by Graeme Kent
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘I can’t even find a broom that works around here for a start.’
‘I asked you to stay with Mr Imison and me because I knew you wouldn’t be intimidated,’ said Brigid. ‘You wouldn’t have let him bully me, even if he did try to batter me down. I used to have spirit like you.’
‘You still do.’
Brigid shook her head. ‘No, it’s all gone now. And what a liar the man is. All that malarkey about him being a writer for a newspaper.’
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘Do you?’ asked Sister Brigid scornfully. ‘The only thing that man’s ever written is an application for a search warrant.’
‘He’s a cop?’ asked Sister Conchita
‘He’s either that or something similar. He’s used to asking questions, that’s certain. And accustomed to beating the answers out of people too, if you ask me.’
‘How can you tell?’
Brigid’s face contorted into a savage grin. ‘I haven’t always been a nun,’ she said. ‘Back home in the slums of Belfast I had six brothers. When the police came calling at the front door of a Saturday night, it was no unusual occurrence. My ma would just ask them which one they wanted this time and to kindly take their pick and leave the rest of us alone.’
‘Do you want me to make an official complaint about Mr Imison’s behaviour?’ asked Conchita. ‘I can go to the Bishop about it.’
‘No, he’s not worth the bother.’
‘I’d better be getting back to work then,’ she said. ‘You wait here until you’re sure you’re feeling better.’
‘Stay a minute,’ said the old nun. ‘Sister Conchita, why are you so set on finding out who killed Mr Blamire?’
‘He was murdered here at the mission shortly after I rejected what I now think was his plea for help. I suspect that I ignored his appeal for sanctuary. I believe that at the very least I owe it to him to try to find out what happened.’
‘How do you intend doing that?’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed the young nun. ‘I can only think that his death has something to do with the tour party. Mr Blamire didn’t look like a typical tourist. I think he was there to keep an eye on other members of the group, perhaps Mr Imison and his friends.’
‘And do you have any, what are they called, clues?’
‘Not really; I can only follow where Mr Imison leads me.’ Sister Conchita paused. ‘That islander Imison mentioned, Kakaihe, he seems to be the reason why he and his associates have come to the Solomons. Perhaps he knows something. Do you know where I can find him?’
‘He’s dead,’ said Sister Brigid.
‘Well, could you take me to where he used to live?’ asked Conchita. ‘Perhaps someone there might be able to tell me about him. We don’t want Imison finding anything out first. Heaven knows what use he’d make of any information that came his way.’
‘I might be able to help.’ It was a fresh voice.
Conchita turned. Sister Johanna was standing in the shadows by the door. Conchita wondered how long the old German nun had been there and how much she had heard.
‘No, Sister Johanna!’ said Brigid desperately.
‘Hush now,’ said Johanna soothingly. ‘Perhaps it is meant to be. Sister Conchita may have been sent to the mission for this one purpose. Who are we to question the will of God?’
‘Can you take me to Kakaihe’s island, then?’ asked Conchita, while Sister Brigid seemed to shrink even further back into her chair.
‘I can,’ said Sister Johanna. ‘But think carefully before you ask me to do so. It’s a dreadful place! Sister Brigid has good reason to know that.’
Chapter Eleven
KELLA RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS to the asthmatic chugging of the engines of a small boat. He was lying on top of a blanket on a narrow bunk in the cabin of a ship. His head ached and his mouth was dry. Gently he caressed a bump on the side of his head. He swung his legs to the floor and stood up. He eased his way across the confined space of a cabin to a porthole. It was clamped shut too securely to be opened. Through the thick glass he could see the placid waters of the sea. There was no land in sight. Inside the cabin there were no other furnishings, but the available floor space was piled high with stencilled sacks of Guadalcanal Plains rice.
Kella felt giddy and sat down again. At least he was alive. In fact, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep him that way. After he had been knocked out in the bush village, he must have been strapped to a makeshift stretcher and carried through the bush back down to the shore, where he had been loaded on to this ship.
