Killman Page 7

  Sister Conchita nodded. ‘You mentioned that you wanted a favour from me.’

  ‘As a matter of fact it’s about Papa Noah,’ said Brother John. ‘He’s being buried on one of the artificial islands early tomorrow morning. I’ve got to see someone else so can’t be there. I was wondering if you could attend in my place. With Father Pierre being laid up, you’re the only expatriate missionary in the Lau region at the moment. It would be a sign of respect and inter-church cooperation if one of us could be there.’

  The big man was trying to appear casual, but his words did not ring true. Sister Conchita wondered why he really wanted her to attend the funeral. Still, he had helped her enough times during her early days in the Solomons, and most of the different missions tried to assist one another when they could. Why should this be an exception?

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll regard it as a mandatory church parade.’

  Brother John nodded and raised a hand in thanks before padding away like a graceful bear. Within a few minutes he was out of sight among the trees. Sister Conchita turned to walk across to the classrooms. Considering the time she had left before the afternoon school bell rang, she would have to forgo lunch and eat that evening when matters had calmed down a little.

  At that moment she heard screams coming from the islanders encamped under the trees where the main track wound through the bush into the mission area. As she hurried in the direction of the din, she sensed that something bad was about to happen. She increased her pace to a stumbling half-run across the ridges of mud. Dignity, always dignity, she told herself wryly, hitching up her habit. By the time she arrived at the trees, she was approaching a wild gallop and panting for breath.

  A big golden-skinned man was rampaging among a group of seated islanders, pulling them to their feet and pushing them roughly into lines, urging them towards the bush track through the jungle. As she drew closer, Sister Conchita recognized him as Shem, who had claimed to be Papa Noah’s son at the Lau Church of the Blessed Ark. The islanders being bullied into place were cowering, making no effort to fight back. Their eyes were dilated with terror. Sister Conchita had never seen a group of Melanesians so subdued.

  ‘Stop that at once!’ she panted, standing in front of the furious Tikopian. Shem glared at her, his large hands clenching and unclenching spasmodically.

  ‘Go away, Praying Mary!’ he growled. ‘These are my people now that Papa Noah is no longer with us. I’m taking them back to the ark where they belong.’

  ‘They came here for sanctuary,’ the nun told him. ‘They’re frightened and confused. They don’t know what to do.’ She took a deep breath. ‘They are under the protection of this mission as long as they wish to remain here. Please leave them alone and go away.’

  ‘I must take them!’ shouted Shem. ‘Three members of my church have been murdered!’

  Conchita did not know what the man meant, but she tried to outstare the Tikopian, desperate not to show the man how frightened she was, and determined to stand her ground no matter what the consequences. Shem spat something in his own language at her and turned away to start manhandling his former followers again. Before she had time to think, Sister Conchita darted forward and pulled him away from the group. Taken by surprise, he staggered back a few inches. Then he turned on the nun with a roar. It had started to rain harder. She wondered what sort of sight she must be presenting to the gaping islanders, soaking wet and bedraggled in the tropical downpour as she struggled with an infuriated man twice her size. None of the terrified refugees moved forward to help her. For a moment the nun wondered if she was going to meet an incongruous end amid the clinging mud of this corner of her cherished mission. For some reason she fleetingly recalled the awful circumstances surrounding the death of Papa Noah outside his ark, with his soaked, rag-doll-helpless body and face immersed in the flooding rock pool as she tried to revive him.

  She realized that Shem had stopped struggling, and peered confusedly through the tropical downfall. The big man was paying no attention to her. He was facing the trees, trembling. Another Tikopian was standing on the track under the foliage. He was not as wide as Shem, but taller and older. He wore a loincloth with a leather belt around his waist. A long knife was thrust into the belt. The effect on Shem was dramatic. He gave a half-despairing grunt and then ran quickly past the second Tikopian and was lost to sight among the trees. The other Tikopian looked expressionlessly at Sister Conchita, and then turned and glided easily after Shem, his right hand cupped over the knife in the belt.

