Solomons Seal

Chapter Eight

It was Mac who took me up to the house, hiding himself under a large black umbrella so that he looked like a two-legged beetle walking its carapace up the hill. It was just after midday. The rain had eased to little more than a drizzle, and the sun, striking vertically down on us through what was now only a very thin cloud layer, gave off such a glaring, humid heat that every movement had become an effort. I wouldn’t have gone up there if it hadn’t been for something he told me, something that switched my mind back to that half-breed Lewis up at Cooktown and his story of the Dog Weary mine.

It must have been about an hour after we had anchored. The wind had dropped considerably, and I had just completed a tour of the ship with Luke and the police inspector. When we got back to the wheel-house, we were still discussing whether to put in to Chinaman’s Quay and land everybody there, or wait in an attempt to make a night landing close to the airfield. Mac was alone, still sitting in the captain’s chair, his body hunched and looking shrunken so that I had the impression he had suddenly aged. The large-scale chart with the plan of the Buka Passage gave no indication of depth along the shore in the vicinity of the airfield. Luke couldn’t help; he had never been in there. I turned to Mac and asked him if he could pilot us in.

He didn’t seem to hear me. I repeated the question, and he turned slowly, staring at me blankly. ‘The airfield?’ He shook his head. ‘That wasn’t why we killed the Japs. He’d never go for that. It was too well guarded.’ He was still back in the past. ‘No, that was our target … ’ and he pointed straight ahead, beyond the bows and the straining anchor chain, to the house which was just emerging from the rain, a grey, dripping shadow among thrashing palms. ‘A boatload of Japs killed, half a dozen Buka men, and two of our own injured. All because he wanted to have it out with that cousin of his.’ He turned to face me again, fastening me with those pale, watery eyes, so bright and birdlike I was reminded of the Ancient Mariner. ‘Something had got into him,’ he breathed, seeing nothing but what was in his mind. ‘Something … I don’t know what. Been there a long time, I reck’n. And that night … ’ His head swung round to stare at the house again. ‘I’ll never forget how he looked that night. We were in that little office he’d had built, the two books laid out on the floor beside the open safe and himself crouched there and staring down at a letter in his hand. Dear Red, it began; it was a letter to Red Holland, you see.’ A long pause, and then: ‘Pity the bastard wasn’t there … that was the house we should have burned over his head …’ And he added, ‘It wasn’t as big then. Not much bigger than the native hut young Carlos built on the self-same site when he ruled the Buka Passage.’ Another longer pause, and then he said, so quietly I only just heard him, ‘It was accursed then. Reck’n it’s been cursed ever since. Still is,’ he muttered to himself, relapsing suddenly into silence.

‘Why was Colonel Holland so determined to make a raid on the house?’ I asked.

I thought at first he hadn’t heard, or else he wasn’t going to answer. But after a while his brain seemed to catch up with the question, and he said, ‘How the hell do I know what was in his mind? From the time I joined him, he was always the same as regards Red Holland — very reticent. An Australian cousin, you see, a distant one, and that young brother of his, Carlos — the one that went down with the Holland Trader — leaving him everything. I am told the two were so alike the islanders thought it was Carlos come back from the dead, and that didn’t help either. And then, after the 1929 crash, when trade just about came to a standstill, the Old Man had to come across from PNG and bail him out. Sold practically everything he had to keep the Line going and virtually took over the running of it, living up there with Red Holland and building a small extension, just an office and a bedroom, out on the west side.’

I asked if he’d still been living there when the war started, and he said, No, the Old Man had been at Kuamegu then. It was early 1940 before he was back at Madehas, helping to organise the coast watchers in case the Japanese came into the war. ‘But if you ask me, he had another reason, too. He wanted to keep an eye on Red Holland and the schooners. Didn’t trust him. Don’t believe he ever trusted the man from the moment he first set eyes on him.’

He went rambling on about the war then, and it took me some time to get him back to the night they’d landed in the cove below the house after ambushing the guard boat. I wanted to know more about the letter that had so upset Colonel Holland, but he said the Old Man hadn’t commented on it, either then or later. No, he didn’t know who it was from, only that it was written to Red Holland and addressed to him. He had seen the envelope lying on the floor beside the books. It was addressed care of the Holland Line at a P.O. Box number in Kieta. He’d been hoping to find Japanese code books in that safe, operational plans, secret documents of some sort. He had thought that was what the raid was all about until he had seen the Colonel sitting back on his heels there with that letter in his hand. ‘All the blood seemed to have gone from his face and he was shaking like a man in a fever. Anger, hatred — I don’t know what it was …’ He hesitated, shaking his head slowly. ‘I never seen a man’s eyes like that, so horror-struck, so appalled — and tears … if he’d seen someone he loved blasted to hell by a land mine, it couldn’t have affected him more deeply.’

‘What happened to the letter?’

‘I never saw it again. Never. Only the books. He showed me those, after the war. Long after. But it was the letter,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘It must have been the letter.’ And he went on, ‘I tell you, man’ — his voice rambling- ‘I tell you, from that moment he became obsessed with the urge to destroy Red Holland. An’ it wasn’t because he was a collaborator. It was personal. Did I tell you we caught up with him eventually near Queen Carola?’

‘Yes.’

‘He had a house there. A native house. All wood and a palm-thatched roof. Went up like a hayrick. He was inside. The Old Man knew that. Told him so myself. There was Red Holland and one of his skippers, some women, too, but he still gave the order. Petrol-soaked arrows, that’s what we used. Fired the first one himself, and when the whole place was a roaring furnace with screaming figures running out of it and the sound of a single shot coming from inside, from the centre of the flames, he suddenly turned away, tears streaming down his cheeks.’

