The Boy in the River (17 page)

He’d analysed the samples taken from three sections of Adam’s bones.

‘One thing we can say straight away’, Ken said, ‘is that Adam wasn’t brought up here. The strontium levels in his bones, and traces of copper and lead, are about two and a half times higher than for a child of the same age brought up in south-east England. The Caribbean and the rest of Europe are completely ruled out for similar reasons: his strontium levels don’t match. So we looked elsewhere. If Adam didn’t come from London or the Caribbean, there was a good chance he came from Africa. But Africa is a big place and the isotopic information available is extremely sketchy. The question was where to look. Initial indicators suggested South Africa, but that began to look less likely as the investigation progressed. Then Will told us to look in West Africa, where we do have some isotopic information.

‘Some places leave a more characteristic signature in the bones than others. It’s not always possible to be sure where an individual has come from. However, I am confident of our results. The West African information precisely matches the geological composition of Adam’s bones. Moreover, there are three relatively small areas of Nigeria that match the results very closely indeed: between Kano and Jos; the highlands towards Cameroon; and the Yoruba Plateau. The evidence points most vigorously to the last of these. With further soil samples from that area I should be able to determine within a very small radius where Adam spent most of his life.’

I caught Will O’Reilly’s smile.

‘We also tested the carbon levels in Adam’s bones,’ Ken said.

Carbon will show up after a much briefer exposure; even a short stay in the UK would have left its mark.

‘From these results, Adam could not have spent any length of time here in the UK. He might have been in the country for six months at the very most, but probably for a considerably shorter time than that.

Nick Branch got to his feet, looking slightly overawed. He explained that as an archaeopalynologist – a pollen archaeologist – he was more used to working on old cases. Very old cases, in fact, including bodies found preserved in peat bogs. Most of his ritual killings dated from the Iron Age, but the same principles of detection and analysis could be applied to modern bodies. He had found pollen spores in Adam’s lower intestine which could only have come from British or other north-western European sources – most notably from the alder tree. The fact that these spores were found in the lower intestine meant that they couldn’t have made their way in from the Thames after the body was dumped. Adam must have ingested them, and some time must have subsequently elapsed for them to have got that far down his intestinal tract.

‘This doesn’t help us determine the upper limit of his time in this part of the world,’ Nick said, ‘but it does give us a lower limit. It means that Adam was in the UK or north-western Europe for at least three days prior to being killed.’

A picture began to emerge of a child who had been brought all the way to London from Nigeria, and had been kept here for between three days and a few weeks before his murder. I think the same thought occurred to all of us at that point: given the meticulous nature of the crime, it was likely that Adam had been brought to London for only one reason. I was overcome by a sense of the loneliness of his final days, and I wondered at what point he had begun to realize the true purpose of his great adventure.

I wondered what else Adam might have ingested. If they could test for pollen grains, why couldn’t they analyse the other material in his gut?

‘I’ll avoid the S-word,’ I said, glancing across at Commander Baker, ‘but I think it’s more than possible that Adam was deliberately fed something. Victims are often given a potion or preparation of some kind before they’re killed, to make them a more acceptable offering to the deity in question. Have we had a chance to look more closely at whatever else was in Adam’s lower intestine?’

‘There is something there,’ Ken said. ‘But we haven’t completed our analysis yet.’

I told them that if Adam had been given such a potion, and we could analyse it, it might help us understand what happened, and why. If the ingredients were sourced from Nigeria, they could corroborate the derivation of the victim and killers. The potion could in fact provide us with the signature of the person who prepared it.

I explained that in Yorubaland such potions were prepared by traditional healers, usually after cooking them for hours in a small pot over a fire. These healers were the equivalent of South African
sangomas
and Central African
ngangas
. In Nigeria they were known as
babalawos
. It sometimes took up to twelve years to train as a
babalawo
. Apprentices were assigned a mentor, a senior
babalawo
, with whom they spent considerable time, often in the depths of the rainforest learning the ways of nature and the properties of animals and plants, perhaps studying just one tree variety, learning how to harvest its sap, bark, leaves or roots for use in medicine.

