Solomons Seal

by Hammond Innes

  ‘Well, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘So perhaps you’ll tell me what it’s all about.’

  He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Better ask Tubby. He spotted it first, not me.’ He took the glass out of his eye, closed the albums and leaned back in his chair. ‘He’ll enjoy telling you, so I won’t spoil it for him. And now, having had another look at the proofs, I have a suggestion to make, bearing in mind your client’s needs and the fact that you’ll be out of the country for a time.’

  What he proposed was to have the collection entered on the books of his partner in Zurich, who would then advance Miss Holland the equivalent of £2,000 in Swiss francs. This would be paid into an external account at her Southampton bank, thus enabling her to draw on it for payments in any currency. The only stipulation he made was that I sign an undertaking on her behalf that the collection would be put up for sale at his Birmingham auction house. ‘We’ll put it up in the autumn, when I hope to have a really big sale, and I won’t charge her any interest on the monies advanced. Okay?’

  It was as good an arrangement as I could have hoped for, and with my departure for Australia so imminent I was relieved to have the whole thing settled. It was only when I was out in the Strand again that I remembered what Tubby had said about the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp having been printed by an American banknote company. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Perkins Bacon. But that was Keegan’s problem now. As far as I was concerned, the collection was out of my hands. Perenna Holland had £2,000 spending money in the form of a guaranteed minimum, and the prospect of at least double that if he was right about the interest the collection would arouse.

  As soon as I got home, I wrote to her care of the bank. Then I rang Tubby. There was no reply. I rang him again later that night, when I had broken the back of the things that had to be done before I left. There was still no reply. My curiosity unsatisfied, I got out my own collection. It always gave me a feeling of satisfaction to look through the colourful print mosaics of my careful lay-outs and to realise that most of the stamps had been acquired long before inflation had got into its stride. But not this time, for I was very conscious that there was nothing in my collection that was in any way out of the ordinary, nothing that would get Josh Keegan talking the way he had about the Solomons Seal.

  In the end I locked the albums away and went to bed. It was after one. An owl was hooting from the big cedar across the moat, and though it was already Saturday, and tomorrow I would be on my way to Australia, the forlorn sound of it seemed to reflect my mood.

  A new country, the possibility of a fresh start – I should have been feeling eager, full of anticipation. Instead, the feeling I had was one of despondency, almost foreboding. And that night I had a very strange dream. I was back in that empty house, and everywhere there were masks and strange obscene figures staring at me, and a voice was calling. I don’t know whose voice it was or what it was trying to say; it just boomed meaninglessly around the empty rooms, and I woke with the feeling that somebody, something had been trying to get through to me.

  I don’t often dream, and when I do, my dreams are usually fairly innocuous. But this wasn’t, and I automatically reached out to the next bed for comfort. But it was empty, as it had been for far too long now, and I lay there in the dark, trying to remember some detail that would provide a rational explanation.

  In the end I switched on the light, got myself a Scotch and took it back to bed, thinking about that girl, and about Australia. What would she do when she got my letter? The memory of her was very vivid in my mind, and I lay there sipping my drink, telling myself it was nothing to do with me and no chance our paths would cross again. It was finished, but the knowledge that she was gone out of my life for good didn’t stop me indulging in fantasy. And all the time I was remembering that booming, unintelligible voice.

  Dawn was breaking before I dozed off, and when I finally woke, it was past nine. I rang Tubby, but again I got no answer. I didn’t bother about breakfast, but drove straight down to the Crouch. His boat was gone. I went on board my own then, got the anchor up and beat down the river against the tide, tacking through the first yacht race of the day until I was out in the fairway and thumping around in a growing nor’easter off Foulness. It did me a world of good, the voice of my dream and that dreadful little house blown away by the stiff onshore breeze funnelling up the estuary.

