Squash Rackets

By Kerry James

Pip Carey just wants a peaceful holiday in Vava`u, but her chosen hotel is filled with noisy New Zealanders wheeling and dealing with the local Tongans over squash exports. Despite her wish for solitude, Pip is drawn into detailed conversations with Brian Urquart, his rival Ian Burke and his wife Raewen, and local tour boat operator Carroll

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kerry James
• Release date: Dec 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645338539

Book preview

Squash Rackets is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Published in 2021 by Kerry James, Wendouree, Victoria, 3355.

© Copyright Kerry James 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievals system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Australian Copyright Act 1968, without the permission of the publisher.

Cover image, ‘Pumpkin plants with rich harvest on a field’, by kstudija, used under licence from Shutterstock, stock vector ID 152517464, www.shutterstock.com

Cover design, print design and ebook production by Golden Orb Creative: www. goldenorbcreative.com

Typeset in Minion Pro 12pt (text) and 20pt (titles).

A National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry has been created for this title:

ISBN 978-0-6453385-2-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-6453385-3-9 (ebook)

Contents

Characters in the story

Chapter One: Pip takes a break

Chapter Two: Kulī Fīnau spins his wheels

Chapter Three: Trouble brews at Port of Refuge Bay

Chapter Four: Selina and company

Chapter Five: Pip learns more of the pirate

Chapter Six: Kulī spends time with friends

Chapter Seven: Pip meets the pirate

Chapter Eight: Death comes to Refuge Bay

Chapter Nine: Kulī goes to work

Chapter Ten: Kulī faces the Fifita

Chapter Eleven: Kulī faces more of the Fifita

Chapter Twelve: Kulī upsets Selina

Chapter Thirteen: Kulī upsets Pip

Chapter Fourteen: Pip goes to work

Chapter Fifteen: Pip goes fishing

Chapter Sixteen: Pip finds herself on Falahola Island

Chapter Seventeen: Pip gets a warning – and an idea

Chapter Eighteen: Selina down again

Chapter Nineteen: Doctor meets doctor

Chapter Twenty: Pip puts the bite on her sweeties

Chapter Twenty-One: Pip wraps it up

Chapter Twenty-Two: Beds and bathtubs

Chapter Twenty-Three: Kulī puts pieces into place

Chapter Twenty-Four: Kulī sees it through

Chapter Twenty-Five: Not quite all is ended

Glossary of Tongan words

Author’s notes and acknowledgements

Characters in the story

(First or familiar names are in bold)

Tonga Police on Vava`u

Detective Chief Inspector Kulī Fīnau, stationed in Nuku`alofa

Detective Corporal Nusipepa (Nusi) Kaisinga, Kulī’s partner, also stationed in Nuku`alofa

Constable `Elini Kahoa, a WPC on Vava`u

Guests and staff at the Port of Refuge Bay Hotel

Dr Pip (Pipa) Carey, a semi-retired anthropologist from Australia

Bob Williams, an Australian Customs officer

Brian Urquart, a squash broker from New Zealand

Paul Ryan, Urquart’s financial backer, also from New Zealand

Carroll Spicer, tour boat owner

Ian Burke, a New Zealand businessman, and his wife Raewen

Neville (Nev) Brown, Ian’s assistant

Rangi Mulihenoa, Neville’s girlfriend

`Alisi Toutai, a highborn woman and departmental head in the Ministry of Fisheries

Vanesa, hotel manager

Local Tongans on Vava`u

Semisi Fifita, head of a business family with strong criminal tendencies, his Tongan wife Teresa, and their adult children: Lavinia (Lavi), and her husband, Hake Fonua; Seta, the youngest; as well as Rodney, a nephew

Toluhema (Tolu) Fifita, the only son of Semisi by his former Sāmoan wife

Lia Fifita, Semisi’s oldest daughter by a former Indo-Fijian wife

Peauafi (Peau) `Ofalahi, Vava`u magistrate, and his wife `Ofa

Selina `Akau, owner of Selina’s Handicraft and Sea Jewellery Store

Henrieta and her mother, Baravu

Josefina and Maliana, friends of Henrieta

Monalisa, a nurse at Prince Wellington Ngu Hospital

Dr Teresa Puniani, a medical doctor at Prince Wellington Ngu Hospital

Other people on Vava`u

The Ambersons, Dave and Dawn, a celebrity couple, both writers for Yachting World magazine

