The Boy in the River (13 page)

Attention was now focused on the Europol conference and no amount of experience as a lecturer was enough to quell my nerves.

This would be the first time my theory had been advanced in public. It flew in the face of most of the press coverage and, coming hot on the heels of the South African trip, it might appear that I was hinting that the Met’s efforts were misplaced. I respected the police and was very anxious not to be seen to criticize them. In addition, the idea that a child had been ritually sacrificed in central London could all too easily cross the line into sensationalism and prejudice.

As time moved on I realized that the various forensic tests that would either back up my theories or prove them wrong wouldn’t be completed before the conference, so I kept myself busy assembling a list of possible West African deities to whom a human sacrifice might be made.

On the Monday evening before the conference Faith and I flew into Schiphol Airport and took one of Holland’s blue and yellow commuter trains to The Hague. After putting the finishing touches to my PowerPoint presentation in the hotel room we headed, as requested, to an Argentinian steakhouse in the main square. The guest list of sixteen or so included some of the leading lights of British policing. Besides officers from the Met there were representatives from the National Criminal Intelligence Agency, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the National Crime Faculty, as well as specialists in child pornography, people trafficking and organized crime.

A very striking figure appeared in front of us and introduced himself. Commander Baker was broad-shouldered and well over six feet tall, with an olive complexion and dark eyes. He was immaculately dressed and radiated charisma.

He took us over to the group gathered around the table, who were wary but respectful. I wasn’t sure how many of these investigators, left to themselves, would have given a high priority to ‘cultural analysis’, but Commander Andy Baker was signalling in the clearest possible way that he took it very seriously indeed. I was immensely reassured.

Andy Baker insisted that I sat beside him with Faith immediately opposite. He flirted decorously with Faith throughout the meal and quizzed her about her work with bonobos. He was amused and intrigued by the social dynamics of these primates, and it crossed my mind that, as a top alpha male himself, he might be getting some ideas. He was attentive, drank little and was never entirely off duty. I introduced myself to Ray Fysh, the forensics expert, and asked him if the results were in yet. They weren’t, largely because he had asked Professor Ken Pye from Royal Holloway College to try out a revolutionary new procedure known as geological mapping – it was the first time this had been used in a criminal investigation. The theory behind it was that everything we have eaten puts down isotopic markers in our bones. These markers can be distinctive, and specific to the region in which a person has lived. It could be possible to match the different mineral deposits in Adam’s bones to the geological region where he grew up.

‘We shouldn’t get too excited,’ Ray said, ‘but if your West African steer is right, and we can get samples from that area, and if – big if – Adam did spend a sufficient length of time there, then we can get his place of origin narrowed right down – possibly even to a particular village.’

The whole idea of the Europol conference was to generate awareness – to draw together pan-European intelligence about ritual killings and to start pooling resources and ideas. The police had wanted publicity and they’d got it. It was pretty clear that the European Ritualistic Killings Conference, as it came to be known, was going to be a media circus.

Faith and I could see that as soon as we walked into the foyer of the vast new Europol building the following day. There was steel-trap security, but the main conference hall was abuzz with journalists. It was a very big room with a massive horseshoe of wooden tables facing the speaker’s podium. The sound engineers and cameramen were unreeling cables, squinting through viewfinders and calling questions to one another. Kate Campbell, Scotland Yard’s senior press officer, explained that Ray Fysh and I would be sitting at the top end of the horseshoe, with Commander Baker sitting to one side and acting as a moderator.

Andy would give a brief introduction, then Will would talk for maybe forty-five minutes about the investigative side of the case. After that, I would have the stage. I had an hour and then there would be a question and answer session.

‘Right,’ I said, with as much confidence as I could muster.

Faith squeezed my arm and moved away to find a place near the back of the hall.