  Back at my moorings I cooked myself a meal, and afterwards I sat in the cockpit with a drink in my hand, wondering whether I would ever see my boat again. The wind had died with the setting sun, the Burnham waterfront gleaming white in the fading light, everything very still except for the ripple of the tide against the bows and the waterborne sound of voices from the last yachts drifting up on the tide. No sign of Tubby, so clearly he was away for the weekend. The pale glow of the town, the estuary, the tide … I had lived in East Anglia ever since finishing my National Service, and the thought of leaving it for good filled me with nostalgia. Would I always have to be shifting from job to job? Was that the pattern of my life, some flaw in my character, a lack of stability? Two months past forty, and here I was planning to start all over again.

  I finished the bottle, slept the night on board and in the morning drove home, closed up the house and took an afternoon train to London. The following morning I was breakfasting at over 30,000 feet and looking down on the bare arid hills of Muscat and Oman.

  Part Two

  Cargo

  Chapter Three

  It was July 2 that I arrived in Sydney, a southerly buster blowing and low cloud obscuring the harbour as we came in to land. It was Australia’s winter, so no problem in finding the people I needed to contact in their offices. I saw little or nothing of Sydney the first two days, moving from office block to office block in the central part around George Street, so that my first impression was of a rather drab, modern, dollar-hungry city full of scurrying raincoats and umbrellas. It took me those two days to decide on Kostas Polites & Co. as the estate agents I wanted to handle Rowlinson’s Munnobungle station. They were an old-established firm of Greek origin commonly referred to as Castor & Pollux, and they had a branch office in Brisbane, which would enable the sale to be pushed locally with the farming community in Queensland, as well as with the institutions in Sydney.

  It was lunchtime on Thursday before I had settled all the details. I had a word on the phone with Cooper, the manager of their Brisbane office, told him I would be flying up to see him the following day, and having booked out on the Ansett flight, I took a taxi to the Ferry Terminal. It was only a short walk along Circular Quay to the sail-like complex of the Opera House, and I had lunch there, looking out to the Harbour Bridge and the bustle of ferries coming and going. The wind was still kicking up little whitecaps in the broad expanse of Port Jackson, but it had stopped raining, and the clouds were broken. I should have been in a buoyant mood, everything fixed and fleeting glimpses of sun through the plate-glass windows. But now that I was on my own with time to think about my own future, I found myself depressed by all the stories I had heard of large properties that had broken the backs of their owners. No doubt the estate agents had exaggerated to emphasise the difficulty of disposing of a place like Munnobungle, but the cases they had quoted were undoubtedly true, and I was beginning to realise how huge and hostile the outback of Australia was.

  I had intended having a look round the docks on the off-chance I might pick up information about the Holland ships, but then I remembered the stamp dealer Josh Keegan had asked me to visit. The slip of paper on which he had written Cyrus Pegley’s address was still in my briefcase where I had put it the night I had packed my things. I paid my bill and walked through the Botanic Gardens and The Domain to the crowded streets of Woolloomooloo.

  In just over half an hour I was in Victoria Street, in a narrow-fronted shop packed with stamps and coins, talking to a little wisp of a man with an untidy mop of black hair and bright birdlike eyes that peered at me from behind steel-rimmed spectacles of extre
me magnification. When he heard why I had come, he handed the counter over to a plain young woman with pebble-thick glasses who might have been his daughter and took me through into an office at the back, where two more girls were busy sorting stamps.

  Yes, he remembered the cover. He also remembered the lettering on the seal ship label. ‘It was a blue label, deep blue to be exact. The vertical lettering HOLLAND SHIPPING. SOLOMONS at the top and at the bottom a space for the amount to be inked in and the word PAID. I’ll show you.’ He picked up a pencil and began sketching it for me. ‘A smudged postmark, I remember, the clerk in a hurry presumably and cancelling it when he should have hand-stamped it with a capital T and the amount due of ten centimes. Instead, it was left to the Post Office clerk in Cooktown to slap a Postage Due twopenny red and green on.’ And he added, ‘I was reminded of that cover only the other day, something I read in the Herald. A Holland ship in for engine repairs. It hadn’t occurred to me the company was still in existence.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked.

