Devil-Devil (7 page)

‘Suppose this guy is local?'

Kella shook his head. ‘Out of the question,' he said decisively. ‘No one from the Lau area would try to kill the
aofia.
'

‘Now we're back to that old thing again,' sighed the sister. ‘You sure put a lot of trust in your status, Sergeant Kella.'

‘Don't knock it till you've tried it. Why don't you get some sleep? I'll wake you when it gets dark.'

Sister Conchita muttered something unladylike but Kella knew that she must be exhausted after all the walking she had done in her thick habit under the morning sun. Reluctantly the nun stretched out under a tree and closed her eyes. Within minutes she was asleep, breathing heavily.

Kella sat down and prepared to wait. He was glad that the sister had been so tired. Had she been more alert she would probably have worked out that her companion was really waiting to find out who had been following them. The place where they had come ashore was one of the few landing spots along the length of the river bank. Sooner or later the man with the rifle would explore it and probably find their canoe.

The scorching, somnolent afternoon burnt away endlessly. Towards evening Kella heard the sounds of a crab-hunting party from a coastal village moving along the river bank. The islanders were lighting their candle-nut torches as darkness began to fall. The distant unseen villagers moved on in a cacophony of mutual insults and laughter until the noise died away. Kella continued to wait beneath the tree. An hour later, with the few remaining orange fingers of daylight gone with the setting sun, Kella heard someone moving laboriously across the swamp from the direction of the river.

The man was alone. He did not seem to know his way, because he was making too much noise as he struggled waist-deep through the mud between the trees. He made no effort to look for the relative comfort of the ridge path. Presumably he did not know of its existence.

With a glance Kella checked that Sister Conchita was still asleep in the gloom. Silently he dropped on to all fours and began to crawl along the ridge path back towards the swamp and the heedless din being made by the approaching man. There was no moon, so Kella could not see his pursuer, but he knew exactly where the man was. He was moving almost painfully slowly. Perhaps he was old or unaccustomed to physical activity. Maybe he was just exhausted, especially if he was trying to keep his rifle dry by holding it at arm's length above his head.

Kella maintained his measured stealthy crawl along the high ridge path, back into the heart of the swamp. He did not stop until he was certain that he was at least several hundred yards away from the sleeping Sister Conchita. Then he waited for the man with the rifle below him in the swamp to continue his unsteady forward progress.

The sergeant did not move until the splashing, grunting man was level with him, about twenty yards to his right. Judging the distance as best he could, Kella stood up abruptly. At the same time he shouted in alarm, as if only suddenly aware of the presence of his stalker. He heard the man flounder to a halt. Kella flung himself to the ground.

There was the report of a rifle. Kella did not move. The other man started to push uncertainly through the mud again. Now he was heading for the high ridge, in the direction of the shout in the dark. As he drew closer, a thin pencil of light from a torch illuminated the night before him. This man must be sure that his quarry was unarmed to be so careless in his approach, thought the police sergeant.

Kella waited until the light of the torch was hovering uncertainly along the ground near him. Then he stood up and ran crouching along the ridge path, back towards the river. He heard another shot echoing through the night. Kella ran for another hundred yards, vaulting the tangles of roots before him, and then stopped and sprawled behind a fallen tree on the wide ridge.

The moon drifted out from behind a cloud. Kella could just make out a figure pushing through the mud in his direction. The sergeant prepared to run again, in order to lead his pursuer into the densest part of the mangrove swamp, close to the river. Kella had spent much of his childhood digging for crawfish in the mud there. If necessary, he could lead the other man round in circles for hours, until he was so tired and lost that he would be begging for someone to come in and fetch him out.

At last the stalker found the ridge and hauled himself gratefully up on to the path. He was still too far away for Kella to be able to distinguish his outline properly. In order further to encourage the man, Kella stood up. The stalker let off another shot without aiming, firing so quickly that the bullet came nowhere near the sergeant. Kella dropped back behind the tree trunk.

Suddenly, to his alarm, he heard Sister Conchita calling his name. He could see the sister standing uncertainly among the trees on the ridge, her white habit standing out vividly against the dark background. She hesitated and then started running towards the sound of the last shot.

Kella shouted to her to go back. The sister continued to run. She thinks I'm in trouble, thought Kella. She doesn't know where she is, or what is going on, but she's coming to help me.

