After he left Wainoni, the Gammon Man, it took Kella over an hour to reach the saltwater village of Tabuna. He paddled several miles down the Lau Lagoon, between the artificial islands, then made a detour and dragged his canoe up on to the beach a mile to the north of his destination. He hurried into the coastal fringe of trees, so that he would not be observed from the open sea.
As soon as he had rounded the headland in his canoe, he had noticed the government vessel at anchor outside the reef. From a distance it looked like the Commissioner, forty feet long, with six cabins and space for eighty deck passengers. Every three months it made a heavily subsidized seven-day trip to the tiny remote island of Tikopia, carrying essential supplies for the Polynesian inhabitants there. Throughout the Solomons, government vessels competed with commercial ones for freight cargoes, generally a source of dismay to the Chinese traders. However, no private vessels wanted the dangerous and unproductive Tikopian run.
A small dinghy, rowed by two Melanesian seamen and containing four bulky lighter-skinned Polynesians perched on top of a pile of casks, was nosing its way into the lagoon through a gap in the jagged coral wall of the reef. Presumably the six men were going to gather water for their long sea voyage, filling their casks from the river skirting the village of Tabuna. The Tikopians were probably passengers going home on holiday after a stint working as labourers on one of the logging plantations in the western islands.
Kella hurried bent double into the trees skirting the beach, hoping that he had not been seen from the rowing boat. He was wearing the red beret of his police uniform, and that was not always a symbol universally accepted by the notoriously rebellious and feckless Tikopians. He found and followed a trampled strand of track leading through the bush towards the collection of thatched huts.
It was strangely quiet among the trees. A narrow overgrown path had been worn away between the haphazard riot of coconut palms, banana plants, canarium and iron trees and the thousands of different weeds and brambles clutching haphazardly at one another and almost blotting out the sun in a great colourful dappled tapestry. Scarlet and yellow orchids sprayed from the branches. Fallen trees littered the path, lying across carpets of scarlet hibiscus flowers, their rotting wood almost obscured by thousands of disciplined marching red and black ants.
Dominating this part of the jungle were the mighty hardwood evergreen banyan trees with their red berries and drooping branches. When these branches touched the ground, they would often take root and form additional reinforcing trunks, so that the trees were growing horizontally as well as vertically in a series of great moss-covered hoops. Because of this constant renewal, the banyan trees were regarded as signs of eternal life. Wherever possible villagers would hold their meetings in their shadows, to guarantee wisdom for their deliberations. Today, however, there were none of the usual urgent hunting parties of men looking for wild pigs, no groups of cheerfully chattering women on the way to their gardens in the clearings along the jungle tracks. Even the birds and animals seemed subdued.
Closer to the houses he encountered a thick curtain of creepers hanging from the upper reaches of the trees. They fell to the mossy ground in great accumulations of green, brown and black. Something among the living trellis looked wrong. Kella stopped for a few moments and tugged thoughtfully at some of the long fronds, gazing up at the higher branches of the trees. After a few minutes he realized what was out of synchronization. Then he continued through the jungle.
He passed the outer circle of huts and emerged in the village square between two rows of thatched homes. Most of the villagers were looking on as a dozen young Melanesians surrounded the six men from the Commissioner. The four Polynesians and the two seamen from the government vessel were standing apprehensively shoulder to shoulder on the bank of the river where it widened and slowed down before disgorging its water into the lagoon.
‘Whichway now?’ Kella asked, using the standard pidgin form of initial police enquiry to ask what was going on. It was a long-held ambition of his to substitute this one day with the phrase ‘Hello, hello, hello’, which he had admired in the television reruns of Dixon of Dock Green on his visit to London.
One of the Tikopians recognized Kella’s uniform and cried out unconvincingly in English: ‘Help us, Sergeant! They will not let us take water from the river.’
‘They are thieves! They will not pay!’ shouted one of the village men.
‘Guard us while we fill our barrels, policeman,’ demanded the Tikopian who had spoken first.
Kella paused, while both groups looked at him waiting for his reaction. Finally the sergeant shrugged indifferently and turned away.
‘Beat the crap out of each other if you like,’ he said. ‘I don’t care.’
