Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

I still had to calculate roughly the acreage of the garden, and I went round the back of the house to pace it out. At the far end, where it backed on to the garden of the house in the next street, there was a toolshed. I checked the contents, adding them to my list, then continued my pacing. A garden fork was stuck into the ground by the remains of a bonfire. I pulled it out and was about to put it in the shed where it belonged when I realised that the heap of ashes in front of me was not an ordinary bonfire. There were charred scraps of paper scattered around it. This was where she had burned the contents of the drawers, all the papers and rubbish that had accumulated in the loft.

I began turning over the half-burned scraps with the fork. There were cheque counterfoils, remains of bank statements, old Christmas cards and scraps of newspapers. Not our newspapers. The words were English, but the names were foreign. A headline caught my eye: Meteor Falls near Goroka Village. The paper was yellowed with age. And there was the remains of a letter. I bent down to read the charred fragment of notepaper and found myself staring at something that lay beside it, a tattered travesty of the human figure, a sort of doll about ten inches high, burned black but with the head still recognisable, a birdlike mask of wood and bones and feathers.

I picked it up. The wood was driftwood, smooth and hardened by the sea, the feathers seagulls’ feathers, and there were shells as well as the thin little bones of seabirds. I had a sudden mental picture of her striding along the beach, the brassy helmet of her hair blowing in the wind, gathering up the sea’s high-tide offerings and taking them back to her brother, and that young man, propped up in his room, half paralysed and alone, struggling to fashion this feathered monstrosity from the bits and pieces of her beachcombing.

I dropped it back on the ashes, standing there staring down at it, feeling sickened that he should have believed in sorcery to the extent of trying to defeat death with that — thing. In a sudden feeling of revulsion I raked the remains of the fire over it and in doing so uncovered something else, a thin sliver of carved wood like a long barbed needle. It was white with ash and badly charred at one end, but when I had wiped it clean on the long lawn grass, I saw that the pointed end was coated with red paint.

The actual point was about six inches long, and below that were several barblike nicks. It looked like the head of a very thin-bladed wooden spear, or perhaps an arrow. But what caught my eye, because it was so strange, was that below the nicks were three long slits cut into the shaft. They had been fashioned with great care, and there was no doubt at all about their purpose. Driven into the body of a man and wrenched back, those slits would cause the hard narrow splines of wood to spring outwards, tearing into the flesh and holding fast.

It was a weapon fashioned by somebody with experience and understanding of a deadly primitive craft, and the red paint on the tip, traces of it still clinging to the slits, right back to where the fire had burned it off, could be nothing else but a simulation of the blood of the intended victim. The masked doll and the weapon, the two together … and the blood-red sky fading above me. I felt suddenly cold and appalled, the concentrated hatred, the deadly fear that had made him do this, lying there in his bed, working away at this murderous copy of a weapon that symbolised a death wish — somebody else’s death — and his face so innocently boyish, his body crippled! What primitive knowledge had driven him to it? A patrol officer in a Civil Administration, and yet somehow he had been infected, possessed almost, by the primitive beliefs of the people he had administered. His grandmother’s people. Was he a throwback to the island woman Colonel Holland had married? And who was the enemy for whom it had been intended, who was the intended victim, whose death would save him? Or was it all just the figment of a dying man’s superstitious imagination?

I slipped it into my clipboard with the intention of getting an expert opinion. Sorcery , she had said. I could hear her voice, the way she had said, You can’t enter that as the cause of death, not in England.

My God, I thought, and she’s gone back there, alone. She’s gone to do what her brother could not do. I was still thinking about that as I took the fork to the toolshed and completed my pacing out of the garden. Then I went down the road to return the key to Mrs Clegg.

She must have been watching for me, for the door opened before I had even rung the bell. ‘You’ve finished then?’

I nodded, my mind still groping for a rational explanation.

‘Is it true the house is up for sale, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will it be, do you know?’

‘We’ll be advertising the date in the local paper. I think sometime next month.’ And I handed her the key.

‘You want me to keep this?’

‘The lawyers will be in touch with you.’ And I added, ‘Some of the things have been put in store. Do you know where?’

But all she could tell me was that a small van had been there about ten days ago. ‘It was just a trunk and several suitcases. There was no furniture moved. You’ll be selling the furniture, too, I suppose?’

‘The contents will go into one of our weekly sales at Chelmsford.’

‘I wonder who will come to live here. It makes so much difference in a road like this. We all know each other.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I hesitated. ‘Did they have many visitors?’

‘No, they kept very much to themselves. I went in occasionally, but Miss Holland didn’t make friends easily, and then there were all those extraordinary carvings. It wasn’t that people here didn’t care, but the house had a strange, rather unpleasant atmosphere. I always felt uneasy when I visited.’

‘What about strangers? Has anybody been to see them just recently?’

‘No. Not just recently.’ She stared at me, a little hesitant. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but earlier, talking about Miss Holland’s appearance — it was the red hair, you see. It reminded me.’

‘Reminded you of what?’ I asked, for she had stopped there as though she had changed her mind about telling me.

‘This man. It was about two months ago. Dick — that’s my husband — he was out, so I answered the bell. He seemed to have mistaken the house. He was asking for the Hollands, and really he looked so like Miss Holland’s brother, the same coloured hair, you see, and his face tanned by the sun, almost leathery. A rather aggressive manner. Australian, I think. He had that sort of accent.’

‘Did he say who he was?’

‘No. He asked if this was the Hollands’ house, and when I said No and pointed it out to him, he just nodded and went straight there.’

‘A relative?’

‘Oh, yes, I would think he must have been, with hair like that and coming to Aldeburgh specially to see them. Do you think that’s why she left? He was there a long time, several hours. I asked her about him when I next saw her. Two days later it would have been, and she just stared me down, making it obvious she didn’t want to discuss it. He was quite handsome in a way, but there was a hardness; the eyes, I think.’

She couldn’t tell me anything else, and I left her, wondering whether there was any connection between this stranger and the things I had found in the ashes of that fire.

I stopped for sandwiches and beer at The Spaniard near Marks Tey, sitting at a table by myself and staring at that arrowhead. Now that I had a chance to examine it closely I knew it wasn’t an old weapon, certainly not one of her grandfather’s collection of spears and arrows. The red coating came away quite easily to the scratch of my thumbnail, and the wood underneath was pale. The coating itself wasn’t hard like paint; it was softer, more like dried blood.