Sister Conchita was heading in the general direction of the elevated ridge path but in the darkness she misjudged the angle and floundered into the stinking swamp. She stopped, but then pushed forward again, almost waist-deep in the mud and brackish water. Crazy with courage, thought Kella. It was a pity about the complete lack of common sense.

The stalker was looking back in obvious bewilderment over his shoulder at the nun. To distract him Kella stood up again and started running along the ridge. He ran upright, in order to present the man with a target. No shots came. Kella stopped and looked round. The shooter had turned and was heading back purposefully towards the sister.

Kella swore softly. The stalker was now on the ridge and able to make good progress, while Sister Conchita's movements were hampered by the all-pervading mud and ankle-deep water of the swamp.

Kella changed direction and sprinted back along the ridge towards the retreating man with the rifle, shouting meaninglessly as he did so, in order to distract him. The stalker looked back and hesitated. Realizing that the police sergeant would be on him before he could reach the nun, he turned and deliberately raised his rifle to his shoulder.

Kella hurled himself off the ridge into the swamp below. The rifle exploded. Kella felt as if he had been savaged in his right shoulder by a cornered wild pig. He sprawled on the ground, pain jolting through his chest and upper arm. His mud-soaked shirt turned even darker as blood started to pump out of the wound.

The moon scudded back behind a cloud. He could see nothing. Kella forced himself to his feet and staggered through the night in the general direction of the marksman. At the same time he shouted to Sister Conchita to go back to the dry high ground, where the trees grew thickly.

Waves of nausea swept over the sergeant. Once, he fell to his knees and had to drag himself to his feet again and reel onwards. He remained down in the swamp, trying to shelter in the shadow of the ridge, presenting as small a target as possible and listening intently for the sound of the stalker's approaching footsteps. Kella was guessing that the man would come back to finish off the job, in case his last shot had not killed the policeman.

Tensely Kella waited beneath the ridge. After a few moments he heard the cautious shuffle of the man walking back along the ridge above him. Kella was too tired and weak to crawl up on to the ridge. Instead, he hauled himself along the side, squirming a painful few inches at a time, using his left hand to gain a purchase on the bank above. He stopped and used the same hand to take his penknife from his pocket. Opening it with his teeth, he waited until the stalker was directly above him. Kella gathered his remaining strength and propelled himself upwards, at the same time striking out viciously with his knife at the man's leg.

He had hoped to sever the tendons of the stalker's ankle, but he was too weak and tired. The blade entered the shadowy figure's leg, just behind the knee. The man screamed. Almost fainting with the pain of his exertions, Kella dragged the blade down the man's calf viciously, slicing it open for a length of six inches. The man yelped again and fell, in the same movement rolling over into the swamp on the far side of the ridge, almost instinctively putting the high land between himself and the sergeant.

Kella tried to crawl after him, but he could not move. He wondered how much blood he was losing from the wound in his shoulder. He lay panting for breath on his back on the slope of the ridge. When he heard footsteps pounding along the ridge he tried in vain to raise himself on to one elbow to defend himself, still clutching his knife.

He was dimly aware of flickering flares approaching rapidly above him. Then Sister Conchita was bending over him, accompanied by a group of solicitous crab hunters, bearing their flaming torches. Dimly he was aware of their awed voices, murmuring, ‘
aofia!
'

‘Lie still!' commanded the sister tersely, taking command.

She pulled the shirt away from his bloodied shoulder. Gently she took the penknife from his hand and used it to cut the shirt away from the wound. She turned away. Kella heard tearing sounds. Sister Conchita turned back. She padded his wound with strips torn from her habit, tying it into place with more strips of the cloth. Kella drifted off into unconsciousness.

When he came round, he was being carried through the bush on a makeshift stretcher of stout branches bound roughly with vines. Sister Conchita was walking beside him, looking concerned.

‘These guys say they know your island and they're taking us there,' she told him. She saw the flicker of apprehension on the police sergeant's face. ‘Things aren't that bad,' she assured him. ‘They taught me a little light nursing at the seminary.'

It was the opening Kella had been hoping for. He opened his mouth and tried to speak. The sister bent to hear him.

‘Please stay with me,' begged Kella. ‘They could harm me with custom medicine. Promise you won't leave me on my island until I'm better.'