He took several deep breaths and picked his way over the profusion of bulging sacks to hammer on the cabin door. At the same time he started shouting loudly. At first he thought he was going to be ignored, but then he heard the light steps of bare feet outside the cabin. A key turned in the lock and the door was flung open. Two islanders carrying solid metal belaying pins in their hands stood menacingly before him. They were short but broad-shouldered. From the tribal markings on their faces, Kella could see that they were Guadalcanal men, no friends of Malaitans. Brusquely they gestured to him to leave the cabin with them.
Outside, he climbed over more sacks of rice piled untidily for the entire length of the narrow passageway. There was a second cabin next to the one he had been held in, presumably belonging to the captain of the ship. The smells of a hundred previous cargoes clung stubbornly to the walls and ceiling of the corridor; the sickly-sweet aroma of copra, the musky scent of cocoa, the dull stench of bananas and a dozen other former loads mingled with the reek of diesel oil to deaden the senses.
The two crew members pushed him to the foot of a short companionway and indicated that he should climb up on to the deck. Once he reached the top step, he saw that he was on a typical inter-island trading ship. It was small, dirty and, like many of its kind, held together with a combination of rust and hope. The vessel had a broad, clinker-built hull with a square stern. It was powered by a coughing diesel engine and was making slow progress, low in the water, suggesting that the hull next to the two cabins was packed dangerously full of cargo. There would also be several tons of pig iron stacked in the bilge to keep the vessel upright. The deck area consisted of a flat-topped superstructure beneath a tattered, flapping awning. Near the bows, behind the solitary mast, was a raised glass-topped hatch, its surface stained and cracked. The vessel was indescribably filthy. The decks were stained and pitted and the rails lurched crazily at different angles, with great gaps where sections had fallen into the sea in the past and had not been replaced.
The ship’s steering wheel was raised on the deck, a few yards behind the hatch. A tall, broad-shouldered white man in his fifties, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, was at the wheel.
‘Sergeant Kella,’ he boomed. ‘Welcome aboard! I must say, we’re shanghaiing a much better quality of supercargo these days.’
‘Commodore Ferraby,’ said Kella, making his way forward. ‘I should have guessed. You do know that you have just added kidnapping and interfering with a police officer in the course of his duties to your usual hobbies of piracy and smuggling?’
He advanced on the helmsman. The two islanders raised their belaying pins menacingly, but the white man gestured to them to go below. ‘Fetch-im kaikai,’ he ordered.
Reluctantly, and continuing to direct suspicious glances at the police sergeant, the pair went back down the steps in the direction of the engine room.
‘Who paid you to take me on board?’ Kella asked.
‘Come, dear fellow,’ chided Ferraby. ‘You can’t expect me to divulge stable secrets like that. The Jockey Club could take my licence away.’
Kella scoured the horizon. Far off to the starboard side across the glass-like surface of the water lay a faint nebulous wisp of curved coastline with a horseshoe-shaped bay and a series of low wooded foothills behind. The land was hardly more substantial than the faint clouds blowing lazily across it.
&nbs
p; ‘That’s Baroraite Island, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘We’re in the New Georgia Sound.’
‘Now, how on earth could you tell that?’ asked Ferraby in genuine astonishment. ‘Oh, of course, you were a coast-watcher here in the war, weren’t you? You sailed with that rogue John Deacon and his motley crew, carrying out hit-and-run raids on Jap coastal camps all over the Western District. For God’s sake, how old were you then?’
‘About fourteen.’
Ferraby whistled. ‘As young as that? You always were bloodthirsty. I thought I started my nefarious career young enough, but you could give me a few years.’
‘I wasn’t at Eton,’ said Kella.
‘Neither was I, dear lad, even if I do claim that on my curriculum vitae sometimes.’
