‘You’re putting it very clearly.’ Suddenly I wanted to hurt her, test her reaction, and I couldn’t stop myself. ‘You wanted a man with certain business and technical expertise to put the Holland Line back in business. You think I’m the man, so you fall in love with me – to order.’
She looked at me, her lips trembling, the scar over her left ear white in the sun’s blaze. I thought she was going to burst into tears. Instead, she suddenly gave that explosive little laugh. ‘If that’s what you want to believe, maybe it’s true. Maybe women do fall in love – to order, as you put it – when they meet a man they think can turn their hopes into reality.’ And she added, ‘It’s as good a basis for mating as any, very practical.’ She turned and walked quickly back to the car.
But later, when she drove me to the airport, her mood had softened again, and it was I who was thinking about the future. All morning I hadn’t been able to get the sight of those ships out of my mind, and now, standing in the shade of the airport building, waiting to board the Fokker Friendship shimmering out there in the hot sun, I told her about my arrangement with Chips Rowlinson. ‘As soon as the sale is over, I’ll have some idea what my ten per cent of the increased value of the property will amount to. It won’t be enough, but I should be able to borrow the rest of it on the scrap value of the ship.’
She stared at me unbelievingly. ‘Are you serious? You’re ready to throw everything you hope to get … ’ She was suddenly laughing, almost crying, her arms round my neck, her lips on mine. ‘Darling! You’re incredible. I love you.’ Everybody was staring at us, passengers, ground crew, everybody, white teeth bright in the dark faces.
They looked as though they were about to cheer as I took hold of her arms rather self-consciously and said, ‘There are conditions.’
She leaned her head back, her hair in the sun now and shining like fire, her eyes narrowing against the glare. ‘What conditions?’
‘First, that I take over the business management of the company. And get paid for it. I’m looking for a job, remember. Second, that the company is re-organised, and only those who put new money into it hold shares. Third, you contribute anything more you get from the sale of the Carlos Holland stamp collection.’ I didn’t tell her about the single sheet of the Solomons Seal labels in my briefcase, and I warned her that I might make nothing out of the Munnobungle sale, and even if I did get something out of it, it might not be enough and I might not be able to raise the rest of the money. ‘So just keep your fingers crossed. Oh, and there’s another condition,’ I told her as the boarding announcement was made and I kissed her goodbye. ‘You and the LCT go together. Is that understood?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she called after me.
‘That we get married,’ I said, waving to her as I joined the passengers moving out to board the aircraft. And as we turned at the runway end, I could just see the brightness of her hair moving through a crowd of islanders to the parking lot.
Next day I was in Brisbane, and Cooper was facing me with a decision I didn’t want to take. He had received two offers for Munnobungle. The first, from a neighbouring station owner on the Burdekin, had been made shortly after I had sailed for Bougainville. The second was from an agricultural company and was the result of his having advertised the sale. Both offers were close to the figure he had thought the property should fetch. The private buyer had now matched the company’s offer so that I had the choice of two certain buyers at a price that would put almost $9,000 in my pocket. Just enough, I thought, to make up the difference between the amount the Holland Line owed and the loan I could expect to raise on the scrap value of the ship.
‘Two birds in the hand,’ Cooper said. ‘Better than I’d have expected on the figures.’ He advised acceptance. The policy of the company was to buy privately, never at auction, and with the present state of the market he thought the best we could hope for at auction would be something around the present offers, and it might well be lower.
I said I would have to cable Rowlinson, but he had already done that and handed me the reply. It was terse, and addressed to me personally: Decide for yourself it’s what you’re there for – Rowlinson.
Auction or private treaty, it made little difference to the agents’ commission, so I accepted Cooper’s advice as being impartial and left for Munnobungle the next day. I felt McIver had a right to some say in the choice of purchasers, and both he and his wife seemed quite touched that I should have thought of consulting them. I had expected them to prefer the local station owner, but as soon as they knew who it was, they opted for the company, one of whose directors had already visited Munnobungle and had indicated that if the company’s offer was accepted, the McIvers could stay on.