  ‘Last week, I think. It was only a short paragraph, and it caught my eye because it was headed “War Hero’s Grandson Sails In”. I read anything about the war. I caught the last two years of it, finishing up at Darwin.’

  ‘What sort of ship was it?’

  ‘An old warship. Landing craft, I think it said.’

  ‘Is it still here?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you. It was only mentioned I think because of the name and the association with old Colonel Holland. He was one of the coast watchers on Bougainville. Stuck it there until the Americans arrived.’ He turned the piece of paper round so that I could see the sketch he had made. ‘There you are. That’s what it looked like.

  ‘Unusual, isn’t it? And the way it came to me was unusual.’ He turned to a filing cabinet and began rummaging through a thick wad of letters.

  ‘You don’t happen to have any more of those ship labels, do you?’ I asked hopefully.

  He laughed and shook his head. ‘Wish I had. I did well out of that sale. But if I’d had any more, I’d have probably sold them anyway. A man came here two or three months ago … Ah, here we are.’ And he handed me a letter written on cheap paper with a Mission address stamped on it in purple.

  I am writing on behalf of Mr Minya Lewis, it began, and a little further down I found the information Keegan wanted … his mother died in Cooktown on February 16 of last year. Being her only son and his father not having been heard from since 1911, I am satisfied that he has right of possession to anything that was hers, and particularly to this letter which was in his father’s writing. She was apparently a very old woman and he found the letter in a box under her bed. As I believe there is some value in old stamps …

  Lewis! Was this the same Lewis that Chips had talked about, the half-breed aborigine who had killed a man named Black Holland? ‘Can I have this photocopied?’ I asked.

  He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘You can keep it if you wish. I can’t see that it’s any use to me now.’ He asked me about the collection I had mentioned, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, he insisted on showing me some of his recent purchases. In the end I came out with a real bargain, a superb mint pair of the first issue Turks and Caicos Islands 3s. purple showing salt-raking against the background of a ship under sail; also a used set of the Papua New Guinea first issue of 1952, which attracted me because they were line-engraved and all of them different, the full set of fifteen stamps conveying a vivid picture of the strange primitive world that lay less than a thousand miles north-east of where I would be in two days’ time.

  I must have been in that shop over an hour, for the evening rush hour had started when I reached the Ferry Terminal, intent on checking the docks to see if Holland’s ship was still there. But though the ferry I boarded gave me a good view of the docks, I saw nothing that resembled a landing craft, the ships all too big to be trading in the islands. It was dark by the time we docked at the quay again, a cold, blustery evening. I took a taxi across Pyrmont Bridge to Union Street, found a way into the docks and began searching the wharves on foot. My mood was quite different now, despite the wind and the bitter cold. Chance had presented me with a priceless opportunity, a ship I understood was bound for the Pacific islands. What more could I ask? I felt she must be there, and in the end I was proved right. I found her at last, up in the northern end of the docks, lying with her square stern close against some dilapidated sheds in a part of the docks that hadn’t been modernised, one of the Mark VIII LCTs, and she had HOLLAND LINE slapped across her rusty side in red.

  There was no glimmer of light showing, and when I tried to go on board, I was shouted at by an old man with a beard who was walking a mongrel bitch as old and shaggy as himself among the empty beer cans littering the dirty quay. He knew nothing about the owners, wasn’t interested. The agents had given him the job, and as long as he was the watchman nobody went on board without written permission from them. The only information I got from him was that the engineers were still working on her.

  I walked slowly the length of the vessel, recalling the cramped quarters, running my eye over her battered plates. She looked old and tired, which was hardly surprising, considering she had been built over thirty years ago. But at least the bridge housing looked well cared for. Her name, painted in black on the stern, was just visible below the flukes of the stern anchor: Perenna – Buka. The fact that Holland, after purchasing the vessel presumably from the Ministry of Defence, had re-named her for his sister started me thinking about her, wondering whether she had got my letter yet, if she was even now on her way to join him here.

