Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jarvie, along with Detectives Lee and White and six constables, turned up to Nick Pecorino’s house at ten o’clock Sunday morning. Nick opened the door wearing a short red kimono wrap. It looked to Gary as if Nick had just woken up and was still slightly disorientated.
‘Good morning, Mr Pecorino,’ said Gary. ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but we need to search your house and property again.’
‘What for?’ said Nick, looking taken aback.
‘It’s just routine, Mr Pecorino. You are still on the suspect list, and we often come back to suspects’ homes for follow-up searches. Personally, I wasn’t present at the first search, and I’ve decided to join my team this time around. We shouldn’t take more than an hour.’
‘Right then,’ said Nick. He opened the door wider to let them in.
As Gary moved into Nick’s lounge room, he was struck by the amount of indigenous art and artefacts hanging on the walls and scattered around the room. There were wooden masks, a woven cloth framed behind glass, and a wooden shield with demon-like faces carved into it. There was even a machete mounted on one of the walls.
Nick saw Gary looking and said, ‘Artefacts from Borneo. From the Dayak people.’
‘Why the interest in Borneo art and craft? Have you travelled there a lot?’ asked Gary.
‘I have been to Borneo a number of times, yes,’ replied Nick. ‘But these artefacts were left to me by my parents. Both are dead now. Mum was born in Borneo. She was a member of the Dayaks, from Iban Dayah in inner Borneo. My father was an anthropologist, studying among them. He met my mum, and they fell in love. So a bit of Italian heritage mixed with Dayak.’
‘Interesting,’ said Gary, noticing, not for the first time, Nick’s very olive complexion, black hair, and rather small stature. As these thoughts went through Gary’s mind, he moved to an old black-and-white photo of a group of Dayaks in traditional dress.
‘That’s my mother’s family,’ said Nick. ‘They’re standing in front of a longhouse, the traditional housing.’ After a pause, he added, ‘They were headhunters.’
Gary immediately turned to look at Nick. ‘What, in their past?’
‘Well, not entirely. The British and Dutch colonists had largely convinced the tribes to stop the practice by the early 1920s, but from time to time it was in the ruling class’s interests to encourage a resurgence.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, during the Second World War, the Allied powers encouraged the Dayaks to behead the Japanese. Then in the 1960s, the Indonesian government wanted to purge the communist Chinese from Kalimantan and saw the Dayaks and this beheading practice as a very handy weapon in their arsenal, so they encouraged it.’
‘What about now?’
‘No, I think it is largely a thing of the past now. You may get a rogue Dayak who goes berserk. In fact, the word berserk comes from the Dayak language. The Dayaks would have to get into a real frenzy in order to go out and behead someone, hence the descriptor. There is also the saying “wild man from Borneo” that you may have heard.’
Gary could not help but remember that phrase being used by his mother when he had come home from a particular muddy game of football.
‘Yes, of course.’
A constable came into the lounge room. ‘Sir, I think you need to see something.’
Nick immediately looked concerned as he watched Gary follow the constable out to his garage.
The constable directed Gary to a white plastic container still in the boot of Nick’s car. The lid was open, and the constable had picked up a skull in his gloved hands.
Nick had followed them out to the car. ‘That’s another of my artefacts from my parents’ collection. And yes, it is a real skull. At least three hundred years old.’
‘Why was it in the boot?’
‘I just recently lent it and a few other artefacts to the Festival Centre. They were showing some Dayak artwork as part of their Asia Festival, and because the CEO of the centre knows of my collection, he asked if they could borrow some of it.’
‘Pretty casual way of transporting priceless artefacts,’ commented Gary.
‘Well, they aren’t priceless. They’d be worth something, yes, but not a lot. And I’m not my father, cataloguing everything and not allowing anyone to touch anything. I probably wouldn’t even be able to tell you if something went missing.’
Gary looked in the boot and picked through the contents of the other plastic container that contained a range of carved totems, necklaces, and statues. ‘How come this skull isn’t carved like the rest of these artefacts?’
‘Sometime the Dayaks carved the skulls, and sometimes they didn’t. But I can assure you that it is, as I said, at least three hundred years old.’
Gary handed the skull to the constable. ‘Get it checked by forensics.’
Nick looked at Gary with surprise. ‘What, are you really going to have the skull examined by forensics?’
‘Routine,’ replied Gary, not wanting to go into a lengthy defence of police bureaucracy. He was convinced that the skull would be found to be as old as Gary had said and a genuine Dayak artefact, but there was due process to consider.
The rest of the search was uneventful.