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  The group of perspiring men staggered beneath the weight of the rudimentary ark as they neared the noise of the waterfall. Pieces of the vessel broke off and dropped to the ground unheeded, their descent muffled by the moss carpeting the track. Kella and the straining islanders left a trail of this debris behind them as they neared the cascade. Kella was big for a Solomon Islander at six feet in height, and had been strong enough to play professional rugby league in Australia for two seasons, but even he was feeling the weight of the shared burden by the time the party emerged again into the sunlight.

  They were on a treeless plateau by the side of the waterfall, halfway down its mighty descent. Water crashed to the river a hundred feet below, while spray hurtled spitefully across the level surface, soaking everyone. At Kella’s command, the villagers lowered what was left of the shattered and contorted structure of the ark to the ground and stood back. Some of them were grinning slyly. It was obvious that the new site was vastly inferior to the one that Timothy had originally selected on the village gardens. The sun beat down steadily on the flying spray, producing an eerie mist that drifted across the ground and swirled to the height of a man’s waist.

  Kella could see that the old man was coming to the same conclusion as the other villagers. Angrily he was beginning to react to being duped. With a sinking heart, the police sergeant realized that his problems were not yet over. In a spurt of rage, Timothy Anifala kicked out at the ark with his calloused bare foot. Now the villagers were laughing openly at him. Kella moved forward to stop the old man from launching himself at his tormentors.

  Then the islanders stopped laughing. They were looking at the edge of the forest. A small, undistinguished rodent was crouching among the undergrowth, its whiskers twitching suspiciously. A beatific smile appeared on Timothy Anilafa’s face.

  ‘Emperor!’ he said caressingly, almost as a greeting.

  No one else on the plateau spoke. Kella moved to one side to get a better view of the rat. He could not recognize its species, but surely the old man was not right? The Emperor Rat, once indigenous to Malaita, had not been seen for the best part of a hundred years. In the 1880s, a British colonial administrator, driven half mad by loneliness and the effects of the sun, and with too much aimless time on his hands, had noted the animal’s existence in excruciating detail in his notebooks. Then it had vanished on to the international registers of extinct species. Over the decades, some islanders claimed to have seen examples of the creature deep in the bush, but there were no recorded official sightings. Yet here was the villager greeting the shy, twitching creature almost as an old friend.

  The Emperor Rat lurched forward and then walked steadily towards what was left of the ark. It stopped beneath an overhanging spar and looked back towards the trees. A second, smaller rat, as undistinguished as the first, emerged and scurried over to its mate. The two animals hesitated for a moment, and then were lost inside the dark recesses of the structure. Kella could hardly believe what he had just witnessed, but he did his best to take advantage of the moment.

  ‘You have your first pair,’ he told Timothy Anifala. ‘Now you must continue with your building here and wait for others to follow. It might take a long time, but the creatures of the island have taken their first steps to assist you in your venture. You have your first animals, the rarest in the whole of the Solomons.’

  The old villager nodded, for once lost for words. Kella looked at the other islanders. No one was laughing any more. All were regarding the ark and its builder with sudden awe. Of such incidents were legends established. Kella clapped Timothy on his scrawny shoulder.

  ‘Nganwi ilana,’ he said respectfully, giving the old man the traditional title bestowed upon islanders who were not priests but who had displayed indisputable proof of being able to see into the future. For the sake of peace in the village, he hoped that the completion of the ark would occupy the remaining years of the venerable old man’s life, thus giving him local prestige in his evening years, together with a sense of purpose. At the same time, fortunately for his welfare, it was very unlikely that he would ever be called upon to test the plainly unseaworthy vessel before the eyes of his peers.

  All in all, it was proving a most satisfactory state of affairs. The policeman decided that it was time to bring an end to proceedings and quit while he was still ahead. He gestured to the other islanders.

  ‘Fetch-im mary bilong you quick time,’ he suggested.

  The men started to hurry back through the trees to bring their wives up to continue work on their now uncluttered gardens. Kella followed them down the slope at a more leisurely pace. Overhead, hornbills crashed their wings like cymbals through the air. A sense of well-being pervaded him. The sudden appearance of the Emperor Rats had been, almost literally, a godsend as far as preserving the peace in the area had been concerned. He did not intend, however, to make any mention of the event in his end-of-tour report. It was likely to be misunderstood by his superiors in the capital. There were some matters with which it just did not pay to bother his expatriate bosses. What they did not know could not hurt them. Especially, decided Kella, when he did not fully understand them himself.

  The sergeant glanced at his watch. He decided that he would spend the remaining hours of daylight walking along the beach to the adjacent village of Haarumou. He had heard rumours that an elderly carver of traditional pan pipes there was refusing to practise his craft any longer because he had been threatened by a Gossile, one of the ghost-children who dwelt among the graves of women who had died in childbirth. The Gossile were reputed to spend their time making pan pipes for the gods. Sometimes they took umbrage if a human being developed the art too well, and would move in on the unfortunate man to harass him.