The memory of that night raid on the Queen Carola anchorage seemed as vivid and disturbing to Mac as the night it had happened. I couldn’t get anything more out of him, except that maybe we’d go up to the house together, later. Now, as we walked carefully up the mud-slimed, slippery track, I asked him about the books, wondering why Colonel Holland had brought them out of the house. It was a casual question, made for no particular reason except that I was puzzled by his behaviour and felt they must have some bearing on what had happened afterwards. ‘Diaries,’ Mac said. ‘That’s what I thought they’d be. Old logs, journals of voyages, something like that. They were a special sort of book, you see, with brass hinges and metal clasps. But all they contained was stamps. Nothing else — no writing, nothing. Just stamps.’

I stopped abruptly, standing there bareheaded, oblivious of the drizzling rain, staring at him. ‘Did they have green leather covers? Dark green, rather worn?’

‘Aye, green.’ He nodded, frowning.

‘And one of them with die proofs at the end — parts of the stamp printed in black?’

Again he nodded, his eyes alert now and questioning. ‘That’s what the Old Man showed me. Sent his launch over for me when I’d just got in from Choiseul and opened up the safe just to show me that. Said it could have been something to do with the Holland Line and had I ever seen a stamp like it.’

‘And had you?’

‘No, never.’ He shook his head, peering up at me under his umbrella. ‘But you have, is that it?’

‘No, only the albums.’ And I told him about the collection Perenna had asked me to sell for her.

A man appeared suddenly out of nowhere, a blanket round his shoulders and a red flower stuck in his hair. He accompanied us up to the house, a disconcerting shadow, smiling all the time, his rather protuberant eyes watchful and curious. ‘Houseboy,’ Mac said, and went on to tell me the safe was now under the stairs, the first four treads of which folded back. ‘It was the Old Man’s idea. Did you ever see one hidden like that before?’ It had been put there in 1949 after the house had been rebuilt, and he didn’t think Hans would know about it. ‘He was too young. In fact, I think there’s only two of us has any idea it’s there. And I’m the only one alive now that can open it.’

‘After Colonel Holland’s death, what happened to those stamp albums? Did they remain in the safe?’

‘Yes, I think so, along with the deeds of Madehas, ship registration papers, medals, all the things he valued.’

‘And Hans Holland didn’t know about it?’

‘No. Nor the combination. It’s a combination lock, you see.’

‘So it was you who gave Timothy Holland the albums?’

‘No, not me. He must have opened the safe himself.’

‘Who told him about it? Colonel Holland?’

He shook his head, moving on up the track. ‘Mr Tim wasn’t there when the Old Man took off. He was still at school in Australia. None of the family were there. The Old Man’s son, Captain Philip, he came across from Kuamegu, but that was after he’d gone. He must have known about the safe, or I don’t reckon he’d have been able to settle the Old Man’s affairs. Aye-’ He nodded his head under the umbrella. ‘He must have known about it, and also the combination, because the deeds of Kuamegu were in that safe, and he would have needed them when he sold up and went to England. He died there, what was it …?’ He screwed up his face in an effort to remember. ‘Almost three years ago, it must be. It was only a few months before Tim was sent here to look into the activities of the new Co-operative everybody was talking about. My guess is his father had written him about the safe before he died; he may even have told him what to look for Captain Philip thought a lot more of Tim, you see, than he did of Jonathan.’

‘And what about the letter that so upset Colonel Holland? Did Tim take that, too, or is it still there?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Is that why you suggested we put into the cove here?’

‘There was a storm coming up.’

‘But you wanted to go up to the house and have a look at that safe again.’

He didn’t answer. We reached a little wooden summer house half hidden under a tangle of vines. Our black shadow pointed to it. ‘Mi bring Coca-Cola, coffee, tea, anything yu want?’

Mac shook his head. We were on grass now, recently mown, the house looming over us, its veranda bearing the rot scars of damp and neglect. Beside the entrance steps was a green-painted drum overflowing with blackish water scummed with drowned insects. An unswept pile of them lay under the naked light bulb by the front door. The place looked like bachelors’ quarters run by servants, and when we were inside, there was no doubt about it, everything worn, dusty and uncared for, windows open to the rain, broken panes and curtains only half pulled back. No woman had been mistress of the house for a long time. ‘Doesn’t anybody live here now?’ I asked.

Mac shook his head.

‘What about Hans?’

‘His home is at Queen Carola. He’s lived up there ever since he was a laddie.’

We had moved from the entrance hall into a big central room that reached up to the roof. God knows what design the house was based on, vague memories of baronial halls perhaps. There was a grand staircase opposite the door, dividing at a landing and then climbing to a gallery that ran round the four walls with doors leading off, presumably to the bedrooms. The room in which we stood was panelled in some darkish wood that looked like teak, and the panels were hung with pictures. There were some watercolours of schooners and Pacific islands that reminded me of those in the Aldeburgh house, but most of the pictures were prints of well-known London buildings, the sort you can pick up in English country house sales. They looked quite incongruous in this setting. There was also a stuffed crocodile hanging above the landing halfway up the stairs. Two tattered tiger skins faced each other either side of the hearth, which was built of stone to pseudo-baronial proportions. ‘Who perpetrated this?’ I asked, my gaze lifting to the heavy carving of the gallery balustrade.

‘The Old Man.’

‘Yes, but what mad architect?’

‘No architect. He designed it himself. Saw to the building of it, too.’

‘After the war?’

‘Aye, there was a bit of a boom out here then, and ships were cheap. Old MFVs, a few schooners, hundred-baggers mainly — that’s bags of copra, you understand. Business was very good.’

‘And he put the safe under the stairs.’

