‘I think of that woman every time I go into court.’

The case Bili puts Jericho to work on concerns forests at the other end of Papua, north-east from Moresby, past the mountain, towards the tail of Papua. On the map tacked to the office wall, the forest is thick and pristine along the coast at Collingwood Bay, where Bili is pointing, interrupted only by swamp, areas of swidden agriculture, a curving river.

‘Do you see where it is?’ she asks.

‘Well, there’s the mountain.’ Jericho moves his finger back along the ranges until he finds the mountain pushing forward onto the northern plain. Oil-palm plantations, marked on the map by a grid pattern of green dots, march like armies in all directions from the town of Popondetta.

‘Forget the mountain for a moment,’ Bili says, dragging his attention back to the forests along the coast. ‘The fjords! See! They’re there, at the top of Collingwood Bay.’

‘Oh,’ he says, and another file opens in his brain: more green, more water, more plumes, more dancing. Another rush of foreboding. Dark-green water. Aaron’s body brought back on the canoe. ‘Our lives. Why is it so complicated? So spread out. Everywhere. It’s like a grenade going off.’

‘Don’t think of the past,’ Bili says. ‘There’s work to be done.’ She gives him a little shake, a smile, and he drags himself to the present, the map, the matter at hand.

‘Are they logging the fjords?’ he asks.

‘No. It’s too steep. But they want to log in Collingwood Bay. See, as soon as the fjords end, it flattens out. All that land is accessible from the beach, more or less flat to the mountains. Perfect for logging. Perfect for oil palm.’

‘There’s no logging on the map.’

‘That’s because we’re fighting,’ and she begins another long story for him to wrap his mind around.

He looks at the map, the swidden patches of agriculture. ‘Gardens?’ he asks.

‘All along there.’ She traces her finger in the strip between the coast and the curve of the river. ‘Beyond that’ – her finger moves towards the mountain – ‘is hunting ground.’

‘So if it’s tribal land and the elders don’t want it logged, then what’s the problem?’

‘False registration,’ she says. ‘If you want to make money logging, it’s easy enough to find someone in town who’ll make the claim. You pay them off and, if you’re quick enough, the bulldozers get in before the villages know what’s happening.’

‘So how did you find out?’

‘From a clerk in the forestry department. He comes from over there. He got suspicious, and some papers fell out of a cupboard.’ Bili doesn’t know how he came by them. She needs not to know. ‘It happens often enough,’ she says. ‘It’s the only way we find out.’

Because customary land is held by clan and tribe, it cannot be sold, she tells him. It is a provision of the constitution written back before independence. ‘A beautiful document, everyone says, written to safeguard a way of life that depends on the collective ownership of land.’ Bili gives a curt laugh. ‘All that idealism Aaron and Rika were part of. They imagined a fine Melanesian future ruled by people like Aaron, but not a future ruled by money.’