Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘There was a storm coming up.’

‘But you wanted to go up to the house and have a look at that safe again.’

He didn’t answer. We reached a little wooden summer house half hidden under a tangle of vines. Our black shadow pointed to it. ‘Mi bring Coca-Cola, coffee, tea, anything yu want?’

Mac shook his head. We were on grass now, recently mown, the house looming over us, its veranda bearing the rot scars of damp and neglect. Beside the entrance steps was a green-painted drum overflowing with blackish water scummed with drowned insects. An unswept pile of them lay under the naked light bulb by the front door. The place looked like bachelors’ quarters run by servants, and when we were inside, there was no doubt about it, everything worn, dusty and uncared for, windows open to the rain, broken panes and curtains only half pulled back. No woman had been mistress of the house for a long time. ‘Doesn’t anybody live here now?’ I asked.

Mac shook his head.

‘What about Hans?’

‘His home is at Queen Carola. He’s lived up there ever since he was a laddie.’

We had moved from the entrance hall into a big central room that reached up to the roof. God knows what design the house was based on, vague memories of baronial halls perhaps. There was a grand staircase opposite the door, dividing at a landing and then climbing to a gallery that ran round the four walls with doors leading off, presumably to the bedrooms. The room in which we stood was panelled in some darkish wood that looked like teak, and the panels were hung with pictures. There were some watercolours of schooners and Pacific islands that reminded me of those in the Aldeburgh house, but most of the pictures were prints of well-known London buildings, the sort you can pick up in English country house sales. They looked quite incongruous in this setting. There was also a stuffed crocodile hanging above the landing halfway up the stairs. Two tattered tiger skins faced each other either side of the hearth, which was built of stone to pseudo-baronial proportions. ‘Who perpetrated this?’ I asked, my gaze lifting to the heavy carving of the gallery balustrade.

‘The Old Man.’

‘Yes, but what mad architect?’

‘No architect. He designed it himself. Saw to the building of it, too.’

‘After the war?’

‘Aye, there was a bit of a boom out here then, and ships were cheap. Old MFVs, a few schooners, hundred-baggers mainly — that’s bags of copra, you understand. Business was very good.’

‘And he put the safe under the stairs.’

‘Yes.’ He turned to the houseboy hovering in the entrance. ‘Yu go.’ He pushed him out and locked the door, also the door to the servants’ quarters. Then he crossed to the staircase, feeling under the carved base of the balusters on the right-hand side, while I stood staring up at the open-plan interior of the house Colonel Holland had built. It told me something about the man himself — his need of material recognition for what he was and what he had achieved out here in Bougainville-Buka, his nostalgia for home and his pride in the City, where he had learned the shipping business. His interest in wood and carving seemed to reflect a fundamental simplicity that must have been at odds with the paranoiac desire for grandeur. ‘Give me a hand, will you?’ Mac pointed to a hairline crack along each edge of the lower treads. ‘Made it himself.’ There was deep admiration in his voice. ‘He was always a perfectionist, and very good with his hands.’

He bent down then, motioning me to put my fingers under the lip of the bottom tread. There was a groove there, and together we lifted. I think one man could have done it, but the treads were heavy, the wood at least an inch thick and the hinges were stiff with dirt or corrosion. Four and a half treads folded back like the boot of a car to fit snugly against the treads above, revealing a 3-foot-high compartment thick with dust and cobwebs. The safe stood at the back against a wooden partition, the steel of it clean and glowing in the half dark. Mac wiped his fingers across the metal surface and sucked in his breath.

‘How long since you last opened it?’ I asked.

‘Me? I haven’t been to it since the Old Man was alive.’

‘Then who?’

He shrugged, bending down with one knee on the floor. ‘Hans, most likely.’ He reached to the combination dial, his fingers turning the knob.

‘I thought you said he lived up at Carola.’

‘So he does. But this place is handy for him when he’s got ships in the Buka Passage.’

‘So you think he knows about the safe?’

‘Either that or Jonathan has been here. I didn’t tell him the combination, but I did tell him about the safe and where it was hidden. I had to do that. It was a few months back. I knew I was drinking myself to death, and he’d a right to know.’ He looked up at me. ‘Something I don’t like, now I come to think about it. It was just after Mr Tim’s accident that Hans began using the place.’ He bent again to the safe, his eyes on the knurled dial as he turned it deliberately. ‘I had to tell someone,’ he murmured. There was a click, and he straightened up, giving the door a good strong pull. It came slowly open to show the inside of the safe crammed with stuff. There were dollars, tens and fives in packets, ships’ papers, two small gold bars, deeds covering the various properties, including Madehas, and right at the back, tucked in behind some ledgers, a large manilla envelope. He pulled it out with all the rest, and the name LEWIS stared up at me.

I reached down across his shoulders, picking it up from where it had fallen amongst the dirt and the cobwebs of the floorboards, and the first thing I pulled out of it was an envelope bearing the Solomons Seal stamp. It was addressed to Mrs Florrie Lewis of Dog Weary, Cooktown, Queensland, Australia, and it carried the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp in deep blue with SOLOMONS at the top and HOLLAND SHIPPING on the two sides, just as Pegley had drawn it for me, and PAID at the bottom. This was cancelled by a smudged postmark as though the Post Office clerk at Port Moresby not only had been in too much of a hurry to notice that the letter was incorrectly stamped but had failed to make a clear cancellation. The clerk at Cooktown, on the other hand, had obviously been on his toes, for the Australian Postage Due 2d. stamp, though stapped on at an angle in the bottom left-hand corner, had been clearly postmarked 28.JY.11.

No doubt about it, this was the cover Berners had bought at the Robson Lowe auction two years back. The catalogue description fitted exactly. So he had bought it for Hans Holland, and now it was here, in this safe, confirming that Hans knew not only about the safe, but also the combination, and that he was in the habit of using it. And that wasn’t all the envelope contained. It was a bulky packet, the main contents a tightly folded, badly stuck-together wadge of gummed paper, blotched by damp. I managed to separate one of the innermost sheets and open it out. I couldn’t help thinking of Tubby Sawyer then, how excited he would have been, for what I held in my hands was a complete sheet of sixty of the Solomons Seal ship labels. In the mass like that they looked really beautiful, all recess-printed and of a wonderful deep blue. Deep blue, Pegley had called it, but it looked to me in the dull light of that big room more a rich Royal Navy blue.

‘You collect stamps?’ Mac had stopped turning out the safe and was peering down at the sheet spread out on my knee. I nodded, wondering what they’d fetch at auction — wondering whether he’d let me take them away, or at least a sample sheet. And then, as I examined the whole wadge to see how many there were and the extent of the damage caused by damp, I came across the letter. It was an old letter, written with a steel-nibbed pen on quite superior pale blue notepaper that was faded at the edges, the ink gone brown with age. And the writing was the same as the writing on the cover addressed to Florrie Lewis in Cooktown. Dear Red , it began, This will come as a shock to you I am sure thinking me dead …