Solomons Seal (33 page)

It was Mac's use of the word ‘ghost' that started me thinking again about the disappearance of the
Holland Trader.
But then he said, ‘Couldn't be Jonathan that showed him how to open the safe.' He was referring
to Hans. Most of the things in the safe belonged to Hans Holland.

‘Colonel Holland might have given him the combination,' I suggested.

‘No, definitely not.'

‘Tim Holland then?'

‘He wouldn't have told him.'

‘Maybe Hans Holland caught him here with the safe open and those albums in his hand.'

But Mac wasn't listening. He was reading through Lewis's letter again, his hands trembling slightly and a shocked look on his face. When he finished, he folded it up slowly and sat quite still for a moment, squatting back on his heels and staring at nothing. Finally he passed the letter to me. ‘You'd better keep it. Take it back with you to Australia, find out what happened to Merlyn Lewis.'

‘I know what happened to Lewis,' I said. And I told him how he had shipped out of Sydney as a stoker.

‘And why would he do that, do you think? A year later, a whole year after writing that letter. There's more mystery for you.' He was rummaging around in the safe again, and when he found there was nothing else of importance there, he began packing the money, the papers, everything back the way we had found it. But as well as the letter he let me keep that single sheet of the Solomons Seal blue stamp, and so that they wouldn't get wet, I tucked them between the pages of an old copy of
Playboy
magazine I found lying on a table among a pile of faded newspapers.

After closing the door of the safe and replacing
the lower stair treads, Mac unlocked the doors. The houseboy had been joined by an older man, also a woman, with two girls hovering in the background, one of them wide-mouthed and smiling. She had long bare black legs, their length and their shapeliness emphasised by the shortness of her dress, which was a brilliant red and too small for her so that her nubile breasts seemed bursting out of it. She was excited, the dark brown eyes staring straight at us, her hair standing up like a golliwog, and against the green of the lush growth outside, drab in the falling rain, she looked like some bright tropical fruit, the bloom on her jet-black skin adding to the lusciousness of her youthful abandon. Her eyes caught mine, the smile widening, white teeth in a black face, and then she turned away, overcome with embarrassment, simpering and giggling with blatant sexuality. I heard Mac telling the houseboy to bring us some coffee, and then he took me on a tour of the house.

I don't know whether he was looking for anything in particular, but if he was, we didn't find it. The bedrooms upstairs were spartanly furnished with iron bedsteads and marble-topped washstands complete with china ewers and basins. The beds were unmade; the mattresses, rolled up. Downstairs the rooms had a feeling of emptiness and decay. It was a sad, neglected place, unloved and uncared for, the big kitchen, where Perenna had fought off her mother's murderers, opening on to weed-grown flags of coral cement.

We had our coffee and left, the rain still falling steadily and the track even more slippery as we made
our way down the hill to the cove, the two girls following us, but keeping a discreet distance and only betraying their presence by their giggling and the occasional flash of a red dress through the palm tree boles and the ferns. The rain didn't seem to worry them.

It wasn't until we were halfway down that the ship gradually emerged from out of the dripping miasma. Seen through the tropical green of island foliage, a rusty, battered relic of a long-dead war, there was a sense of unreality about her, a ghostly quality that matched the empty house behind us. I turned to Mac. ‘What do we do now?' I asked.

He smiled up at me from under his umbrella. ‘See if the outboard starts.' We had come ashore in the rubber dinghy. ‘Afterwards … we wait till dark, I imagine.'

‘Then go for the airfield?' I was thinking of Perenna, all the whites down in Arawa; they'd all be at risk if the police held an airfield and the PNG government were able to fly in troops.

He nodded. ‘Either that or Queen Carola. It depends which the Inspector thinks he's a better chance of holding.'

‘And suppose his men have had enough and don't want to risk their lives again?'