I knelt down to make the final adjustments to my laptop connections and noticed my hands were shaking. The Met had never asked to see what I was going to say. They had imposed no restrictions and didn’t seem to want me to clear anything in advance. But there was no time to worry about that now. The hall was already beginning to fill. Within a few minutes I was listening to Andy Baker’s brief overture and after that to Will’s methodical setting out of the detective work. Then I found myself at the podium.

I began by explaining some basic definitions. I pointed out that religion and ritual were by no means as clear cut as people sometimes thought. Ritual exists in many settings without religious association – the rituals of prison or Army or school life, for example. Sportsmen who wear lucky talismans, people who will only drive to work along a certain route, or daughters who ring their mothers only on Saturday mornings are all following ritualistic patterns. It is no surprise that people often say that they perform regular duties religiously, even when churches and gods are very far from their minds. When true religious belief is added to the equation there is a deeper dimension to ritual through the appeal to divine authority. This association confers power – sometimes awesome power – on the rituals concerned, and the balancing fear of dreadful penalties if they are neglected.

I then turned specifically to the Adam case and discounted the
muti
line that had been so publicly trumpeted in the media. I pointed out that, while there can be a ritualistic element to
muti
, the manner of death is quite different from sacrifice. I explained that
muti
murder is undertaken to collect body parts whereas in sacrifice the object is to spill the blood of the victim. I continued carefully through my list of differences between the two practices, illustrating my points wherever possible.

Photographs of body parts, mutilated victims, dried organs, sacrificial knives and fetish masks flashed on the screen behind me. Assuming a fair degree of resilience in my audience, I hadn’t pulled any punches, and at several points there were gasps of revulsion from around the room. I could feel the tension building. I realized that, despite the fact that these were among Europe’s most senior police officers and criminologists, they had little or no conceptual framework for this kind of crime. They were, quite simply, horrified.

‘I don’t believe Adam was butchered for his body parts,’ I said. ‘His genitals and internal organs were all intact. He was not killed agonizingly slowly, but quickly – at least fairly quickly – by precise cuts to the throat, his body held horizontally or upside down until it was drained of blood. And the body was dressed in orange-red shorts after death and placed in the river. For all these reasons, it is my conviction that Adam was the victim of a human sacrifice.’

I heard an intake of breath from Andy Baker and sensed a flicker of astonishment from the body of the hall. I heard whispering, journalists scribbling furiously on notepads. No one here was going to miss the significance of this story: a child sacrificed to some jealous African god in the heart of a European capital city.

‘Let me go further,’ I said. ‘Given that Adam was almost certainly African, he was probably sacrificed as an offering to one of the gods or deities of West Africa. Why West Africa? In my opinion, it’s only there that sufficiently sophisticated religious and ritual systems exist that could account for the complexity of the awful ceremony to which he was subjected. Allied to this is the historical association of this region with the practice of sacrifice, and cultural factors such as his circumcision.

‘If I’m right about that, then many aspects of this disturbing crime fall into place. The colour of the shorts will prove to be important, and similarly the deposition of the body in water. Also the precise way the killing was carried out. And the timing: the fact that the body was dressed in the shorts only after death. We do not know yet why they wanted to sacrifice a child in London, but they obviously felt they needed power for something major, which as yet is unknown to us.

‘Knowing which deity is involved’, I went on, ‘could obviously help lead us closer to Adam’s killers. But identifying the particular god or goddess is no easy task – there are literally hundreds in the West African pantheon. I will be looking further at deities associated with both the colours orange and red, and with water – especially those in the Yoruba tradition and surrounding ethnic groups. Here for now are some possible candidates on my shortlist.’

I told them about the fiery Shango, lover of the colour red and of sacrifices. He was a distinct possibility. Then I described Shango’s wife Oshun. Orange was only her secondary colour, but she was a river goddess. That might make her a credible suspect, but I described how, though capricious, she was generally seen as a benign figure. I mentioned Yemaya the Yoruban sea god, Angayu Shola who had an association with red and with rivers, and a string of other West African gods and goddesses who were, or might be, in the frame.

