One Blood Page 4

  Little was known about his background. Early in his life he had been picked out by the Methodist missionaries working in the Western Solomons as a pupil of exceptional promise and had been given a place at their secondary school, Goldie College. There he had confirmed his potential. With the coming of the war to the west, he had disappeared from sight. Several years later he had reappeared, almost out of nowhere, on Guadalcanal. For a time he had worked as a clerk in one of the town banks. He had embarked upon a course of study at evening classes held at the Government Primary School and had been an almost permanent resident of the Honiara Public Library in his spare time. He had been an assiduous pupil, for he now spoke perfect English, with just a faint trace of pedantic hesitation, as if he was constantly translating the language in his mind and checking it in an invisible primer.

  Now that Buna was a full-time politician, his source of income was a mystery and a subject of considerable gossip. So far he had made so little impact on the Advisory Council that he was known as the Invisible Man. Kella, for one, guessed that this was not due to diffidence but a desire on the part of the ambitious Roviana man to bide his time.

  ‘Sergeant Kella,’ Buna said politely. ‘How good to see you. I believe that you are going to Roviana to look into the problems at the logging camp.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Buna,’ Kella said. Buna certainly had his contacts, but so did most of the local politicians.

  ‘You may find the situation in the West a little inflamed,’ said the politician. ‘I know that I can depend upon you to treat the matter with your usual common sense.’

  ‘I shall do my best,’ said Kella.

  ‘Of course, but there’s one more thing, I’m afraid.’ Buna seemed to be experiencing difficulty in digging the words out. He had the appearance of a man not accustomed to asking for favours. Finally he said, ‘When you return from this tour of duty in my region, I would appreciate it if you would report to me—unofficially, of course—and give me your opinion of things as they stand in Roviana. Would you do that for me?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Kella said, wondering what was coming next. He waited for the politician to say more, but Buna merely nodded and turned and hurried away. After a few yards he stopped and turned back.

  ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to do so before you make your official report to the Police Commissioner,’ he said, before turning and continuing his journey.

  Kella strolled down to the wharf and looked at the cargo ships being loaded with copra. He thought uneasily about his assignment in the Western Solomons. Not only were the two cultures completely different, but while the gods of Malaita, apart from the shark-worshippers, were mainly land-based, in the lagoon the water gods held sway. They were known to be furtive. They hid in the sea itself, and in rivers and lakes. No outsider would ever know when he had placed himself in danger by trespassing in a tambu sacred place. Kella’s mana would certainly be overpowered by that possessed by the Roviana ghosts.

  He would need all the help he could get on this occasion, thought the sergeant.

  He wondered if there was any hope of it coming from one particular direction. He had heard over the grapevine that the fiery Sister Conchita had been transferred to the Western District recently. The young nun certainly had a powerful mana of her own, supplied by her faith. He hoped she might be persuaded to share it with him. Whether her presence in the Roviana Lagoon might turn out to be a good thing or a bad one, Kella had no means of foretelling. Almost inevitably, however, he thought with a slight lifting of his spirits, it should be eventful.

  Chapter Five

  SISTER CONCHITA GUIDED her narrow-draught canoe across the Roviana Lagoon, one hand on the tiller of the diesel-driven Yamaha outboard motor. Through the pellucid water beneath her she could see floating coral gardens and even the twisted outlines of several Japanese fighter planes downed during the war. The passage of time was gradually turning these into contorted, rusted artificial reefs. Thousands of tiny multicoloured fish swarmed among the transmogrified wreckage. As usual, the surface of the lagoon was calm and peaceful. Thirty miles long, it was protected from the elements by a series of coral reefs, some as much as a hundred feet high, surrounding its quiet waters.

  She was skirting the deserted white beaches of the island of Munda, a few miles from the mission. Most of its inhabitants preferred to live on the other side of the island, away from the noise of the occasional charter flights from Honiara, which many considered had practically turned the area into a metropolis. There was a tin-roofed open-sided waiting room at the far end of the narrow airstrip left over from the war. Beyond that was the sprawling wooden government rest-house originally designed mainly for the use of occasional official visitors to the area. So few touring district officers had made use of the structure that it had been sold to an Australian tourist company, who had installed a local woman to run it.