Bob McLean, boat captain

Helmut Kanft, manager of Lupepau`u Airport, Vava`u

`Iosefa Hopoate, chief Customs officer

Blake and Betty Taunton, owners of the Marlin Bar

People on Falahola Island

Keith Howell, a New Zealand Rotarian

Suseta Faka`osi, and her husband Tomui (Mui)

People on Nuku`alofa

`Iunisi Makamata, Deputy Police Commander, Tonga Police

Commander `Opeti Vaka, Tongan Navy

Mele Fīnau Hausia, Kulī’s sister

Dr `Ana Fane, a medical doctor

People in Aotearoa New Zealand

Binty Quentlone and Keren Huftstrop, both former students of Pip’s

Detective Chief Inspector John Wilson of the Auckland Police

Chapter One: Pip takes a break

Dr Pip Carey was looking forward to her holiday so much that her nose almost hit the windscreen of the hotel bus as it lurched away from Vava`u’s Lupepau`u Airport, bounced under a canopy of `ovava , or banyan, trees and jolted left onto the road that led to Neiafu, without giving any signal but simply assuming a divine right of way.

‘Isn’t this lovely? Faka`ofo`ofa?’ cried Pip, with a look of pure, joyous anticipation.

The driver grunted. He was a married man with nine children, who was no longer used to receiving looks of joyous anticipation. He was also worried that if the excited middle-aged pālangi lady next to him, with the green eyes and satisfied smile of the cat that had eaten his mutton flaps last Sunday, bucketed any farther forward she would fall right off the seat and onto the hot gear box.

He hurtled the bus up to the village of Feletoa where Pip saw that the post holding up the Tourism Bureau sign pointing to the moat around its ancient hilltop fort had sprouted green shoots, and that women had spread pandanus leaves and a large newly-painted ngatu, tapa cloth, on the grass to dry outside the community hall. The driver plunged the bus down the hill. A few miles on, over more hills and past lush plantations, it reached a crossroads where rusted iron sheets, hanging from a house that had lost its roof in a recent cyclone, banged dolefully against the walls, tolling its demise.

Here, the driver heaved the bus around to the right. The old crate hovered in mid-air before it shook itself back onto the road and ran downhill past houses and gardens. At the bottom of the descent, the town finally came into view, the Port of Refuge Bay sparkling behind it like a field of cornflowers rippling in the gentle south-easterly breeze. Pip had always thought of Neiafu as a sleepy port town, but its pace had really picked up. The main street was crowded with people, and lorries laden with green and yellow fruit rumbled by, sending clouds of dust into the bus and making her sneeze

‘Squash harvest,’ said the driver, giving his head a sorry shake.

Pip thought he had said ‘Gesundheit!’, and beamed at him again. As the bus squeezed between the lorries roaring towards them and an unbroken line of vehicles parked by the side of the road, she subconsciously drew in her stomach, and they got through with a bare inch to spare.

‘Hina,’ spat the driver.

Of course! Vava`u growers were harvesting pumpkin squash for sale to Japan. The promise of prosperity was giving the town a buzz. It meant that the hotel would probably be filled with squash-export agents, as well as the usual run of tourists and big-game fishermen, but she need have no truck with them. She need not make appointments, interview people, take notes, or even notice what was happening, if she did not want to. She was on holiday.

A long-time anthropologist of Tonga and its people, Pip was now semi-retired and earned more money doing the odd consultancy (some of them very odd, she had to admit), than she ever had as a researcher. She had just completed a report, in Nuku`alofa, on the role of women in government and the potential barriers to their promotion in the civil service. The assignment in Tongatapu had paid well. ‘Rest and reward after toil,’ she had piously told her friend Mele Fīnau Hausia, with whom she’d been staying, when she booked a week at the swish Refuge Bay Hotel.

‘Kulī should drive you to the airport, Pipa. But he’s off-island somewhere. He never tells me these days where he is going,’ grumbled Mele.

‘I’ll be fine; I don’t need Tonga’s top detective to help me find the airport.’ Pip had laughed before Mele could list all her youngest brother’s personal failings, especially those concerning his duty towards his oldest sister.

The bus climbed the sharp rise by the Catholic church overlooking the bay, wound around the point between the nuns’ house and the community hall, and jolted along the ridge. It trundled past the Catholic secondary school, the clusters of houses, shops and cafés, and the people, pigs, dogs and chickens on the road, until it passed the very grand residences of the governor of Vava`u, a noble of the realm, whose grounds reached down to the bay. It then gave a final shudder, shot across the path of a rapidly oncoming lorry filled with pumpkins, and lunged into the hotel driveway, where it stopped with an asthmatic wheeze.