  Feeling sick, the nun tried to control her trembling limbs. She wondered how close she had just come to death. Shem had been enraged almost beyond endurance, there was no doubt about that. But what had the second Tikopian been doing? Conchita was convinced that he was the same man she had now encountered twice in the ark. She would have to consider matters carefully when she had more time to spare. She started to walk towards the remaining islanders to comfort and reassure them, but they scattered like skittish horses into the trees at her approach.

  Sister Conchita took a few steps along the track, begging the islanders to return. She heard approaching footsteps around a tangled corner in the jungle path. Could it be Shem returning to try once more to fetch his former adherents from her mission? Over her dead body, decided Sister Conchita, with a rush of adrenalin.

  ‘I’m not going to move from this path,’ she called out, only too aware of the quaver in her voice. ‘If you make any attempt to enter the mission, it will be over my dead body!’

  ‘And good afternoon to you too, Sister Conchita,’ came a cool, modulated response from the trees.

  Unkempt, drenched, sweat-stained and mud-encrusted, Sister Conchita peered through the undergrowth. For the first time since she had encountered Shem that afternoon, she allowed a moan of genuine despair to escape her lips. Rounding the corner was the self-possessed, immaculate and somehow, despite the downpour, apparently dry form of Father Kuyper, the bishop’s feared inspector.

  10

  THE SPIRIT OF THE ISLANDS

  The Spirit of the Islands had left Honiara the previous evening and now was only a few miles from Kella’s home in the Lau Lagoon. Sitting on the deck next to the wheelhouse, Kella wondered how much it had cost the mysterious Mr Mayotishi to charter even such an admittedly decrepit vessel.

  Kella studied the ship around him without enchantment. It was a familiar sight about the islands. He had been a deck passenger on too many of its incarnations to be enthused by the prospect of travelling on the precarious old tub once again, even on the short journey between Honiara and Malaita. Before the war, the ship had been a fishing trawler, until it had piled on to a reef off the island of Santa Isabel and been abandoned by its owner and the surviving members of its crew. It had lain neglected on the coral rocks throughout the war years before, in 1945, an enterprising and bored Australian beachcomber had utilized his sober and sometimes his drunken moments to crudely restore the vessel, using a variety of spare parts cannibalized from ships and vehicles left behind by the retreating Japanese forces, and a few hunks of metal and components stolen at night from neglectful, poorly guarded US bases and dumps.

  The resultant hybrid had been surprising seaworthy, and for a time the alcoholic owner had even scraped a precarious and hazardous living delivering supplies and mail to remote plantations, missions and government stations among the islands. Then one night, emboldened by alcohol, he had foolishly tried to outrun a storm on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal. As a result, The Spirit of the Islands had been hurled up on to the shore like a crumpled toy, to join the vast ghost fleet of unwanted sunken and beached Japanese and American vessels now rusting on islands and atolls all over the post-war Solomons.

  Yet again a saviour had been on hand to salvage the indomitable ship. A Chinese company based in Honiara had decided to increase its fleet of battered cargo ships collecting copra from the coastal villages. Its engineers paid salvage rates for the tortured assemblage of wood and metal, towed
the wreckage to Honiara and set out on the second reconstruction job in its eventful thirty-year history. Once again The Spirit of the Islands was hammered and cajoled into a variety of fresh shapes, emerging a little elongated and considerably wider in the beam, as a combined cargo vessel and inter-island ferry boat, with room for forty deck passengers. Below there were three cabins, a stuffy stateroom, a galley, two fairly capacious holds, fuel storage tanks and an engine room with a reconstructed pair of diesel engines.

  To the surprise of many, including its owners and crew, the renovated and now extremely ugly Spirit of the Islands emerged as a tenacious and courageous battler in the roughest of seas, and had become a familiar sight dragging its rusted carcass around the islands. Today Kella was the only passenger. He had been offered a passage back to Malaita by the ubiquitous Japanese as he left the fishing village the previous afternoon, and had accepted unhesitatingly.