He lay back exhausted. Sister Conchita looked surprised but touched by his unexpected display of dependence on her. She nodded reassuringly. ‘I won't go, Sergeant Kella,' she said. ‘That I promise.'

Kella let the men carry him towards the lagoon a mile or so away. He was conscious of his strength ebbing again. All the same, he felt oddly satisfied. At least by his stratagem he might have secured the sister's safety, until he was well enough to look after her again.

There was no doubt in his mind that she needed protection. Back in the swamp earlier that evening, as soon as the stalker had seen Sister Conchita he had turned to go after her, leaving Kella. It looked as if all along it had been Sister Conchita he had been intending to harm.

The distant, familiar and much-loved sound of lapping water soothed his ears. A few minutes later, through the swirling mists of his mind, he was dimly conscious of being loaded carefully on to a canoe at the lagoon's edge.

Suddenly a thought struck Kella. He tried to sit up to speak. Gentle but strong hands pushed him back on to his stretcher at the bottom of the canoe. As he floated into oblivion, the sergeant groaned.

He had assured the sister that no Lau man would ever harm him. That was true. But it did not mean that the same applied to Sister Conchita.

9

ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS

The gigantic
baekwa
, the man-eating crocodile, powered towards Kella through the waters of the lagoon, its massive tail thrashing violently, grotesquely swollen jaws opening and closing in heart-stopping slow motion. Kella turned to swim away, but his arms and legs seemed powerless. Screaming silently, he waited for the savage representative of the gods to devour him.

He woke up on the mat on the floor of his hut, trying to recall the details of his dream and the terrifying part that the menacing custom ghosts had again played in it.

Painfully he stood up and walked to a corner. He picked up a length of bark cloth. Carefully he unwrapped it and took out a string of Lau shell money. It was ten feet long, looped several times. The decoration consisted of alternate red and white shell discs strung along a length of bush vine. At each end of the string was a large grey mussel shell.

The necklace had been made by his mother before he was born. She had given it to him just before her death. She had hoped that one day he would use it as part of the bride price he would have to pay to the family of the woman he wanted to marry. Kella reckoned that it should be considered valuable enough even by the most demanding of the spirit people for his present purpose.

Kella carried the shell money to the door. His strapped shoulder still felt sore but after four days of drifting in and out of consciousness he was beginning to regain his strength. The bullet seemed to have passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm, doing no permanent damage.

He came out into the afternoon sunlight and walked down to one of the island's stone jetties. As always, he felt comfortably at home in his village of Sulufou, the largest artificial island in the Lau Lagoon. Forty or fifty thatched huts were crammed together on top of the great stones which formed the base of the island, eighty yards long and thirty yards wide. Other houses on stilts surrounded the island.

In the small square in the centre of the village stood a stone church, painted green and white, with a galvanized iron roof. The church had three small towers with spires. Outside the door of the church was a wooden drum used for summoning the islanders to prayer every morning and evening.

Brown-skinned children were swimming in the sheltered lagoon or skimming in tiny canoes across its placid surface. Most of the women were on the mainland, working in their gardens. Out in the open sea, on the far side of the coral reef, the younger men shouted excitedly as they controlled their bobbing outrigger canoes against the crashing waves. Blue herons swooped over them, waiting for fish to surface. The men were beating the water fiercely with their paddles to drive into the lagoon sea-bass, snapper, mackerel and mullet through the narrow fissures in the coral walls.

Inside the lagoon, older men were treading water, spears in their hands, ready to impale the fish as they were frightened into the enclosed area, and then stuff them in floating wicker baskets.

Farther out to sea, the occupants of other canoes were fishing with crude kites. Each kite was floating in the air, attached to its canoe by a length of vine. Another piece of vine, with a shell hook, dangled in the water from the kite, attached to a small stick that acted as a float on the surface of the water. Greedy large fish often mistook the kite for a bird hovering in wait for a shoal of smaller fish, and would hurry over to impale themselves on the hook.

The entire length of the Lau Lagoon, two miles wide and constantly refreshed by more than a dozen rivers pouring down from the mountains of the main island, was dotted with smaller artificial islands, each with its collection of houses. Over a period of a hundred years they had been built, stone by stone, by men and women from the mainland seeking to avoid the malarial mosquitoes and the constant warfare between saltwater dwellers and bushmen. The closely knit, sea-going Lau people spent much of their lives on their stone fortresses, going ashore only to hunt and tend their gardens.

