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apart. The men and women of the vast area were now panic-stricken and demanding that their chieftains put a stop to the apparently random slaughter before the killman struck again, hence this hastily constructed meeting. It also appeared as if both the deadly assaults had taken place over the last six weeks, while Kella had been on secondment to Hong Kong.
    ‘Has anyone seen this killman?’ he asked desperately. He did not expect anyone to answer. To his surprise, Chief Basiana stood up, brandishing above his head something wrapped in pandanus leaves and secured with bush twine. ‘One of my men found this beside the body of the dead man in his garden,’ he said. ‘The killman must have dropped it.’
    The chieftain passed the package to Kella at the front of the
beu
. Kella undid the wrapping and took out a rusty blade about twenty inches long. He recognized the type of weapon immediately. He had seen a number of them when he had been working as a twelve-year-old scout with a coast-watchers’ raiding party against the Japanese in the Roviana Lagoon in 1942, eighteen years earlier. It was a Japanese Type 30 bayonet for a Meiji 38 rifle. The blade was straight, and it had a quillon cross-piece hand-guard that also made it suitable for stabbing purposes.
    ‘
Bilong Japani,’
grunted a chieftain in the front row.
    ‘The Japanese left hundreds of these behind after the war,’ Kella told him. ‘Anyone could have found such a blade and used it to kill an innocent man, or even two of them.’
    The room was suddenly silent with the unvoiced scepticism of the elderly islanders present. Kella wondered what he could have said to affect the tough old chiefs so palpably. The oldest man in the room indicated that he wished to be helped to his feet again. As he stood tottering between two younger leaders, his quavering voice could be heard clearly.
    ‘Neither man was killed with a knife,’ he said briefly, hawking up a globule of phlegm.
    ‘How did they die, then?’ Kella asked.
    ‘They both drowned,’ said the old man. He paused and took a deep breath. The veteran of a dozen battles was actually trembling with apprehension. ‘And there was no water near either of them. Take my word for it, the evil spirits are playing jokes on us through this killman!’
    His words were a signal for a precipitous jostling exodus on the part of the assembled chiefs as they made their way out of the meeting hut back to their waiting canoes. They had presented the
aofia
with their problem. How he dealt with it was now up to him. Kella decided that he would start his journey to the sites of the two reported killings at first light in the morning.
    One of the older chieftains paused in front of the sergeant on his way out. Covering his face and upper body were the tribal markings of a leader from Santa Isabel.
    ‘There is another thing,’ he said. ‘The two men who were killed both belonged to the Church of the Blessed Ark.’ He looked at the police sergeant almost with pity. When he spoke again, it was in the local Bugotu dialect.
    ‘
Vautuutuni oka!
’ he muttered.
    Of all the words that Kella had heard that evening, these were the ones that struck the greatest chill into his heart and over the next few weeks were to prove the most unwelcomingly prophetic.

6
TIME LONG SUN
    Sister Conchita approached the ark slowly. Several days had passed since the death of Papa Noah. She had not wanted to come back, but something had told her that amid all the disorder after the events of the big feast there would be one task remaining, and that she must accomplish it. She had come back from Ruvabi Mission in her lunch hour to take care of the matter.
    As she walked across the plateau through the spray of the waterfall, the scene looked calm and almost pastoral. It was daylight, ‘time long sun’ in pidgin, and there were no obvious reminders of the dreadful events of a few days ago. The trees whispered softly, seeming to call all the creatures of