Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island. Kathy Marks

his Norwegian-born wife, Kari, who had lived with him for 15 years on Pitcairn.

      Steve Christian did not bother with pseudonyms. Instead, he exploited his position as mayor to attack the British government and the prosecution. He did not disclose—and few people outside the island realised—that he was himself directly affected by the legal action. Another man in his situation might have stepped down. Not Steve. Already in October 2000, shortly after being interviewed by police, he had flown to London for a gathering of leaders of the British Overseas Territories. Baroness Scotland was among seven British ministers who attended the meeting, which included drinks parties and official receptions. Steve also travelled to Chicago in his official capacity, and in May 2002, soon after Simon Moore’s announcement that he planned to lay charges, gave a speech to a United Nations seminar in Fiji on decolonisation. Steve inveighed against the delays in the criminal case, calling them ‘an abuse of process’, and criticised Britain for neglecting the island and its infrastructure. ‘Must we hijack a yacht, or be invaded like the Falklands, to get attention?’ he inquired theatrically.

      On his way home via New Zealand, Steve was due to see Richard Fell, a courteous, unflappable man who had become the islanders’ principal bête noire. When Fell refused to allow him to bring a lawyer, the meeting was cancelled. Steve called it ‘yet another example of the pattern of high-handed behaviour exhibited by the Governor’s office’.

      He did not seem worried about the impending prosecution. ‘I think Steve thought that nothing was going to touch him,’ says one British official.

      A key figure behind the scenes was Leon Salt. In theory, the Commissioner was just a British employee; in practice, he was enormously powerful. He ordered supplies for the islanders, and arranged for them to be delivered. He organised passenger berths on container ships. All mail to and from Pitcairn passed through Salt’s hands, as did email messages, via a central server in his Auckland office.

      Salt—tall and rangy, with long, curly hair and a big moustache—had Pitcairn blood; he was well educated, somewhat alternative in his lifestyle. He owned a smallholding north of Auckland and had a passion for vintage cars. He was fiercely attached to the island and its inhabitants, having spent three years teaching on Pitcairn before becoming Commissioner in 1995. He knew the individuals, their relationships, their feuds and affairs. He knew precisely how the tiny, squabbling community functioned.

      While some locals saw the softly spoken Salt as their champion, others claim that he favoured certain families, particularly Steve Christian’s. If Steve wanted an item loaded onto the next ship leaving Auckland, it would get on, some islanders say, at the expense of goods belonging to others. Leon Salt was good friends with Steve, who called him ‘Boss’, and with Steve on Pitcairn and Salt in Auckland, it is said, the pair ran the island between them. In 2002 they deported an English journalist, Ben Fogle, who had arrived by yacht. Salt, who was visiting, spat at Fogle’s feet and would not permit him beyond The Landing. ‘We don’t want your sort spying on us,’ he told him.

      When Operation Unique started, Salt was helpful. Police worked out of his office, at his invitation, and he unearthed documents from his archives for them. He was a fund of useful information, most of which he carried in his head. When police voyaged to Pitcairn to interview suspects, the Commissioner went too, and stayed with them at the Lodge. Salt, say British officials, was level-headed about the island and ‘didn’t buy into the myth’. Almost everyone, including Simon Moore, regarded him as a thoroughly good bloke.

      Those who know him say he was revolted by the child abuse allegations. But he felt it was ‘inappropriate to apply a UK solution to a Pitcairn problem’, he told the Governor. Salt wrote, ‘The UK has ignored law and order on Pitcairn for 200 years … It would seem perhaps incongruous that UK justice is to be imposed in all its might after all this time, particularly given the fact that reported serious crime has escaped investigation in the past.’

      Salt supported an amnesty and, astonishing as it seems, he even told police, according to Peter George, ‘I’ll get the men to plead guilty—provided there’s an amnesty first.’

      After that avenue was closed, his attitude changed. Detectives asked Salt to sign an affidavit releasing documents from his office; if the affair got to court, he would have to give evidence for the Crown. He refused, and withdrew all co-operation from the inquiry, telling prosecutors that if they proceeded as they intended, history would ‘judge them very poorly’.

      The men and their families, unwilling to see the case go to trial, pressed, instead, for a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’, based on the body that probed human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa. The idea of transposing truth and reconciliation to Pitcairn had initially appealed to major players, including Simon Moore, but had to be abandoned once it was decreed by Baroness Scotland, Britain’s Overseas Territories Minister, that the conventional legal process had to take its course. Still, Moore remained hopeful that the healing principles it embodied could be integrated into that process.

      New Zealand is a pioneer of ‘restorative justice’, which offers criminals who plead guilty the opportunity to express remorse, apologise to their victims and make reparations; when they then go before a court to be sentenced, they can expect a significantly reduced penalty. Moore believed that this approach would enable most of the Pitcairn men to avoid prison. Christine Gordon, his deputy, consulted restorative justice experts, and researched a model employed in a Canadian – Indian community where generational child sexual abuse had been exposed.