Solomons Seal

by Hammond Innes

  Mac looked at me. ‘He’s their leader.’ He said it flatly, and still in the same flat voice he added, ‘You should’ve done it yourself if you wanted it done different.’ He turned to Luke, telling him to get Teopas’s body out on to the bridge wing. And when he didn’t move, standing frozen into immobility as he peered down at the man’s chest with the holes leaking blood, Mac grabbed hold of him and shook him. ‘You want to get killed?’ He reached for the telegraph handle, slammed it to Stop Engines and picked up the broadcast microphone again, this time speaking into it himself, using the Buka language, not Pidgin. ‘Get that body out of here, on to the bridge wing, where they can see it,’ he shouted to Luke. ‘Go on, move! Yu tu.’ He motioned to the helmsman with the machine pistol. ‘Mekim.’ Then he was speaking into the mike again. The ship’s engines had stopped, everything very still as we lost way, the reeds and mangrove trees almost stationary, the bows swinging.

  For’ard the guards on the catwalks, all four of them, were facing aft, eyes showing white and the dark faces puzzled and uneasy. Suddenly one of them fell prone, wriggling behind a ventilation cowl, his gun thrust forward. The others followed his example. ‘Sitting targets,’ Mac said, still with the mike to his mouth so that his words boomed round the ship. He caught my eye, nodding towards the dead coxs’n. ‘Get him to the bridge wing, and pitch his body down on to the deck. Go on – move! Show the bastards he’s dead. If they don’t throw their guns down into the tank deck then, we’ll have to kill them.’ It was the threat to kill them that got me moving. Luke, too, I think. We got hold of the body, half carrying, half dragging it to the doorway. ‘Now stand him upright,’ Mac said. ‘Let them see how he’s been shot to pieces. Then pitch him down the ladder.’ And as we pushed Teopas into an upright position, holding him there on the bridge wing so that guards and prisoners alike could see, Mac’s voice boomed again from the loudspeakers. ‘Push him over,’ he called, and we pitched the body down the ladder. It fell with a sickening thud, the round black head rammed against the metal grating, blood staining the woolly halo of hair.

  Silence! Then Mac’s voice again and movement on the tank deck. Luke and I dived for the shelter of the wheelhouse. The rifle Teopas had been carrying so casually, with such total confidence, lay abandoned on the deck. I picked it up. It was the first conscious independent action I had taken. Mac nodded approvingly. ‘You take the door. I’ll cover the deck.’ But there was no need. Men were swarming up the ladders from the tank deck, spilling on to the catwalks, and the Buka guards were rising sheepishly to their feet, their hands in the air, their guns on the deck.

  It was over without a fight. Armed now with machine pistols that they knew how to use better than our Buka crew, the police moved in on the bridge housing in a quick crouching run. Two of them came directly up to the wheelhouse, one of them with sergeant’s stripes on his shirt. The other, short and broad and smiling, announced that he was Inspector Steve Mbalu. He went straight through into the alleyway, shouting for the Buka crew to surrender as his men began moving down the ladders from deck to deck towards the engine-room. For’ard all was chaos as the mass of captives struggled to escape the oven heat of the tank deck, climbing the ladders on to the catwalk, crowding the foredeck, spilling over into the shade of the bow door housing, anywhere to get a breath of air to relieve the humid, suffocating heat. The sun was half obscured, the air thickening all the time, the heat impossible. A shot sounded from down in the bowels of the ship. It turned out to be no more than a warning shot, and a minute later the Inspector came back to report that he was now in complete control of the ship.

  Mac had hung his pistol by its strap on the back of the captain’s chair and was leaning heavily against it, his screwed-up features the colour of mud, his eyes staring out through the open starboard door of the wheelhouse. No breath of air now, the ship drifting slowly sideways with the current and a view back down the Buka Passage framed in the doorway, the scene darkening as heavy cu-nim clouds obscured the sun. ‘Always was a tricky place.’ He was muttering to himself, wiping the sweat from his face, the hand holding the dirty handkerchief shaking uncontrollably.