  Sister Conchita knew that she should be heading for Gizo to pick up medical supplies for the mission, but her conscience impelled her to visit the rest-house and its inhabitants. It had only been a few days since Ed Blamire, the American tourist, had died at her mission. The remaining members of the tour party might need her help.

  Most assuredly Father Ignatius in Honiara would not approve of her action. Before she had left the capital, the mission administrator had summoned her to his office for an official warning. ‘We are giving you a big assignment for such a young and inexperienced member of our order,’ he had informed her severely. ‘At times you might find it onerous. But there is a reason for sending you to Marakosi.’ The priest gave his caustic, thin-lipped smile. If he were a horse, thought Conchita, he would positively be whinnying with pleasure. ‘There have been times, Sister Conchita,’ he went on sententiously, ‘when you have rebelled against authority. By giving you a taste of leadership so early in your career, we hope that it will provide you with experience of supervising others, and also of appreciating the responsibilities and duties of command. You could get a lot from it.’

  ‘Am I then being punished for something, Father Ignatius?’

  ‘Certainly not, Sister; you are being given an opportunity to enlarge your horizons. You will be at Marakosi just for a few weeks, until a replacement priest can be sent there. Go with God!’

  Take the bones out of that, thought Conchita. One thing was certain: for all their avowals, there would be a number of senior nuns and priests in Honiara waiting to see her fall flat on her face in her first position of any authority.

  Judging her distance, she changed direction, cut out the engine and skimmed the canoe into the shallows before jumping out and dragging it up the beach. She walked across the hot sand to the rest-house. A burly Solomon Islander with a broken nose and the patchwork scar tissue of a boxer around his eyes was caulking the bottom of an upended canoe on the beach. He looked up and nodded cautiously.

  ‘Sister Conchita,’ he said.

  ‘How are you, Mr Dontate?’ asked the nun. ‘I’m very sorry about all the trouble you’ve had lately. I was wondering if you would like me to say anything to your tourists.’

  She had known Joe Dontate on her pastoral visits when he had worked for a while as a combined barman and bouncer in the notorious Everlasting Delight Bar in the capital’s Chinatown. A former competitor in the middleweight division of the South Pacific amateur boxing championships, a decade earlier he had been taken to Australia by an enterprising professional manager, who had given him the billing of Chief Joe Dontate. Over the course of a few years the islander had worked his way up to semi-windup status, supporting the main event, at the Sydney Stadium. He had saved his purses parsimoniously and had augmented his earnings with one last substantial losing purse against a touring former world champion from Puerto Rico seeking to top up his pension fund in parts of the world where he still had a reputation. Dontate had lasted the ten rounds grittily against his over-the-hill but still useful and hard-punching opponent, and at the final bell had walked expressionlessly out of the ring, wit
hout waiting for the decision to be announced, or even waving to his supporters, a section of his life over. Returning to the Western District, he had invested his ring earnings in several successful trading stores now being run for him by trusted relatives or wantoks. Originally there had been disputes with a number of Chinese traders objecting to the former fighter taking business from their island-hopping vessels, but after one of these ships had been gutted by a mysterious fire, the Chinamen had altered their attitudes and their routes circumspectly, to avoid Dontate’s stores and thus preserve his monopoly and their lives.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he told the nun. ‘You’ll be wasting your time, though. These are cold-hearted bastards. Pardon my language. If they’re tourists, I’m a tindalo.’

  Sister Conchita was surprised at the man’s scepticism. A tindalo was the spirit of a dead man reputed to retain his power on earth after his demise. Dontate hardly ever made any reference to island traditions, but she knew that he was proud of the fact that he came from a long line of warrior chiefs. As far as she could tell, he cared for little except the accumulation of wealth. Another of his commercial sidelines lay in acting as the local agent and guide for the Australian travel agency organising tours in the west. He had secured an arrangement with the owners allowing his tourists to use the rest-house at otherwise quiet times of the year. Plainly he was not enamoured of his current batch of clients.