The big man hummed contentedly as he studied the water ahead of him, from time to time making minute adjustments to the set of the wheel beneath his large and capable hands. His leathery, weather-beaten face was at odds with his cultured drawl. Hugh Ferraby, who preferred, with some irony, to be known as Commodore, after a brief and abruptly terminated period as the executive of the Honiara Yacht Club, was a throwback to the pre-war years in the islands of the South Pacific, when footloose amoral expatriate soldiers of fortune prowled the area in their dozens, eking a living by any means they could, prospecting for gold, trading, managing plantations and running various dubious enterprises.
Some of them married local women and then went native, idling in the sun and depending on the extended families of their wives to provide them with lives of ease in the sun. Others, like Ferraby, were not above acting beyond the law, smuggling seashells and artefacts out of the region, pulling off insurance scams with their wrecked vessels, secure in the knowledge that the insurance companies would bear their losses with resignation rather than go to the expense of sending assessors to the remote and dangerous reefs and jungles of the Solomon Islands. Occasionally a plot would go awry, and as a result Ferraby and his ilk would spend a few months in a local prison with reasonable forbearance.
The well-educated Ferraby was one of the few beachcombers to return to the Solomons after the war, which he had spent serving with some distinction in the RNVR. With his savings and gratuity he had bought his present trading vessel, extremely ancient even in 1945, and had spent the next fifteen years running cargoes around the island, living from hand to mouth on the meagre profits and any tricks he could pull on the side.
‘What are you supposed to do with me?’ Kella asked.
Ferraby raised an eyebrow. ‘Why, treat you as an honoured guest, old boy. No worries, Sergeant Kella. I regard you in the light of a rather special visitor. I’m looking forward immensely to your company. It’ll give you a chance to see how the other half lives. You work far too hard anyway, always running around and popping up in the most unexpected places, harassing and arresting splendidly innocent fellows like me. I want you to regard this voyage in the light of an extended holiday.’
‘Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining. Where are we going?’ asked Kella, although he already anticipated the answer.
‘Ontong Java,’ answered Ferraby with relish. ‘Ever been there? Marvellous place! The women have no inhibitions at all. They’re Polynesian, you see, and beautiful with it. Do you know, every so often they have a ceremony where all the virgins on the island parade bare-arsed naked, hand in hand in pairs through the main village street, so that the young bucks can ogle them and take their choice. Oh, you’ve got a treat in store.’ Ferraby rolled his eyes. ‘Imagine how a ceremony like that would liven up Budleigh Salterton or Tunbridge Wells, eh?’
Kella tried not to display the dismay he was feeling. Ontong Java was an atoll of over a hundred tiny specks of islands more than 150 miles north of the Western Solomon Islands. Only a couple of thousand people lived there. Once Ferraby had skirted the edge of Santa Ysabel, he would leave the calm island waters behind him and embark on a perilous voyage across the Pacific Ocean. The seas between the Western Solomons and the distant atoll were notoriously difficult, with frequent storms. There were rich pickings for any traders brave or foolhardy enough to make the hazardous journey to such a remote spot. To make matters worse, as far as Kella was concerned, once he reached the atoll, Ferraby would probably spend several weeks cruising among the the islands, exchanging his present cargo for copra.
‘What are you taking there?’ he asked.
‘Rice,’ said Ferraby enthusiastically. ‘They can’t grow their own. The poor sods live on a diet of fish, taro and coconuts. For them rice is a mixture of caviare and pâté de foie gras. We’ll exchange the lot for copra and bêche-de-mer. Either way, there are whacking great profits in prospect, Sergeant Kella. O, frabjous day!’
‘You won’t be able to spend your profits in prison.’
Ferraby’s eyes widened theatrically.
‘Who on earth is going to send a law-abiding citizen like me into durance vile?’ he demanded. ‘We found your unconscious body on the beach, rescued you, gave you a cabin to yourself and provided medical aid to the limit of our abilities. Unfortunately, we were bound for Ontong Java and limited by the tides and weather conditions, so we didn’t have time to put you ashore anywhere. Still, we nursed and looked after you, as was our bounden duty. I might even apply for a good citizenship award. And anyway, it will be our word against yours.’