I drew the talk to a close. I felt a surge of relief: it was out there now.

I was still surprised that the question and answer session which followed was quite so electric. Commander Baker, Will O’Reilly and I were bombarded with questions. Predictably, some of the more ghoulish ones were bowled up to me.

‘Exactly how was the boy killed, Dr Hoskins? Could you describe the precise nature of the ceremony?’

I did, as far as I was able.

‘Dr Hoskins, what do you think the killers did with his head?’

I replied, ‘They may have placed it on an altar, and later buried it near the place of sacrifice. It becomes a kind of remembrance of the act of sacrifice – a reminder of the power that has been invoked. Or they may have disposed of those parts separately. We just don’t know yet.’

‘Was he brought to Britain specifically for this sacrifice?’ someone else asked, touching on something that had also begun to nag at me. ‘Did he know in advance what was waiting for him in London?’

‘We don’t know the answers to either of those questions yet,’ I hedged. ‘But as far as the second one is concerned, we can only hope that the answer is no.’

‘Just how many ritual murders have there been in Europe recently, Dr Hoskins?’

‘That’s one of the things this conference is hoping to establish. But we shouldn’t get it out of proportion. This kind of thing is mercifully very rare.’

‘All the same, the number is on the rise?’

‘I would expect so.’

‘Why would you expect that?’

‘Because modern Europe is much more of a cultural melting pot today than ever before; because more people want to come here, for work or refuge, from more countries around the world, and because both legal and illegal migration is on the rise.’

‘Does this mean we can expect to see African sacrificial rites become common in our cities?’

I hesitated, but Will O’Reilly stepped in quickly and gave some suitably down-to-earth answer, which defused the question.

I was glad when the session broke up soon afterwards, but I didn’t have a chance to compare notes with Will or Andy Baker. In the body of the hall I was instantly besieged by reporters, but also by police officers from all over Europe wanting to ask about their own cases. I was astonished at the number – murders in Scandinavia, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy which may or may not have had a ritual connection. Cold cases on which the ritual angle might throw new light. In the middle of all this the Europol regional officer cornered me and took down my details. He told me I was to be designated an ‘official expert’ on ritual crime.

I fielded this sudden celebrity as well as I could, while Andy Baker stood on the fringe of the group, clearly pleased that my talk had made such a splash. When I finally managed to extricate myself from the crowd, he drew me aside and surprised me by saying that he wanted to put my contact details on the database for the national Crime Faculty, the body which selects specialists to be called in to work on major crimes when the level of expertise required goes beyond regular policing.

‘You know, Richard,’ he said. ‘Something struck me listening to you talk, and to the questions afterwards. This isn’t just about Adam. This is much wider than that. This is about something changing right across our society.’ He gave me a significant look. ‘You could find yourself with a good deal to do.’

He moved off silently into the press throng. I watched him go, brought up short by his words and suddenly oblivious to the clamour around me. Not just about Adam. I remembered the barrage of unsolved cases that had just been thrown at me. He was right. It wasn’t just about Adam.

Kate Campbell told me that BBC’s
Newsnight
wanted to film a piece about my work on the Adam case for transmission that night. She had checked with Commander Baker and he thought it was a good idea.

I hesitated: I didn’t want to miss Ray Fysh’s presentation. Faith stepped in, and I found myself walking up a Dutch city street as a BBC cameraman inexplicably took footage of my shoes and the interviewer, anxious to present me as some sort of ghostbuster, introduced me as ‘an expert on ritual killings’.

By late afternoon Faith and I had escaped to our hotel room. We sat on the bed, side by side, completely drained. I wanted to ask her how Ray’s briefing had gone, but we were both too tired even to talk about it. Instead, we went downstairs and wandered for a while as the cool spring evening settled over the waterfront. We ended up in an Italian restaurant, sharing a bottle of indifferent Chianti.