  I moved out to the port bridge wing. Released prisoners crowded the deck below, clung to the ladder leading up to where I stood. Our bows had already drifted past No. 7 marker post, the current carrying us out towards another pole beacon with a flat top marking the last of the Minon Island shallows, and beyond that beacon, in line with our stern, the island of Madehas was coming into view with a small hill covered with palms and a house just visible on North Madehas Point.

  I went back into the wheelhouse and got the glasses. It was a wooden building with a veranda, rather taller than the old DC’s house on Sohano and with storage sheds. There was a track leading down to a reef-enclosed creek. Something that looked like a light was stuck up on a pole. ‘Is there a jetty there?’ I asked Mac.

  I got no reply. He was staring past me, straight towards the house, his eyes quite vacant, seeing only something that was in his mind. The body of the dead crewman was being carried out, but he didn’t notice. The Inspector was talking to Luke, the ship drifting, everything in a hush of suspended animation, nobody – least of all myself – knowing what to do next. Luke kept glancing at Mac, hesitating. Finally he turned to me. ‘Inspector Mbalu say we must get under way. We cannot stay here.’

  ‘Of course not.’ If we didn’t get moving soon, even a shallow draft vessel like this would be aground. ‘But where does he want us to go – continue on or turn back into the Passage?’

  There was a long pause, and then the Inspector said, ‘On. We go on.’ It was obvious he hadn’t thought what he was going to do next and needed time to consider. Rain began to fall, large drops as big as coins. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Mac turned his head, jerked suddenly out of his trance. ‘Holland House Cove,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s five fathoms close off the jetty. You can anchor there.’ He peered out through the bridge wing door. ‘Aye, and you’d better do it quick, or you won’t be seeing a bloody thing.’ And he climbed into the captain’s chair and just sat there, staring moodily ahead.

  I rang for engines and with a little backing and filling got the ship’s head round. We were already past the flat-topped marker post, another fine on our port bow and not much more than half a mile to go. The Buka Passage vanished behind us, engulfed in a thundering, inky blackness. The raindrops bounced on the flat brown surface of the water, leaping to meet the next drop falling; lightning ripped the indigo heavens, a crack of thunder and a distant hissing growing closer.

  We were just off the eastern reef of the cove when the storm hit, everything suddenly wiped out in the torrent of water pouring down. Luke was aft seeing to the stern anchor, the Buka crew working under police guard, and I was left to con her in, nothing visible – only the echo-sounder recording 7 fathoms and the vague impression of the reef-edge yards away to port. I could see nothing, absolutely nothing. I took her in on the echo-sounder, dropped the stern anchor by guesswork and then ordered Luke to the bows to supervise the letting go of the main anchor.

  About ten minutes later the wind hit us. It came from the north at first, tugging at our stern anchor. The rain, lessening now, drove horizontally past the ship, and there was nothing else to see – just the wind-driven rain and the water round us lashed to such a frenzy that at moments the surface of it took off and became airborne. It was like that for perhaps a quarter of an hour. It seemed much longer, the wind backing and the noise so violent it was impossible to speak, even to think. Gradually the wind shifted to south so that we were under the lee of Madehas, gusts alternating with lulls, and then for a moment there was no wind at all, the rain much heavier now and falling vertically in a steady, persistent downpour. That’s how I arrived at the Hollands’ house on Madehas, looking up at it through a curtain of tropical rain with the sun’s faint glimmer coming and going.

  Part Four

  The Buka Passage

  Chapter Eight

  It w
as Mac who took me up to the house, hiding himself under a large black umbrella so that he looked like a two-legged beetle walking its carapace up the hill. It was just after midday. The rain had eased to little more than a drizzle, and the sun, striking vertically down on us through what was now only a very thin cloud layer, gave off such a glaring, humid heat that every movement had become an effort. I wouldn’t have gone up there if it hadn’t been for something he told me, something that switched my mind back to that half-breed Lewis up at Cooktown and his story of the Dog Weary mine.