  ‘All the same, in a way I feel responsible,’ persisted Sister Conchita. ‘Mr Blamire died at Marakosi. I feel that I should have a word with the others.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Dontate indifferently, returning his attention to the canoe. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.’

  As she approached the rest-house, Sister Conchita could hear voices raised in anger inside. She knocked on the door and went in. There were three white men sitting in basket chairs in the sparsely furnished lounge of the building, all wearing the shorts and rainbow-hued shirts favoured by tourists. They were studying a manila folder containing a number of letters and were deep in lively conversation. All three were younger and fitter-looking than the usual run of visitors, Sister Conchita noticed.

  ‘It’s not a lot to go on,’ said the youngest of the three men.

  ‘It confirms the rumours about Kakaihe,’ said an older man. ‘It’s all we’ve got to go on.’

  The three men stopped arguing when the nun in her white habit entered the room. They regarded her with a mixture of surprise and hostility.

  ‘Good morning. I’m Sister Conchita from Marakosi Mission,’ Conchita told them. ‘I was just wondering if I could do anything to help after your bereavement?’

  ‘What bereavement?’ asked one of the men blankly.

  ‘Mr Blamire had his dreadful accident at my mission several days ago. I thought that perhaps under the circumstances you might need some sort of spiritual guidance from me.’

  One of the men guffawed. The other two silenced him with glances.

  ‘Oh, him,’ said another of the tourists. ‘We hardly knew the guy. He sort of kept to himself.’

  The oldest of the three men stood up and shouldered his way through to the nun, taking command of the situation as if by right. He was in his early forties, hatchet-faced, with a dark chin and a receding crew cut. ‘How are you, Sister?’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I’m Clark Imison. It was good of you to drop by. I’m afraid the rest of our party has gone over to Gizo for the market. Perhaps some of them might need your spiritual help, but none of us here are what you would call religious. Thanks all the same.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Imison?’ said Sister Conchita, shaking the man’s hand. ‘I take it you didn’t fancy a shopping trip?’

  ‘Not in our line,’ replied the man. He was obviously trying to be friendly, but there was a nervous edge to his charm. ‘We’re just here for a tour of the battlefields. We’re off to Rendova this afternoon.’

  ‘Did you serve here in the war?’

  ‘All three of us did. The 43rd New England Infantry Division, XIV Corps, Lieutenant General O.W. Griswold commanding.’

  ‘The district must seem very different now in peacetime.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am; you can say that again.’

  Imison nodded politely, but said no more. The other two men regarded the nun restlessly. It was obvious to Sister Conchita that she was not wanted in the rest-house. There was something not right about the three men. They were definitely out of place in their tropical surroundings, three urban dwellers transported, probably against their will, to the remote island, like toys thrown carelessly into the wrong box.

  ‘How long have you been in the Solomons?’ she asked.

  ‘Lady, you sure ask a lot of questions!’ burst out one of the younger men.

  Conchita was disconcerted by the sudden display of animosity directed at her so openly and unexpectedly. Before she could answer, Joe Dontate appeared in the doorway. He arrived so suddenly that Conchita suspected he had been lurking outside in case of trouble. He regarded the three Americans with little favour.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Just fine,’ answered Imison. ‘The sister was on her way.’

  ‘Sister Conchita goes when she wants to go,’ said Dontate quietly. ‘She’s highly thought of in the islands.’

  Imison flushed. Conchita thought he was going to object to Dontate’s tone, but then he seemed to think better of it and shrugged.

  ‘I was forgetting,’ he sneered. ‘You’re a big man in these parts, aren’t you, Dontate? High cockalorum, or whatever.’

  ‘Have you got a problem with that?’ asked Dontate.

  ‘It’s a free country, I guess. Primitive but free. You do what you’re paid for and we’ll get along all right.’

  ‘Right, if you’re sure I can’t be of any help, I’ll be on my way,’ Conchita said, trying to ease the atmosphere. ‘I have to get over to Gizo.’