‘Yes.’ He turned to the houseboy hovering in the entrance. ‘Yu go.’ He pushed him out and locked the door, also the door to the servants’ quarters. Then he crossed to the staircase, feeling under the carved base of the balusters on the right-hand side, while I stood staring up at the open-plan interior of the house Colonel Holland had built. It told me something about the man himself — his need of material recognition for what he was and what he had achieved out here in Bougainville-Buka, his nostalgia for home and his pride in the City, where he had learned the shipping business. His interest in wood and carving seemed to reflect a fundamental simplicity that must have been at odds with the paranoiac desire for grandeur. ‘Give me a hand, will you?’ Mac pointed to a hairline crack along each edge of the lower treads. ‘Made it himself.’ There was deep admiration in his voice. ‘He was always a perfectionist, and very good with his hands.’

He bent down then, motioning me to put my fingers under the lip of the bottom tread. There was a groove there, and together we lifted. I think one man could have done it, but the treads were heavy, the wood at least an inch thick and the hinges were stiff with dirt or corrosion. Four and a half treads folded back like the boot of a car to fit snugly against the treads above, revealing a 3-foot-high compartment thick with dust and cobwebs. The safe stood at the back against a wooden partition, the steel of it clean and glowing in the half dark. Mac wiped his fingers across the metal surface and sucked in his breath.

‘How long since you last opened it?’ I asked.

‘Me? I haven’t been to it since the Old Man was alive.’

‘Then who?’

He shrugged, bending down with one knee on the floor. ‘Hans, most likely.’ He reached to the combination dial, his fingers turning the knob.

‘I thought you said he lived up at Carola.’

‘So he does. But this place is handy for him when he’s got ships in the Buka Passage.’

‘So you think he knows about the safe?’

‘Either that or Jonathan has been here. I didn’t tell him the combination, but I did tell him about the safe and where it was hidden. I had to do that. It was a few months back. I knew I was drinking myself to death, and he’d a right to know.’ He looked up at me. ‘Something I don’t like, now I come to think about it. It was just after Mr Tim’s accident that Hans began using the place.’ He bent again to the safe, his eyes on the knurled dial as he turned it deliberately. ‘I had to tell someone,’ he murmured. There was a click, and he straightened up, giving the door a good strong pull. It came slowly open to show the inside of the safe crammed with stuff. There were dollars, tens and fives in packets, ships’ papers, two small gold bars, deeds covering the various properties, including Madehas, and right at the back, tucked in behind some ledgers, a large manilla envelope. He pulled it out with all the rest, and the name LEWIS stared up at me.

I reached down across his shoulders, picking it up from where it had fallen amongst the dirt and the cobwebs of the floorboards, and the first thing I pulled out of it was an envelope bearing the Solomons Seal stamp. It was addressed to Mrs Florrie Lewis of Dog Weary, Cooktown, Queensland, Australia, and it carried the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp in deep blue with SOLOMONS at the top and HOLLAND SHIPPING on the two sides, just as Pegley had drawn it for me, and PAID at the bottom. This was cancelled by a smudged postmark as though the Post Office clerk at Port Moresby not only had been in too much of a hurry to notice that the letter was incorrectly stamped but had failed to make a clear cancellation. The clerk at Cooktown, on the other hand, had obviously been on his toes, for the Australian Postage Due 2d. stamp, though stapped on at an angle in the bottom left-hand corner, had been clearly postmarked 28.JY.11.

No doubt about it, this was the cover Berners had bought at the Robson Lowe auction two years back. The catalogue description fitted exactly. So he had bought it for Hans Holland, and now it was here, in this safe, confirming that Hans knew not only about the safe, but also the combination, and that he was in the habit of using it. And that wasn’t all the envelope contained. It was a bulky packet, the main contents a tightly folded, badly stuck-together wadge of gummed paper, blotched by damp. I managed to separate one of the innermost sheets and open it out. I couldn’t help thinking of Tubby Sawyer then, how excited he would have been, for what I held in my hands was a complete sheet of sixty of the Solomons Seal ship labels. In the mass like that they looked really beautiful, all recess-printed and of a wonderful deep blue. Deep blue, Pegley had called it, but it looked to me in the dull light of that big room more a rich Royal Navy blue.

‘You collect stamps?’ Mac had stopped turning out the safe and was peering down at the sheet spread out on my knee. I nodded, wondering what they’d fetch at auction — wondering whether he’d let me take them away, or at least a sample sheet. And then, as I examined the whole wadge to see how many there were and the extent of the damage caused by damp, I came across the letter. It was an old letter, written with a steel-nibbed pen on quite superior pale blue notepaper that was faded at the edges, the ink gone brown with age. And the writing was the same as the writing on the cover addressed to Florrie Lewis in Cooktown. Dear Red, it began, This will come as a shock to you I am sure thinking me dead …

Mac seized hold of it. That’s the letter I was telling you about. The one that upset the Old Man so much the night we raided this place.’ His lips began forming the words, reading it slowly … ‘Who wrote this?’ He opened out the folded sheet. It was signed Merlyn Lewis, and when he turned back to the beginning again, I saw the date — Fifth June 1910.

If it had been addressed to Carlos Holland, I could have understood, but a letter to Red Holland back in 1910 … that was a full year before Lewis had posted the letter to his wife from Port Moresby and stamped it with the Solomons Seal ship label. That was what I couldn’t understand. It was Carlos, not Red Holland, who had had those sheets printed. And if Merlyn Lewis was the father of Minya Lewis from Cooktown, then he hadn’t been heard of since the year the Holland Trader had disappeared.

Mac finished reading the letter through, then handed it back to me. ‘Didn’t you mention the Dog Weary mine, some crazy story told by a half-breed abo named Lewis? Well, you read that letter.’ He was frowning, his eyes screwed up in concentration, the hand holding out the letter to me trembling. ‘Something there that don’t make sense.’

Fifth June 1910.

Dear Red,

This will come as a shock to you I am sure thinking me dead. But I got out thanks to some abos who took me walkabout across by Alice and down as far as the Nullabor. I was there 2 years working at Gt Boulder then at Ora Banda to earn enough to come after you now I know where you are.

