KELLA COULD HEAR the man’s voice raised in anger as he walked up from the beach towards the plantation house on the hill. He had seen the motorized barge at anchor some way out in the lagoon, and had guessed what was about to happen. He hoped that he had arrived in time to prevent bloodshed.
The path up from what was left of the wharf veered sharply. Round the bend, Kella saw an emaciated middle-aged man menacing with a shotgun two larger, younger and definitely uneasy white men.
‘Take it easy, Dad,’ said one of the younger men.
‘I’m not your dad,’ snarled the emaciated man. He lifted the shotgun, his finger curling speculatively round the trigger.
‘Easy!’ shouted Kella.
He reached the group and placed his hand on the barrel of the gun, forcing it down until it was pointing to the ground. At first the emaciated man struggled, but then he relaxed, the fight running out of him like sand in an egg timer.
‘The old bastard was going to shoot us!’ shouted one of the younger men, emboldened by the emaciated man’s obvious sense of defeat.
‘If he wanted to shoot you, you’d both be dead by now,’ Kella told him. He nodded to the older man. ‘Hello, Mr Hickey. Seeing off the scrappers again?’
‘Thieving sods,’ muttered the emaciated man. Suddenly he looked very tired.
‘I’m Sergeant Kella, Solomon Islands Police Force,’ Kella told the two younger men. ‘I take it you’re scrap-metal merchants from Brisbane?’
‘We came ashore to make the owner a genuine offer for his war relics,’ said the younger man who had done all the talking so far. ‘He charged out of the house and waved that bloody blunderbuss at us.’
‘Liars!’ snarled the middle-aged man. ‘They were walking straight past the house to start loading up without my say-so.’
‘When we saw the house, we thought it was abandoned, so we went on,’ said the younger man. ‘Well, look at the state of the place! It was a perfectly genuine mistake.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Kella. ‘This plantation belongs to Mr Hickey. Nothing on it is for sale. Go back to your barge and move on. And be careful how you behave in the lagoon. I shall be putting out a radio message warning people to keep an eye open for you.’
‘Sod him, he’s only a kanaka policeman,’ sneered the man who had not spoken so far.
‘That’s true,’ said Kella. ‘But I think you’ll find that this is a kanaka country, if you live long enough.’
The two men slouched away down the track to the beach. Hickey stooped and picked up his shotgun. He aimed it in the air and pulled the trigger. The noise of the explosion sent birds wheeling and screaming. The two scrap-metal dealers broke into an undignified run, sliding down the path to the beach. Hickey started to climb the steps into his house.
‘That’s telling ’em,’ he said. ‘Come inside, mate. Long time no see.’
They entered the living room of the planter’s house. The building was raised on top of four hardwood piles on the side of a hill five miles along the coast from Gizo. A large veranda occupied the front of the house, with a sweeping view of the sea below. The building had a galvanized-iron roof and large windows with wooden shutters. Efforts had once been made to surround the house with a lawn, but it was now a neglected and overgrown sprawl of kunai grass and weeds.
‘You’ll probably remember this place when it was at its peak,’ said Hickey bitterly. ‘Changed a bit, hasn’t it? Drink?’
‘It’s a little early in the morning for me,’ said Kella.
‘It’s never too early,’ said Hickey, refilling his glass. He was a slight, narrow-shouldered man in his fifties, bare-chested and wearing long white shorts and scruffy sandals. He had not shaved for several days.
‘When were you last here?’ he asked.
‘Not since the war,’ said Kella. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
‘You’re a bit young to be writing your memoirs,’ said Hickey. The planter was not drunk, but his speech was beginning to sound slurred. ‘Did you pick up any mail for me in Honiara?’
‘There wasn’t any.’
‘Sod it!’ Hickey indicated a bamboo table covered with handwritten sheets of paper. ‘You’d think that Government House would reply to at least one of my bloody letters.’
‘What are you writing to the High Commissioner about?’ asked Kella, although he already knew the answer to his question. Hickey’s vendetta with the government was common knowledge.
