The Boy in the River (14 page)

I looked out over the quay. It was well lit, very orderly, very clean, very Dutch. But just beyond the neat railings lay the sea, dark and mysterious.

‘Do you think it’s just chance’, I asked Faith, ‘that I, of all people, get called in on this case? The sacrifice of a child? With my history?’

‘It’s your history that qualifies you. That’s the point.’

‘But they don’t know that. The police don’t know anything about what happened to me in the Congo. They don’t know about Abigail and Judith. A few months ago I was an obscure West Country academic. Now, apparently, I’m Witchfinder General. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?’

She looked uneasily out of the window. ‘I don’t believe in things that go bump in the night, Richard.’

‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘That’s why it’s weird.’

18

London and Bath, May 2002

Over the next few days newspapers in Britain continued to carry stories connected with the Adam investigation. They exhausted the most clear-cut approaches to the case on day one, and almost immediately after that it was obvious that they were scratching around for something new to say.

They began publishing stories about apparently similar killings in the UK and elsewhere. Some of these had been mentioned in The Hague; others looked as if they had been trawled up out of the archives and subjected to a little journalistic licence.

I was sitting at my desk in Bath, having just read one of the more fantastic offerings.

‘You know, Mahinda,’ I said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether this high-publicity strategy isn’t something of a double-edged sword.’

‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘This is, I’m afraid, the nature of journalistic inquiry.’

He was standing at the window, gazing with obvious delight at the springtime fields. He looked rather like a gigantic spring blossom himself. The foot-and-mouth crisis of the previous year was behind us now and the fields had been restocked with dairy cows for the first time in many months. Mahinda liked cows.

‘They’re beginning to publish some pretty iffy stuff,’ I said unhappily, folding the paper. ‘A lot of it’s really speculative and sensational.’

‘The authorities have stimulated the media with the promise of great news,’ he said. ‘But for the moment they have nothing more to tell. Naturally, the gentlemen of the press have no choice but to try to make much of little.’

An enormous Guernsey lumbered right up to the window – so close that her big soft nose rested on the glass – and gazed at Mahinda with adoration. He gazed back.

The phone rang.

It was a journalist. I didn’t think his timing was great, given my growing disenchantment, but on the other hand I knew that what Mahinda had said was true. Trying to hold back from the media now would merely encourage more speculative stories. We couldn’t blame reporters for flying kites if we didn’t talk to them when they asked. So I spoke to him about the case and answered his questions as fully as I could.

‘They didn’t send me to The Hague, I’m afraid, Dr Hoskins,’ he told me. ‘I wish they had. Could you tell me something about what you said to the conference?’

I gave him a precis. I explained to him that Adam’s killing was a sacrifice. I told him that I thought the crime was related to a Yoruban religion, and I told him my reasons, mentioning my shortlist of a dozen possible deities to whom the sacrifice may have been dedicated.

Pretty soon I began to feel wary, as he came back repeatedly to the river goddess Oshun. I sensed that he had already worked out his own agenda, and that he was probing not for information but confirmation.

‘Oshun’s just a possibility,’ I stressed. ‘There are several others. She’s not even top of my list. And I’m not just saying Yoruba itself, but neighbouring groups like Igbo.’

‘Oh, I understand that. But she is a contender.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And she does have a very strong following. Am I right?’

Alarm bells went off.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to use me as a source I need to see this piece before you run it.’

‘That’s absolutely no problem, Dr Hoskins,’ he assured me.

I put the phone down. Mahinda was tickling the glass and making baby noises to the Guernsey, which was luxuriously licking the window from the other side.

‘She can tell I’m a Buddhist,’ Mahinda told me, ‘and thus a vegetarian.’

‘Great,’ I said, thinking of the time I could have sworn I’d seen him eat a beefburger. ‘You two were meant for each other.’