I’m back east now, in Queensland, panning up round the headwaters of the Palmer, and for summer I have a shack over at the coast by Cooktown. I call it Dog Weary, just so I don’t forget you and what you did. You made a fortune, you bastard, taking all the water and leaving me to die. I nearly did too but not quite and now I’m coming for my share of the ships you got out of the Dog Weary money.

MERLYN LEWIS

‘He calls him Red, you see.’ Mac pointed his finger at the final lines. ‘My share of the ships, he says, and he’s writing it in 1910, remember, when it was Carlos running the schooners here. As I say, it doesn’t add up, does it?’

‘Unless, of course, it was the cousin who had staked Carlos. If Red Holland had financed the purchase of the first schooners, it would explain why Carlos left everything to him instead of his brother.’

Mac shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t have upset the Old Man the way the sight of that letter did. He was crouching there in that office, just as we are here, reading it by torchlight and the effect on him … shattering, that’s what it was. And he was quite different after that, very morose and bitter, and he couldn’t seem to settle, not until after we’d raided Queen Carola. After that he seemed suddenly himself again, as though burning Red Holland’s house over his head had exorcised a ghost.’

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.

The ship seemed suddenly very empty as they moved down the ramp, vanishing one by one up the road into the darkness of the palms. In case things went wrong, I had the ramp winched up and the bow doors closed, with the Chief and one of his officers on stand-by in the engine-room and the bos’n waiting by the stern anchor winch. Luke and I moved to the upper bridge, where it was cooler and we had a clear view in every direction, and I invited Mr Treloa and some of his more senior Administration officers to join us.

There was nothing to do but wait after that, the hot night air very oppressive, the stillness exaggerating the sound of the current running past our stern. It was running fast, a gurgling sound which seemed to grow as the whisper of hidden voices died away and the bodies strewn about the ship lay sleepless, wondering what the dawn would bring. We had only just enough fuel to get back to Anewa and if the police failed … The tension in the ship was very strong, the uncertainty and the strain of waiting communicating itself to all on board.

I tried to lessen my own reaction to it by doing the rounds with a Mortlock helmsman I had come to trust. Below decks the ship seemed deserted, the day’s heat trapped and hardly a soul to be seen. Topside there were bodies everywhere, but none of them asleep, the white glint of eyes following me, sometimes the white of teeth as well as mouths opened in a nervous grin. Back on the upper bridge, I paced to and fro, glancing surreptitiously at my watch, trying to conceal the nervous tension inside me, wondering about Perenna and Jona Holland, all the other whites, picturing in my mind those men moving on to the airfield in the darkness and only eight of them armed. And all the time the gurgling menace of the tide running past our stern and the dark straight line of the Buka Passage like a smooth black tarmac road under the stars. Not a light anywhere, just the shape of the land black in outline, the feeling of something hanging over the place, a brooding, overpowering, tropical presence.

At last the luminous hands of my watch pointed to 02.00 hours. No sound — nothing. Only the tide to break the stillness. A minute, two minutes — and still no sound of any shots. An anticlimax tinged with fear, the minutes ticking by and nothing happening; only voices murmuring through the ship as men gave utterance to thoughts that we on the upper bridge kept strictly to ourselves, fearing now that the police had either lost their way or been taken in ambush without a shot being fired.

I went down to the signals office, where Simon Saroa, a native of one of the fishing villages near Port Moresby, was sitting with earphones on and an expectant look on his face. He had briefed one of the police on the equipment at the airfield and was listening out for him. He shook his head. Nothing had come through so far. I went back to the bridge, very conscious now of the six Buka men imprisoned behind the locked door of the old sergeants’ mess. I rang down for the engines to be started up and then began to haul off on the stern anchor while at the same time transferring the kedge hawser from stern to bow. I was taking no chances, intending to lie off, bows-on to the current, until I knew definitely what had happened.

We were halfway through this operation when, above the throb of the engines and the sound of the big drum winch aft, I heard a man shouting. Then more shouts, the shouting relayed along the length of the ship until all the blacks on board seemed to have gone out of their minds. Even the senior administrators, gathered in a huddle at the rear of the upper bridge, were leaning over the rail, yelling themselves hoarse. A hand touched my arm. ‘Kepten.’ It was Luke. ‘They have taken the airfield.’

I stared at him. ‘Without a shot?’

‘Yes, without a shot. There is only a small guard, and they take them by surprise. It has just been reported by radio.’

I should have realised that in the islands of the Solomon Sea, and all through the South West Pacific, radio was the equivalent of the telephone in more densely populated areas. It was the main means of communication, and Simon Saroa had instructed the police officer to tune to the channel commonly used for communication throughout the Bougainville District. The result was that within minutes of the announcement that the airfield had been taken I was called to the signals office, where Simon Saroa thrust the mike into my hands without a word, as though glad to get rid of it. The voice that answered me from the loudspeaker wasn’t the soft voice of Inspector Mbalu; it was a harsh, abrasive voice with a strong Australian accent. ‘What’s happened, you bastard? What’s happened up there? You tell me. Over.’

‘Who’s that?’ My voice sounded taut in the hot little cabin.

‘Hans Holland, you fool. Who else? Now just you tell me what’s happened. The airfield is in the hands of the police, right? … How did they get free? Where did they get the arms? And where’s Teopas? I asked to speak to Teopas, where is he? Over.’

I told him briefly what had happened. I didn’t tell him who had killed Teopas, but he guessed. ‘It was Mac, was it? He’s the only man … that drink-sodden bastard! I should have got him off the ship. Where did he get hold of the gun?’ I started to tell him, but when he realised that Mac had been armed with nothing more than a knife, he shouted at me, ‘And what were you doing? Looking on and applauding? An old drunk with nothing but a knife-’

‘He was sober,’ I said. ‘And he knew what he was doing. He had the guard mesmerised, and nothing I or anyone else could do. It all happened too quickly. And once the man was dead and he had his gun …’ I didn’t enjoy making excuses, knowing I’d been of two minds what to do and had let events take control. And when he told me I’d have to move a lot faster if I wanted to skipper one of his ships, my temper suddenly flared. ‘If you think you can handle the situation here any better, why don’t you come up and do it?’

