Authors: Graeme Kent
For a moment Ebury almost looked interested. Then he shook his head abruptly and drank from the bottle again.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘For a time we thought that perhaps a surviving Japanese soldier was conducting a one-man private war in the bush,’ said Kella, almost talking to himself. ‘That would be motive enough for the killings, if someone thought he was still fighting for his country.’
‘He knew how to fight, Johnny Jap.’ The cue sparked Ebury into life for a moment. ‘Got to give him that. Never knew when he was defeated. I had a lot of time for the bloody sons of Nippon. I had a good war, as a matter of fact. It was the peace that buggered me up.’
The expatriate’s head rolled back and his eyes closed. Kella gave up. ‘I’ll be at Police Headquarters in Honiara until Thursday,’ he said, without much hope. ‘I’m staying on for the farewell ceremony at Henderson Field for a Japanese soldier whose body we found on Malaita. If you do think of anything, try to get a message through to me.’
Heedless, Ebury started snoring. Kella walked to the door.
There was a brief lull in the ceremony on the airstrip at Henderson Field outside Honiara. The police band had played a selection from Gilbert and Sullivan and the students’ choir from the British Solomons Training College had sung ‘Abide with Me’. Now, just outside the small one-storey departure lounge that doubled as a customs reception area, the senior members of the administration were getting into arthritic position for the farewell ceremony to mark the departure of the ashes of Lieutenant Shimadu from the Solomon Islands to Tokyo.
The High Commissioner, resplendent in his white uniform, referred to by his wife in one of her more disenchanted moods as his ice-cream seller’s suit, topped precariously by a plumed hat, was standing with the Chief Justice in his more subdued but equally sweat-inducing robes of office. A little to one side of them, the expatriate heads of the various government departments were lining up in three ranks with the practised ease of permanent and pensionable officers who had been jostling for position in the cruel heat of the sun for most of their careers. They were uniformly middle-aged, most of them wearing rather shabby suits that were a little too tight for them. Their hand-stitched artificial sharkskin jackets and trousers had originally been purchased in happier times during overnight stops in Hong Kong on their way home on leave, from the celebrated twenty-four-hour tailors of the crown colony. Unfortunately, with no one quite certain when the cold hand of localization might start sending them on a more permanent departure, few had invested lately in new suits, which at best might be worn only several times a year at official receptions at Government House.
Perspiring in the early afternoon heat, the Accountant General squeezed in between the Director of Agriculture and the Registrar of Co-operative Societies. Next to them the Comptroller of Customs and Excise stood gloomily with the Conservator of Forests, the Commissioner of Income Tax, the Superintendent of Marine and the Director of Medical Services. Behind them the Commissioner of Police and the Government Statistician fell into line with the Financial Secretary, several district commissioners and a dozen chief executive officers.
Behind them on hard-backed chairs under a slanting awning affixed to the roof of the airport building sat the wives of the officials, upright, uncomfortable and rigidly resigned to whatever boredom the afternoon might bring, in print dresses, stockings, long gloves and large hats. They resembled a slightly ageing but carefully preserved chorus line from an amateur production of
Floradora
. At the back stood several hundred islanders, headmen and government office workers bussed out to the airstrip for the occasion. There was even a press section, a roped-off square next to the wives. The Chief Information Officer had hoped for an influx of newsreel companies for the occasion, perhaps even several cameramen from television stations, but he had had to be content with half a dozen reporters from Australasian newspapers and the wife of a Chinese merchant who worked part-time as a stringer for an American press agency.
A small fence separated the crowd from the landing strip upon which waited a thirty-nine-seater turboprop Fokker F-27 Friendship aircaft in the orange livery of Trans-Australia Airlines, waiting to take its passengers to Papua New Guinea and connections on to Hong Kong and Tokyo. Crates of cargo had already been loaded into the hatches and the pilot was awaiting the signal to take off as soon as the guest of honour arrived and the other passengers were released from the airport waiting room.
The only relics remaining of the war years lay a couple of hundred yards to the west of the airstrip. These were a few crumbling sheds and an abandoned open-air steel control tower consisting of a winding staircase leading to a platform forty feet high surrounded by a knee-high rail.