Kella wrapped the length of shell money around his hand and muttered a
ngara
, the prayer made when an object was surrendered to the ancestral ghosts. He hesitated and then hurled the shell money as far as he could out into the lagoon.

He was aware of someone standing behind him. He turned to find Sister Conchita staring in surprise at him. The nun had come out of the women's hut in which she was living.

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

‘Making an offering to my ghosts,' Kella told her.

‘For heaven's sake, why?'

‘I must have offended them. Otherwise I would not have been wounded. Anyway, they've been entering my dreams, and I want them to leave.'

‘Do you really believe that?' asked the sister.

‘Sometimes,' said Kella. ‘It depends.'

Sister Conchita sank on to a pile of stones. She had washed her habit and sewn a patch over the piece she had used as a bandage for him. Her face was red from exposure to the sun. She was looking more relaxed than he had ever seen her. He found it hard to remember that less than a week ago she had been thrusting through the mud of the mangrove swamp, putting her life at risk in order to help him.

‘How are you feeling?' she asked, obviously deciding from the expression on his face that there would be no point in asking the sergeant about the resident gods and devils of the lagoon.

‘Good.'

‘I'm glad, because I'd like a word with you.'

‘Can't hide from you for ever.'

‘I'm pleased you appreciate that. So, what have you got to say for yourself, sergeant?'

‘About what, Sister Conchita?'

‘You know full well what,' said the nun calmly. ‘All that garbage you gave me about you needing me here to nurse you back to health. Telling me that you were afraid of custom medicine.'

‘Oh, that,' said Kella.

‘Yes, that! What custom medicine? The morning after we arrived a guy came over from the mainland with a supply of penicillin and sulfa tablets for you.'

‘My brother Henry. He runs the government medical clinic at Atta.'

‘And the smart-looking guy who turned up in a speedboat with ointment, bandages and aspirin?'

‘My brother Samuel. He's a mate on one of the government ships.'

‘Just how many brothers have you got?' asked Sister Conchita.

‘Five. The other three live here on Sulufou with my father and work our land over on the main island of Malaita.'

‘Looks like you boys have the district pretty much sewn up between you.'

‘We try. It's all a matter of line.' The young sister looked blank.

‘Family,' Kella explained. ‘My bloodline owns most of this island and some land on the coast. One way or another, I'm related to just about everyone in the lagoon and the saltwater villages along the shore.'

‘Great,' said Sister Conchita resignedly. ‘I've teamed up with the Melanesian mafia.'

She shaded her eyes and looked out over the lagoon. The fish-laden canoes were on their way back to the island with swimming escorts of noisy children. Women were beginning to paddle dugouts over from the mainland, their craft heaped with supplies of taro and sweet potatoes.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk?' asked Sister Conchita.

‘Sure,' said Kella. ‘I know just the place. I wanted to show it to you anyway.'

He conducted her across the public dancing ground and past a
bisi
, one of the houses in which women remained for thirty days after they had delivered their babies. Kella untied a canoe from the jetty and paddled the nun out towards the reef.

They passed over coral gardens, beautifully designed fragile shapes and patterns shimmering at the bottom of the pellucid water. Kella used the short period of calm to consider some of the problems that had been brought to him as the
aofia
, since he had regained consciousness.

A palm tree had been toppled in a garden on the mainland after the recent earth tremor. During its lifetime the tree had belonged to one family, the nuts to another and the land upon which it had stood to a third. All three families had requested him to give judgement as to the disposition of the tree, its roots and fruit.

In another case, a young man from Sulufou was in dispute with the family of a girl he wanted to marry, about the amount of bride price he would have to pay for her. There were also complaints from one of the coastal villagers that the aged hereditary tree-shouter had lost his
mana
. For decades if a tree had proved too big to be felled by hand, islanders had approached the shouter and begged him to hurl incantations at it. Generally within a month the tree would begin to lose its leaves and branches and then die. Now it appeared that the old man had lost his powers. The villagers wanted him replaced. Kella would have to give rulings on these matters, and several others, before he left the lagoon to resume his police duties.

He stopped paddling and steadied the canoe against a ridge of stones. They had reached a small deserted artificial island, close to the outer reef. So far it was little more than an extended pile of rocks. Kella held the craft firmly while Sister Conchita stepped gingerly ashore. He tied the craft to one of the outcrops of coral and followed her on to the baking stones of the artificial island.

