Solomons Seal (9 page)

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.

Who had taught him, I wondered, to fashion such a weapon, and for such a deadly purpose? I had never met him, yet holding that wicked little sliver of wood in my hand, I seemed to feel his presence. I could see him, propped up in that bed with the pictures on the wall in front of him, pictures that represented his real world,
and labouring to trim the point and cut the slits, and death in his heart as he struggled to control and direct the movements of his hands. And she had thrown it on the fire, hating it. The doll, too. And now, to save him from himself, she was working her passage back to the world he had come from, where she had been born.

Pay-back, Chips Rowlinson had called it.
If I catch up with the man
… I felt a chill run through me, though the darkened bar was heavy with the day's heat trapped in the crush of people eating and drinking. An English pub, everything so ordinary, and the sliver of wood in my hand, the memory of her words. And those stamps. They were part of it, too. I was certain of it, so that sitting there, drinking the rest of my beer, I wondered how Timothy Holland had come by them. He couldn't have inherited them, not from his father at any rate; otherwise the albums would have been at Aldeburgh all the time, not as his sister had said among personal belongings sent home with him from Papua New Guinea. No, he had either discovered them or been given them out there. But where? And had he known they were valuable, or was his interest in them in some way connected with the disappearance of the
Holland Trader?

Unfortunately, I had other things to think about next day in London, and when I discovered the stamps were probably worth even more than Tubby had offered for them, I ceased to worry about their real significance. If you're hungry, you don't enquire where the manna comes from.

*

Canberra House, where I had to go for my visa, is near the Law Courts so that it was only a short walk to the Strand Stamp Arcade and on my way to the Qantas office to pick up my airline tickets. This philatelic hypermarket almost next door to the Savoy has the atmosphere of a bazaar, a sort of Aladdin's cave of stamps. I preferred it to Stanley Gibbons on the other side of the Strand because you were not confined to any one dealer and could wander from counter to counter, looking at stamps, chatting to dealers, meeting other collectors, and no pressure on you to buy anything. However, since I had got to know Josh Keegan personally, most of my purchases had been through him. He was expensive, handling nothing but the best, but if you could catch him between Continental buying trips, he was fascinating to talk to, full of stories of deals he had pulled off, fakes he had exposed and, of course, his latest acquisitions, which were always superb and mostly beyond my modest means.

His stand was at the far end of the arcade: J. S. H. Keegan, Specialist in GB & Commonwealth. It was just before lunch when I arrived, and his manager, Jim Grace, was invoicing some early St Helena he had just sold to a thickset man flourishing a German credit card. The only other customer at the counter was picking over some Specimen GBs neatly packaged in plastic envelopes.

‘Is Josh Keegan in?' I asked.

Grace nodded. ‘Just back from Birmingham. Our first auction is next week.' To look at this small stand in a crowded arcade it was difficult to realise that he
had a partner in Zurich, another in Munich, and had just gone into partnership with a firm of auctioneers in the Midlands. ‘If it's about that little collection Commander Sawyer brought in, I know he'd like to see you.' He reached for the credit card, jotting down the number on the invoice. ‘He's upstairs in the office if you'd like to go up.'

I had only once before been to his office on the third floor; that was when Tubby had introduced me to him. It had originally been one large room; now it was partitioned off into small cubicles where his staff sorted, packaged and priced the material he acquired, most of it from private collectors. His own office was little bigger than the others, a desk, two chairs, a window looking down on to the Strand and the walls lined with small filing tray cabinets. He was standing at the window when I went in, a neatly dressed man with a shock of grey hair. He might have been a musician, except that he had a block of orange stamps gripped in a pair of tweezers and was holding it up to the light, his glasses pushed on to the top of his head and a jeweller's magnifying glass screwed into his right eye.

He turned and smiled at me. I think he was Irish, the smile and the charm all part of his stock-in-trade. ‘Ever seen a block of four five-pound orange? Lightly cancelled, too. I thought they might be fakes, but no, they're all right and it's the blued paper.' He held the block out for me to see. ‘Superb, isn't it?' His eyes were shining with enthusiasm.

‘What's it worth?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘What anybody will pay for it – four thousand pounds, five thousand, I don't know. But it's something to bring the dealers down to Birmingham when we hold our big auction there in the autumn.' He slipped the brilliant orange block back into its plastic mount, his eyes already fastened on the parcel I was carrying. ‘Is that the Holland collection you've got there?' He sat down at his desk, clearing a space with a sweep of his hand. ‘Are you going to let us auction it for the lady, or is she prepared to sell direct? I'll make you an offer for it if you like.'

‘Tubby has already made an offer,' I said. ‘And I've given a man named Berners until July sixteenth to better it.'

‘Two dealers after it already, eh?' He smiled and rubbed his hands together. ‘Tubby won't get it, of course, poor fellow. I've already been on to my Zurich partner, and I've just heard that one of our clients over there is willing to go to thirty-five hundred pounds, probably more, provided the background is substantiated. In that case I might even go to four thousand myself.'

I stared at him. ‘But you were only willing to give five hundred and fifty for the Trinidad ship stamp.'

‘It's not the “Lady McLeod”. Didn't Tubby tell you what he had discovered?'

‘He said something very odd had come to light, but I was in a hurry and wasn't prepared for one of his lectures. I thought it was some finer point of printing—'

‘Some finer point of printing?' He laughed. ‘You
could certainly call it that.' He leaned back. ‘So you don't know. And if I'd offered you four thousand pounds, you'd have taken it?'

‘There's Berners,' I said. ‘Also I'd have had to get advice about exchange regulations.' And I told him about Perenna Holland's movements. ‘As a UK resident, I think it might require Bank of England permission to send money out to her.' That was before exchange controls were lifted.

‘No problem, if you're willing to let us auction the collection.'

I hesitated. But it was what I had been hoping for. ‘Provided you can let her have some sort of guarantee in advance.' And I explained her position and also that I was booked out for Sydney on Sunday evening.