  Kella stood up and walked to the ship’s rail. In the distance he could make out the reefs surrounding his lagoon. He would spend the night in the beu at Sulufou, and then visit the ark early the following morning. He did not expect to find much of use there. From long experience he knew that there were rarely such things as productive crime scenes among the islands. Earlier in the week, when he had visited the sites of the killman’s first two murders, not only had both decomposing bodies been buried already, but the areas of the deaths had been trampled by dozens of curious visitors.

  He would have to rely upon the evidence of eyewitnesses like Sister Conchita, Brother John and Dr Florence Maddy. Perhaps Shem, the Tikopian, might volunteer some information, but as he was heir apparent to the church, with its presumably munificent coffers, he would hardly be an impartial witness.

  ‘The bosun tells me that we will be putting you ashore in less than an hour,’ said Mayotishi, his head emerging above the companionway. ‘Could you spare me a few minutes before then, Sergeant Kella?’

  Kella followed the Japanese down the steps into the stateroom. Like Mayotishi himself, the cabin was small and tidy. A table was clamped to the floor in the middle of the room. Mayotishi ushered the sergeant into one of the wooden chairs around the table and took another one opposite him.

  ‘Thanks for the lift across,’ Kella said. ‘I might have had to wait a week for a boat from Honiara.’

  ‘I’m afraid I had an ulterior motive,’ said the Japanese. ‘But you will already have guessed that, Sergeant Kella. You have the reputation of being a very shrewd man. You also speak very good English. I believe that you acted as an official interpreter during the war. You must have been very young then.’

  ‘They brought me back from my secondary school in Fiji to help with the liaison between the Americans and the islanders in 1942. I found it boring, so I got a job on a coast-watcher’s raiding boat in the Roviana Lagoon.’ Kella hesitated, but it was important that the foreigner knew the truth. ‘You accused me yesterday of being anti-Japanese. I don’t think I am, but I have killed Japanese soldiers.’

  ‘We all did our duty. I did my insignificant share of fighting too.’

  ‘Here in the Solomons?’

  Mayotishi shook his head. ‘The Philippines,’ he said. ‘I served on a destroyer.’

  ‘What exactly are you doing in the Solomons now, Mr Mayotishi?’ asked Kella, deciding that it was time to stop pussyfooting around. ‘We don’t get many tourists on this part of Malaita.’

  Mayotishi took his time over replying. He seemed almost embarrassed. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the table in front of him.

  ‘To be absolutely frank with you, I’m not a tourist, although my visa may say so,’ he said. From his wallet he produced a blue embossed warrant card bearing his photograph. ‘I’m an official of the Hikiage Engo Kyoku – the Bureau of Repatriate Welfare in Tokyo. It is the duty of my department to investigate reports of Japanese soldiers believed still to be surviving in former Pacific battle areas. I’m here in an official capacity, although I have not yet reported my presence to the authorities in your capital, an omission for which I can only apologize.’

  ‘Aren’t you a little late getting here?’ asked Kella, while his mind worked on the information. ‘The war ended fifteen years ago. Most of the Japanese pulled out in 1943 and went home.’

  ‘Would that that were true,’ sighed the Japanese. ‘It might surprise you to know that we suspect that even today there might still be dozens of Japanese survivors of World War Two scattered about the islands of the South Pacific. There have been a number of such cases since 1945, I can assure you. My colleagues and I are still coming across troops of the Imperial Japanese Army who do not yet know that the war is over.’

  ‘That sounds rather self-absorbed,’ Kella said.

  Mayotishi did not react to his tone of levity. ‘Let me give you a few examples. On the island of Peleliu in 1947, thirty-four Japanese holdouts actually attacked a peacetime US Marine garrison. Several years later, in 1949, two of our machine-gunners finally surrendered on Iwo Jima. One of our corporals was killed by Philippine soldiers on Lubang in 1954. Earlier this year, in May, Sergeant Tadashi Ito and Private Bunzo Minagawa finally surrendered on Guam. They are just a few of the brave soldiers of the emperor who chose to fight on after 1945. It is the responsibility of my department to find each survivor, inform him of the true situation and bring him home as swiftly and safely as possible.’

