He tethered the dugout to the long, carefully maintained Sulufou jetty, shrugged into his shirt and sandals and started running past the huts towards the men’s longhouse at the far end of the village. There were four islanders on guard at the door, each carrying a club. Recognizing the unarmed scowling police sergeant and sensing his mood, they stood aside hastily to allow him to enter.
The interior was crammed with old men basking circumspectly under a transparent cloud of cigarette and tobacco pipe smoke. There were at least forty gaunt, gnarled veterans, clad in their workaday lap-laps, squatting in rows on the floor of the low-roofed building. Without appearing to look, Kella saw that every one of them was a custom chief and that, unusually in such a fiercely divided area, they came from all over the northern and central part of the island and even farther away. Such a multi-clan assembly among the island leaders was almost unheard of. There were shark-worshippers from his own coastal district of Lau, ancestor-venerating mountain-dwellers from the inaccessible flesh-eating region of Kwaio, custom priests of the Fataleka lowlands, where the gigantic knee-high orchids grew as profusely as grass, and other chiefs from the distant Christian areas of Mbaengguu, Doro and even Kwara’ae and Isabel.
These were all genuine chieftains, noted Kella as he hurried through their ranks to the front of the beu, not government-appointed but ultimately powerless headmen who flattered expatriate government officials and impressed them with their mission-school-accumulated knowledge of English. The men assembled silently and coldly before him would never deign to address or even appear before a visiting white man, should one venture into their districts. These were influential warriors who controlled wide swathes of land and could, if the need arose, raise whole armies. Some he knew personally, others by reputation. There was the one-eyed and vicious Volomo, who as a young man in 1927 had taken part in the murder of District Officer Bell at Sinaranggo over a head-tax dispute and had survived the consequent bombardment of the coastal villages by an Australian gunship and the desecration of his tribal shrines by Christian native police patrols sent by the authorities from northern Malaita. Further down the hut squatted Dauara and Nakongo, as usual sullenly watchful. After the Second World War, each had served four years’ imprisonment at hard labour for their part in the abortive independence uprising known as Marching Rule. Sitting on his own was the remote and supercilious Basiana, the chieftain of Aiseni, who had the gift of being able to build and consecrate according to ancient rituals the holy dwelling known as a beu aabu on his own in a single day. He guarded his precious reputation so jealously that he seldom spoke to mere mortals, even others of chiefly rank.
Uneasily Kella realized that he had never before seen so many influential headmen gathered together in one spot. There were blood feuds represented in this beu that probably went back decades. One hasty word might bring a long-dormant vendetta back to life in an instant in the shape of a sudden fatal knife thrust between the ribs. Only an event of monumental importance could have persuaded the leaders of so many warring factions to declare a truce and assemble, no matter how warily, in this fashion. This truly was a kibung, a meeting of the mighty. The thought tempered the sergeant’s approach to the elderly clan commanders as he began to address them in an improvised amalgam of pidgin and dialect.
‘Mighty fisi kwau,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You did not have to trick me into meeting you here by pretending that the white woman had been taken.’
‘How else were we to be sure to get you back to Lau?’ gruffly demanded a clan leader from the Doro district. ‘These days you are spending all your time with the white men. How many times have you left Malaita already this year? On the other hand, how often have you visited our villages to make sure that there is peace among them?’
There was a general murmur of agreement from the wizened old men in the room. They had a point, thought Kella, although he was not about to admit it publicly. As usual, he had a balancing act to fulfil. Aloud he said mildly: ‘The government sends me abroad to learn more, so that I might become a better policeman.’
‘We are not interested in whitey’s law,’ said a chieftain from Kwara’ae. ‘You are the aofia, our peacemaker. The priests anointed you when you were small, and it is your job to make sure that no blood is spilt on Mala.’
‘These days you spend too much time as a black white man,’ said one of the four clan leaders of Sulufou witheringly. ‘You live in their houses and eat their kai kai. They say you even fornicate with their women, although I hope you have better taste than to do that. Tonight we thought that the only way to get you here to attend to our problems was by sending word that a white woman was in trouble. We could not be sure that you would return just for our humble and unimportant concerns here on Big Mala.’
The old men in the audience drummed their heels in agreement on the earthen floor of the men’s house. Matters were even worse than he had feared, decided Kella. He was being accused of disrespect.
‘How may I help, my chiefs?’ he asked humbly. There must be a series of particularly complex boundary disputes that he was going to be called upon to adjudicate, he assumed. Either that, or some bored and mischievous young bushmen had destroyed the canoes of a saltwater village once too often after the dugouts had been drawn up overnight above the high-water mark on an isolated shoreline.
He was not expecting the reply that came from the body of the room. With some difficulty, two younger islanders supported an elderly and emaciated chieftain to his feet. When he spoke, the shrivelled man’s voice was surprisingly firm.
‘There is a killman at work on Mala,’ declared the venerable chieftain briefly. ‘He is murdering our people!’