‘I will,’ he snapped back at me. ‘I’ll do just that. Meanwhile, you pull out into the stream and stay anchored there. Don’t let anybody ashore.’

I told him we should have to go ashore for food, but he ignored that. ‘Haul out into the Passage and stay there. Tell your operator to remain tuned to this channel. I’ll see if I can raise Queen Carola, get them to send a truckful of boys down to Chinaman’s Quay. The airfield isn’t all that important. PNG won’t dare fly in troops, not after the warning we’ve given them. But still … ’ He was thinking aloud. ‘Open like that, it’s a temptation. Some silly sod of a politician might be tempted … You still there? … Good. Keep your operator tuned on this channel, and it’s VHF only. No communication with the outside world. Understand? We keep this to ourselves till the airfield’s retaken. Okay? Over.’

‘I’m not exactly my own master,’ I said.

But all he replied was: ‘Tell whoever is on that radio of yours I’ll string him up in the Buka Passage if it’s reported to me that he’s been operating key. One word in Morse about that airfield being open, and he’s a dead man. You tell him. And don’t you fool around with me. Just think of Perenna, your own future, where you stand in all this. Over and out.’

That was the end of it, and I looked down at Simon Saroa, his face pale in the glare of the overhead light bulb, his hand not quite steady as he put the mike back on its bracket. ‘Three trucks were blocking the runway.’ His deep voice shook slightly. ‘They are clearing them now.’ His eyes lifted to mine, a frightened stare as he asked, ‘What do I do about Port Moresby? Inspector Mbalu asks me to try and contact somebody right away.’

I didn’t know what to say, and before I could reach any decision, Hans Holland’s voice came out of the loudspeaker again, wanting to know the strength of the force now holding the airfield. ‘Here we reckon there were some twenty-five to thirty police captive on your ship. With six guards, plus Teopas, only seven of them can be armed. That correct? Over.’ I hesitated, wondering whether to say there were more, but it didn’t seem to matter very much. I told him his information was about right, but of course, the effectiveness of the force now in control of the airfield would depend on the weapons they had captured. He didn’t like that, but since I had nothing more to add, he signed off. I was back with Simon Saroa then and his question, which I couldn’t answer. In the end I told him it was nothing to do with me. It was between him and his superiors to decide whether he should risk his neck or not, and to the inevitable question, Did I think Mr Holland would carry out his threat, I told him, ‘Yes.’

What else could I tell him? I left him and went to my cabin. Let the government officials sort this one out. I lay down on my bunk and tried to think, but apart from organising enough food to keep us going, there didn’t seem much I could do but stay here and wait upon events. If the operator decided to send and troops were flown into Buka, then it could be a messy business. And where did that leave me? I couldn’t help smiling to myself, remembering how I’d let my imagination build a future on the strength of Hans Holland’s offer. Captain of an ore carrier … Bloody hell! I’d be lucky to come out of this alive the way things were at the moment.

I fell asleep shortly after that. At least, I suppose I was asleep. My eyes were closed, I know that because I remember opening them as the light flashed on my face. And I was dreaming, my mind chaotic, with a picture of Tim Holland as I had seen him in that photograph, but sitting in the sea with the circular huts all belching smoke through their thatch and one of them in flames with pigs like little balls of fire running out of it. He was sitting propped against a pillow in the water, whittling away at a piece of wood. Suddenly he looked up at me, his eyes empty sockets, his hands proffering me the piece of wood, and at that moment a booming voice — ‘Kill them now …’ A gun stammering, and it wasn’t Teopas who was slammed off balance, falling backwards; it was Hans. Hans Holland with his red hair, dancing on the balls of his feet, and Perenna holding the gun, a chattering stream of staccato bullets building to a cry I could not understand, the gun swinging, the barrel pointing, pointing at me and blasting light, and I woke suddenly, in a sweat, my eyes blinded, my mouth open.

The torch shifted, and I heard a voice say, ‘On your feet now.’ A hard voice, and the face in the torchlight bending over me, hard with red hair flaring. His hand shook me roughly, ‘Come on now. I want the engines started and the anchor up.’

I lay there, staring up at him, wondering how the hell he’d got here. ‘What time is it?’

‘Coming up to six. Soon be dawn.’

I swung my feet out of the bunk and sat up. ‘How did you get here?’

But all he said was: ‘Malulu here will be watching you. Get some clothes on. You’re going up to Queen Carola.’ He turned abruptly and left the cabin.

‘Mi lukaut long yupela.’ Malulu jabbed the hard steel muzzle of his machine pistol into my ribs. I pulled on my shorts and a shirt, slipped into my canvas deck shoes and went on to the bridge. The ship seemed full of men being herded at gunpoint down into the tank deck, and lying alongside was the tug I had last seen in Anewa.

‘Yu get engines started,’ Malulu said, waving his gun at me.

I put the engine-room telegraph to Stand-by and to my surprise got an instant response, a gentle vibration under my feet. I wished I could have had a cold shower. I was sticky with sweat and my brain still sluggish. Even a tug couldn’t have got him up here in under four hours. I cursed myself then for not remembering that VHF has a range of only 30 to 40 miles. When the news that the airport had been taken was broadcast, he must have been more than halfway up the coast already. Which meant, of course, that he’d had some sort of radio contact set up between Anewa and Queen Carola so that by midday, at the latest, he would have known I hadn’t arrived and that something had gone wrong. I ought to have anticipated that. Instead, I had turned in, and now, under cover of darkness, he had boarded the ship and regained control of her so quietly that it was only his torch on my face that had woken me.