‘Then he'll have a mutiny on his hands.' We had reached the floating wooden jetty where we had left the rubber dinghy. The oil drums were rusted away, the planks half submerged, and he stood there on the rocks gazing out across the flat, rain-pocked water to the
ship, lying grey in the rain against a background of reeds. ‘And so will you,' he added. Then turning to me, he gripped my arm. ‘A word of warning: These people – they look innocent enough, like children, smooth-skinned and smiling. Seeing them like that, you'd think there was no more friendly people in the Pacific. But just remember this, they were cannibals only two or three generations back, and they still eat people when they have a chance in the more remote parts of PNG. And like children, their mood can change very quickly. D'you understand what I'm trying to tell you?'

‘I think so. You're explaining why you had to kill that man in the wheelhouse and then shoot Teopas down in cold blood.'

‘Aye.' He nodded vehemently. ‘They're a primitive people, and no amount of missionary work is going to change their pagan hearts. Not in my lifetime anyway,' he muttered as he released the painter from the rock we had tied it to.

‘And they practise sorcery, do they?'

He turned then, the painter in his hand. ‘Perenna's been talking to you, has she?' He stepped cautiously on to the floating jetty, balancing carefully. ‘Tim was a fool to come here, knowing there was pay-back owed for Red Holland's death. And taking those albums. It would have been dangerous enough just doing the job he had to do with the Co-operative becoming more powerful every day. But taking those albums … maybe they're not of any great significance, but he was asking questions … the man was a tactless fool.'

‘Perenna thinks he's had a death wish put on him.'

‘Aye, she told me. She wanted to know if it was Hans who had done it.'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘That I didn't know.' He shrugged. ‘Sapuru, more like. Or one of the elders of the Co-operative anyway.'

‘But you believe in that sort of thing? It could happen?'

‘Oh, aye, it happens all right. Tim would have known that. He must have had a lot to do with it in PNG, which is why I say he was a bloody fool, meddling around here. And if you believe in that sort of thing, then you're vulnerable, eh? But not me.' He gave a quick little laugh. ‘I never believed in it, not really. Though, mind you, living out here it's difficult—' He was interrupted by a shout, somebody hailing us from the LCT. I couldn't hear what the man was shouting, but he kept waving to us, so I grabbed the painter and waded out to the dinghy, the water warm as I pushed it clear of the rocks, swung it stern-on and climbed in. The engine started first pull, and as soon as Mac was settled under his umbrella in the bows, I swung the outboard round and took her fast back to the ship.

An excited murmur of voices greeted us as we climbed on board, but nothing I could understand. The excitement seemed tinged with fear as we pushed our way up the ladder to the bridge, where Luke stood waiting for me, and with him the senior Administration officer, Mr Treloa. Apparently one of the government HQ personnel had attended a radio
course, and with Luke's permission he had been given the run of the signals office. He had not attempted to make contact with the outside world, but while familiarising himself with the equipment, he had tuned in to Sydney and picked up an ABC newscast announcing that Bougainville was in the hands of insurgents. The rebel leader, Sapuru, was reported to have declared Bougainville-Buka an independent sovereign state affiliated to the Solomon Islands group, and the newscast had ended with a statement from the Australian government that it was in consultation with the government of Papua New Guinea.

So the mining people had been able to get a message out, or had the news come from Hans Holland and the Buka Co-operative? Whichever it was, the news was out, a fact that had encouraged Inspector Mbalu to make up his mind. They would go for the airfield in the early hours of the morning, and would I kindly arrange to put them ashore shortly after midnight as near to the target as possible? The time was then just after noon. Ten hours to wait and nothing left to eat. We still had fresh water for another day, perhaps two days if everybody was careful. I had already had the supply to all taps cut off, the men on board divided into groups of twenty and each group rationed to one bucket every eight hours.

It was a depressing, wretched day, the rain never letting up and nothing to do but sit around in the steaming heat, thinking about what was going to happen. I tried looking at that Solomons Seal sheet. I was more and more convinced that having somehow
survived the loss of the
Holland Trader
, they were in some way connected with what had happened. And the letter. I tried reading that, too. I must have read it through half a dozen times, visualising the scene out there in the waterless wastes of Central Australia, where Merlyn Lewis and his partner had struck gold and been so tired they had called the place Dog Weary. Had they had a row? Had they fought over it? Or had Red Holland murderously and cold-bloodedly walked out on his partner in the middle of the night? And Lewis, waking up to find him gone, alone there in the desert, nothing left to drink and only death for company.

