‘A successful return then,’ Martha says. ‘Selling the bark-cloth sounds a good idea. I gather Leonard is optimistic.’

‘It’s already walked him into trouble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘He was held up on the road. Didn’t Laedi tell you?’

Martha’s heart gives a bump of fear. ‘Guns?’ she asks.

Milton shakes his head. ‘More a confrontation. Young men. They’d been sent to tell him that the bark-cloths Hector had sent down to Presley had been stolen. Presley’s door had been broken down the night before. They’ll steal these next ones too, the young men said, indicating the ones Jericho and Hector were carrying. “You pay now,” they said. “You keep the cloth. Ten thousand kina.” A ridiculous amount. Jericho turned out his pocket, showed them it was empty. He didn’t have a key card. They took his wallet, cursed, thumped the ground with the clubs they carried. Jericho held his nerve. Or Hector, more likely. Obi was with them and said, okay, we go to the school, find Milton, we’ll negotiate, and the young men – who knows why – said okay, we will tell Milton. Maybe they thought they could get the money from me.’

‘So what happened?’ A note of injury enters Martha’s voice. She hasn’t been told any of this. ‘Did you sort it out?’

Milton gives one of his gruff almost-laughs. ‘No. Not me. Meg. She knew one of the boys, had nursed his mother. She roused on them, and told them they should be ashamed. They went away and we locked the bark-cloth in the school office. We thought it was a try-on. Too inept for a shake-down. But a couple of days later Meg was stopped on the road. It was a foreman from one of the oil-palm plantations, married to a woman from the village near the airstrip. Warned her off. He frightened her, and Meg’s not easily frightened.’

‘So, it’s not just young men from the airstrip,’ Martha says.

‘No. There’ll be someone behind it, using them. The bark-cloth that was stolen from Presley was dumped at the school turn-off. Some of it had been slashed and dumped in oil.’

Milton consults his hands for a while, as if to say that’s enough talk for now. He pulls himself up out of the chair and says he’s going for a walk, into the small township, and to the school. The head teacher had been a student with him, long ago when they were boys at Martyrs. He invites Martha to go with him, but she is perturbed by this story. So she stays on the terrace alone with her thoughts, and this sweet air. Judas perfume, Pete used to say, the treachery of paradise, the sweetness that leads you into the forest, where the smells are acrid and moist, the ground treacherous. She thinks of Pete with his head slumped on the table when she came in from the shops. She knew as she put the key in the door that something had happened. The air felt dead, even before she called out and nothing came back. He’d been reading the paper. And now here she is, alone, without him, looking into the deep green of the fjord.