Sister Conchita stood at the back of the crowd on tiptoe, in an effort to see what was going on on the tarmac. She had been invited to the ceremony at the insistence of Mayotishi but had been too shy to claim the reserved seat she knew awaited her up front among the great and the good. She could not see any of her companions on the last trek up to the banana plantation of the Kwaio bush, though as she scanned the crowd she noticed Florence Maddy talking vivaciously to Sergeant Ha’a. The musicologist was wearing a white suit and carrying a bag. Presumably she was travelling on the Fokker Friendship and was saying a temporary goodbye to the sergeant. She was looking almost animated, her hand on Ha’a’s sleeve as she stared into his rolling, rather embarrassed eyes, reinforcing Sister Conchita’s opinion that Florence Maddy, although a perfectly pleasant and inoffensive woman, was a throwback to a previous age in which some females preferred to defer to a man, any man. The thought gave her an idea. She waited a few minutes for them to complete their farewells and then walked towards the couple.
Ha’a nodded to the nun and sketched a salute before scuttling off with relief to resume his perfunctory attempts at crowd control. Sister Conchita smiled at Florence.
‘How’s the music collection going?’ she asked.
‘Wonderfully,’ said Florence, uncharacteristically enthusiastic. ‘Johnny’s got such a collection of songs. It will take me weeks to sort them out when I get home.’
‘That’s good,’ said Sister Conchita. She decided to chance her luck. If Florence had transferred her allegiance to Sergeant Ha’a and was about to leave the Solomons, she might consider herself less securely bound to previous loyalties.
‘You know, there’s one thing I’ve been trying to work out,’ she said as casually as she could. ‘It wasn’t Shem who persuaded you to go to Tikopia, was it? There wouldn’t have been any point in it. He already had enough problems of his own.’
Florence hesitated, and then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It was Mr Wainoni. He practically insisted on it. He was sure that I’d find plenty of material on Tikopia. He was quite wrong, of course. I don’t know where he could have got that idea from! I didn’t tell anyone about it because I didn’t want to get him into trouble. I know that Sergeant Kella was cross because I’d gone to Tikopia. I really shouldn’t be telling you this now, but you’ve been very good to me.’ She looked at her watch. ‘In fact I must find Mr Wainoni to say goodbye. The plane leaves in an hour. Thank you for all your help, Sister.’
Florence eased her way through the crowd. Sister Conchita decided that she had better look for Sergeant Kella. Perhaps the information she had just garnered from the musicologist might be of use to the policeman.
Kella stood beside the outside-broadcasts van being used by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service and surveyed the crowd. A Melanesian commentator was standing on a box outside the van, describing the scene excitedly in pidgin. The fledgling local radio station seldom dipped a toe into the fraught technical waters of on-the-spot commentaries, because too much could and usually did go wrong, but this afternoon those outer islands in possession of radio sets that actually worked and had batteries would be tuning in to the great event.
The preoccupied and depressed Kella hardly noticed what was going on. For the great occasion he had been relegated to keeping a place free for the car bringing Mayotishi and his precious cargo from the Mendana hotel to the airport.
He had shared a farewell drink with the Japanese in the latter’s room at the hotel the previous evening. Both of them had ignored the baleful glares of the manager in the lounge. Mayotishi had produced a bottle of whisky and two glasses from a drawer.
‘Scotch, not Japanese,’ he had commented.
They had drunk mainly in silence, but just before Kella left, Mayotishi had shaken his hand.
‘Regard the next couple of years as an interim period,’ he had said. ‘The next time we meet, I suspect that we shall both be doing different jobs.’
Sergeant Ha’a gave up trying to marshal his section of the crowd and strolled over. ‘It’s all right for some,’ he said. ‘How come you get all the cushy jobs?’
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ said Kella, ushering a crowd of excited small boys out of the way. ‘This is the equivalent of being exiled to Elba.’
‘Whitey’s an ungrateful bastard all right; he expects a lot from poor sergeants for his thousand dollars a year,’ sighed Ha’a. He looked sideways at Kella. ‘Although it must help if you and your brothers own a copra plantation on Malaita that’s so big it takes a pigeon three days to fly across it.’