  It must have been about an hour after we had anchored. The wind had dropped considerably, and I had just completed a tour of the ship with Luke and the police inspector. When we got back to the wheel-house, we were still discussing whether to put in to Chinaman’s Quay and land everybody there, or wait in an attempt to make a night landing close to the airfield. Mac was alone, still sitting in the captain’s chair, his body hunched and looking shrunken so that I had the impression he had suddenly aged. The large-scale chart with the plan of the Buka Passage gave no indication of depth along the shore in the vicinity of the airfield. Luke couldn’t help; he had never been in there. I turned to Mac and asked him if he could pilot us in.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. I repeated the question, and he turned slowly, staring at me blankly. ‘The airfield?’ He shook his head. ‘That wasn’t why we killed the Japs. He’d never go for that. It was too well guarded.’ He was still back in the past. ‘No, that was our target … ’ and he pointed straight ahead, beyond the bows and the straining anchor chain, to the house which was just emerging from the rain, a grey, dripping shadow among thrashing palms. ‘A boatload of Japs killed, half a dozen Buka men, and two of our own injured. All because he wanted to have it out with that cousin of his.’ He turned to face me again, fastening me with those pale, watery eyes, so bright and birdlike I was reminded of the Ancient Mariner. ‘Something had got into him,’ he breathed, seeing nothing but what was in his mind. ‘Something … I don’t know what. Been there a long time, I reck’n. And that night … ’ His head swung round to stare at the house again. ‘I’ll never forget how he looked that night. We were in that little office he’d had built, the two books laid out on the floor beside the open safe and himself crouched there and staring down at a letter in his hand. Dear Red, it began; it was a letter to Red Holland, you see.’ A long pause, and then: ‘Pity the bastard wasn’t there … that was the house we should have burned over his head …’ And he added, ‘It wasn’t as big then. Not much bigger than the native hut young Carlos built on the self-same site when he ruled the Buka Passage.’ Another longer pause, and then he said, so quietly I only just heard him, ‘It was accursed then. Reck’n it’s been cursed ever since. Still is,’ he muttered to himself, relapsing suddenly into silence.

  ‘Why was Colonel Holland so determined to make a raid on the house?’ I asked.

  I thought at first he hadn’t heard, or else he wasn’t going to answer. But after a while his brain seemed to catch up with the question, and he said, ‘How the hell do I know what was in his mind? From the time I joined him, he was always the same as regards Red Holland – very reticent. An Australian cousin, you see, a distant one, and that young brother of his, Carlos – the one that went down with the Holland Trader – leaving him everything. I am told the two were so alike the islanders thought it was Carlos come back from the dead, and that didn’t help either. And then, after the 1929 crash, when trade just about came to a standstill, the Old Man had to come across from PNG and bail him out. Sold practically everything he had to keep the Line going and virtually took over the running of it, living up there with Red Holland and building a small extension, just an office and a bedroom, out on the west side.’

  I asked if he’d still been living there when the war started, and he said, No, the Old Man had been at Kuamegu then. It was early 1940 before he was back at Madehas, helping to organise the coast watchers in case the Japanese came into the war. ‘But if you ask me, he had another reason, too. He wanted to keep an eye on Red Holland and the schooners. Didn’t trust him. Don’t believe he ever trusted the man from the moment he first set eyes on him.’

  He went rambling on about the war then, and it took me some time to get him back to the night they’d landed in the cove below the house after ambushing the guard boat. I wanted to know more about the letter that had so upset Colonel Holland, but he said the Old Man hadn’t commented on it, either then or later. No, he didn’t know who it was from, only that it was written to Red Holland and addressed to him. He had seen the envelope lying on the floor beside the books. It was addressed care of the Holland Line at a P.O. Box number in Kieta. He’d been hoping to find Japanese code books in that safe, operational plans, secret documents of some sort. He had thought that was what the raid was all about until he had seen the Colonel sitting back on his heels there with that letter in his hand. ‘All the blood seemed to have gone from his face and he was shaking like a man in a fever. Anger, hatred – I don’t know what it was …’ He hesitated, shaking his head slowly. ‘I never seen a man’s eyes like that, so horror-struck, so appalled – and tears … if he’d seen someone he loved blasted to hell by a land mine, it couldn’t have affected him more deeply.’

  ‘What happened to the letter?’

