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  ‘Did he have much to do with Mr Imison and the other ex-soldiers on the tour?’ asked the nun.

  The plump woman grimaced. ‘Sister, if those guys were soldiers, then I’m a captain in the Salvation Army. I’m an army brat myself. My father was in the Corps of Engineers, and as a kid I was brought up in camps all over the world. My late husband Wendell spent twenty years in the Field Artillery. I know the service. Imison and his guys are slick. The army ain’t slick, believe you me.’

  ‘And Mr Blamire, did he spend much time with the others?’

  ‘Hardly any. Come to think of it, I don’t believe they liked one another very much. Imison and the others used to josh Blamire sometimes, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Josh?’

  ‘You know, hassle him a little. They seemed to think he was square, someone who didn’t belong with them. Blamire took it in good part mostly. He did have a couple of rows with Imison, as I recall.’

  ‘What about?’

  Mrs Pargetter shrugged. ‘The first was the usual thing, I reckon. In my experience, men only fight over women and politics. This one was politics. Imison said something disparaging about John F. Kennedy, and Blamire took exception to it. It was soon over, though.’

  ‘What did they argue about the second time?’

  Mrs Pargetter knitted her brows in concentration. ‘That was strange,’ she said. ‘Mr Blamire asked Joe Dontate if somebody would take him to one of the islands in the lagoon. Imison said that there was nothing there worth seeing. When Mr Blamire still insisted on hiring a canoe and a guide and going off alone, Imison got quite angry because his advice had been ignored. It all blew over eventually.’

  ‘Was the name of this island Kasolo?’ asked Conchita.

  ‘Come to think of it, it was. I remember because that was where John F. Kennedy was washed up in the war. Imison said that it was too small to contain anything of interest, but Mr Blamire said that you never knew what you might dig up if you tried. That made Imison even angrier. Joe Dontate had to separate them.’

  That would explain why Dontate did not have a high opinion of Imison and his group, thought Conchita. The tour guide seemed to have had his hands full keeping the peace among his party.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘By the way, did your whole party come to the mission open day on the day that Mr Blamire died?’

  ‘Every single one of us was there, honey. Even Dontate, our guide, came with us. He used the launch to bring us over, and then took us back, including the body of Ed Blamire. That was one macabre journey, I’m here to tell you. They chartered a plane to take the body back to the States the same day.’

  This was an aspect of the case that particularly interested Conchita. She opened her mouth to pursue the subject, but before she could say anything, Joe Dontate himself appeared in the doorway.

  ‘There you are, Mrs Pargetter,’ he said. ‘The launch is leaving to take us back to Munda now.’

  The tourist picked up her bag and rose. ‘On my way, Joe,’ she said, walking to the door. ‘I enjoyed our chat, Sister,’ she said, looking back at the seated nun. ‘Let’s get together again soon. We’re going to be staying at Munda for another few days, isn’t that right, Joe?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the tour organizer, standing to one side to allow the plump woman to leave the store. ‘You can’t have too much of a good thing.’ His voice was expressionless. Conchita stood up to follow Mrs Pargetter. Dontate advanced and stood glowering in front of her.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere with my tourists,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Conchita asked.

  ‘Haggling for the carving back at the store was out of order.’

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to get ripped off, that’s all.’

  ‘If they want to spend, let them spend. It’s no skin off your nose.’

  ‘You mean you get a cut of anything they buy in the area?’

  ‘That’s none of your business. Just keep out of my affairs, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  Dontate eyed her speculatively. ‘I heard you could be a nuisance,’ he said quietly. ‘Well you might get away with it on Malaita, but this is my territory. Don’t cross me again. My people have been chiefs in Roviana for hundreds of years.’

  ‘May I remind you that you are talking to a member of a Christian order, Mr Dontate?’

  ‘And you’re a long way from home, Sister Conchita, you and Ben Kella. You know nothing about the West. Don’t meddle in what doesn’t concern you.’

  Dontate turned and left the store. Sister Conchita let him go, and then followed at a slower pace. It had been an interesting morning, she thought as she emerged into the sunlight. On the debit side, she seemed to have made an enemy of Joe Dontate. Fortunately, Mrs Pargetter had turned out to be unexpectedly observant. As a result, Conchita had learned that Ed Blamire had been a loner in the tourist party. Could he have been watching somebody, and if so, why would he have done that? And why were so many people interested in the tiny island of Kasolo? It was definitely something to ponder.

  Chapter Nine

  KELLA COULD HEAR the singing while he was still some way from the village. Women’s voices were joined in a tuneless, monotonous chant that cut through the dusk like a blunt knife. He tried to increase his pace, beating his way through the steaming undergrowth with a stick he had cut from a nanum tree. The path before him was slippery and undulating in the last precious hour of daylight. The earth beneath his feet squirmed with the caress of water seeping from one of the adjacent rivers. The trees rising from the mud were linked up to knee height with bushes and undergrowth, making progress on foot difficult. He wondered if he would reach the village by nightfall, or whether he would have to construct a temporary shelter among the trees and then continue his journey the next morning. Fortunately he had brought a little food with him, a few grey balls from the hearts of germinating coconuts, consisting of the solidified milk of the nuts. These should keep him going.