The anchor was coming up. A helmsman took his place at the wheel. Luke came into the wheelhouse, his jet-black skin shining with sweat, his heavy lips jutting, his eyes sullen. He went through on to the bridge wing, stood for a moment staring for’ard, then came back and reported, ‘Anchor upan’down now.’ He came and stood beside me. ‘Kepten Holland, he is on the tug. Also Miss P’renna.’

I went to the bridge wing, Malulu at my heels. Down on the tug Jona was standing at the open entrance to the caboose, staring up at our slab side, watching one of the Buka men fooling around with his gun. He didn’t see me. But Perenna did. She was sitting on the tug’s bulwarks, close up near the bows, and for a moment our eyes met. Then, very deliberately, she turned away to stare fixedly at the bos’n, who was coming down off the foredeck after checking that the anchor was properly stowed.

Back in the wheelhouse, I found Mac had been brought in. His wrists were tightly bound, his lips swollen, one eye half closed. He was so beaten up, or else so drunk, he could hardly stand, the skin of his face like paper turned yellow with age. ‘What’ve you done with it?’ he mumbled through his bruised lips.

‘Done with what?’ I asked.

‘The letter, of course.’ His eyes creased up so that I think he was attempting a grin. ‘I told him how we went up to the house on Madehas and opened the bloody safe. It got him mad as hell. Said he’d have it back if he had to kill me for it. You’ve hidden it, I hope.’

I shook my head, trying to remember what I had done with it.

‘That’s right,’ he mumbled. ‘Keep your mouth shut. Don’t admit to anything.’ His eyes switched apprehensively to the door, then back to me, and again that mockery of a grin. ‘I havena got the guts, you see. Not any longer. Need another bottle at least. One more bottle’d put me right out.’ He shook his head. ‘No more bottles now. Not a drop left.’ There were tears in his eyes.

We had started to drift. Dawn was breaking fast, a beautiful, rain-fresh, cloudless dawn, and I could see the shore trees sliding past. The tug hooted, a sudden blast of steam at the funnel, and the stern warp tightened, the propeller churning a wake as she began to stem the current, holding both ships steady. Hans Holland appeared on the catwalk below, moving with a rolling gait, his head down, his hands clenched. He climbed to the bridge wing, stopped just inside the doorway, staring round the wheelhouse, then came across to me. ‘McAvoy tells me you’ve got a letter of mine.’ I didn’t know how to answer him, so I kept my mouth shut. ‘From a man named Lewis.’

‘The letter to your father?’

‘Yes, to my father. Where is it?’

‘Up at the house, I think.’ And I added quickly, ‘I’m not sure. I know I read it. But afterwards I can’t remember what I did with it.’ But now I did remember. Just before I had fallen asleep I had slipped it back between the pages of Playboy and put the magazine on the shelf above my bunk. And the sheet of stamps, they were in it, too. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was written so long ago I didn’t think it of any importance.’

He eyed me coldly, and I watched him trying to make up his mind whether I had told him the truth. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘As soon as this ship has got under way, we’ll go over to the house and find it.’ He pushed past me on to the port bridge wing and called down to Jona Holland, telling him to take command of his ship again. ‘And you,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘You come with me. McAvoy, too.’ He started down towards the tug, and when I insisted on getting my things, he merely shrugged. ‘Give you five minutes.’

It was less than that when I clambered down on to the tug with my bag. I had purposely left it only half zipped up, the copy of Playboy visible on top of my clothes. Walking out through the wheelhouse, I found Jona sitting on the captain’s chair, his long fingers nervously scooping baccy from a battered pigskin case into his pipe. He seemed more or less himself again, but his hands trembled, and his eyes had a strangely vacant stare as he gazed straight down the length of the ship. It was almost as if they were made of glass, no life in them, and his lips moving as he muttered to himself under his breath. He made no reply when I wished him a good trip. I don’t think he even saw me.

The tug’s warps were let go, and the rusty box shape of the LCT was instantly swept clear of us by the current. We hung in the tideway until she had manoeuvred herself round with her bows to the west; then we headed for the wooden pier. By the time we were tied up, leaving just enough room for the ferry, the LCT was abreast of Minon Island and already turning to go out past Madehas by the North Channel. Watching her fade into the morning haze, I wondered what Hans Holland had said to Jona, what he had done to make him go back to his ship again. Had he convinced him that the independence of Buka and Bougainville was now so assured that the future of the Holland Line was in his hands? Or was it something else, something more sinister? Hans was ashore now, talking to a group of Buka men gathered in a bright huddle round an aged truck. But Perenna was still there, in the bows, her hair stirring gently in the breeze that was beginning to ripple the surface of the water. I moved up the deck to join her. ‘Good morning.’

She turned her head, a quick sideways glance, but she didn’t say anything.

‘What’s happened to your brother? When I left him on the bridge there, he was like a zombie.’

‘If you’d lived here-’ Her shoulders lifted in a shrug which seemed to suggest I was a child and impossible to communicate with.

‘He looked as though he had been hypnotised.’

She turned on me angrily. ‘Brainwashed. That’s the modern term, isn’t it? But out here … Oh, you’ll never understand. You’ve got to be born here.’ She was staring into the distance again. ‘It’s … it’s in the genes. It’s psychological. Tim, Jona, me, Hans — we kick against it — not Hans, of course, he’s different — but we can’t avoid it, none of us. Not here. Particularly not here.’ Her voice was so subdued I could barely catch the words. ‘If you’d lived at Madehas …’

‘Mac said the house was cursed.’

‘Perhaps.’ And she suddenly turned her head and looked at me. ‘What’ve they done to Mac? He’s been beaten up. Why?’

I told her about Teopas’s death, and then about the safe and the letter.

‘So you’ve been to the house?’

‘Yes.’

