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Mac finished reading the letter through, then handed it back to me. ‘Didn’t you mention the Dog Weary mine, some crazy story told by a half-breed abo named Lewis? Well, you read that letter.’ He was frowning, his eyes screwed up in concentration, the hand holding out the letter to me trembling. ‘Something there that don’t make sense.’

Fifth June 1910.

Dear Red,

This will come as a shock to you I am sure thinking me dead. But I got out thanks to some abos who took me walkabout across by Alice and down as far as the Nullabor. I was there 2 years working at Gt Boulder then at Ora Banda to earn enough to come after you now I know where you are.

I’m back east now, in Queensland, panning up round the headwaters of the Palmer, and for summer I have a shack over at the coast by Cooktown. I call it Dog Weary, just so I don’t forget you and what you did. You made a fortune, you bastard, taking all the water and leaving me to die. I nearly did too but not quite and now I’m coming for my share of the ships you got out of the Dog Weary money.

MERLYN LEWIS

‘He calls him Red, you see.’ Mac pointed his finger at the final lines. ‘My share of the ships, he says, and he’s writing it in 1910, remember, when it was Carlos running the schooners here. As I say, it doesn’t add up, does it?’

‘Unless, of course, it was the cousin who had staked Carlos. If Red Holland had financed the purchase of the first schooners, it would explain why Carlos left everything to him instead of his brother.’

Mac shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t have upset the Old Man the way the sight of that letter did. He was crouching there in that office, just as we are here, reading it by torchlight and the effect on him … shattering, that’s what it was. And he was quite different after that, very morose and bitter, and he couldn’t seem to settle, not until after we’d raided Queen Carola. After that he seemed suddenly himself again, as though burning Red Holland’s house over his head had exorcised a ghost.’

It was Mac’s use of the word ‘ghost’ that started me thinking again about the disappearance of the Holland Trader. But then he said, ‘Couldn’t be Jonathan that showed him how to open the safe.’ He was referring to Hans. Most of the things in the safe belonged to Hans Holland.

‘Colonel Holland might have given him the combination,’ I suggested.

‘No, definitely not.’

‘Tim Holland then?’

‘He wouldn’t have told him.’

‘Maybe Hans Holland caught him here with the safe open and those albums in his hand.’

But Mac wasn’t listening. He was reading through Lewis’s letter again, his hands trembling slightly and a shocked look on his face. When he finished, he folded it up slowly and sat quite still for a moment, squatting back on his heels and staring at nothing. Finally he passed the letter to me. ‘You’d better keep it. Take it back with you to Australia, find out what happened to Merlyn Lewis.’

‘I know what happened to Lewis,’ I said. And I told him how he had shipped out of Sydney as a stoker.

‘And why would he do that, do you think? A year later, a whole year after writing that letter. There’s more mystery for you.’ He was rummaging around in the safe again, and when he found there was nothing else of importance there, he began packing the money, the papers, everything back the way we had found it. But as well as the letter he let me keep that single sheet of the Solomons Seal blue stamp, and so that they wouldn’t get wet, I tucked them between the pages of an old copy of Playboy magazine I found lying on a table among a pile of faded newspapers.

After closing the door of the safe and replacing the lower stair treads, Mac unlocked the doors. The houseboy had been joined by an older man, also a woman, with two girls hovering in the background, one of them wide-mouthed and smiling. She had long bare black legs, their length and their shapeliness emphasised by the shortness of her dress, which was a brilliant red and too small for her so that her nubile breasts seemed bursting out of it. She was excited, the dark brown eyes staring straight at us, her hair standing up like a golliwog, and against the green of the lush growth outside, drab in the falling rain, she looked like some bright tropical fruit, the bloom on her jet-black skin adding to the lusciousness of her youthful abandon. Her eyes caught mine, the smile widening, white teeth in a black face, and then she turned away, overcome with embarrassment, simpering and giggling with blatant sexuality. I heard Mac telling the houseboy to bring us some coffee, and then he took me on a tour of the house.

I don’t know whether he was looking for anything in particular, but if he was, we didn’t find it. The bedrooms upstairs were spartanly furnished with iron bedsteads and marble-topped washstands complete with china ewers and basins. The beds were unmade; the mattresses, rolled up. Downstairs the rooms had a feeling of emptiness and decay. It was a sad, neglected place, unloved and uncared for, the big kitchen, where Perenna had fought off her mother’s murderers, opening on to weed-grown flags of coral cement.

We had our coffee and left, the rain still falling steadily and the track even more slippery as we made our way down the hill to the cove, the two girls following us, but keeping a discreet distance and only betraying their presence by their giggling and the occasional flash of a red dress through the palm tree boles and the ferns. The rain didn’t seem to worry them.

It wasn’t until we were halfway down that the ship gradually emerged from out of the dripping miasma. Seen through the tropical green of island foliage, a rusty, battered relic of a long-dead war, there was a sense of unreality about her, a ghostly quality that matched the empty house behind us. I turned to Mac. ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

He smiled up at me from under his umbrella. ‘See if the outboard starts.’ We had come ashore in the rubber dinghy. ‘Afterwards … we wait till dark, I imagine.’

‘Then go for the airfield?’ I was thinking of Perenna, all the whites down in Arawa; they’d all be at risk if the police held an airfield and the PNG government were able to fly in troops.

He nodded. ‘Either that or Queen Carola. It depends which the Inspector thinks he’s a better chance of holding.’

‘And suppose his men have had enough and don’t want to risk their lives again?’

‘Then he’ll have a mutiny on his hands.’ We had reached the floating wooden jetty where we had left the rubber dinghy. The oil drums were rusted away, the planks half submerged, and he stood there on the rocks gazing out across the flat, rain-pocked water to the ship, lying grey in the rain against a background of reeds. ‘And so will you,’ he added. Then turning to me, he gripped my arm. ‘A word of warning: These people — they look innocent enough, like children, smooth-skinned and smiling. Seeing them like that, you’d think there was no more friendly people in the Pacific. But just remember this, they were cannibals only two or three generations back, and they still eat people when they have a chance in the more remote parts of PNG. And like children, their mood can change very quickly. D’you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’

‘I think so. You’re explaining why you had to kill that man in the wheelhouse and then shoot Teopas down in cold blood.’

‘Aye.’ He nodded vehemently. ‘They’re a primitive people, and no amount of missionary work is going to change their pagan hearts. Not in my lifetime anyway,’ he muttered as he released the painter from the rock we had tied it to.