If a healer had prepared a potion for Adam to swallow, it would have had his own signature. The particular ingredients, the quantities and the manner of preparation would be distinctive. I told Ken I could give them some pointers; certain plants, animals and minerals which stood a fair chance of finding their way into the mix.

We concluded the meeting by agreeing that Ray and a police officer would head for the Yoruba plateau to gather samples of local soils, local foods, animal bone and tissue, and so on.

Andy Baker took me to one side before I left. ‘Maybe I came on a bit strong. It’s just that “sacrifice” is such a powerful word. And we had scientists present . . . I don’t want them to go bandying that word about to anyone who asks . . .’

23

Glasgow and London, July 2002

The police raided Joyce Osagiede’s Glasgow flat one afternoon later in the month.

It was on the first floor, up a couple of flights of steps. Will O’Reilly, Nick Chalmers and DC Mark Ham arrived with two Glasgow policemen. Nick thumped on the door. There was confused and aggressive shouting from inside, and then silence.

The police knew more about Joyce Osagiede than Nick had let on at the Japanese restaurant. Glasgow officers had gone to see her twice before the raid. Joyce had allowed them into her flat. They didn’t have enough evidence to arrest her, but while they were trying to persuade her to give a DNA swab, Jo Veale, a sharp-eyed female detective constable, noticed a letter bearing a London address. She memorized it. A few days later Nick and DC Mark Ham sought it out: a run-down terrace, the home of another Nigerian woman and her family.

She denied knowing Joyce Osagiede, but admitted to recognizing the woman in the picture from Joyce’s social security dossier. She said that Joyce had appeared at her door one day looking for a priest. When the officers pressed her for more details she remembered that Joyce had mentioned that she’d recently been in Germany.

Outside Joyce Osagiede’s Glasgow flat a decision was taken. The door was smashed open.

Joyce stood against the far wall. A big woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a baggy brown blouse and blue trousers, she was alone and seemed frightened.

Mark Ham walked into the back room. Clothing was tossed over the unmade bed and across the floor. There was a cupboard against the wall; Mark tugged it open. Tucked away at the bottom, out of sight, were some more odds and ends. He held them up to the light.

Their washing instructions were in German. Their labels said ‘Kids’n’Co’. Mark and Nick had seen this label before, on a pair of orange-red shorts.

Nick asked, ‘Can you explain where you got these clothes, Joyce?’

‘I bought them,’ she said. ‘I was living in Germany. I bought them there.’

‘Where would that be in Germany, then? What store?’

She looked from one to the other in confusion, perhaps trying to gauge the advantages of answering honestly.

‘Woolworths,’ she said at last.

Mark unearthed more hidden items of clothing, all with the same German markings.

‘Mrs Joyce Osagiede,’ Nick said, ‘I am arresting you in connection with the murder of a young boy known as Adam in London during September 2001. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

It was a long way from a conviction or even from a charge, but it was the first arrest and, after nearly a year of painstaking work, it was the first moment when everyone involved thought they might at last be on the trail of Adam’s murderers.

The police brought Joyce back to London for questioning. She clammed up at first and then began to talk in a confused and illogical way. The duty solicitor encouraged her to respond ‘no comment’, as was her right, and the police got very little out of her.

Now that she was under arrest, however, they did get an all-important DNA sample. Forensics got to work on it at once.

Joyce was taken back into the interview room with her solicitor the next morning. The detectives faced her over the plain wooden table. Nick Chalmers took the lead. This time, Joyce spoke more freely.

She said she was from Sierra Leone, but that she had moved to Nigeria to get married and lived in Benin City. From there she went to Germany, where her two children were born. She’d lived near Hamburg, where she had bought the clothes. No, she had never claimed benefits in Germany. She hadn’t needed to. She had lived with her husband.

Joyce began to grow visibly nervous at this point.

‘So his name was on your passport,’ Nick Chalmers said. ‘What was that name, Joyce? The name you originally had on your passport?’