At this point, Pip Carey became Dr Dynamo. She hurtled from her seat, out of the bus, up the three steps onto the hotel terrace, and into reception. ‘I’d like to have Unit 31, please, at the end of the back rooms,’ she announced, when she managed to draw a breath.

‘That’s a cold-water room due for upgrading. No-one stays there until after renovation,’ said the young receptionist, looking with marked disapproval at Pip’s small flushed face with its pair of pink plastic spectacles askew.

‘Oh, could you check that, please? I always have that unit,’ said Pip.

The receptionist also looked as if she were prepared to stand her ground, but as all the other guests were now jostling for attention behind the small stubborn figure in front, she unwillingly gave in, scrawled ‘31’ on a registration form, and handed it over.

Pip’s heart surged. She had achieved her twin objectives. She had caught the very earliest plane up to make the most of her stay, and had just secured the only self-contained unit in the hotel. It was tacked onto the most unfashionable wing and, as Pip knew, was due not so much for renovation as demolition; but it was private. Pip liked people and found human behaviour fascinating, which was part of the reason that she had become a social anthropologist in the first place, but the recent job had left her drained. She needed a place to recharge.

At first light, she had flown above Tongatapu’s patchwork of plantations, roads, and villages. Half an hour later, the plane was over Ha`apai, the middle group of islands in the Tongan archipelago, where the early morning sun struck the atolls so that they shone like fire opals set in gold on the azure sea, and the volcano, Kao, rose as a perfect cone etched pink against the pearl grey sky on the western horizon. Near to it lay the densely wooded island of Tofua, sprawled low in the sea, its central crater hidden in deep shadow. The mutiny on the Bounty, when Bligh and his men had been cast adrift in a longboat, had taken place just off its sullen shores. Pip rubbed her arms, which had grown goose bumps at the very thought of being so abandoned on the vast South Pacific Ocean. She was terrified of the sea, and it was always with as much relief as delight that she began to see the outlying islands of Vava`u, Tonga’s main northern group, appear as specks in the ocean forty minutes later.

She was gaily printing ‘Carey, Philomena Mary’ on her registration form when the final ‘y’ went wildly astray, her arm knocked by a burly man who pushed past her to flap a sheet of paper at the receptionist.

‘This fax has to go urgently. Charge it to my room: 402,’ he snapped.

‘Only the manageress can send faxes,’ said the girl primly, and put the paper down on the desk. Pip saw it was addressed to a law firm in Auckland.

‘Well, ask her to do it quickly for once, would you? And if a phone call from New Zealand comes for me, find me in the dining room.’

The man strode out of the lobby and into the dining room next to it.

Glad I don’t have to deal with him, thought Pip, as she took her key. She wheeled her suitcase over the driveway and down a cement path that ran behind the back wing. The main road into town lay just on the other side of the hotel’s high mesh fence where a line of squash lorries sent tremors through her feet and covered her with fine white coral road dust. She whirled around the end of the wing and opened the door to Unit 31. Here she was greeted by a familiar musty odour of stale air, damp and mildew. To her joy, she saw, just inside, the old refrigerator sweating away on a patch of linoleum, and the equally ancient gas ring perched on a rickety bench the size of a postage stamp, where she could make simple meals without having to socialise. The other beauty of the unit was its entrance, which looked down the glorious sweep of hotel lawn, past the Garden Wing, to a stand of trees at the northern end of the exclusive Harbour View Wing. Through the gaps in the trees, Pip could even see blue triangles of bay. Oh, yes, it was all very satisfactory.

She ran her fingers through her short, dark hair, which was now flecked with grey so that it looked rather like her late father’s badger-bristle shaving brush, and pushed her spectacles back up her tip-tilted nose, a gesture she repeated many times a day owing to the largeness of the spectacles and the smallness of the nose. She locked the door, patted its outer rusty screen door, as if to encourage it to keep hanging on, and set off along the path back to the dining room.

❧

‘She says here she’s a doctor, but she insisted on going into Unit 31.’ The receptionist directed a doubtful look at Pip as she trotted past the lobby.

The manager, Vanesa, laughed as she drifted back into the inner office with the guest registration forms and the fax. ‘She regards it as hers, I’m afraid. She’s been coming up here for years. She’ll be alright down there for a week. She knows this place better than you do.’