  ‘I never saw it again. Never. Only the books. He showed me those, after the war. Long after. But it was the letter,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘It must have been the letter.’ And he went on, ‘I tell you, man’ – his voice rambling— ‘I tell you, from that moment he became obsessed with the urge to destroy Red Holland. An’ it wasn’t because he was a collaborator. It was personal. Did I tell you we caught up with him eventually near Queen Carola?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He had a house there. A native house. All wood and a palm-thatched roof. Went up like a hayrick. He was inside. The Old Man knew that. Told him so myself. There was Red Holland and one of his skippers, some women, too, but he still gave the order. Petrol-soaked arrows, that’s what we used. Fired the first one himself, and when the whole place was a roaring furnace with screaming figures running out of it and the sound of a single shot coming from inside, from the centre of the flames, he suddenly turned away, tears streaming down his cheeks.’

  The memory of that night raid on the Queen Carola anchorage seemed as vivid and disturbing to Mac as the night it had happened. I couldn’t get anything more out of him, except that maybe we’d go up to the house together, later. Now, as we walked carefully up the mud-slimed, slippery track, I asked him about the books, wondering why Colonel Holland had brought them out of the house. It was a casual question, made for no particular reason except that I was puzzled by his behaviour and felt they must have some bearing on what had happened afterwards. ‘Diaries,’ Mac said. ‘That’s what I thought they’d be. Old logs, journals of voyages, something like that. They were a special sort of book, you see, with brass hinges and metal clasps. But all they contained was stamps. Nothing else – no writing, nothing. Just stamps.’

  I stopped abruptly, standing there bareheaded, oblivious of the drizzling rain, staring at him. ‘Did they have green leather covers? Dark green, rather worn?’

  ‘Aye, green.’ He nodded, frowning.

  ‘And one of them with die proofs at the end – parts of the stamp printed in black?’

  Again he nodded, his eyes alert now and questioning. ‘That’s what the Old Man showed me. Sent his launch over for me when I’d just got in from Choiseul and opened up the safe just to show me that. Said it could have been something to do with the Holland Line and had I ever seen a stamp like it.’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘No, never.’ He shook his head, peering up at me under his umbrella. ‘But you have, is that it?’

  ‘No, only the albums.’ And I told him about the collection Perenna had asked me to sell for her.

  A man appeared suddenly out of nowhere, a blanket round his shoulders and a red flower stuck in his hair. He ac
companied us up to the house, a disconcerting shadow, smiling all the time, his rather protuberant eyes watchful and curious. ‘Houseboy,’ Mac said, and went on to tell me the safe was now under the stairs, the first four treads of which folded back. ‘It was the Old Man’s idea. Did you ever see one hidden like that before?’ It had been put there in 1949 after the house had been rebuilt, and he didn’t think Hans would know about it. ‘He was too young. In fact, I think there’s only two of us has any idea it’s there. And I’m the only one alive now that can open it.’

  ‘After Colonel Holland’s death, what happened to those stamp albums? Did they remain in the safe?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, along with the deeds of Madehas, ship registration papers, medals, all the things he valued.’

  ‘And Hans Holland didn’t know about it?’

  ‘No. Nor the combination. It’s a combination lock, you see.’

  ‘So it was you who gave Timothy Holland the albums?’

  ‘No, not me. He must have opened the safe himself.’

  ‘Who told him about it? Colonel Holland?’

  He shook his head, moving on up the track. ‘Mr Tim wasn’t there when the Old Man took off. He was still at school in Australia. None of the family were there. The Old Man’s son, Captain Philip, he came across from Kuamegu, but that was after he’d gone. He must have known about the safe, or I don’t reckon he’d have been able to settle the Old Man’s affairs. Aye—’ He nodded his head under the umbrella. ‘He must have known about it, and also the combination, because the deeds of Kuamegu were in that safe, and he would have needed them when he sold up and went to England. He died there, what was it … ?’ He screwed up his face in an effort to remember. ‘Almost three years ago, it must be. It was only a few months before Tim was sent here to look into the activities of the new Co-operative everybody was talking about. My guess is his father had written him about the safe before he died; he may even have told him what to look for Captain Philip thought a lot more of Tim, you see, than he did of Jonathan.’