  ‘Then we mustn’t keep you,’ said Imison, nodding with obvious relief. ‘I’ll tell the others that you called when they come back from their trip.’

  Joe Dontate walked back down the beach to Sister Conchita’s canoe with the nun. ‘See what I mean?’ he asked, not looking at her. ‘Tough cookies, all of them.’

  ‘They didn’t seem unduly disturbed by Mr Blamire’s murder,’ Sister Conchita admitted. ‘By the way, what happened to Mr Blamire’s body?’

  ‘I took it to the hospital at Gizo. The medical assistant there pronounced him dead. He thought that Blamire might have had a heart attack and fallen on to the flames. Perhaps the sight of the bonfire going up brought on the attack. Anyway, the corpse was taken over to Honiara for an autopsy.’

  ‘Perhaps I can find out the result from Central Hospital,’ Conchita said.

  ‘Whatever. You won’t be able to see the body, though. The tour operators contacted Blamire’s relatives and they had it flown back to the States for burial.’

  ‘That was quick!’

  ‘Bizness bilong whiteman,’ said Dontate, half mockingly. ‘You don’t leave bodies lying around for long in this climate.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But nobody’s come over to the mission to investigate his death yet. That seems a little odd.’

  ‘Why should they? It was just a nasty accident. There’s one expatriate inspector and a local sergeant at the Gizo police station. At the moment they’re both on the other side of New Georgia investigating a custom killing. I imagine that, seeing a tourist is involved, they might send someone from Honiara to look into things at Marakosi eventually. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

  ‘I should hope so! It might be a bit late by then.’

  ‘Don’t worry; it will get sorted. You whiteys know how to look after your own in the islands. You’ve had plenty of practice. By the way, there’s one thing you can tell me while you’re here. Just who is John F. Kennedy?’

  ‘He’s the Democratic candidate for the presidency in the USA,’ said Sister Conchita, who came from Boston. ‘The elections back home a
re being held in a few weeks’ time. Mr Kennedy is running on the slogan A Time for Greatness.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Dontate. ‘Apparently he served here in the war. Those three guys back there talk about him a lot. They’ve hired me to take them over to Kasolo, the island where Kennedy was stranded in 1943. It’s only a few miles across the lagoon.’

  ‘That was seventeen years ago.’

  ‘They seem interested,’ shrugged Dontate.

  ‘Do you like showing tourists around?’ asked Sister Conchita.

  ‘It’s a job,’ said Dontate. ‘Did you know that as far back as 1910, Burns Philp ships were bringing American tourists to the Roviana Lagoon to see the headhunters? What goes around comes around.’

  He gave the nun a hand pushing her canoe back into deeper water, then walked back to the shore. The engine started up at the first pull. Sister Conchita steered the vessel back towards the centre of the lagoon. As she did so, she thought about her encounter with the three Americans back in the rest-house. It was possible that Clark Imison might have served with the US Army in the Solomons as a very young man. He had certainly been quick enough, almost too quick, to recite the name of his supposed unit and commanding officer. But if his two companions had also been in the military, as Imison had claimed, then judging by their youthful appearance, they would not have been much more than fifteen at the time, a most unlikely state of affairs. Dontate had sensed something odd about the three men as well. If they were neither genuine tourists nor war veterans, what were they doing in the Roviana Lagoon? There was something wrong on the island of Munda, mused the sister, and if her instincts were to be trusted, it almost certainly had something to do with the death of Ed Blamire.

  She looked back over her shoulder. Joe Dontate was standing on the beach. He was regarding the nun in her canoe with a particular intensity. It nagged at Sister Conchita that so little seemed to have been done to investigate Blamire’s death. Mentally she began retracing her steps on the afternoon upon which she had met the tourist. Why had he seemed so worried, almost frightened? Had he had a premonition of his violent death? Could he have been fleeing from someone? And what had caused the signs of struggle in the church? Abruptly she tried to dismiss her thoughts. Even if the death had taken place on her station, it was not her duty to investigate. She was mindful of a second interview she had endured before leaving the Honiara mission headquarters. This time it had been with the venerable mother superior of the order in the capital. She too had been in a warning mode.