‘Could I have a word, Sergeant Kella?’ asked an incisive voice from behind them.
Ha’a faded into the crowd again at the first hint of a salvo from authority. Kella turned. For a moment he did not recognize the white man addressing him. Then he saw that it was Ebury, but an Ebury transformed almost beyond recognition. The former government officer had showered and shaved. He had plastered his hair close to his head with some sort of gel. He was wearing sharply pressed drill trousers and a spotless white shirt. On his shirt front was pinned a row of medals, among them the ornamental silver Military Cross. For the first time that Kella had seen him in the last decade he was erect and sober. Aware of the sergeant’s surprised scrutiny, the expatriate looked self-conscious.
‘After you left the other day, I started thinking about what you said about the Japanese officer’s remains being taken out of the Solomons,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Didn’t seem right that the Johnny should go out unrecognized, as it were, so I thought I’d better come and see him off.’ He looked around almost shyly. ‘I didn’t realize that it was going to be a scrum like this. Maybe I’m not needed after all. Best be getting back home perhaps.’
‘No!’ Kella heard his voice crackling with authority. He paused and went on apologetically. ‘I’m sure that Lieutenant Shimadu would have wanted you here today. You’ve more right than most.’ He beckoned to the lurking Sergeant Ha’a, who moved back over, crab-like with apprehension at his sudden proximity to a white man who might have the power to exert a deleterious influence on his future comfort and well-being.
‘Sergeant,’ Kella said, ‘I want you to take Major Ebury to the VIP stand and find him a space there. Is that clear?’
‘It’s clear enough,’ objected Ha’a, ‘but it’s not going to be easy. All the places there are reserved.’
Ebury’s broad shoulders went back an inch further. Thirty years seemed to have dropped off him since his recent encounter with Kella. ‘Just get me to the stand, Sergeant,’ he told Ha’a confidently. ‘I’ll find my own place in the sun when I reach it.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and produced a crumpled sheaf of handwritten papers. ‘By the way, you got me on something of a run down memory lane after we met. Sorry if I was a bit brusque at the time. I started thinking about what you said concerning civil cases brought by locals before the war. Actually there was something that might be relevant to your investigation. I had a personal link with it, actually. I must have been half asleep not to make the connection when you first brought it up at my place. Good day to you.’
Ebury nodded in response to Kella’s salute and followed Ha’a through the crowd into the airport building. Kella watched them go. You weren’t half asleep, he thought; you were stoned out of your mind. But you’ve come good when it matters. He started reading the papers. After the first few lines he stopped and started again. He walked away, totally absorbed, from the airport buildings across the uncultivated fields surrounding them. The grass grew longer here, covering the concrete foundations of the old hangars and huts of the wartime days. The mouths of the disused communications bunkers in the rows of hillocks were overgrown with creepers, like the dirty green webs of huge spiders.
Kella heard a car jolting across the field in his direction but did not look up at first. When he did, it was too late. A dusty 1949 Australian Holden sedan jolted to a halt and two young men leapt out. They were young Chinese in cheap suits. Kella clenched his fists, but forced himself to relax when he saw that both youths were carrying knives. One of them indicated the waiting car. Its engine was still running.
‘Inside!’ he shouted.
The two men hustled Kella into the back of the car and sat watchfully on either side of him. A third Chinaman, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, was sitting behind the wheel. He bounced the car back into life, the tyres shrieking across the field towards the main road to Honiara.
They rejoined the road a few hundred yards away from the airport and drove erratically in the direction of the capital. Kella could see that all three of the young men were strung out. For their day jobs they were probably hired by Chinese merchants as debt collectors and minders at floating games of
pai gao
and
sic bo
in Chinatown. Kidnapping a police officer would be a little above and beyond their normal call of duty, and it was showing. He tried to engage the nervous youths in reassuring conversation, but the three men ignored his tentative overtures. He wondered, if he got out of this alive, whether he could suggest a new police manual to his superiors:
100 Ways to Conciliate Your Abductors
.