One of the villagers who could speak English translated for the benefit of his companions. The men around him grunted indignantly and broke into a dozen separate conversations.
‘Are you going to allow these strangers to invade our village?’ demanded their spokesman.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ yawned Kella. ‘All you’re doing is biboimim. If I want to see play-acting, I’ll go to the Point Cruz cinema and watch John Wayne at work on the screen. Come with me, all of you.’
He walked confidently back into the trees without looking round to see if he was being followed. When he reached the nest of overhanging creepers, he came to a halt. As he had hoped, the men from the ship and the villagers were all at his heels. Behind them most of the women and children from the village were also gathering hopefully, in case the latest visitor to their settlement was about to prove to be some sort of source of entertainment to break up the long, boring day for them.
Kella indicated one of the darker strands cascading to the ground. ‘Pull hard on the end of that,’ he said in the Lau dialect to the nearest villager, a young, broad-shouldered man. The islander looked frightened and eyed his companions furtively for guidance. Kella transferred his attention to the nearest Tikopian. ‘All right,’ he sighed, switching to English. ‘You do it, then.’ The Polynesian shook his head sullenly, his downcast eyes studying the ground with sudden interest. Kella nodded.
‘I thought not,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some sort of precious cargo stored away up there, haven’t you? Something that could break if it was brought down too violently. Bottles of hooch, perhaps? My guess would be Australian whisky from a Chinese store in Honiara. Am I right?’
No one answered. Kella reached out to give the strand a tug. There was a howl of anguished protest from the men in both groups. Kella let go of the creeper and stood back. He looked enquiringly at the group. One of the villagers shuffled forward.
‘Mefella fetchim,’ he muttered.
For the next quarter of an hour, three of the younger villagers went up the tree from various sides, climbing agilely hand over hand. Each returned from every journey with three bottles of Australian Sullivan’s Cove malt whisky cradled compassionately in his arms. After four trips for each man, Kella counted more than thirty full bottles on the ground before him. The villagers and visitors from the ship looked at him like errant schoolboys.
‘Let me guess,’ said the sergeant. ‘You Tikopians came to the end of your contracts as labourers in the Roviana Lagoon or somewhere like that, and invested a chunk of your savings in this whisky in Honiara. You then had it transported by truck along the road to this village, while you travelled down on the government ship. Am I right so far?’
‘We have not broken the law,’ growled one of the Tikopians.
‘Not yet,’ agreed Kella. ‘That was to come next. You knew that the Commissioner would put in here at Tabuna, so you came to an arrangement with the men of the village. They would hide the bottles until you arrived, for a price, and then hand them over to you. You bribed these two seamen from the Commissioner and volunteered to come ashore with them, ostensibly to fill the water casks from the river. In fact, of course, you were going to hide the whisky bottles in some of the barrels and smuggle them ashore when you arrived at Tikopia. That would be against the law, because the four hereditary chiefs of Tikopia have banned the import of alcohol to their island.’
‘You forget,’ offered one of the Tikopians hopefully. ‘The men of the village threatened to attack us when we arrived.’
‘No they didn’t,’ scoffed Kella. ‘Even the peace-loving men of Tabuna would have made a better job of an ambush than the pathetic attempt I just had the misfortune to witness. What really happened was that one of the villagers saw me heading for the village in my uniform and you all hastily concocted the attack story in the hope that I would be fooled and maintain the peace and look on while you loaded the whisky on to the ship.’
There was a pause.
‘How did you know about the whisky?’ asked the oldest villager.
‘Because your work was sloppy,’ said Kella. ‘You didn’t expect anyone in authority to turn up, so you just put the bottles in a fishing net and suspended it from the top branches of one of the trees. However, you had to make sure that you knew which was the right tree among all the others in this wilderness, so you dangled one of the strands of the net to the ground, among all the other creepers. As I walked through the bush, I saw that one of the strands was much darker than the other fronds. When I touched it, I could feel that it was manufactured from nylon, probably in Taiwan, and was not a real creeper. So I guessed that something was being hidden in a net above my head.’
‘Are you going to arrest us?’ asked one of the Tikopians uneasily.