‘Who lives here?' asked Sister Conchita, looking around.

‘I will one day, when it's finished,' Kella told her. ‘I'm building it myself. I get a little help, of course.'

‘Naturally,' said Sister Conchita, ‘What with you being so well connected and all.'

He led her to the solitary makeshift thatched hut on his island. The roof was supported on poles and there were no walls. They sat facing one another on rush mats in the shade.

‘Right,' said Sister Conchita with a dogged resolve to get at the truth. ‘That guy with the rifle who you frightened off in the mangrove swamp — it was me he was trying to kill, wasn't it?'

‘What makes you think that?' asked Kella cautiously.

Sister Conchita gestured impatiently. ‘Because I am neither blind nor stupid, Sergeant Kella! You deliberately tried to draw him away from me. As soon as he saw that I wasn't with you, he turned back and came gunning for me again. He would have got me, too, if you hadn't slowed him up by making him shoot at you.'

‘It's hard to be sure—' began Kella, but by now the sister was in full spate.

‘Afterwards,' she went on, ‘you suspected that I might still be in danger. So you concocted that cock-and-bull story about being afraid of custom medicine, whereas really all you wanted was to keep me safely on Sulufou until you were better. Am I right, sergeant?'

‘Possibly,' said Kella, wondering how much he could tell the nun without frightening her.

‘Of course I'm right!' snapped Sister Conchita, reverting for a moment to a trace of her former impatient self. She stopped and controlled herself with an effort. ‘I'm sorry. I'm grateful, I really am. It's just that I can't imagine who could want to harm me. Well, apart from a few senior priests, and maybe a church administrator or two, and perhaps some of the instructors at the seminary.'

‘Hardly anybody at all,' agreed Kella. ‘What did you do with your Novice of the Year plaque?'

The sister laughed in spite of herself. ‘All right, all right, so I can be a pain in the butt. However, not to the extent of making anyone want to hire a hit-man to dispose of me. They'd be too cheap to spend the money, apart from the ones who would prefer to do it themselves.'

‘Perhaps you've discovered something that you shouldn't have,' suggested Kella. It was a thought he had been mulling over during his periods of consciousness during the past few days.

‘What? So far I've been moved from one dull job to another — administration, archives, comparative religions, you name it, I've done it. If you ever want to know anything about ancestor worship and pagan ceremonies, just come to me. I'm practically an expert on the recondite.'

‘Have you upset anyone on the mission station?'

‘Even
I
haven't been there long enough for that,' said Sister Conchita. ‘I've had two weeks in Honiara, and now less than a month with Father Pierre at the Ruvabi mission. I'd really have to try hard to make someone want to kill me in that short period of time.'

Behind her flippant attitude Kella could sense that the sister was worried. That made it easier for him to broach the next subject. ‘I'd like you to go back to Honiara for a while,' he told her. ‘You'll be safe at the mission headquarters in the capital.'

‘No way,' said Sister Conchita. ‘No one's chasing me off with my tail between my legs. I'm going back to the mission, where I belong. I've got work to do there.'

‘I wasn't thinking about you,' Kella told her. ‘I'm worrying about Father Pierre. He's too old to look after you, and as long as you're on his station you'll be a liability. He deserves better than that.'

The nun looked horror-stricken. ‘I hadn't thought about that,' she confessed. ‘I was too busy giving my impression of a hot-shot, I guess.' She considered the matter, her head bowed. Finally she nodded. ‘All right, Sergeant Kella, you win.' She looked appealingly at him. ‘Will you be coming back with me to Honiara?'

Kella shook his head. ‘It's my job to find out who was shooting at us,' he said. ‘One of my jobs, anyway. I'll get a friend to take you back to Guadalcanal, maybe tomorrow.'

The sister looked across the lagoon at the mainland. Dark clouds were forming over the forested mountain range which formed the spine of the island. Despite the heat she shivered.

‘I don't envy you on your own over there,' she said with feeling.

Kella followed her gaze. ‘That's not the hard part,' he said.

‘What is then?'

‘The fact that you're involved,' Kella told her frankly. ‘We don't often get expats involved in island problems. When they do, it gets complicated. I'm telling you this because I want you to be on your guard, even in Honiara.'