The journalist never contacted me again, and that weekend his paper published a story linking Adam’s sacrifice directly to the Yoruban people. It specifically cited the river goddess Oshun as the most likely deity to whom Adam had been sacrificed and quoted me as the authority for this. I shuddered.

My anger was not just a matter of professional pique. There were some serious issues here. Oshun has a large number of devotees worldwide, and they would be offended to be singled out in this way and to have their faith linked with such an abomination.

Two days later I came in to work, turned on my computer and went off to make a cup of coffee while the machine booted up. Things had quietened down a bit and I was glad about that. I had gone forty-eight hours without a media inquiry, and that was OK with me. I was at my desk, sipping my coffee, when the phone rang.

‘Dr Hoskins?’

The caller was a woman with a West African accent. I didn’t recognize the voice but I instinctively didn’t like it. There was an edge to it, as if it were being released under pressure.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Who’s this?’

‘I am Princess Tania Olesungo. Dr Hoskins, you have done the Yoruban people a very great wrong.’

I held my tongue for a second or two. I didn’t like the sound of this. I wasn’t overawed by the ‘princess’ part of it – Yoruban royalty is tolerably numerous and in Lagos I have been in taxis driven by princes of the blood – but I could hear the hostility in this woman’s voice and I didn’t like her phoning straight through to me on my direct line. I asked her what she wanted.

‘Oshun has nothing to do with this murder case,’ she said. ‘I am myself a worshipper and I know this. It is an outrage that you say so.’

‘I did not say so,’ I told her. ‘The article in the paper last week put too much weight on that side of the issue, if that’s what you’ve been reading. For the record I never said Oshun devotees were behind this. But I’m afraid I am convinced that a Yoruban group of some kind was involved.’

She was silent for a moment and I could hear her breathing. ‘You have no evidence for that,’ she said. ‘You must tell me now why you are making such a grotesque assertion.’

I told her that the evidence was confidential and I really could not divulge it. But I assured her I wouldn’t have stood up in front of Europe’s leading police officers – and the press – unless I believed I was right.

‘You must retract this at once,’ she hissed. ‘or we are going to ruin you.’

I said, ‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Dr Hoskins, there is no basis to these charges. They are a slur against Yorubans and against all Nigerians. You will be in very serious trouble if you persist in these slanders.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘We will ruin you,’ she whispered again, her voice tight with malice.‘I am warning you of this. There are more of us. We will ask Oshun for help to bring you down.’

She hung up. I sat for a long time staring at the telephone.

‘I think we should call the police,’ I said to Faith that evening.

‘You don’t think she’s just some silly woman going over the top because she thinks her people have been insulted?’

‘Probably. But there is a murder at the centre of this case.’ The next day I called Nick Chalmers. I half expected him to laugh at my concerns but his reaction surprised me. The police had received calls from the same person and others who claimed to be her associates. Nick sounded guarded, even a little cagey, and that didn’t reassure me. I sensed that he was not altogether comfortable with this turn of events himself, and I asked him if he thought I should be concerned.

‘Well, you know more about these people than I do, Richard,’ he said carefully. ‘We tend not to worry too much about this kind of thing, unless there’s a direct physical threat, of course.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’

‘No. Not likely. But anything’s possible in this big bad world, as we all know only too well. In all probability these are just angry people letting off steam. But, well, you know . . .’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘Well . . . just keep your eyes open, that’s all. That’s common sense. And stay in touch.’

He hung up, rather too quickly I thought.

A day or two later I let myself into the office, made coffee and settled with it in front of my computer. I opened my email inbox. I saw a message headed ‘
Observer
article’, and my stomach knotted.

It had been sent from London and came from two people claiming to be Oshun devotees. Both of them, apparently, were postgraduate students studying in London.

They denied absolutely that Adam’s death had anything to do with either Nigeria or the Yoruban people, or indeed with Oshun. I was, they said, steeped in ignorance and prejudice and had publicly discredited myself. They went on to attack everything I had said about the Adam case. They didn’t stop there. They threatened to make sure everyone knew of my gross misinterpretations and they planned to smear my academic reputation around the world.

