Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘When did this happen?’ I asked.

It was the barman who answered. ‘A long time back. In 1952, and this murdering old bastard gets away with manslaughter.’ The barman’s face cracked in a grin that showed sharp brown-stained teeth. ‘The way he tells it you’d think the other fella started it. But I’ve heard it said it wasn’t like that at all, and the old-timers here, they say it was pay-back, that after the war he went looking for Holland. That’s right, ennit?’ And he glanced along the counter to the old men drinking and listening, and they all nodded.

‘Because he was wounded in Kieta?’ I asked.

‘No. Because of the mine and what happened to his father.’

It seemed incredible that this shrunken, wizened little black man should have gone looking for the man and killed him because of what happened out there on the edge of the Simpson so many years ago. ‘What happened to your father?’ I asked him. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? When did he die?’

The old man stared at me, and when I repeated the question, he buried his face in his beer and didn’t answer.

‘Always the same,’ the barman said. ‘Tells his story the way he wants, but start slinging a few questions at him and he shuts up.’

‘In July 1911,’ I told him, ‘your father was in Sydney and signed on as a stoker on the Holland Trader. That’s right, isn’t it?’ The old man nodded almost imperceptibly, but when I asked him what had happened to the Holland Trader , he just stood there staring at me out of eyes that had suddenly become frightened, his black face puckered and worried. He knew I wasn’t a tourist, and when I asked him about the letter his mother had received, at almost the very moment the Holland Trader had disappeared, he seemed to confuse it with the envelope, those blue eyes of his darting this way and that as he said, ‘Bilong me. Yu speak Father Matthew. He get stamp money and take forty dollar for the Mission.’

I tried again, explaining that I knew about the stamps and the money he had been paid, but what I wanted was the letter that had been inside the envelope. But all he said was, ‘Yu polis?’ And he gulped down the rest of his beer like a man about to flee.

‘I told you,’ the barman said with a grin. ‘Start asking him questions and he clams up.’

But I got it out of him in the end. I took him by the arm and more or less frog-marched him to a table; then I bought him another beer, sat him down opposite me and began talking to him, asking him the same questions over and over again. I wasn’t police, but he must have thought I was giving a pretty good imitation. How did he know it was Red Holland who had been his father’s partner? Had his mother told him, or was it in the letter? But hadn’t she shown him the letter?

It was a silly question. He’d had to go to Father Matthew to have the letter about the stamps written, so it was obvious he couldn’t read or write. ‘Were there any other letters from your father?’

He shook his head. ‘No. No more letters.’

‘So why did you kill Black Holland? He wasn’t your father’s partner. He had nothing to do with it. Why did you kill him?’

‘Him say things against my papa.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Bad things.’

‘Accusations, lies, taunts — what? What sort of things?’

Those sapphire blue eyes were wide and staring. He was drunk now. He didn’t care, and suddenly it all came out, the whole terrible story. It was pay-back and the avenger blown to pieces, obliterated, sunk by his own weapon of vengeance. And he hadn’t got it from a letter or from his mother. He had got it direct from the drunken mouthings of Red Holland’s illegitimate half-caste island son, the man who had become notorious during the war as one of the chief leaders of the Black Dogs of Kieta.

The way he told it I found great difficulty in piecing it together into a coherent story, but the first thing to emerge clearly confirmed that Carlos Holland and Red Holland were the same person. It was Carlos Holland who had left his partner to die on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It was Carlos who had formed a mining company and developed the Dog Weary mine, and with the money from that he had founded the Holland Line of schooners and made himself the uncrowned king of the islands around the Buka Passage. And in Sydney, in July 1911, the past had caught up with him, his one-time partner shipping as stoker on his newly acquired vessel. Lewis was an experienced miner. He had time fuses and explosives concealed in his personal belongings, and with these he had mined the ship.

But it hadn’t been his intention to blow it up. It was merely a threat, his son assured me, the means by which he hoped to force Carlos Holland to give him the compensation he had so far refused. Instead, Carlos Holland had drugged him and had him carried on board the Holland Trader as a drunk. He had put him in his own bunk, where he had smothered him with a pillow. He had then gone ashore again — ‘Him spik Kepten big bisnis in Port Moresby. After, ship sail and finish downbilow sea when bombs explode. All men die.’

When he said that, I knew it was true. It explained something that had been worrying me since Mac had described Colonel Holland’s reaction to that letter we had found in the safe. If Carlos and Red Holland were one and the same person, Colonel Holland would have known it at once. After all, Carlos was his younger brother. He might pass himself off to the islanders as a distant cousin who bore a close family resemblance and who had inherited the Holland Line, but he couldn’t possibly have fooled his brother, Lawrence. Presumably he had been able to produce some specious and very convincing reason for his behaviour — debts, for instance, something as impersonal as financial difficulties that would explain his leaving the Holland Trader at Port Moresby and assuming another identity. Colonel Holland may have had his suspicions, but if he had, doubtless he had put them aside, making allowances for his brother and giving him the benefit of the doubt. But that night, when he had raided Madehas and opened the safe, reading the letter that had begun Dear Red and discovering for the first time that Carlos’s wealth was built on the abandonment of his partner to a slow death, that he had lied and lied again, that he was a pitiless monster, that sudden opening of his eyes to what his brother was capable of doing had come as a great and appalling shock — shattering, Mac had called it. Not only had Carlos Holland killed Merlyn Lewis, his one-time partner, but he had sent the Captain and his entire crew to their deaths, and he had done it without pity, without a thought for their families. This was what his son, Hans, had had to live with ever since he opened the safe and found that letter, those sheets of stamps. Ever since then he had known his father was a pitiless murderer. And he had known, too, that the money he had inherited, the basis of his little fleet of RPLs, was blood money, stemming from those murderous actions.

It was then that an idea came to me — if I could show in a court of law that Hans Holland’s assets were based on money his father had obtained from the sinking of the Holland Trader , then the insurance company, not the PNG government, would have the prior claim. At least it might delay things until after the stamps had been sold. Even if I could raise a loan, interest rates were high, and an extra £2,000 or £3,000 would make all the difference to our ability to keep the ship operational.

I wrote out a statement for Lewis to sign right there in the hotel, then took him along to a solicitor and had it typed, signed and witnessed as a statutory declaration. I think he was so frightened and confused that he barely knew what he was doing.