I phoned Cooper in Brisbane, told him to close with the company, and with that settled, I was free to take a trip north to Cooktown to locate Minya Lewis. I wanted to find out what had happened to his father, if he really was the Merlyn Dai Lewis who had shipped as stoker aboard the Holland Trader in July 1911. Also, I had a feeling I might discover the reason Hans had been so determined to get his hands on anything connected with those Solomons Seal ship labels. It was almost as though they were some damning piece of evidence that had to be acquired at any cost.
Cooktown from the air was a straggle of neatly laid-out clapboard buildings facing on to the muddy estuary of the Endeavour River and its mangrove swamps. The memorial to Cook was clearly visible as we came in over Grassy Hill, and there were wallabies bounding through the long grass at the edge of the airfield where we landed. We were met by a minibus, and as soon as I mentioned the name Lewis the driver said, ‘You want the Old Timers’ Hotel. They’ll get Dog Weary Lewis for you.’
We passed the gold rush cemetery, and shortly afterwards he dropped me off at an old wooden hotel building. The big bar room that occupied most of the ground floor was almost empty, only a few old men propping up one end of the counter and the barman talking to them. Silence fell as I dumped my things and enquired for Lewis. ‘Old bastard’s usually here by now,’ the barman said, coming over to me. ‘Want to buy him a beer and hear his story, do you?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Okay, mate.’ He looked across at the little huddle of habitués. ‘Go fetch him, Les.’ He came and joined me, leaning hairy arms on the counter, the pale dome of his head with its few hairs carefully slicked down outlined against one of the gold rush murals that decorated the walls. He had a beer with me while we waited, and when I asked him where the Dog Weary mine was, he said it was on the edge of the Simpson, way over beyond the Georgina. ‘Helluva long way from here, and what’s so bloody silly, he can’t get it into his thick woolly head that it was worked out years ago, before he was even born, I reck’n.’
He wouldn’t tell me anything about Black Holland, only that Lewis had killed him because of an argument over the mine. ‘Ain’t fair to spoil his racket for him. That’s how he pays for his drinks, telling Pommies and others like you about the Dog Weary and how he killed a man over it. Except for one time when he got some sort of a legacy, or maybe he stole something. Anyways, he was flush with money for the better part of six months.’ I asked how long ago that would be, and when he said about three years, I knew it must have been the cash from the sale of the Solomons Seal cover.
Frosted glass windows, and mirrors advertising plug tobacco I had never heard of, gave the place an Edwardian appearance. ‘Custom-built for the gold miners,’ the barman said over his shoulder as he dealt out beers to the old men at the far end. ‘All red plush. You wouldn’t believe it, looking at the town now, but there were sixty-five saloons and a score of eating houses then, that’s what they say. And the cemetery full of kids dead within months of being born. You have a gander at the gravestones. There’s men there that were brought in by ship at the turn of the century dying of blackwater fever.’
We were on to our second beer when Lewis finally arrived. God knows what age he was, his hands gnarled and trembling, his shoulders
stooped, the muscles of his neck standing out like cords, wiry hair turned grey. He was small and tough-looking, his face so creased and wrinkled it looked like the face of a mummy dried and preserved in the hot Queensland sun. ‘Heard you’re gonna buy me a beer.’ His voice was deep and husky, barely intelligible. ‘Then I tell you about Dog Weary mine.’ He wore a dark serge suit that hung loosely on his thin frame, and the bulging eyes that stared at me greedily were blue like sapphires in a bloodshot yellow setting.
I bought him a beer, and straight away he began talking. It was a long, rambling tale about his father being left to die in the desert by his partner. In essence, it was what I had already read in that letter.
‘What was your father’s name?’ I asked.
‘Him Lewis.’
‘I want his Christian names.’ The blue eyes stared uncomprehendingly. ‘Was his name Merlyn Dai Lewis?’
He nodded, the black wizened face without expression.
‘And the partner, what was his name?’
‘Him take water, gun, everything. Come back after, dig gold.’
‘Who? Who was his partner?’
‘Holland.’