The receptionist sniffed and stuck a yellow frangipani behind her ear.

A moment later, a beat-up second-hand sedan with a band of blue and white checks painted on its dusty sides jounced into the hotel driveway, thereby effectively stopping the bus from going anywhere soon. A large man with a dark moustache and broad shoulders, wearing a grey and black police uniform, clambered out of the sedan.

The receptionist perked up at once and thrust out her own very well-developed chest.

‘That’s Detective Chief Inspector Kulī Fīnau up from Tongatapu. He’s here to pick up the pālangi, not you,’ said Vanesa.

‘Her? You mean the one that just walked past?’

‘Heaven forbid. Although Pipa’s was a last-minute booking. I hope she’s not here to find him.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There just always seems to be trouble when those two get together,’ she added vaguely.

‘But she’s older than him,’ objected the receptionist.

‘Not that kind of trouble, although she’s not that much older … No, I meant much worse trouble, like … Oh, it’s alright; he’s come to pick up the Australian Customs man again.’

As Kulī turned a dazzling one hundred-kilowatt smile and one thousand kilowatts of charm on the middle-aged European man walking towards him, his eyes happened to pass over the girl, who promptly subsided in a fit of giggles.

I didn’t think she would stand up under heavy fire, thought Vanesa. ‘Mālō e lelei, Kulī. Fēfē hake?’ she called out.

‘Sai `aupito, mālō, Vanesa,’ the big man replied, his deep voice rumbling around the lobby.

He was gone by the time the receptionist reappeared from beneath the kauri pine desktop. She had then to replace the frangipani behind her right ear because the first one had gone quite brown around the edges.

Chapter Two: Kulī Fīnau spins his wheels

Kulī jammed himself back behind the steering wheel and thrust his right arm and shoulder out of the driver’s window. There still did not seem to be enough room for the rest of him inside, and the small sedan, which passed for a police car in Vava`u, had heated up like a sauna. His brain, hovering a centimetre below its roof, felt as if it might melt. His grey police shirt, fresh on that morning, was crumpled and blotched with sweat, and even its smart silver and black epaulettes looked crestfallen. His black police trousers threatened to cut him in half around the middle, and his toes, crammed into new size-twelve regulation black shoes, screamed every time he pressed them down on the pedals. He wriggled about, which brought him out in a fresh torrent of perspiration. The problem was that he was too big, the car was too small, and the equator was too close. That was actually three problems, he reminded himself.

Vava`u was two hundred miles to the north of Nuku`alofa, the capital, on the main island of Tongatapu. Now, in late October, the heat and humidity were intense. He had wanted to come north to follow up on some drug leads, the last words of the Minister of Police still drumming in his ears: ‘Your failure to contain the drug situation in Tonga is a disgrace to your colleagues, your country, and your king.’ That last had stung, more than Deputy Police Commander `Iunisi Makamata’s dutifully murmured ‘hear, hear’ or the long look she had given the minister from beneath her lashes.

What he had not wanted was that permission to travel be granted on the condition that he puppy-walk the visiting Australian around all the wharves in the kingdom while he lectured the local customs officers. He had spent days cooling his heels with Bob Williams in Nuku`alofa, then in Pangai, Ha`apai, and now in Neiafu, although here his heels were as hot as his head. Still, there was only one more day to go before he could get on with his work. Kulī flung the car into reverse, and shot out onto the road into town.

Williams, a grey-haired man with a comfortable manner and a beer gut to match, had been seconded to Tonga for two years through a bilateral aid programme to put into place a series of measures to clean up corruption on the wharves. No Tongan could do the job, bound as they were in networks of reciprocal obligations created by kinship and other personal ties, whereas Western law assumed an impartiality which ruled out the favouring of some people over others – all things being equal, and in an ideal world, that is. Kulī adjusted his seat belt, and gazed down at the Port of Refuge Bay. It looked like a poster for Club Med. Yachts bobbed at anchor, dinghies carved white wakes between them on the blue water, and coconut palms stuck up like cockatoo crests. Stunning, he thought, but hell to police.

‘Those yachts down there must present a security problem for you, Coolie,’ said Williams, pronouncing his name in a way that suggested the detective moonlighted in a paddy field.

‘They do,’ growled Kulī. ‘But the hurricane season starting next month will begin to frighten them away.’ He brightened visibly at the thought.