‘What the hell do you think I’m complaining about?’ said Hickey, indicating the view of his plantation through the open window with a sweep of his arm. ‘Compo, mate, that’s what I’m after, compo! I’m due a bagful and it’s well overdue. I’ve been asking for it for donkeys’ years. Do they pay me a blind bit of notice? Do they buggery?!’
‘Haven’t they paid you any compensation at all yet?’ asked Kella. ‘That’s bad.’
‘Bad, it’s a bloody tragedy! How am I expected to live? Planters in Papua New Guinea have been repaid in full for war damage done to their estates. Those of us unlucky enough to live in the Solomons have had zilch! Come with me and I’ll show you the state the place is in.’
As they walked out of the room, Kella noticed a box containing half a dozen sticks of dynamite stored carelessly under the table. It was possible that the planter was using the explosive to make structural alterations to his grounds, but it was more likely that he was employing the sticks to stun dozens of fish at a time in a local river or lake and thus accumulate enough to send to the market at Gizo. Hickey followed his gaze.
‘Going to lock me up, Officer?’ he asked.
‘Not if you give me what I’ve come for,’ Kella said.
He followed the other man out of the house. It had been more than fifteen years since he had last visited Hickey’s home, but the change certainly was staggering. Once the Australian’s plantation had been a byword for order and efficiency. Regimented rows of carefully tended palms had been spaced with scientific precision to allow coconuts to be harvested and the copra extracted with a minimum of fuss. The drying sheds for the copra meat had been painted. Now the area was an expanse of raw and gutted wasteland. The trees had been felled and their roots torn out by bulldozers so that the whole area could be transformed into a Japanese army camp. The camp had gone in its turn, leaving only the debris of its former occupants.
To one side of the campsite extended an airstrip of crushed coral, running the entire length of the plantation. The rest of the ground area was covered with flat concrete slabs, which had formed the bases for barrack rooms and administrative buildings. The few palm trees that had been left around the fringes of the camp had been neglected. Coconuts had been allowed to fall from the trees and lie in rotting piles on the ground.
‘The Yanks didn’t even bother to invade the place in 1943,’ said Hickey. ‘They just bombed it to smithereens and then starved the Japs out over a period of months. This is what they left—the few who were still alive.’
Scattered over the ground were the rusted, twisted remains of military hardware. There were rusted shell casings, searchlights, barbed wire, bloated rubber wheels and gas cylinders. They had all been crudely hacked with saws and axes so that the more valuable parts of the metal could be wrenched off and loaded on to barges.
‘The Japanese didn’t leave much of any use to you,’ said Kella.
‘That wasn’t the Japs, that was the bloody scrappers,’ said Hickey. ‘As soon as the war ended, they sailed up from Australia and swarmed over the place like vultures. By the time I got back here, all the good stuff had been loaded and taken, and I was left with this useless rubbish.’
Hickey plodded on ahead, shaking his head at every fresh piece of evidence of depravations to his estate. He had had an eventful war. When the fighting had reached the Western Solomons in 1942, he had climbed into the hills behind Gizo. From there he had reported on Japanese troop, ship and aircraft movements over a cumbersome three-hundred-pound teleradio, operated by storage batteries but capable of transmitting for a range of four hundred miles. He had been so good at his job that he had been smuggled out to Townsville in Queensland to monitor and correlate all the incoming coast-watchers’ reports from the Solomon Islands. After that he had joined the Australian army and served as an infantry officer in New Guinea. He had not returned to his plantation for two years, by which time it had been reduced to its dilapidated present condition. He had been affected so deeply that he had made no effort to return his grounds to their previous effective state. Kella had no idea how he had been scraping a living ever since.
‘Anyway, what did you want to know?’ Hickey asked, examining the shattered fuselage of a Japanese floatplane.
‘I want to know what really happened in the search for the crew of PT-109,’ said Kella. ‘You know better than anybody what went on.’
‘What are you asking me for? You were here at the time.’
‘Not in August,’ said Kella. ‘We were looking for a Japanese landing barge off Rendova for the first two weeks.’
‘Deacon and the rest of you ragged-arsed cutthroats always were a law unto yourselves,’ said Hickey. ‘We never had any idea where you were.’
‘We weren’t too sure ourselves half the time.’