  ‘And you think that some of these could be here on Malaita?’ asked Kella.

  ‘It is possible,’ nodded the Japanese. ‘Doubtless you are aware of the rumours to that effect. I am here to enquire into the matter. Often these reports turn out to be unfounded, but sometimes not. It is my duty to carry out a thorough investigation into all aspects of the sightings.’

  Kella wondered how Mayotishi could have heard about the Japanese bayonet being abandoned after the attack on the islander in the territory of Basiana. It was a sign of how much money the Japanese government was prepared to back their agent with. Or perhaps it merely indicated how poor most Solomon Islanders were that Mayotishi could afford to recruit a network of spies with such ease.

  ‘And where do I come into this?’ Kella asked.

  ‘I’ve been searching for you rigorously for several days, ever since I arrived in Honiara,’ said Mayotishi. ‘I need your help, Sergeant Kella.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The situation is a delicate one,’ Mayotishi said. ‘As I intimated, there have been examples on other islands in the Pacific of Japanese soldiers actually attacking villages and military installations, under the misconception that they were still fighting in the war. In some cases, unfortunately, there have been deaths. If that happens, we prefer to find our nationals quietly and smuggle them home to save diplomatic embarrassment. In this case, I could hardly conduct an official enquiry with the backing of the Protectorate’s officials if, the gods forbid, it was to result in a Japanese citizen being arrested for murder. You can see my dilemma. The presence of the Japanese in these islands is still an emotive matter, as you must know. After all, seven thousand US troops and thirty-two thousand Japanese soldiers were killed in the Solomons in 1942. Nobody knows how many islanders died.’

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ said Kella. ‘Why should they?’

  Mayotishi gestured impatiently. ‘I didn’t mean that their lives were unimportant, just that no records were kept.’

  Kella let it go. ‘You still haven’t told me why you’ve been looking for me,’ he said, although by now he had a pretty good idea.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? I made enquiries and I was told that you were almost certainly the best policeman and tracker on Malaita,’ said the Japanese. ‘That you knew the island better than anyone else, and that you were a man of influence in the local tribal structure. You are also generally held to be a man of considerable independence of mind. Who wouldn’t want to have you on his side? I need you to help me hunt down this killman and ascertain whether or not he is a former Japanese soldier who doesn’t know that the war is o
ver. If it transpires that the killer is not Japanese, then you can arrest him in the normal way and take him back to Honiara.’

  ‘And if he is Japanese, Mr Mayotishi?’

  ‘Then the matter will be taken out of our hands and transferred to a higher diplomatic level,’ said Mayotishi. ‘I’m not asking you to hush anything up. I just want the initial stages of the enquiry carried out by an expert, in my presence. I do not come entirely empty-handed. I have chartered this vessel and its crew. I am prepared to put them at at your full disposal if you will use them in the search for this alleged Japanese soldier. I imagine it will be better than trudging all over Malaita on foot.’ Mayotishi took a map from a drawer in the table. ‘I am told that the island is a hundred miles long and twenty-three miles wide, and that the central jungle is almost impenetrable, with a mountain range rising to a height of three thousand feet. Using The Spirit of the Islands will at least provide us with a comfortable and reasonably fast-moving base to take us round the coast. What do you say?’

  He looked expectantly across the table. Kella tried to seem inscrutable, although he was probably wasting his time. He had the feeling that he was playing poker against an expert. He had to admit that the idea of conducting an investigation in some sort of comfort and at a reasonable speed for once was a tempting one. On the other hand, Chief Superintendent Grice and the other expatriate administrators were unlikely to look kindly on what was in effect a moonlighting operation on his part, should they find out what he had been doing. However, if eventually the end was to justify the means, that might make up for the trouble he would undoubtedly get into. There was no denying that Mayotishi’s proposal might fit in handily with other plans that were beginning to formulate in the policeman’s mind.