‘Well, in any case, I think we’ve got the message across to the local customs boys in the last couple of days, don’t you?’ said Williams. ‘I must say, they looked a bit stunned when I outlined the new one-stop shop to get goods off the wharf; but the present system of having to get signatures at five or six different offices invites graft, with ten bucks going out here and ten bucks there, to get the goods signed off. Computerising procedures should stop the double invoicing too, and help to tally incoming goods with the lading notices – when we get the computers in place, of course, and officers who can operate them. Ha`apai won’t be much of a problem, but this place and the main port in Nuku`alofa will need a real overhaul.’ He shot Kulī a shrewd sidelong look. ‘You don’t think much of this mob up here, do you?’

Kulī’s own belief was that it would take a bomb blast, rather than a series of reforms, to get His Majesty’s Customs Service to work effectively. Looking stunned was the customs officers’ habitual expression, except when pay and conditions were mentioned, when they looked put out. He braked to allow a sow and six newborn piglets to cross the road, and winced as a sharp pain ran from his toes all the way up his right leg. Beads of perspiration prickled his head and ran down his brow. His moustache was so damp that it might well have begun to compost.

‘You know, Bob,’ he said carefully, ‘Most of our customs officers have not received any formal training. They learn on the job from older men, who never knew the rules or had joined the service before the present day rules were introduced.’

‘You mean they’re a lot of lazy, corrupt, time-serving bastards, but you can’t say it,’ guffawed Williams.

‘I mean that it’s always easier to train up new men than to rehabilitate long-serving officers. Tonga, like other countries in the Pacific, has had problems with border control for a long time; but it’s only recently they have received much notice or aid donor assistance.’

‘Yeah, we realise now that the Pacific Islands are our weak spot,’ said Williams, looking at him sharply. One of the factors that had jogged this realisation had been a joint operation between Fiji Customs and Police, which had uncovered the importation of substances into neighbouring Fiji for the manufacture of amphetamines in quantities that could have supplied the entire Pacific Region, if not the Rest of the World. The operation was so well-organised that materiel to make bombs or chemical weapons might conceivably have followed.

‘The police inspector here seems alright; a bit long in the tooth, perhaps,’ said Williams, keen to change the subject.

Kulī’s hands tightened on the wheel until they turned into the hands of a strangler. The local police inspector had much the same effect on him as the customs service and the close proximity of the equator.

‘He goes south on leave from today. He’ll be on the same plane as you.’

‘You won’t be travelling back with us then?’

‘No; I have things to attend to here,’ replied Kulī.

Once through the busy town, Kulī turned left off the main road down a steep slope to the wharf and pulled up at the customs shed. All around was the cheerful hubbub of ships loading, vehicles backing and turning, dogs barking, pigs squealing, and people calling out to one another as if they had not a care in the world.

‘Coolie, do you want to say something to Customs today? You haven’t said much so far.’

Kulī’s brilliantly white smile lit up his face. ‘That’s your portfolio, Bob. You could just remind them, though, that money from the pumpkin harvest brings in some imports they need to be on the look-out for.’

Williams paused, then asked, ‘Pumpkins are a problem for you?’

‘Worse than Cinderella,’ growled Kulī.

Williams let out another guffaw, clearly finding anyone less like Cinderella than this large policeman hard to imagine. A lorry full of squash kicking up dust all over town was hardly a gold coach either. Still, Kulī knew he was right on the button, as usual. He and Williams had already heard some nasty rumblings among the expats at the hotel. To people not used to handling it, big money often spelled big trouble.

Kulī, whose name literally meant a hunting hound that relentlessly ran its prey to ground, gave the harbour a dark look and rammed his hands into his trouser pockets. He took them out again before his fingers went numb. He then followed Williams into the Customs shed for another day of mind-blowing inaction.

Chapter Three: Trouble brews at Port of Refuge Bay

Pip bustled along the hotel terrace beside tubs of double yellow hibiscus. The day was bright, the air was still fresh, and mynah birds chattered, for once amiably, to the red-tailed bulbuls clattering about in the palm fronds above her. But she should have looked where she was going. As she sped into the dining room, she almost ran into a man coming out. He was not looking where he was going either, but shouting at two men, a pālangi and a Tongan, seated just inside the terrace doors.

‘You’re nothing but a bloody pirate, Brian. I’ll make you pay for this, you thieving bastard,’ he snarled, and kicked at a black briefcase lying on the floor.

It was the man who had knocked her aside at reception. As he stormed