‘Onojhighovie,’ she said, and looked around wildly.

‘I didn’t quite catch that, Joyce. Would you please write it down for us?’

Nick slid across a ruled pad and a pencil. She picked them up, toyed with the pencil for a moment and wrote, ‘Tony Onus
’
.

After that she denied everything. She denied that she had mentioned the name Onojhighovie, and claimed that she had never been to Germany. She said she had come to Britain directly from Lagos by ship. She knew nothing about clothes, nothing about rituals. Her version of events grew more contradictory at every turn.

Nick believed she was either very confused or very scared. Will thought it more probable that she was being deliberately evasive. Meanwhile, time was running out.

Forensics worked miracles with the DNA tests, and within a few hours of being given Joyce’s sample they phoned the results through to the team. They were negative. She was not related to Adam.

Joyce Osagiede was driven to Heathrow Airport in an unmarked police car and put on a plane back to Glasgow. For the moment at least, she was a free woman.

24

Devon, August to September 2002

The frightened voice coming down the line from Lagos didn’t sound anything like Blessing’s cool, measured tones from a fortnight earlier.

She’d been researching the Nigerian Guru Maharaj cult to which Joyce Osagiede’s husband apparently belonged and had already sent me three packages of literature and notes. But her fourth package had failed to reach me. Now Blessing feared some sort of conspiracy. The cult was extremely powerful. I tried to reassure her, pointing out that mail went missing all the time. She didn’t sound convinced, perhaps because I couldn’t entirely convince myself. Blessing’s fourth package never did turn up.

‘And other things have been happening,’ she said darkly.

A friend of hers had been badly hurt a few days ago, knocked from his motorcycle by a hit-and-run driver. She had often ridden that motorcycle herself, and now no witnesses could be found to the crash. There had been strange phone calls to her department at the university, from people she didn’t know. She thought she was being followed, and had seen men hanging around outside her apartment at night. She paused. ‘They are using
juju
against me, Dr Hoskins. I am sure of it. And I think it is beginning to work.’

Now thoroughly rattled, I told her to stop everything, to ask no more questions and to undertake no more research.

I said, ‘Blessing, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done. But maybe I shouldn’t have asked you to get involved.’

‘Someone asked you,’ she said, some dignity returning to her voice, ‘and you agreed to help. So I did the same.’

After the phone call I spent some time looking out of the caravan window. The sun blazed on the paddock. I glanced down at the death mask, which was still sitting next to my computer. It was black as obsidian. The light streamed through the eye sockets in long spokes. I stretched out my hand towards it, pushed it away and reached instead for Blessing’s research material.

I had pieced together a picture of the ‘Black Coat Eyes of the Devil Guru Maharaj’ and could see why Blessing had been so spooked by them.

The real Divine Light Mission had suspended all its own operations in Nigeria for fear of being tarnished by the cult’s reputation, and with good reason.

The man who ended up leading the Nigerian sect was a Yoruban by the name of Muhammed Saib. His family had lived in Ghana, where he was born in the 1950s, but had moved back to Yorubaland when Saib was in his mid-twenties.

He’d been a security guard, worked for a transport firm in Lagos and in a factory. He once played Father Christmas at the YMCA. Then Saib had come to London illegally in 1975 after enrolling on a course at the Institute of Marketing, and encountered the teachings of the Maharaj Ji. Blessing had done sterling work: she’d even sent me copies of Saib’s letters from there to his faithful devotees. In one he described attending a Halloween party, where the rituals reminded him of his homeland river gods. He went on to emphasize the importance of sacrifices to these deities.

Saib had gone back to Nigeria in 1980 and declared himself to be the new and rightful Maharaj Ji, the new
satguru
for the world. Most Nigerians were not fooled, but a small and significant number of mainly Yoruban followers signed up to the cause. Ostracized by DLM International, Saib set up his own breakaway group, interchanging the names Divine Light Mission, Elan Vital and others, including variations on the theme of the Guru Maharaj. The most common name the cult used was the singularly inappropriate ‘One Love Family’.