  He was approaching the end of his first day on the large volcanic island of Kolombangara. He had paddled over from Marakosi and started his trek inland early that morning. Kolombangara was a thickly forested island some twenty miles in diameter. In the centre, the still active volcano of Mount Veve rose to a height of over five thousand feet, tendrils of its smoke drifting much higher so that they could be seen all over the Western District. There were only a few bush and saltwater villages dotted about the island, which was known to its inhabitants as Water Lord, because it was divided by over eighty rivers and streams flowing in different directions. Once its lower regions had contained the bases for ten thousand Japanese soldiers, while at the top of the volcanic peak, Reg Evans, a lone Australian coast-watcher, had radioed details of their movements to the Allied headquarters at Tulagi from his precarious eyrie.

  Kella thought about Sister Conchita’s problem with the lack of official activity over the death of the tourist Blamire. Before leaving Marakosi, he had used the mission’s generator-operated two-way radio to contact Police Headquarters in Honiara about the matter. The reply had been short to the point of brusqueness. Blamire’s death had been an accident. That particular matter was well in hand. Sergeant Kella was not, repeat not, to take any part in the ongoing enquiries. Instead he was to concentrate on the important matter of the sabotage attempts at Alvaro logging camp and to report back, preferably with a solution, as soon as possible.

  Well, in a roundabout way he was doing that, he decided hopefully, toiling up another mud-covered slope, listening to the squeaks and blundering wings of flying foxes moving above him. The trees were joined together by lianas, sprawling hanging gardens of mosses and ferns. He walked warily. The bush village for which he was heading had once been the centre of headhunting forays in the Roviana Lagoon. There had been no examples of these for several decades, but during the war, the Allies had turned a blind eye to ambushes on Japanese outposts that had culminated in the trium
phant party returning to their homes with a number of Japanese helmets with their owners’ heads still inside them.

  Kella remembered with little pleasure from his wartime service in the lagoon that on this island, local traditions were still observed. The corpses of the dead were buried upright, with their legs drawn back and secured behind their bodies with vines. Their heads were left protruding above the ground until they had rotted into bare skulls, at which time they would be detached and transferred to the aabu, the holy temple. At the death of a chief, a funeral pyre would be built, and the dead man and all his possessions consigned to the flames. The mourning period would last until the ashes were cold, at which time the female relatives of the dead man would strip naked, daub their bodies with red clay and then prepare a great feast of pork and yams for the whole village. At the end of the feast, the naked women would offer their bodies to the new chief.

  Lately the bushmen had started making tentative advances towards the other cultures in their region. They no longer depended entirely on barter for their subsistence. They had even begun to use Australian currency, rather than strings of teeth from the flying fox, in some of their internal trading ventures. A virgin could now be purchased for ten dollars cash, while a widow could fetch almost half that sum.

  The chanting ahead of him grew louder, and a drum started to beat. Kella knew that he had been seen. This would be the great talking drum of the bush people, made from a tree trunk. It was seven feet long, almost three feet wide and the same in height. The only opening was a narrow slit at the top, through which all the hollowing-out had been accomplished with a stone chisel. It was beaten with a bundle of eight rods, each about half an inch in diameter. It was used to announce the arrival of strangers within the village bounds, and could be heard three or four miles away.

  Suddenly the thud of the drum was dwarfed by the sound of a woman’s screams. The policeman hurried forward as quickly as the thorns and bushes would allow him to push his way through the undergrowth. Scratches and weals appeared on his arms and legs. Be cautious, he warned himself, you have no mana here. On Kolombangara, the water gods had precedence. He did not know what their punishment for intrusion would be, but he could guess that it would most likely include a prolonged end in some river, perhaps between the jaws of one of the gigantic crocodiles of his nightmares. The gods of all the islands could be ingenious in the forms they devised for their death sentences.

  He did not slacken his pace. As a result, before long he was standing on the edge of a village established in a clearing. A dozen stunted leaf houses were huddled closely together, as if for company against the dark, threatening trees. Acrid smoke from cooking fires drifted across the area. Twenty or so women were gathered around a slight figure seated hunched on a tree stump outside one of the leaf houses. The seated person was a girl in her twenties, and she was shivering and screaming in agony as some of the women held her down. Even from a distance Kella could see that she was beautiful, with a light brown skin, curly black hair and fine features. She was wearing a long cloth lap-lap falling from her waist to her ankles, her upper body naked, revealing high, firm breasts. Incongruously, blood was pouring down her back in rivulets as she sat hunched forward, writhing in agony on her seat. One woman standing behind her, frowning in concentration, was tracing a maze of patterns on the girl’s soft skin with a pointed bone of a bat, while another was rubbing coloured herbs into the bleeding wounds. Both women were retaining a firm grip on the girl’s shoulders with their free hands.

  Kella realized that he was watching a tattooing ceremony. The women would have been singing for hours in an attempt to keep the girl awake, hoping, usually in vain, that she might fall asleep before the gruesome ritual could get under way, thus relieving her of some of the pain. After the traditional process was over, her wounds would be allowed to ooze and congeal for three days while more and more indelible pigment was infused into her cuts.