‘Certainly not,’ said Kella. ‘As I said, you haven’t broken any laws yet, and will not have done so until you attempt to smuggle these bottles on board the Commissioner.’
Besides which, he thought, there could be another twenty bloody-minded Tikopians involved in the smuggling racket and spoiling for a fight waiting on board the government vessel outside the reef. There was no way in which a single policeman could assert any authority over such a potentially dangerous bunch.
‘What will happen to the whisky?’ asked a voice from the men from the ship.
‘That’s the first sensible question I’ve heard from you. I suggest that you leave it here in Tabuna until you sail back for your next logging job in six months’ time,’ Kella said. ‘You won’t make a fortune from it, but you can still have a hell of a party upon your return.’
The Tikopians and the two Melanesian seamen who had rowed them ashore conferred in undertones. The man who had done most of the talking so far stepped forward.
‘How do we know that the men of this village will not drink it first?’ he asked.
‘For two reasons,’ said Kella. ‘The first is that they are afraid of you Tikopians.’
‘And what is the second reason?’
‘They’re afraid of me, too.’
The Tikopian spoke quickly to the others again and then nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We trust you and will leave the matter with you, Sergeant.’
‘I’m glad that’s settled,’ Kella told them. ‘Now perhaps I can get on with my real work. I’m looking for the American woman who collects songs. Who can show me where she is?’
The relieved islanders conducted him back to the centre of the village, where the Tikopians and the seamen resumed filling the casks, moving much more swiftly this time. Kella wondered what the villagers had made of the musicologist with her tape recorder. On the whole, the islanders were accustomed to the apparent eccentricities of the occasional touring expatriates and paid little attention to them. In years past, one government geologist had been famed for his proclivity towards teaching bush schoolchildren to sing ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ in Esperanto, while a driven district administrator had spent years constructing a seaplane out of materials jettisoned by the Japanese. When after several attempts it had failed to take off in one of the bays, he had attacked it wildly with an axe and reduced it to matchwood.
Florence Maddy, wiry and alert, permanently ready to go on to the defensive, was standing outside one of the huts with a number of the village women. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She recognized the police sergeant without any obvious sign of warmth, brushing an errant strand of hair back from her face with a nervously trembling hand as she greeted him.
‘Sergeant Kella,’ she said with a slight nod. ‘I believe you’re looking for me again. What is it this time?’
The emphasis on the last two words indicated that their last encounter on her artificial island still loomed in her mind. Taking his cue from her brusque greeting Kella got straight down to business.
‘I’m investigating the death of the islander known as Papa Noah last week,’ he said. ‘I believe that you were present at the church feast by the waterfall. Can you tell me what you saw there?’
‘Nothing of any help to you in your official capacity, I’m sure,’ Florence said stiffly. ‘I attended the feast because I heard that the choir would be singing songs of interest to me in my research project. In fact they only sang one such song. Then the storm blew up and some of the women present helped me down the slope to shelter in the village.’
‘Did you see anything of Papa Noah during this time?’
‘I had spoken briefly to him earlier to express my disappointment that only one pidgin song had been sung, but he seemed preoccupied over some visitor he was expecting. Then the storm came and everything became chaotic. I could hardly see an inch in front of my nose. As I told you, at this juncture some of the local women bundled me away to safety through the storm, and that’s all I know.’
‘But who invited you to the feast in the first place?’ persisted Kella.
‘I really can’t remember,’ said the musicologist. ‘Does it matter? Excuse me, I have work to do.’
Reluctantly Kella turned aside. As he did so, he noticed a backpack and several suitcases inside the door of one of the adjacent huts. They were half hidden beneath a number of woven mats.
‘Are you going somewhere, Dr Maddy?’ he asked.
The musicologist flushed. Too late Kella heard someone walking up behind him. He half turned, instinctively raising his hands to protect himself. Something very hard descended with force upon the back of his head, and suddenly he seemed to be falling forward helplessly into a very deep, very dark and apparently endless chasm. Before he was completely enclosed in darkness, the sergeant thought how misguided he had been ever to turn his back on a group as temperamental as the Tikopians.