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.’ she began uncertainly. ‘I mean . . .’
    â€˜Bones,’ said Kella, not looking up, his fingers working busily. ‘Ever since I landed on the island two days ago I’ve been hearing nothing but bones. There was a suspicious death at a village near here after a bones curse had been placed on the dead man. A magic man came down from the high bush just to frighten me off with a bones tabu. When I reach the station I find that there are rumours that a bones curse has been put on something here as well. There’s only one place where a bones curse could really operate and that’s in a graveyard. So I decided to keep watch here for a couple of nights.’ He paused and then added, ‘Then there was the way you were behaving this afternoon.’
    â€˜Me?’ asked Sister Conchita, startled.
    â€˜You were apprehensive about something. You knocked over a glass when Father Pierre said that the priest was responsible for the safety of everyone on his station. When the father at the Santa Isabel mission spoke over the sked asking permission to bury a non-Christian in his cemetery, you looked really upset. That made me wonder whether you knew something about what was going on here.’
    â€˜You’ve been very observant,’ said the nun in a small voice.
    â€˜Believe me,’ said Kella grimly, ‘I haven’t even started yet.’
    His groping hands had found the skull. Quickly he turned it in his hands. At the back of the cranium there was the unmistakable indentation of a bullet hole.

6
    LOFTY HERMAN
    â€˜Kella wants a coffin,’ said Inspector Lorrimer.
    â€˜Surely not?’ said Chief Superintendent Grice. ‘He can’t be more than thirty. Years ahead of him yet. More’s the pity.’
    â€˜It’s not for him,’ said Lorrimer patiently. Grice sometimes overdid his bucolic act. ‘Apparently he’s found a corpse on Malaita.’
    â€˜So what else is new?’ asked Grice dispiritedly.
    The two men were in the chief superintendent’s office on the second floor of the police headquarters building in Honiara. Lorrimer was standing at the window, looking down at the parade ground where a squad of recruits was being drilled noisily by an immaculate sergeant in a white lap-lap . On the other side of Mendana Avenue, which ran through the centre of the capital, were the white walls of the Guadalcanal Club, with its verandah running down to the beach behind and the slow, white-topped breakers of the deep-blue sea.
    â€˜Why a coffin?’ burst out Grice petulantly. ‘Doesn’t Kella usually bury the people he kills in a hole in the ground and hope we don’t hear about it?’
    â€˜We’ve never been able to prove that he’s killed anyone,’ Lorrimer pointed out reasonably. It was a wonder they ever caught any criminals at all, he thought. There were only three hundred officers and men in a police force responsible for the hundreds of tropical islands extending across the Coral Sea for almost a thousand miles in the chain lying north-east of Australia.
    â€˜Only because he’s a little tin god on Malaita. What native is ever going to give evidence against a ju-ju man, for God’s sake?’
    â€˜He’s an aofia ,’ Lorrimer corrected his senior officer. He had researched the subject while preparing the papers for Kella’s court of inquiry the previous year. ‘It’s a position peculiar to the Lau region of Malaita. Every few decades, a man of the line of chieftains appears who is of such probity and strength of character that he is appointed while he is still a child to maintain peace among all the people of the Lau region. It’s a heavy responsibility. He’s a sort of paramount chieftain.’
    â€˜He’s supposed to be a bloody policeman,’ pointed out Grice violently.
    â€˜Kella thinks he can be both.’
    â€˜How the hell can Ben Kella be a peacemaker?