‘You went ashore with the Marines at Segi, didn’t you? That was a bloodbath.’
‘My sense of self-preservation kicked in,’ said Kella. ‘By the time it was over, I was running faster than the bullets they were firing at me. What can you tell me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hickey doubtfully. He turned over the remains of a searchlight with his foot. ‘There’s the Official Secrets Act to consider,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I signed it.’
‘When the new Legislative Council meets for the first time, the elected members will have a great deal of power,’ said Kella. ‘Personally I think they should take up the matter of compensation to planters for war damage.’
‘Are you pulling my pisser?’ asked Hickey, hope flickering in his eyes.
‘I’m not promising anything, but I’ll talk about your plantation to some of the politicians I know,’ said Kella.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Hickey, trying not to display his elation. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ He started walking across the littered terrain again, a little faster this time. The endless hunks of abandoned metal before him made the landscape look like the aftermath of a battle between robots on some distant planet.
‘Kennedy’s disappearance caused a right shebang,’ he went on. ‘Those PT boat captains were the elite, a bit like the Prussian cavalry. They were only young sprogs, but many of them were Harvard or Cornell graduates. That meant that their families had influence. And young Kennedy had more influence than most. I’ll say he did! His daddy was old Joe Kennedy, for God’s sake; one-time ambassador to England and as rich as Croesus. Mind you, he blotted his copybook a bit early on when he told Franklin D. that Britain had no chance of winning the war.’
‘So your orders were to find young Kennedy quickly?’
‘It was a case of panic stations. Only it wasn’t as easy as that. At the time, the Yanks had invaded New Georgia and were in the process of taking five thousand casualties. In the week that Kennedy went missing, the Yanks attacked and took Munda from the Japs. In response, the Japanese from Rabaul were bombing the coast-watchers on top of the volcano on Kolombangara and everything else they could see that moved in the Roviana Lagoon.’
‘Difficult to divert people to look for one PT boat crew in the middle of all that,’ commented Kella. ‘Kennedy was on Kasolo by then, wasn’t he?’
‘It was like this. The PT-109 had been patrolling at night in the Blackett Strait,’ said Hickey. ‘A Japanese destroyer ran it down and cut the boat in half. The PTs weren’t the most substantial of craft. They had a complement of three officers and fourteen men and operated mainly at night. After the collision, the ship caught fire. Kennedy swam to Kasolo with his surviving crew members from the wreckage. He even towed one badly burnt seaman on a rope held between his teeth. Apparently he’d swum the backstroke for Harvard.’
‘Not a complete waste of a privileged education, then.’
‘Seemingly not. They soon decided that there wasn’t enough food on Kasolo for eleven men, so Kennedy started swimming around the lagoon looking for a bigger island, while keeping out of the way of the Japs. That took some guts. Eventually he found Olasana a couple of miles away. It was a much bigger island, and thickly wooded to give them shelter in case there were Japs there as well. After that they moved on to Naru, but the coast-watcher scouts were closing in on them by this time. They found Kennedy and his crew and got them back to safety. That’s your story.’
‘Right,’ said Kella. ‘Then what?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What you’ve told me so far tallies with the generally accepted account, as far as it goes. But there’s more, isn’t there? There always is.’
‘Rumours,’ said Hickey disgustedly. ‘Rumours and gossip that don’t amount to anything.’
‘But that don’t always reflect well on Kennedy?’
‘Not if you believe them. I don’t.’
‘And you know what was being said because you heard everything at Townsville. Everything passed through your receiver. Tell me about them.’
Hickey skirted a line of Japanese foxholes and stopped abstractedly to admire some ground orchids growing through a skein of barbed wire.
‘Why do you want to know all this?’
‘It might have some bearing on an investigation I’m conducting.’
‘Look,’ said Hickey. ‘Everything factual that I’ve heard about the story makes Kennedy look good. He did everything right and he showed that he was a brave bloke into the bargain. For God’s sake, Kella, the guy could be president of the USA in a few weeks. Leave it alone.’
‘Good luck to him and all who sail with him,’ said Kella unfeelingly. ‘What were the rumours?’
