31. Coach Trip

“Where is your travel bag?” my father said. “You’re coming home for a while.”
“But I have work to do.” I protested weakly.

“All arranged. There’ll be no planting for a while anyway. The island has to remain locked down while this is sorted out. We must go tonight or you will be stuck here indefinitely. The Captain will be going down to the Village with the tractor and I’ve made sure they’ll save a seat for you.”

He emptied my cupboards into the duffel bag and picked up the model from the desk.
“We know now that this is a link to The Shadows and Hama Batu. The investigators will want to talk to you about your burglar when you are feeling up to it.”

We walked out together to the gatehouse, where I waited in an empty office until the Tractor was ready to leave. I sat at the back of the trailer on the way back to the Village, squeezed onto a sofa made for two beside three burly Guardians. The vehicle was filled to capacity, with Captain Hasiki, a Guardian Lieutenant and half a dozen men, as well as my father and the Sergeant who had come up with him to the plantations.

I am afraid that the conversation in the coach passed in something of a blur for me but I think that subsequent events showed that it was important, so I will do my best to reconstruct it.

Some of the talk was about the details of the fire. One of the problems had been that there was the water supply from the Village was not designed for emergency use so that it had been very hard to fight it. In addition, there had still been some drums of oil stored in the back of the hangar and they had contributed a dark, rank smoke to the blaze. The sergeant thought that even the attackers had not understood how the fire would spread and what damage it would cause.

“They didn’t act alone.” He said. “They would have had to get hold of our uniforms and the drum of gasoline. There’s no way that three fuzzies from the jungle could have pulled that one off without help. But we’ll get them. If we have to chop down all the trees on this island, we’ll find every last one of them and make them wish they’d never been born.”

“Careful there.” Hasiki said gently. “We need to be very cautious as we follow this one through that we don’t make things worse. We have to make very sure that we focus very narrowly on the culprits.”

“With respect, sir.” The Sergeant interjected. “You didn’t see the hangar and smell the fire. We need to show these people that we’re not going to be pushed around. We have to hunt them down like the monkeys they are. Catch them and pull their toenails out one by one, then make them eat their own excrement. Then chop their heads off. That will teach them some respect.”

“Is that what people are saying in the Village?” the Captain asked.
“They had better not go anywhere near the Village, Sir. They will end up roasted on a slow fire themselves. Everyone would be ready to join in the hunt. They are just waiting for you to get there so that they can set it all up.”

“As you say.” Hasiki hesitated, “But we want to react carefully. After today, the whole island will be outraged by this. We need to build on that to starve the perpetrators of sympathy. The one thing that we don’t want is for people to feel sorry for them.

The best defence against this sort of atrocity isn’t to emphasise its importance. Over the last few years, we have been gradually undermining Hama Batu’s power base. He used to have dozens – perhaps hundreds – of followers. As we’ve given people work in the plantations and gradually expanded the area we control, that number has reduced and reduced.

Today’s attack is a desperate measure. This is the work of a group that fears that it’s being marginalised and squeezed out of existence. Yes, they’ve inflicted a serious wound on the Village but I think it was as much by accident as because they attack from a position of power. Three people rolled a drum of gas down a hill and set fire to it. That is the only strength they have shown and it might be almost the total strength of their position. Three men and a match.

No doubt they planned it carefully; they seem to have been well organised. But I suspect that they would have been almost as surprised by the scale of their success as we are. What we have to avoid is turning a defeat into a disaster. They want to provoke us; to get us to turn them into heroes and to inspire their supporters.

The best way to deal with them isn’t to attack everything is sight. The best thing is to carry on eating their lunch. Take away their supporters. Give them jobs. Take away their territory, leave them exposed. I’ll tell you who the most valuable fighter is in the battle against Hama Batu and the Shadows. It’s Tommu. Every time he plants a palm tree, he strengthens the Village and he weakens them.”

“But Sir, if we let them get away with it they’ll think we are weak. They’ll take it as a licence to attack us again.”