‘The man you killed?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Him Black Holland. This man his father. Red Holland.’ And he went on to tell me how his father had been rescued by some aborigines on walkabout, how he had travelled with them back across all the deserts of Australia. He had married an aborigine girl and had worked in the gold fields around Kalgoorlie. ‘Me born in the desert, and sometime we live in Ora Banda.’ Then they had come east, to Cooktown, where he had been brought up, and his father had gone off to find the man who had left him to die in the desert and get his share of the gold.
‘What happened then?’ I asked.
‘Him never come back.’ And he added, ‘Mama spik me. She very sad papa no come back, she very poor, so me go look white fellow. But white fellow him dead, too.’ There was something I couldn’t follow then, about being shot and put in a hospital. The name Black Holland was mentioned. And then suddenly with a sweeping gesture of his hand: ‘Sometime me hear him working Queensland, find him and he laugh at me. Him very drunk, say many things – say Dog Weary bilong him. So me kill him, an’ now Dog Weary bilong me. Savvy?’
The barman laughed, coming towards us and leaning his elbows on the counter again. ‘Same old story, is it? Can’t get that bloody mine out of his head. Talks of going there, but never has. Lazy bastard.’ He looked across at Lewis, smiling and tapping his forehead. ‘Yu longlong. That’s Pidgin for crazy. Reck’n it was the war.’ And without my asking he got another can of beer out of the fridge.
‘You mean he was wounded in the war?’ I asked him.
‘That’s right. Something I reck’n he didn’t bargain for since he was in the Pioneer Corps. Got sent to Bougainville, an’ the Black Dogs put a bullet through his neck. Got it through there, din’t you, mate?’ And he pointed a dirty finger at the old man’s neck. ‘Well, never mind. Drink that.’ And he put the can down in front of him.
Lewis filled his glass and drank half of it in a single swallow. Then, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he began telling me how he had found Black Holland working on a sugar plantation near the coast. His voice was already a little slurred, and it was difficult to follow, but I thought what he was saying was that this was the man who had shot him during the war. There was an argument over his father and who owned the Dog Weary mine, and Black Holland had suddenly drawn a knife. Then, quite clearly, he said there had been a fight, and in the struggle he had seized the knife and ripped the man’s belly open with it.
‘When did this happen?’ I asked.
It was the barman who answered. ‘A long time back. In 1952, and this murdering old bastard gets away with manslaughter.’ The barman’s face cracked in a grin that showed sharp brown-stained teeth. ‘The way he tells it you’d think the other fella started it. But I’ve heard it said it wasn’t like that at all, and the old-timers here, they say it was pay-back, that after the war he went looking for Holland. That’s right, ennit?’ And he glanced along the counter to the old men drinking and listening, and they all nodded.
‘Because he was wounded in Kieta?’ I asked.
‘No. Because of the mine and what happened to his father.’
It seemed incredible that this shrunken, wizened little black man should have gone looking for the man and killed him because of what happened out there on the edge of the Simpson so many years ago. ‘What happened to your father?’ I asked him. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? When did he die?’
The old man stared at me, and when I repeated the question, he buried his face in his beer and didn’t answer.
‘Always the same,’ the barman said. ‘Tells his story the way he wants, but start slinging a few questions at him and he shuts up.’
‘In July 1911,’ I told him, ‘your father was in Sydney and signed on as a stoker on the Holland Trader. That’s right, isn’t it?’ The old man nodded almost imperceptibly, but when I asked him what had happened to the Holland Trader, he just stood there staring at me out of eyes that had suddenly become frightened, his black face puckered and worried. He knew I wasn’t a tourist, and when I asked him about the letter his mother had received, at almost the very moment the Holland Trader had disappeared, he seemed to confuse it with the envelope, those blue eyes of his darting this way and that as he said, ‘Bilong me. Yu speak Father Matthew. He get stamp money and take forty dollar for the Mission.’
I tried again, explaining that I knew about the stamps and the money he had been paid, but what I wanted was the letter that had been inside the envelope. But all he said was, ‘Yu polis?’ And he gulped down the rest of his beer like a man about to flee.
