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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.
    ‘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?’
    ‘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.
    ‘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?’
    ‘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.’
    ‘He’s supposed to be a bloody policeman,’ pointed out Grice violently.
    ‘Kella thinks he can be both.’
    ‘How the hell can Ben Kella be a peacemaker? He’s as wild as an alley-cat sometimes.’
    ‘He doesn’t have to be a pacifist to be an aofia . The reverse, sometimes. I agree it’s not an easy concept to grasp.’
    The two policemen were silent in a rare moment of concord. The atmosphere between them was usually one of armed neutrality. Grice was a permanent and pensionable officer, a member of what in its pomp had once been the Colonial Police Force, now better known locally as the African Retreads. Lorrimer was on a temporary secondment from the Metropolitan Police in London.
    ‘Kella could have had it all, you know,’ Grice complained, almost sadly. ‘He’s a Malaita man, so all the other islanders are scared shitless of him. He was the first native graduate to join the police force. He’s been on half a dozen attachments to forces all over the world. If he would just keep his head down he could be the first Melanesian Commissioner of Police, when independence comes. But what does he want?’
    ‘Kella’s his own man,’ said Lorrimer.
    ‘He wants to be a bush policeman, that’s what,’ said Grice, ignoring his subordinate. ‘Spends half his time poking around the jungle. And look at the trouble that got him into.’
    ‘He got an official reprimand for it,’ Lorrimer pointed out.
    ‘Bit of a mate of yours, isn’t he?’ sniffed the chief superintendent .
    ‘Kella’s an interesting man,’ said Lorrimer non-committally. ‘Honest, too. He could have lied his way out of trouble after that missionary was killed last year.’
    And he knows the islands, he thought. He wished that Kella was back in Honiara. The case presently occupying Lorrimer concerned two feuding neighbouring villages on Choiseul in the Western District. The occupants of one village were Methodists and the other comprised Seventh Day Adventists. The dispute had originated over a garden plot situated between the villages and claimed by both. Trouble had escalated to such an extent that the Methodists were waiting until Saturday, the Adventist day of church worship, and then pillaging the SDA gardens. For their part, the Adventists were retaliating by raiding the Methodist