“No Sergeant. If we over-react, they will know that we are weak. Have you ever watched a monkey that’s got fleas?”
“Fleas, Sir?” The Sergeant looked puzzled.
“Yes. The monkey sits in the sun. It runs its fingers through its fur and it finds a flea. It catches the flea and it squashes it with its finger nails. The fleas are a small problem for that monkey.”
“What do you mean, Sir?”

“Now imagine the same monkey. It sits there scratching itself all over. It snatches at where the flea is biting it on its leg then it scratches its stomach, then its back. Perhaps it is just one flea but pretty soon the fur is coming out in tufts and you see its bare skin, red and swollen. That monkey has problems.

It still has the problem of the flea, but now it has the problem of the damage it has done to itself as well. You watch that monkey and you know it is in trouble.
I know which monkey I would rather be.”

The conversation drifted on to other things and I was left in the back with my own thoughts, something I could well have done without. As we drew nearer to the Village, there was smoke on the wind and an aroma of roasted flesh that would prevent all of us who smelled it from ever again enjoying a barbecue.

The hangar – or the shell of it – was illuminated by arc lights. The roof had collapsed and the afternoon rain had damped the last of the fire but it was clear that blaze had stopped because the interior had been completely burned out. A Lieutenant Guardian ran up to the Tractor and took Captain Hasiki and the Sergeant to a meeting at the old court houses. The Gardener’s coach was swiftly unhitched and a water tanker hooked on instead. Fighting the fire had used more water than the pumps could deliver to the tanks at the top of the hill and it appeared that more was needed to help replenish them before the supplies to Our Granny’s house and her gardens were impacted.

The charred remains of the dead, had been placed in neat lines in the field nearby. The men at the site were smoke blackened and exhausted. They were still working on securing the ruin, propping up collapsing walls and beams so that they could get in and out safely. As I looked at them, I recognised in their tired eyes my own sense of disbelief. I could see that their movements were dazed; mechanical.

They too felt that this was an enormous mistake; that if, perhaps, they worked hard enough, tidied up enough, they could somehow put things in order. They were trying to find an obscure error and correct it so that everything would be back to what it always had been.
“We should help them to clear up.” I said to my father. “They look done in.”
“No.” He replied. “There is nothing that we can do tonight that can’t be done as well tomorrow morning. We need to get some sleep now, to prepare for that.”

We set out to walk up the hill to his house. Although it must have been close to midnight, the Village was still wide awake. There were lamps lit in every house with people out in their gardens and on the street corners. Everywhere was the smell of the fire and ash.

As we walked, we passed groups of Guardians escorting prisoners. My father stopped one and asked who they were.
“Suspects.” Came the reply. “We’ve been through the shanties and picked up everyone we found in the wrong place. And you know what sort of job that was. Two of my men have knife wounds.
Every damned family has some relative from the jungle with no papers staying with them. And as soon as they realised what was happening, of course they hid or ran away to the hills. I shouldn’t think we’ve got half of them.”

“Were they involved with starting the fire?” my father asked.
“They say they weren’t, but of course you’d expect that. But there’s time enough to find out tomorrow which of them are telling the truth. A little persuasion and they’ll be singing in no time. We’re having to hold them in the old court houses up near Our Granny’s garden.” He broke off to encourage one of the prisoners who was lagging behind.
“Move along there!” He shouted. “You lazy piece of beetle dung! Or you’ll feel the weight of my boot!”
Our paths diverged and we walked on up the hill in silence. My father was thoughtful.

“Hasiki is right, you know.” He growled. “I’d like to catch the people who did this as much as anyone, and gut them like fish, but this is stupid. They’ve brought in dozens of low life illegals and if there’s even one or two of them that had anything to do with the fire we’ll be lucky.

They should have secured the perimeter and gone to bed. As it is, the culprits will have been warned and they’ll be the last to be caught. If we’d waited until tomorrow we could have done some proper investigation and perhaps found the real villains instead of going out recruiting for Hama Batu.”