‘Now tell me what really happened,’ said Kella. ‘Were you in on this from the beginning?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Ferraby. ‘I never get any fun like that. To be honest, old chum, we had to leave Gizo in a bit of a hurry a couple of nights ago. Something to do with unpaid mooring bills, I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say we had to cast off unexpectedly, without taking enough water on board for the trip. That same night we stopped and put ashore at Kolombangara in the dinghy to refill our barrels. When we reached the beach, who should be waiting for us but …’ Ferraby stopped and coughed. He continued. ‘Well, suffice it to say someone was standing there with you, or rather with your comatose form. When I told your captor that we were heading off on a three-week voyage into the wild blue yonder, we entered into business negotiations on the spot. A very satisfactory sum of money changed hands and I agreed to take you out of circulation for the best part of a month. Voilà!’
‘So you didn’t do this to me?’ asked Kella, feeling the swelling on the side of his head.
‘Would we dare, old boy? To strike the aofia would practically be lese-majesty in the Solomons. Only a real hard man or a foreigner would dare touch you.’
The two Melanesians climbed back on to the deck with two plates of yams and taro and two green drinking coconuts, pierced at the top. They handed a plate and a coconut each to Ferraby and Kella. Ferraby gestured to one of the islanders to take the steering wheel. The second islander crouched at the feet of the other. Both men kept their eyes warily on the police sergeant. Ferraby led Kella over to the hatch. They sat on the flat wooden surround and started to eat. To his surprise, Kella found that he was hungry.
‘Are you still playing rugby?’ asked the trader.
‘No, I’ve given that up.’
‘Pity. I saw you play league in Sydney about five years ago. You were bloody good, a real hard case. You must have made a mint at that game.’
‘Not really,’ said Kella. ‘I didn’t stick at it long enough. I wanted to come back to the islands and do other things.’
‘Catch me giving up doing anything I was making money at,’ said Ferraby. ‘However, chance would be a fine thing, I suppose.’ He looked reflectively out to sea. He seemed in a mood to chat. His itinerant way of life probably made it difficult for him to find fresh people to talk to, thought Kella.
‘I was twenty-five when I first came out to the Solomons,’ Ferraby went on. ‘I’d already failed at a fair few things—university, the navy, the city, marriage. Even then I guessed that this was going to be my last chance. Well, it was, and I blew that, too.’
‘There’s
still time,’ said Kella. He stared down into the hatch. The glass covering was smeared and cracked and plainly insubstantial. Its sole purpose was to protect the cargo below from the elements. In the hold, rows of sacks of rice were piled on top of one another to a height reaching only a few inches below the hatch cover.
‘I begged, borrowed and stole every dollar I could to buy that rice,’ said Ferraby, following his gaze. ‘I suppose you could call it the last throw of the dice on my part.’
‘Quite a gamble,’ said Kella.
‘I’ve staked all I had on plenty of those in my time,’ said Ferraby.
Kella drained the last of the milk from his coconut. Casually he strolled over to the ship’s rail and tossed the husk into the water. Ferraby and the two Melanesians watched him alertly. Kella put a hand on the rail. As he had thought, the iron stanchion was rusted and loose in its socket, worn away by years of wear. He tested it reflectively in his hand.
‘Right, old boy, I think it’s time you took your food down to your cabin,’ said Ferraby sharply. ‘We’ll bring you up for another run this evening, all being well, if you behave yourself.’
Kella nodded and turned as though to obey. Suddenly he seized the stanchion with both hands and used all his considerable strength to tear it from its socket. He staggered back, his shoulders and biceps aching with the effort of dislodging the section of rail.
Ferraby and the islander who had been sitting on the deck leapt to their feet, while the helmsman looked on helplessly. With a couple of strides Kella leapt back to the hatch and balanced on top of it, holding the iron rail threateningly in the air.
‘Hold it!’ he ordered. ‘If any of you takes one step towards me, I’ll smash this glass cover to pieces.’
Ferraby hesitated and then gestured to the two Melanesians to stay where they were. ‘Now why would you want to do something like that, old son?’ he asked in an aggrieved tone.
