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the warm sunlight, wondering what she had just witnessed. Of one thing she was certain. The large light-brown islander was the same man she had seen in the ark on the day of Papa Noah’s death.

7
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
    ‘One more question, Sergeant Kella,’ said the overweight middle-aged white woman from the Ministry of Overseas Development. ‘In what ways do you think this proposed secondment will add to your professional development?’
    It won’t! Kella wanted to scream. It will be a complete waste of time! I’ll be sent to a country that has nothing in common with the Solomons to spend another three mind-rotting, boring months watching other people do their jobs while I should be back on Malaita trying to do mine.
    ‘I suppose it will provide me with more experience,’ he said.
    Surreptitiously he scanned the faces of his three interlocutors, hoping that in some way by sheer force of personality he had managed to antagonize them to such an extent that they would dismiss him ignominiously from the conference room in the Secretariat building. To his dismay, he saw that they were all nodding benign approval. As so often before on these dreary occasions, he had been served a lob and had returned it innocuously to the baseline in the approved manner. It was becoming a frightening habit. If he was not careful, it might develop into a skill.
    ‘Quite so,’ said Chief Superintendent Grice, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, attempting without success to contain his satisfaction. ‘We shall of course be sorry to see you off on your travels again so soon after your recent return from Hong Kong, but it is essential at this stage in your career that you get as broad and objective an overview of policing in general as possible.’
    And the more often I’m kicked into touch somewhere thousands of miles away, the less chance I’ll have of getting up your nose here in the Solomons, thought Kella. He and Grice were old adversaries, but these days his colonial superior officer was beginning to defeat him with monotonous regularity by the simple dint of approving the frequent courses on which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office mandarins in London were so keen to send Kella and other educated islanders in the long run-up to independence for the Protectorate. This time Kella had been tempted to ignore the invitation to visit Honiara, the capital, but at the same time he had received an urgent but ambivalent invitation for the
aofia
to look in at the fishing village just outside the town that afternoon to discuss a possible exorcism, so the interview could serve as an excuse for his journey across from Malaita.
    ‘Any more questions?’ asked Welchman Buna, the appointed member of the Legislative Council for the Roviana Lagoon, who was chairing the meeting. He was a tall, greying, dignified man from the western Solomons who, not long before, had saved Kella’s life when three rogue FBI agents had menaced the sergeant and Sister Conchita on the island of Olasana, where a young John F. Kennedy and the fugitive survivors of the crew of PT-109 had once taken refuge. Buna was one of the quietest but most influential of the local politicians and widely tipped to become the first indigenous prime minister of the Solomon Islands when the British could finally be persuaded to hand over the reins.
    ‘There is one more thing,’ said the woman from London. ‘It has to do with this peacemaker business.’
    There was an explosion of silence in the room. Even the insensitive and suddenly panic-stricken Chief Superintendent Grice knew that expatriates never discussed the spiritual beliefs of Malaitans in public.
    ‘I hardly think—’ began Buna, but the plump woman interrupted him.
    ‘I know that I’ve only been in the Solomon Islands for a few days,’ she ploughed on, leaning forward eagerly. ‘But I’ve already heard a great deal about you, Sergeant Kella. I understand that you are some sort of spiritual leader of your people.