip of beach was little more than a series of dumps for abandoned, rusty machinery cannibalized almost into extinction. Huge patches of discoloured
diesel oil mottled the scuffed surface of the sand. Floating in the water in a large wooden pen was the business of the island: piles of logs waiting to be collected and winched aboard by the timber ships when they arrived. On the far side of the pen, a launch bobbed at anchor. Painted in white letters on its side was the inscription
Alvaro Logging
.

The coastal mangrove swamps with their slender, distorted trees, being of no commercial value, were still in place and continued to ooze stinking mud and thrust their tangled roots grotesquely into the air, like the clutching talons of drowning witches. The mouth of a sluggish river coughed gobbets of red mud into the sea where its banks had been eroded by bulldozers. Smoke drifted over the island from dozens of bush fires lit to clear land in the interior.

Most prominent of all from his vantage point was a glaring white track thirty yards wide made of compacted and rolled lump coral, crawling miles inland through the swamp forest to the hundreds of species of more valuable trees available on the slopes of the mountain in the centre of the island. These were in the process of being uprooted in their hundreds and transported down the slope by the logging company. Large rolls of black plastic sheeting littered the side of the track, ready to be rolled over the surface should the rains come and stop work.

On either side of the path inland from the beach was a contorted assemblage of tin-roofed houses, sheds, tarpaulins and canvas tents erected haphazardly for the workers on the island. To make room for this shanty town, bulldozers and excavators would have torn the topsoil from the ground, uprooted trees and demolished the huts of the islanders who had originally lived there on custom land.

Kella muttered a short prayer to the
agal I matakwa
, the sea ghosts, for his safe deliverance from his recent journey. From the bottom of the canoe he picked up a coconut that he had found lying on the ground at Munda. He hefted it in his hand
and then threw it into the sea behind the dugout as a propitiatory offering to his ancestral sharks that, according to Lau custom, would have accompanied him unseen on this trip so far from his home island.

He steered his canoe into the shallows and dragged it up on the discoloured and pitted beach. He had hired the dugout from Joe Dontate at the Munda rest-house earlier that morning, after negotiating a trip on one of the irregular charter flights linking Honiara with the Western District. He had expected the usual battery of caustic remarks from the one-time boxer. His path had crossed that of the wily and truculent Dontate on a number of occasions, and despite their mutual respect, there was little love lost between them. However, the Western man had seemed too preoccupied with a flock of disorganized and vocally demanding American tourists squawking like demented chickens around him to do more than direct a virulent scowl in the direction of the police sergeant. If he had to spend more than a few days in the lagoon, decided Kella, he would pay an island craftsman five pounds to build him his own small canoe.

He picked up his rucksack from the bows and stood and surveyed the sight before him. Although his face remained impassive, he felt sick. Close up the island seemed in an even worst state than it had done from a distance. He knew that the desecration of the interior rainforest inevitably meant that in addition to erosion, the habitats of hundreds of birds and small animals would have been destroyed, diminishing sources of food for the few remaining indigenous inhabitants. All the available coral had been removed from the reef. If the company wished to drive the track even farther into the bush, it would also be removing all river gravel suitable for bedding rock, thus further poisoning the island’s main drinking water supply. He could see that no efforts had been made at reforestation. Creepers and weeds were smothering any new trees trying to sprout.