There was a sudden awkward silence. Finally I said, ‘Hans told Mac he’d kill him if he didn’t get that letter back. Do you think he would?’

‘Why, do you have it?’ She was staring at me dully. ‘Can I see it please?’

I glanced up the road. Hans was still there, and another truck had arrived. I got the copy of Playboy from my bag and gave her the letter. She read it through slowly, then read it again. And when I produced the sheet of Solomons Seal ship labels, she sighed. ‘So that’s what it’s all about, why he wanted those stamp albums. He was prepared to do anything — to me, to Tim — to get his hands on them.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘It’s his father, isn’t it? His reputation. That’s what’s at stake.’ She gave a little humourless laugh. ‘His closest ancestor, his godhead if you like. And that man Lewis — he left Lewis to die. That’s the same as murder.’

‘Was Hans that fond of his father?’

‘Oh, God!’ she said in an exasperated tone. ‘Ancestor worship. Don’t you understand? He worships him.’

‘But that’s paganism.’

‘Yes, paganism. Cry to one ancestor for relief of disease and pain, to another for wealth, which is the same as Cargo. Hans isn’t a man unless he has Cargo.’

‘Do you mean power?’

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t mean power. Among all these blacks, he’s the dominant one. He has power already. What he needs is success and everything that goes with it. Money is what drives him. Greed. And Mac says it’s greed that drove his father.’ She handed the letter back to me. ‘And what about you? Is it greed that’s driving you? Is that why you took over Jona’s ship without a thought about what your action meant to him, or to me?’

I shook my head. I couldn’t answer her, not in any way that would make sense in her present mood. ‘Where’s Mac?’

‘Below somewhere, locked up I think.’ She was silent then, and I returned the copy of Playboy to my bag. The skipper of the tug, a young Australian with close-set eyes and a small sun-bleached beard, was in the caboose drinking coffee. I joined him, and he poured me a mug, handing it to me with a sly grin. ‘You always get the girls hotted up with Playboy, mate?’

I was back in a world I understood. Afterwards I went ashore. The sun had gone, the sky clouded over. There was a heaviness in the air as I stood under the solitary banyan tree, looking across the road to the line of Chinese shops with their worn wooden steps and exotic signs. They were already open, and youngsters in from the villages were gathered in chattering huddles, sucking ice cream and drinking lolly water, which is their name for a soft drink. Beyond the shops, just before the turning down to the Government wharf, where the coaster lay, was an open concrete building something like a pagoda. This was where the trucks had stopped, and as I walked towards it, I realised it was a market, the throng of people gathered there mostly stallholders setting out their produce.

It began to rain, warm, heavy drops. Umbrellas and plastics sprouted like mushrooms. Hans crossed the road to a prefabricated wooden building that looked quite new. It had a sign like the Chinese shop-fronts that read Buka Trading Co-operative. I reached the market just as the atmosphere became so heavy that the rain poured out of it, the noise of water drumming on the market’s tin roof drowning the chatter of people crowding in. There was one white woman amongst them, a blonde with a thin, bony face, her white cotton dress immaculately ironed. She squeezed through between the piles of fruit and vegetables to ask me whether I knew what was happening over in Bougainville. She was a Mission School teacher, and she had friends in Arawa. An aerial mast, just visible through the rain across the road, caught my eye, and I suggested she ask at the Buka Co-operative for news, but she seemed to freeze at the suggestion as though I had advised her to consult with the devil. A moment later I saw her talking to a young nun who had just stepped out of a mud-bespattered Toyota four-wheel drive, looking calm, collected and very Catholic in her habit.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, a tap turned off, and in an instant bare black feet had churned the area round the market into a quagmire. The sun’s heat was filtering through, burning up the thin veil of cloud that was now so low that the futher shore of the Passage was hidden from my sight. The dirt road, running straight as a sword through endless plantations, was a brown slash of steaming mud, out of which strange shapes emerged as villagers bringing woven mat baskets of produce in to market. I bought some bananas and ate them, wandering round the concrete display counters — so much colour, so much ripe fruit, so many bare breasts — and then the nun came and spoke to me. They had heard on the radio that a Ruling Council had been formed in Kieta and Daniel Sapuru had been elected first President of the Republic of Bougainville-Buka. Was I off the tug? Did I know Mr Holland? Could I give her any more detailed information?

I shook my head, wondering what Hans Holland’s role really was, just how much he was in control. The nun knew him, of course, but only to greet, she said. She was Italian from the big Catholic Mission halfway up the island, and when I questioned her about Hans and his relations with the Co-operative, she said very coolly, ‘I have nothing to do with him. He is bisnis. Always bisnis.’ She changed the subject then, very firmly, asking me about myself and telling me about the produce on the counters as she made her purchases. There were paw-paw, of course, and yams and mangoes, real bananas, small and perfectly ripe, as well as big coarse plantains for cooking, green oranges and a large pink grapefruit she called pomolo. There were also things I had never seen before: betelnut, pit-pit, lou-lou like a big crunchy apple, snake bean, Chinese cabbage, taro and cassava and the sweet potato they call kau-kau.

It was when she was leaving, having by then in her quiet way discovered how I had come to Buka, that she told me something about the Hollands that surprised me, and not in answer to any question from me, but of her own volition. There was talk, she said, among the expatriate inmates of the Mission that long ago, before World War II, Mr Hans Holland’s father had been a convert to the Catholic faith and that he had done it to make his peace with God because of some terrible transgression. ‘A man with red hair like that’ — she smiled up at me, a gleam of amusement in her eyes as she shook my hand — ‘they always have evil tempers, no? We have them in Sicily. They are descendants of the Vikings and do terrible things.’ She hesitated. ‘This Hans Holland, he also has red hair. Has he done something bad? I’m told he has some island blood, but he still comes to us regularly to confess.’

‘He’s a Catholic, then?’