  One of the women in the group saw Kella on the other side of the clearing and shouted a harsh warning. They all glared across the intervening space at the intruder. There were no men attending the ceremony; perhaps they had been excluded because watching the tattooing was tambu. At least it seemed to be almost over now, so perhaps the villagers would accept him as an outsider who knew no better than to interfere. Putting a good face on it, Kella walked across the clearing towards the group, hoping that the sight of his police uniform would reinforce his immunity if inadvertently he had broken any local customs.

  ‘Hello, oketta,’ he said. ‘Mefella Sergeant Kella, mefella polis. Me lookim long this fella Mary Gui.’

  ‘I’m Mary Gui,’ said the beautiful girl who had been tattooed, looking up with an effort. She spoke in perfectly modulated English, although she was biting her lips against the pain that must have been racking her lovely body. She gazed at him coolly and without shyness, making no effort to conceal her seminudity. She was fighting for breath now that her ordeal was over. ‘I must say, you choose your moments for your professional calls, Sergeant. It could almost be construed as voyeurism.’

  Kella could not conceal his surprise. He had assumed that the girl at the centre of the ritual came from the village, and was being initiated into the ranks of young village women ready for marriage. A suitably tattooed woman was considered a considerable prize in the bush villages of the West, and would fetch a high bride price. However, he had been told that the Mary Gui he was looking for was a mission-educated young woman who had won a scholarship to an Australian university and had recently returned to the Solomons with a degree. Why was she undergoing a centuries-old ceremony in such a remote area?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is hardly the moment to question you; I can appreciate that. I’ll find somewhere to sleep overnight, and come and see you when you’re feeling better.’

  Mary shifted her position on the log stump and winced. The women behind her moved away, their task accomplished for the moment.

  ‘At the moment I don’t think I’m ever going to get better,’ she said, wincing and standing up with an effort. ‘They tell me that I’m going to feel like shit for the rest of the week anyway. You might as well go ahead now. It might take my mind off things. Walk with me round the village.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Kella, falling into step with the hobbling girl. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

  ‘It’s custom, of course. You should know all about that, Sergeant Kella. I’ve heard all about you, aofia. This is my home village. Like you, I left it to go to a mission boarding school when I was ten, and I haven’t been back much since. But now that I am back, I don’t want people to think that I’m just a rice convert. I’m one of them. I’m proud of my traditions and I wanted to go through the ceremony. Now everyone will know that I come from Kolombangara.’ She paused. ‘I only wish it didn’t hurt so bloody much.’

  ‘People will only know you’ve gone back to your roots if you walk around half-naked,’ said Kella.

  ‘I wouldn’t be ashamed of that either,’ said the girl with a flash of spirit. ‘Although I’m sorry if my tits embarrass you. Talking of custom, you’d better take this.’ She hobbled over to one of the other women and returned carrying a betelnut the size of a plum, which she handed to the sergeant. ‘We’d better observe procedure as long as you’re here,’ she said.

  Kella nodded and put the nut in his mouth. It would stain his teeth red, but would have the kick of a mild narcotic. There were many such forms of greeting in the islands. The saltwater people would give a visitor a cooked gnarli fish, which had the power to bring on hallucinations. By rights the girl should also have given him lime and wild pepper wrapped in a leaf as flavouring for the nut, but she could not be expected to remember everything after such a long absence from her home islands.

  In fact, she was trying just a little too hard, thought the sergeant. He could appreciate the young woman’s dichotomy; he had been through it himself. The girl could not make up her mind whether she was a Solomon Islander o
r a brown whitefella. In truth, of course, she was neither—or both. She would discover that fact as she grew older. In the meantime, much like himself, she was trying to keep a foot in both camps. A back covered in custom tattoos would make a useful rallying point if she ever wanted to further her career in local politics and canvas votes in the bush villages.

  ‘I tried to find you at the Munda rest-house,’ he said, ‘but they told me you’d gone home for a week’s leave, so I followed you here. I want to talk to you about the Solomon Islands Independence Party. I understand that you are its president.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘There have been accusations that some of your members attacked the logging camp in the lagoon on several occasions and destroyed a quantity of valuable timber.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘But you don’t approve of the actions of the loggers?’

  ‘Does anyone? Not only are they destroying the island, but they’re enticing the local girls into prostitution. The Australian workers on Alvaro lure them on to the island to cinema shows and dances and then pay them for sex. After that, they’re damaged goods—spoiled marys—as far as their kinfolk are concerned.’

  ‘Do you and your organisation feel badly enough about that to do damage to the logging camp?’ Kella asked.

  ‘I’m not going to talk about it,’ the girl said.

  ‘Several attempts have been made to damage stocks of wood on Alvaro. Were you or anyone you know responsible for this damage?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said the girl indignantly. ‘I’m not at all bothered if the loggers are having trouble, but I’m not responsible for it, nor is anyone else I know. I’ve only been back in the Solomons for a month. That’s hardly time to develop a terrorist organisation. When I attempt to get rid of logging in the Roviana Lagoon, it will be by legitimate means.’