But did that justify the violence of Colonel Holland's reaction?
Dear Red
… as Mac said, it didn't add up, for if it had been Carlos, then Colonel Holland's reaction at finding a letter reminding him of his young brother would have been one of sadness, not anger against the man who had inherited after the
Holland Trader
had gone down. And the stamps … lying naked on my bunk except for a towel round my loins, I stared at that sheet of sixty damp-blotched Solomons Seal labels. If they could only tell their story, explain how they had survived, how one of them had been acquired by Lewis and used on the letter he'd sent to his wife in Cooktown. The Port Moresby postmark had been just decipherable, the date ‘17th July 1911' indicating he had posted it just before the
Holland Trader
sailed out into the Coral Sea and oblivion.

Mac had offered to take the first Dog watch, and when I relieved him at 18.00,1 asked him whether he
had ever heard of a part-white, part-indigene called Black Holland.

‘Black Holland. What do you know about Black Holland?' he asked.

‘He was killed in a bar brawl up near Cooktown, and I'm pretty certain it was Merlyn Lewis's son who killed him.'

‘When did it happen?'

I told him what little I knew, and he nodded. ‘Killed him in 1952, eh? Black Holland would have been about fifty then … no, older – nearer sixty. He was Red Holland's son by the daughter of a chieftain down near Kieta. He and his father were very close, birds of a feather, you might say, and when the Japs occupied the islands, he became one of the leaders of the Black Dogs. But that wasn't how he got his name. He was called Black Holland down at Kieta to differentiate him from his father up here in Buka.' And he added, ‘The war must have seemed pretty good to those two bastards, for a year or two anyway.' He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Merlyn Lewis's son, you say – and he killed him because of that Dog Weary mine.' He spread his lips as though smiling and sucked in air through his teeth. ‘He's your man then, isn't he? He'd know what happened to his father.' And with his lips spreading and contracting, and that peculiar hissing intake of breath, he pushed his way down the crowded alleyway to his cabin.

Apart from the functional parts of the ship and the officers' cabins, every nook and corner that gave prospect of shelter was crammed with bodies. And
when the rain finally stopped, most of the men stayed where they were as though, huddled together like that, they were protected against the dark uncertain world outside. Mbalu came to see me shortly after the clouds had rolled back and the night sky had cleared. He and his three sergeants had decided to make their attempt on the airfield at 02.00; with that timing in mind, when and where would it be best for them to be put ashore? I got hold of Luke, and the three of us pored over the chart. I couldn't see anywhere I could run the ship in without grounding, and in any case, I wasn't at all certain I wanted to be involved. A lot of people could die as a result of the airfield's being opened up, and if the police didn't succeed, or took it and failed to hold it …

I think Mbalu must have sensed that I was hesitating, for he suddenly went aft and routed Mac out. He came into the wheelhouse smelling of whisky again and with a belligerent look in his eyes. He was in no doubt at all, either about the need for the operation to go ahead or the way it should be launched. We should put back into the Passage itself and land the police force at the usual LCT landing place. There would then be no danger of anything going wrong in the landing, and they would have the airport road for their approach march with no chance of anybody getting lost in the darkness or in the thick growth of the plantations.

And that was what we finally did, fetching our anchors shortly after midnight and steaming slowly north-east out of the cove. Navigating by echo-sounder,
we back-tracked past the marker posts, which were just visible in the starlight, until we had the Buka Passage open on radar. After that it was quite straightforward. But though Luke knew exactly how to run the ship in to the landing place, it was almost 01.15 before we finally squared off to the shore with a kedge out to hold us against the current, the bow doors open and the ramp down. Of the twenty-seven-strong police force waiting to go ashore Mbalu had only been able to arm eight with the weapons he had seized from the Buka guards.