She nodded. ‘Since last year.’ And she added, very quietly, ‘There is good in all people, don’t you know, my friend, so God be with you.’ And she smiled as she got into the Toyota and was driven off, her head bowed, her hands on the beads of her rosary, and only the satisfaction of a quick sidelong glance to assure me of her femininity.

I ate another banana, watching the Buka Cooperative and chatting about the weather to a big-breasted sultry-looking woman selling fruit. She spoke Pidgin mixed with Mission English and assured me the sun would shine. ‘Bik fella rain tru finis’im. No rain. Sun nau.’ She chuckled, her mountainous bosom heaving under the coloured cotton that did little to conceal it. ‘Bik fella rain tru, yu savvy? It mean rain all time. Not rain all time nau.’ She gave me a huge betelnut smile, and almost instantly the daylight faded and the rain poured down again.

The door of the Co-operative opened, and Hans Holland peered out. He called to one of the truck drivers; then he saw me and shouted, ‘You. Slingsby.’ He hesitated, glancing up the road, then made a dash for it through raindrops bouncing knee-high. ‘Where’s Perenna? Still on board?’ He licked the rainwater from his lips, staring at me, his red hair plastered to his skull. ‘I saw you talking to her. Did she say anything about Highland workers up at the mine? Well, did she?’

I shook my head, wondering what it was all about. He seemed to have been thrown off balance. ‘Something wrong?’ I asked, but he had turned, signalling to the truck driver, who now had his engine going. The truck drew up close to where we stood, the door swinging open. ‘I’m going up to the ADC’s office. They’ve got a direct line to the radio station over on Sohano. You’d better come, too, unless you want to get soaked.’ He climbed in, and I followed him. ‘Kiap’s office,’ he told the driver. Then, as we drove off into the thundering grey wall of the teeming rain, he turned to me. ‘It’s Arawa,’ he said. ‘They’re down into Arawa, a great crowd of redskins, I’m told, all raising hell.’

‘You mean Chimbu Highlanders?’

‘Yeah. Highlanders from Papua New Guinea.’

‘What are they raising hell about?’

‘That’s what I want to know. They’ve no weapons. Not firearms anyway, so they can’t do anything. They’re just making a bloody nuisance of themselves, and they won’t talk to anybody but Perenna. That’s what they say. I don’t know what the hell they want.’ He had been yelling in my ear to make himself heard above the tom-tom beat of the rain on the cabin’s tin roof. Now he relapsed into silence, not saying anything till we drew up at the Sub-District HQ. A truck and two Toyota short-wheelbase land-cruisers were parked outside, and sheltering in the corrugated iron garage was a bunch of Buka men armed with old, rust-worn rifles. ‘You wait here.’ There was a guard on the door, an elderly man with close-cropped hair holding what looked like a Japanese rifle, and he had two very old grenades fastened to the waistband of his shorts. It was a wet, soggy world, the rain a steady downpour now and the light so dim it was a steaming sepia colour. Hans Holland was only gone five minutes. He came back in a hurry. ‘Tugboat.’ He jumped in and slammed the door, his tanned leathery face tight-shut and frowning.

‘What’s happened? What’s the news?’

The empty truck bumped and skidded its way down the track, and for a moment he didn’t answer me. Then suddenly he said, ‘If I’m not there, they make a balls of it. If I am there, they say I’m trying to run things myself. I told them to put a guard on that tote road when I found you’d come out that way. They didn’t, of course, so now they’ve got these redskins in Arawa, and they don’t know what to do about them.’

‘How many of them?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Sapuru said several hundred, but he’s probably exaggerating. Why do you think they insist on talking to Perenna? All their leader keeps saying is: “Yu send Miss Perenna, we speak with her.” That’s what Sapuru says.’

I was remembering Perenna in conversation with that thickset Chimbu Councillor outside the Immigration Office. ‘Did he say what the man looked like?’

He shook his head. ‘Just one of those PNG people they employ for the hard manual work up at Paguna. If it were only a few of them, it wouldn’t matter. But the riot squad was always having trouble with those people. They get on the beer — they’re not used to beer — and now if they go on the rampage, like they did a few years back …’ He turned and looked at me, a hard stare. ‘You asked me what their leader looked like. Why? Do you think you’ve met him?’

I hesitated, but there was no point in not telling him what Perenna had said, and when I had finished, he nodded. ‘Chimbu,’ he said. ‘They’re most of them Chimbu. But a fight leader. I never heard of a fight leader coming over to work at Paguna.’ I was still trying to explain what she had told me about that when we drew up at the ferryboat jetty.

I thought he would have forgotten the letter by now, but as we walked along the wooden boards to the tug, he started asking about it again. ‘Who’s read it? Yourself, McAvoy — anybody else?’

‘What’s it matter?’ I was wet and irritable, my shirt sodden. ‘It happened seventy years ago, maybe more.’

‘Perenna.’ He stopped there, staring at me hard, his face so close to mine I could see every pale line of the crease marks in his skin, exaggerated by the water streaming off his bare head. ‘What about Perenna, has she read it?’

I shook my head slowly, something in the expression of his eyes warning me. ‘No,’ I said.

‘You didn’t show it to Jonathan? No, you couldn’t, of course. But anybody on the LCT? Who else has seen it?’

‘I’ve told you, nobody. Just myself and Mac, that’s all.’

‘You’re lying.’ He stood there in the rain, staring at me, and suddenly, for a moment, he was a different man. There was something in his eyes, a sort of madness — or was that my imagination? I seemed for a second to be looking into his soul, into pools of unfathomable darkness. A trickle of water reached my crotch, and I shivered.

‘Okay,’ he said, his voice and manner suddenly normal again. ‘As soon as I get back from Sohano, we’ll go over to Madehas — you, me, Perenna, McAvoy, too. I want that letter, understand? Meanwhile, you stay on board.’