Kella left the Honiara police headquarters building on Guadalcanal early in the morning and started walking in the direction of the Roman Catholic mission at Visale,
He was lucky and picked up a lift on an empty truck returning from the town market. He sat in the back with a few other villagers as the vehicle jolted along the coastal road on the ten-mile trip on one of the few made-up thoroughfares on the island. As the sun rose in the sky, they passed the villages of Kakanbona and Tanavasa and then skirted Bonegi Creek, where two Japanese troop carriers had sunk at the beginning of 1943. It was said that both vessels, partially submerged beneath the surface only twenty metres from the shore, provided ample opportunities for tourists wishing to dive and snorkel, but in common with most veterans of the war, Kella had never attempted to visit either ship.
He thought about the interview he had conducted the previous day at police headquarters with Abalolo, the Tikopian pastor. The man had been of little help. Yes, he had been driven to despair by the revival of the pagan faith on his island, reinforced by a stream of Tikopians who had joined the Church of the Blessed Ark on Malaita. Yes, he had travelled to Malaita in an effort to stop this, but had been unable to do anything about it. He had been reduced to lurking in the bush, relying on supplies of food from Brother John. One night, almost demented with loneliness, he had accosted Shem and fought him, to no good purpose. Kella did not think that the shy, inarticulate Tikopian was a killer, but he was still not sure where Brother John fitted into the equation.
The truck dropped the sergeant off at the village of Tambea, with its distinctive beaches of black and gold sand, before carrying on to its destination at Lambi Bay at the very end of the road. Kella walked along the beach, avoiding the village, which was a little way inland. From this makeshift natural harbour the Japanese had secretly evacuated ten thousand sick and wounded men under cover of darkness when finally they had abandoned their campaign on Guadalcanal at the beginning of 1943. He wondered whether Lieutenant Shimadu had been one of them. Perhaps he had hoped that his war was almost over and that he would be returned home. Instead he had spent the rest of his life as an exile on a tabu site in the high bush of Malaita, with only a former slave girl for company. The pair of them had tried to form some sort of life together, thought Kella; according to the lieutenant’s diary entries they had even achieved a modicum of happiness. He hoped that had been true.
A hundred yards past the village he turned inland and walked along a track through a copse of palm trees. At the end of the path a small house had been erected on stilts. It was more substantial than a typical village house but in a bad state of repair. It had a galvanized-iron tin roof and large windows across which shutters could be folded at night. A lopsided veranda with holes gaping dangerously in the floor leaned precariously at an angle in front of the house. It was the sort of dwelling once found all over the islands when expatriates defied the climate and disease to scrape a living as planters and traders. Kella climbed a couple of steps on to the veranda and tapped on the open front door of the house. There was no answer. He entered the main room.
The shutters on the window had been closed, leaving the room in semi-darkness. One door led to a bedroom and another to a small kitchen. The room was cluttered with heavy, old-fashioned chairs and settees that looked as if they had been in place for a long time. There were framed sepia photographs on the walls. The floor was covered with empty whisky bottles and half-eaten tins of food. A man lay asleep on a settee in the gloom, breathing stertorously. Kella tiptoed over to him and saw that it was Ebury, the retired government officer. He was unshaven and reeked of alcohol and cigar smoke.
Ebury stirred in his sleep and opened his eyes unwillingly. He saw Kella and scrabbled for a shotgun lying amid the debris by the settee. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up unsteadily, the shotgun cradled on his lap.
‘Who the hell are you, and what do you want?’ he demanded in a husky but cultured voice. ‘How dare you enter my house uninvited!’
‘I’m Sergeant Kella of the Solomon Islands Police Force,’ said Kella.
‘I don’t care who you are. You’re still a kanaka and you’re trespassing on my property. Get the hell off it!’
Kella recalled an episode on a government boat taking him back to Malaita immediately after the war. The vessel had been crowded. Ebury had been the only white man on board. As of right he had occupied the solitary cabin, below decks. After a few hours he had complained petulantly about the noise being made by the feet of the women and children deck passengers above his head. Acting on the expatriate’s instructions the bosun had crowded the passengers uncomfortably together at the rear of the ship, so that the district officer’s sleep had not been further impeded.
‘I need your help,’ Kella persisted.
‘Well you’re not going to get it. Clear off now!’
‘It’s like this,’ said Kella. ‘Most of the government records were destroyed when Tulagi was evacuated in 1942. There are no colonial officers still serving who were in office before the war. That’s why I’ve come to you.’
‘You’ve come to the wrong place, Sergeant. In case you don’t know, I was dismissed from my job for incompetent and drunken behaviour. I don’t remember a bloody thing, and I don’t want to. Now will you go?’
Ebury bent forward and felt on the floor for a bottle. He unscrewed the top and drank deeply. ‘Are you still here?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about them,’ Kella said, ‘but there have been a series of murders on Malaita.’
‘So what? You guys have been killing one another since God was a little boy.’
‘That may be true,’ said Kella, ‘but I don’t think this is a case of internecine tribal warfare. The killings have been planned carefully and approached with subtlety. I think that either an expatriate is involved or that the reason for the killings is something much more important than a bush quarrel. That’s why I’ve come to you. You were an administrator before the war. Can you think of any court case or local appeal anywhere in the islands at that time that might cause someone to bear such a grudge that he would want to achieve payback on a really large scale? Something that would be enough to make a man or woman want to kill and, if necessary, be prepared to spend years planning revenge against the administration?’
For a moment Ebury almost looked interested. Then he shook his head abruptly and drank from the bottle again.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘For a time we thought that perhaps a surviving Japanese soldier was conducting a one-man private war in the bush,’ said Kella, almost talking to himself. ‘That would be motive enough for the killings, if someone thought he was still fighting for his country.’
‘He knew how to fight, Johnny Jap.’ The cue sparked Ebury into life for a moment. ‘Got to give him that. Never knew when he was defeated. I had a lot of time for the bloody sons of Nippon. I had a good war, as a matter of fact. It was the peace that buggered me up.’
The expatriate’s head rolled back and his eyes closed. Kella gave up. ‘I’ll be at Police Headquarters in Honiara until Thursday,’ he said, without much hope. ‘I’m staying on for the farewell ceremony at Henderson Field for a Japanese soldier whose body we found on Malaita. If you do think of anything, try to get a message through to me.’
Heedless, Ebury started snoring. Kella walked to the door.