‘I told you,’ the barman said with a grin. ‘Start asking him questions and he clams up.’
But I got it out of him in the end. I took him by the arm and more or less frog-marched him to a table; then I bought him another beer, sat him down opposite me and began talking to him, asking him the same questions over and over again. I wasn’t police, but he must have thought I was giving a pretty good imitation. How did he know it was Red Holland who had been his father’s partner? Had his mother told him, or was it in the letter? But hadn’t she shown him the letter?
It was a silly question. He’d had to go to Father Matthew to have the letter about the stamps written, so it was obvious he couldn’t read or write. ‘Were there any other letters from your father?’
He shook his head. ‘No. No more letters.’
‘So why did you kill Black Holland? He wasn’t your father’s partner. He had nothing to do with it. Why did you kill him?’
‘Him say things against my papa.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Bad things.’
‘Accusations, lies, taunts – what? What sort of things?’
Those sapphire blue eyes were wide and staring. He was drunk now. He didn’t care, and suddenly it all came out, the whole terrible story. It was pay-back and the avenger blown to pieces, obliterated, sunk by his own weapon of vengeance. And he hadn’t got it from a letter or from his mother. He had got it direct from the drunken mouthings of Red Holland’s illegitimate half-caste island son, the man who had become notorious during the war as one of the chief leaders of the Black Dogs of Kieta.
The way he told it I found great difficulty in piecing it together into a coherent story, but the first thing to emerge clearly confirmed that Carlos Holland and Red Holland were the same person. It was Carlos Holland who had left his partner to die on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It was Carlos who had formed a mining company and developed the Dog Weary mine, and with the money from that he had founded the Holland Line of schooners and made himself the uncrowned king of the islands around the Buka Passage. And in Sydney, in July 1911, the past had caught up with him, his one-time partner shipping as stoker on his newly acquired vessel. Lewis was an experienced miner. He had time fuses and explosives concealed in
his personal belongings, and with these he had mined the ship.
But it hadn’t been his intention to blow it up. It was merely a threat, his son assured me, the means by which he hoped to force Carlos Holland to give him the compensation he had so far refused. Instead, Carlos Holland had drugged him and had him carried on board the Holland Trader as a drunk. He had put him in his own bunk, where he had smothered him with a pillow. He had then gone ashore again – ‘Him spik Kepten big bisnis in Port Moresby. After, ship sail and finish downbilow sea when bombs explode. All men die.’
When he said that, I knew it was true. It explained something that had been worrying me since Mac had described Colonel Holland’s reaction to that letter we had found in the safe. If Carlos and Red Holland were one and the same person, Colonel Holland would have known it at once. After all, Carlos was his younger brother. He might pass himself off to the islanders as a distant cousin who bore a close family resemblance and who had inherited the Holland Line, but he couldn’t possibly have fooled his brother, Lawrence. Presumably he had been able to produce some specious and very convincing reason for his behaviour – debts, for instance, something as impersonal as financial difficulties that would explain his leaving the Holland Trader at Port Moresby and assuming another identity. Colonel Holland may have had his suspicions, but if he had, doubtless he had put them aside, making allowances for his brother and giving him the benefit of the doubt. But that night, when he had raided Madehas and opened the safe, reading the letter that had begun Dear Red and discovering for the first time that Carlos’s wealth was built on the abandonment of his partner to a slow death, that he had lied and lied again, that he was a pitiless monster, that sudden opening of his eyes to what his brother was capable of doing had come as a great and appalling shock – shattering, Mac had called it. Not only had Carlos Holland killed Merlyn Lewis, his one-time partner, but he had sent the Captain and his entire crew to their deaths, and he had done it without pity, without a thought for their families. This was what his son, Hans, had had to live with ever since he opened the safe and found that letter, those sheets of stamps. Ever since then he had known his father was a pitiless murderer. And he had known, too, that the money he had inherited, the basis of his little fleet of RPLs, was blood money, stemming from those murderous actions.
Solomons Seal Page 32