  Kella’s sharp ears heard someone climbing the wooded hill towards him. The noise was too loud to be made by a local, but very few expatriates visited this part of Malaita. Circumspectly Kella stood behind a broad banyan tree until he could make out who the newcomer was. A few minutes later he glimpsed the portly form of Sergeant Ha’a toiling up the slope, gasping audibly for breath, giving a creditable impression of a tire with a slow puncture. Like Kella, he was wearing the khaki shorts and shirt and red beret of a member of the Solomon Islands Police Force. Kella stepped out from behind the tree and waited for Ha’a to see him. The other sergeant wiped the sweat from his eyes and squinted uncertainly through the trees.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you all damn day,’ he complained when he recognized his colleague. ‘You’re overdoing this jujuman bollocks. You don’t have to make yourself invisible just for my sake!’

  Sergeant Ha’a was a rotund, amiable Western Islander with jet-black skin, a flashing white smile and a reedy tenor voice that had once secured for him a minor reputation as a singer of comedy country-and-western songs on the northern club circuit when he had attended a course in Yorkshire. His bowdlerized rendition of ‘Your Daddy Ain’t Your Daddy, But Your Daddy Don’t Know’ had once even secured him a brief spot on a BBC Radio Light Programme talent show, a taste of fame that Ha’a had relished almost to the point of obsession. As a result, he now spent much of his time applying to attend more courses, of any description, in Great Britain, so that he could return and live the dream once more. In the meantime, he was noted for his addiction to the relatively mild fleshpots of Honiara. It would have taken considerable efforts on the part of his superiors to shoehorn him out of his air-conditioned office in the capital.

  ‘I would have thought that it would have made a nice change for you to get back to your roots like this,’ commented Kella sarcastically.

  Sergeant Ha’a shuddered. ‘I’m from the West,’ he said. ‘We don’t make such a big thing about fresh air as you primitive Malaitans. I’m here to take you over to Honiara sharpish. There’s a government ship waiting for us at Auki. Your attendance is urgently requested at Government House. Apparently there’s some sort of flap on.’

  ‘What about?’

  Ha’a shrugged indifferently.
‘I operate on a need-to-know basis,’ he told the other policeman. ‘And believe me, the older I get, it’s surprising how little I really need to know.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘THE GOOD NEWS,’ said Robinson, the Secretary for Internal Affairs, ‘is that we have an interesting assignment for you, Sergeant Kella. He gave a wintry smile. ‘The bad news, I’m afraid, is that it will take you away from your niche on Malaita.’

  Kella shifted in his chair. He always felt uncomfortable in any of the offices in the administrative block of the Secretariat in Honiara, and this one was no exception. Robinson, the Secretary, was an African retread. On the shelves were carvings of masks and animals, evidence of long official colonial sojourns in what had once been the Gold Coast, British Somaliland and Cameroon, names that were no longer even detailed on maps of the continent in this era of independence.

  ‘I know nothing of the customs and traditions of other parts of the Solomons,’ said Kella hastily. ‘I would be of no use to you outside my own island.’

  ‘You haven’t always been much use to us on Malaita,’ grunted Chief Superintendent Grice sourly. ‘The last time you got into trouble over there, we had to send a dozen policemen to get you out.’

  The expatriate policeman glowered at Kella. The pair of them had experienced a number of run-ins over the past few years when the Malaitan had, in Grice’s opinion, put his duties as the aofia before the administration of the law.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said the Secretary smoothly, ‘I think we can agree that Sergeant Kella’s knowledge of his area, and in particular his unique position in the, er, local religious and cultural hierarchy there, have been of considerable benefit to the authorities on a number of occasions, unorthodox although his position and approach may sometimes have been.’

  Kella looked out of the office window at the single main coastal street that made up the capital, with its population of two thousand people. One side consisted mainly of corrugated huts left behind by the US forces after the war and now used as shops. The other side of the road was occupied by government offices, supplemented with a few more permanent stone buildings, including the exclusive Guadalcanal Club and the ornate Mendana Hotel. Behind the offices was the sea, skirted by the finger of Point Cruz Wharf. Casuarinas added a splash of colour to the afternoon somnolence.

  ‘Of course, if you want to put your faith in a witch doctor,’ shrugged Grice, once again washing his hands of the matter under discussion.

  Accustomed to such displays of overt hostility, Kella ignored his superior. Robinson looked pained. He was a thin, pinched man in his early fifties who had devoted much time and effort over the latter stages of his career to maintaining his balance on the shifting, shrinking sands of the British Empire and, unlike Grice, had learned enough at least to pay lip-service to local observances.

  ‘We’re going to send you to the Western District,’ he explained. ‘It’s rather a delicate mission.’

  Grice harrumphed through his nose at the thought of his rebellious sergeant being tactful or discreet.

  ‘That would be the Alvaro logging station in the Roviana Lagoon, then,’ said Kella. He tried to conceal the relief he was feeling. For a moment he had feared that he was going to be sent on another overseas academic course. He had almost lost count of the number he had undertaken, starting with his BA at the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Enquiry at Melbourne University. Since then he had studied for varying periods of time at the London School of Economics and the University of Manitoba, as well as serving attachments with police forces in the USA, New Zealand and Fiji. In the early days he’d believed that Chief Superintendent Grice genuinely thought he was helping in the personal and professional development of his local subordinate, but lately it had been fairly obvious that it was just to keep the unpredictable Kella out of his hair, even if it did mean acting as a part-time travel agent for him.