As the day wore on, I began to receive similar emails from people overseas. When the language of the messages started to strike me as familiar I became suspicious and decided to scour some of the internet forums I regularly used, to see where all this was coming from. Sure enough, I found that the first two correspondents had posted a statement vehemently attacking the
Observer
article and me, and this statement gave my contact details.

Some of the incoming emails continued to sound threatening. I was told that for daring to suggest a Nigerian link I would be ruined as an academic and that my name would be dragged through the mud. It was unpleasant enough to have abuse heaped on me in this way, but all the more so that it should come from complete strangers. In more than one case writers told me that they would not be responsible for the consequences if I failed to retract my allegations or – worse still – dared to repeat them.

I told myself that a physical threat wasn’t high on my list of concerns. People say all sorts of unpleasant things when they are angry, especially via phone and email, when abuse can be hurled from a safe distance.

All the same, I took to locking my office door.

This precaution caused a good deal of distress to Mahinda. He had his own key, but was forever losing it in the folds of his robes, or leaving it inside the office, so that he had to beat on the door and piteously plead for me to open up. When I did he’d drift in, full of karmic energy. There were times when I thought Mahinda was driving me crazy, and other times when I thought he was just about keeping me sane.

Over the next few weeks I continued to receive abusive correspondence from around the world, and there wasn’t much I could do except sit and take it. Some of it was merely unpleasant, some of it downright lunatic.

By no means all of these messages came from Yorubans or from Princess Tania’s acolytes. I had one phone call from a seriously disturbed man in Wales who claimed he could help crack the crime and wanted to send me a video of a child being raped. I got straight on to Will O’Reilly about that one.

‘Oh, yes. We know about this character,’ he said, and added darkly, ‘leave him to us.’

The silence from Wales was deafening after that.

An outraged teacher from Yorkshire accused me of deliberately undermining racial harmony. Nigerians who had barely heard of Oshun were scandalized that I had implicated their nation in such an obscenity. Some academic colleagues and friends fell unaccountably silent when I mentioned the Adam case to them.

And then I got one message I could not ignore.

It began with the words, ‘I think I know who killed Adam.’

The message was from a British woman called Jean, who was working with her husband at a hospital in Lahore. I had got used to people writing to me with crackpot ideas, but Jean’s email had a convincing ring to it. No mention here of spirit guides or conspiracy theories. She had seen me interviewed on Arabic television. She worked with a Nigerian colleague whom she called Vincent, and whom she suspected of smuggling African children into Europe. She believed that one of his victims had been Adam and claimed she had good evidence to back it up.

If I wanted to know who this man was, I could find his full name and even his photograph in an issue of a certain medical journal, for which she gave details. She would tell me more over the phone in seven days at a strictly specified time.

I called Will O’Reilly at once.

I could almost hear him yawn. ‘Forward it to me and we’ll see what we should do. If anything.’

I reminded myself that the police must have hundreds of calls like these every day. But a few minutes after I had sent him Jean’s email, Will called me back. This time he sounded a good deal more interested.

‘I think we’ll have to follow this up,’ he said. ‘Can you ask her to be a bit more specific? Get her to put something more in writing so we can see if she’s wasting our time.’

Jean’s next message only strengthened the feeling that we might be onto something. Her husband was also a colleague of this man Vincent, and she was afraid that if her husband knew what she was doing he would somehow let it slip and alert him. She was terrified of that, which was why she had to talk to me directly, when she was alone in the house, and she would be able to convince me she had hard evidence. I was to ring her as and when she had requested and at no other time. She could not even risk emailing again before then.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ Will said. ‘We’ll come over and listen in to the conversation.’

I told Faith what had happened at home that evening while I was preparing a curry. She dipped a spoon into the black Colombian pot.