‘Once you get your teeth into something you don’t let go, do you?’ The planter started walking again. Kella went after him. ‘You know what it’s like. Every time somebody starts to make a name for himself, other blokes try to run him down. If you must know, there were stories that the authorities were considering court-martialling Kennedy for negligence in allowing a Japanese destroyer to ram him, but it all blew over and they decorated him for heroism instead.’
‘What else?’
‘Christ, you’re a nosy bugger! It goes with the job, I suppose.’ They had travelled in a wide arc and were walking along the sandy beach. Hickey studied with simulated interest an old pontoon bridge half-submerged in the water.
‘The other rumours seemed to centre round a native called Kakaihe. There were stories that he discovered Kennedy before the other scouts did. All we knew was that Kakaihe was stabbed to death in his search for Kennedy and that his dead body was brought home by a nun, who would never say what had happened.’
‘What sort of rumours were spreading at the time?’
‘You’re going to talk to the politicians about my compo? Put in a word for me?’
‘I promise you. Go on.’
‘Well,’ said the planter, ‘it was all very confused and I was hundreds of miles away, but the gist of it was that Kennedy was mightily pissed off because he’d seen no signs of any rescue attempt. The story was that he might even have been considering surrendering to the Japs.’
Some frigate birds flapped heavily overhead. Waves lapped against the beach.
A small leaf frog hopped ahead of them and then hid under a length of pipe. Somewhere among the trees on the hills a cockatoo screamed.
‘It would be hard to work that into an election slogan,’ Kella said, ‘unless you happened to be Benedict Arnold. Where does Kakaihe come into this mix?’
‘There was speculation, and it was no more than that, mind,’ Hickey said slowly, ‘that a panic-stricken Kennedy or one of his men might have stabbed Kakaihe in case he got back and spread the story that the Yanks had been in the act of surrendering when he found them.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Kella after a long pause. ‘Dangerous stuff. Who spread this story? Was it Kakaihe himself?’
‘He would have had to be quick; he was dead.’
‘Perhaps he told the nun who brought him home. She might have been with him before he died.’
‘We asked her. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us anything. Then the Catholic hierarchy in the islands ordered us to lay off, so we did.’
‘Doesn’t do to upset the bishops.’
‘Like I said, there’s not an atom of proof to support that supposition,’ said Hickey. ‘At the time, we were all too busy. Nobody knew where anybody else was. We just had to wait until the smoke cleared. Afterwards Kennedy was given command of another PT boat, Kakaihe was dead and the nun, who seemed to be the only person who knew what had really happened, wouldn’t say a word to anyone. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. Do you want to spend the night? There’s plenty of room.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Kella. ‘I’ve got to answer a letter.’ Before the puzzled planter could ask him what he was talking about, he said: ‘Can I ask you something else? Why haven’t you made any attempt to get your plantation working again—until you get your compensation, that is?’
‘To tell you the truth, I just can’t be bothered,’ said Hickey. ‘I’m too old and too bloody tired. Now let me ask you something. Just what is this case you’re investigating anyhow?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m supposed to be putting a stop to attacks on a logging camp, but another case keeps getting in the way. Perhaps they’re connected.’
‘And perhaps they’re not,’ said Hickey.
‘In my culture there is no such thing as coincidence,’ said Kella. ‘Everything is related to everything else. All things happen for a purpose. It’s just a matter of finding the right links.’
‘And what are the links in this case?’
‘Everywhere I look, a group of American tourists seems to crop up. These tourists appear very concerned about John F. Kennedy’s time in the Roviana Lagoon. To be honest, I’ve only got two leads at the moment.’
‘What are they?’
‘Well,’ said Kella dispiritedly, ‘to put it bluntly, it seems to be a matter of finding out who crapped on the beach at Alvaro and who smacked me behind the ear on Kolombangara.’
• • •
‘GOOD LUCK,’ SAID Hickey. He shook his head. ‘I wonder if this bloke Kennedy ever realized just how many islanders risked their lives to save him when his boat went down. What’s the pidgin for a close relative or a special mate?’
‘One blood,’ Kella said.
‘Well, if you ask me, Kennedy had a lot of one-bloods he’d never heard of looking out for him in the Roviana Lagoon.’