  Robinson looked surprised. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked. ‘We’ve done our best to keep it quiet.’

  ‘It couldn’t be anywhere else,’ said Kella. ‘Most of the labourers employed there are from my own island of Malaita. Presumably that’s the reason why you need me.’

  ‘Correct,’ said the disconcerted Secretary for Internal Affairs. ‘Spot on, in fact. We’ve had reports of trouble at the station. The logging efforts are being sabotaged, people being beaten up, that sort of thing. We’d like you to look into the matter, Sergeant Kella. The Malaitans there will talk to you. You might be able to get to the bottom of the problem.’

  Chief Superintendent Grice’s disgruntled expression showed that he did not share the Secretary’s confidence in his subordinate’s ability, but he said nothing. Kella was inclined to agree with him. Sending a Lau man to investigate a crime in the Western Solomons would be akin to asking an Inuit to intervene in an inter-tribal squabble in Dahomey.

  ‘Do you have any idea who’s behind the attacks?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s some talk of an independence movement being involved, said Robinson. ‘Nothing concrete, though. That’s one of the aspects we’d like you to investigate.’

  ‘But carefully,’ added Chief Superintendent Grice. ‘The situation’s very delicate in the West. There’s even talk of them wanting to secede from the Protectorate. For God’s sake don’t go blundering in like a bull in a china shop. Show some finesse for once.’

  ‘Even more important than that,’ said the Secretary for Internal Affairs, wincing at the policeman’s bluntness, ‘we want you to be very careful in your dealings with the Alvaro Company. I don’t have to tell you how important their logging business is to the economy of the Solomons. Our total revenue in the Protectorate last year, including a substantial grant-in-aid from the UK, amounted to less than a million and a half pounds sterling. We need new industries in the Western District.’

  ‘Even if they’re ruining the forests there?’ asked Kella. ‘They used to have some of the largest freshwater crocodiles in the world on Alvaro. I hear they’ve all gone now.’

  Like they were on Guadalcanal, he thought. But that had been due to the activities of bored US servicemen stationed on the island after the war who had spent their weekends idly taking pot shots at the creatures.

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’ exploded Grice. ‘He’s a loose cannon! You can’t send this man up there. Who knows what he’ll get up to?’

  ‘I expect Sergeant Kella to do his duty, simply that, whatever his private views might be,’ said the Secretary for Internal Affairs crisply. ‘He will fly to Munda as quickly as possible, investigate the sabotage attempts at the logging camp and put a stop to them. Frankly, Mr Grice, I cannot think of anyone else in your police force capable of undertaking such a hazardous task. Are your duties clear, Kella?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Kella, rising.

  A thought occurred to the official. ‘By the way, will you still have authority among your people when they are so far from their home island?’

  Kella had been wondering the same thing. He had spent a few months in the Western Solomons during the war, but all he knew about the islands was that the women were supposed to be sexually voracious, and that in the old days, known as the time before, before headhunters had been so successful that human skulls were still being retrieved in remoter areas.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried,’ he said. ‘It should be all right. Ramo diingana.’ He translated for the benefit of the others. ‘The chief is still a chief in his canoe, wherever he travels.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you’re right,’ said the Secretary for Internal Affairs. ‘Thank you, Sergeant Kella, that’s all. Chief Superintendent Grice, will you remain behind for a moment? Good morning, Sergeant.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Kella, stopping at the door, unable to resist a final word, ‘the Roviana gods may be stronger than mine, and then the lagoon spirits will have home advantage.’

  Before he could close the office door behind him, Kella could hear the voice of Chief Superintendent Gr
ice raised in anger as the policeman argued with the Secretary for Internal Affairs. Kella and Grice had a long history of disputes and the senior officer would not be happy with any assignment that gave his subordinate such a degree of autonomy as this one, especially in territory that was virtually unknown to the sergeant and was so remote from the control of his superiors.

  As he started to walk away, he heard the Secretary for Internal Affairs’ voice raised decisively in a tone that invited no denial. ‘That’s as may be. Kella may be a law unto himself, but he’s also a bloody good policeman. I don’t have to remind you that there are only three indigenous university graduates in the Solomon Islands and that Kella is one of them. Like it or not, Grice, he represents the future of these islands. Let him get on with his job.’

  Kella had left the building and turned right to walk to Police Headquarters past the flame trees lining Mendana Avenue before he heard his name being called. He stopped and turned. The tall, grey-haired figure of Welchman Buna was hurrying after him. Buna was a reserved, dignified man with an exact triangle of beard. Always smartly dressed, even in the midday heat, he was wearing a shirt and trousers with precise creases. He showed no signs of perspiring. He was one of the local members of the council advising the High Commissioner on island affairs. It was common knowledge that before long, elections would be held for a proposed Legislative Council, giving much more power to the islanders. It was also known that Buna was unobtrusively nursing the Roviana Lagoon area, his own district, and that he was a certainty for election.