  Before returning to my hotel, I asked the watchman the name of the agents, and all the way back, walking briskly through the lit city with ragged clouds glowing red and the moon showing intermittently between their torn edges, I was remembering other nights of velvet humidity when I had stood on the compass platform of just such a ship conning her through the Molucca Straits. The things you do as a youngster remain incredibly vivid, and the more I thought about it, the more I was attracted to the idea of trying for a passage on the Perenna when the engine overhaul was finished. There was always the possibility that job prospects in the Solomons might be better than they seemed to be in Australia. But I knew bloody well the real reason was curiosity and the thought that if I could stay close to her brother, I might see her again, perhaps even be able to help her.

  I rang the agents from the airport next morning, but was told the man dealing with the Perenna was out. Whoever it was speaking could give me no information about her sailing date, and when I asked whether it was Holland himself who had brought the ship to Sydney, he wanted to know my business and why I was making enquiries about her. In the end he suggested I ring again later and put the phone down.

  By then my plane was being called, and once we were airborne I put all thought of the ship out of my mind, concentrating on Munnobungle and the notes in my briefcase. The sun was shining when we landed in Brisbane, and I spent most of the afternoon in the Kostas Polites office going over the details with Ted Cooper. We finally agreed that the auction should be in Brisbane on August 22, six weeks being, in his view, the minimum required to obtain full coverage for the sale in such a large area as Queensland. That evening he and his wife gave me an excellent dinner of mud crabs in a restaurant overlooking the Brisbane River, and the following day I went on to Townsville.

  Townsville was the nearest airport to Munnobungle, and McIver, the station manager, was there to meet me. I found him in the airport lounge, a craggy, sun-dried Australian in khaki shorts and open-necked shirt. He was in conversation with a black man neatly dressed in a tropical suit that was almost sky blue, a marked contrast to McIver’s sweat-stained bush gear. ‘You want a beer before we start?’ he asked in a grating voice without any friendliness in it.

  ‘Just as you like.’ He had every reason to resent my arrival, and I was wondering how best to handle him.

  ‘Well, I bloody do.
Had a flat on my way in, so I only just got here in time.’ He went over to the bar and came back with two cans and glasses. The black man had drifted off, and we drank in silence. Finally McIver said, ‘How’s Rowlinson?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. And because I wanted to get things straight at the start, I added, ‘Look, the fact that he’s selling has got nothing to do with the result for last year. He doesn’t want to sell, but he’s under pressure – from his wife, and from his business associates.’

  ‘That’s what he wrote, but it’s hard to believe. I liked the bastard, and I thought he understood. You’ll see when you get to Munnobungle. It’s a tough station.’

  There were quite a few people waiting in the terminal, many of them black, some very black indeed with frizzy hair. ‘Most of the people here are from Papua New Guinea,’ McIver said, making an effort at conversation. ‘The Port Moresby plane is in, and they’re waiting to board.’

  ‘Are there many of them in Australia?’ I asked him, thinking of the man Chips had called Black Holland.

  ‘Not many in Australia, but here in Queensland, oh my word, yes. They come over to work in the sugar plantations. Not that fella I was talking to, he’s a PNG government official. Been down in Sydney buying road-building equipment.’

  The loudspeaker suddenly burst into voice, announcing the departure of the Air Niugini flight for Port Moresby. The black men began gathering up their belongings, and I watched them move to the exit. McIver said something, but I didn’t hear it, lost in the knowledge that here I was at the gateway to that primitive world so beautifully depicted on the stamps I had bought, the world that Chips had talked about with such nostalgia. ‘Another year,’ McIver was saying, ‘an’ I reck’n we’d have turned the corner.’