The Boy in the River (18 page)

As I told Will O’Reilly, Muhammed Saib was then variously known as the Guru, Black Jesus, or Perfect Living Master. I’m not sure I had his full attention until I told him their sacred colour was a warm orange-red.

‘The Guru always dresses in orange-red robes. He drives a big, flashy Mercedes, and even that’s been re-sprayed orange-red.’

Will wanted to know whether I thought they had any real power.

‘The group’s got twenty-nine cult compounds – ashrams, really – all around Nigeria, in all the major cities. And there have been a lot of complaints about them. The Guru was accused of killing a Ghanaian in 1999. The man went into the Iju ashram to try to find his sister. Apparently she’d been virtually held captive there for years. He never came out. The Guru was arrested and even jailed for a while, but in the end he was acquitted. There had been accusations of torture and of people disappearing, none of which had been conclusively proved.

I knew Will was growing weary of these increasingly bizarre complexities. He was going to Nigeria with Ray Fysh in a few weeks to focus on the kind of policing he preferred – collecting forensic evidence, gathering facts, interviewing potential informants.

Maybe they could all forget about cults and pagan sacrifices and red-clad gurus who played Father Christmas before allegedly butchering people for a pastime. I looked at the mask. The afternoon light had shifted and shadows fell across it at a new angle so that it leered at me. I could almost believe that it was watching me.

‘Right, that’s it,’ I said.

I scribbled a note to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

‘I’m a professional academic,’ I wrote. ‘I’m not supposed to believe in curses and spells. But I can’t have this artefact anywhere near me or those I love for a day longer. It’s a genuine death mask, and I’d be grateful if you’d take it off my hands. If it’s not suitable for your collection, please destroy it.’

I bundled the mask into a plastic bag and taped it up into a rough package, ostensibly to protect it but in fact so that I would not have to look at it again. I left the caravan at once, got in the Land Rover and drove through the dusty lanes to Okehampton. I bought a cardboard carton at the post office and shoved in the mask. ‘Goodbye,’ I said under my breath, as the silver-haired lady behind the counter dropped the package into the post sack. ‘Rest in peace.’

She smiled nervously at me. I hadn’t spoken quite as softly as I’d meant to.

25

London, September 2002

A full year after Adam’s body had been found in the Thames, the Met organized a memorial service at the splendid new offices of the Greater London Authority near Southwark Bridge.

I’d learned over the last few months that they were not the hard-nosed cynics they were often thought to be, and many had developed a truly personal commitment to giving this child back his identity and finding his murderers. At the same time, they hoped the service would refocus the public’s attention on the crime, and provide the opportunity to broadcast a fresh appeal for information.

Faith and I met John Azah of the Kingston Racial Equality Council at London Bridge station. John was an engaging Ghanaian with a huge moustache and a ready smile. We walked along the river, chatting about the case.

‘You know, Richard,’ John said, ‘some of the police didn’t like your sacrifice theory much.’

This wasn’t news to me. I told him about the meeting at Royal Holloway.

‘They don’t necessarily think you’re wrong. Andy Baker just wants to avoid the press running away with it.’

After the hammering the Met had taken over the Stephen Lawrence killing, they seemed to be trying to treat Adam’s death as a more conventional murder than it really was in order to minimize further controversy. I had some sympathy with that, but believed strongly that if they didn’t face the truth, the result would be much more damaging.

I’d sent the list of likely ingredients through weeks ago but had heard nothing more. Not for the first time I wondered if they now secretly wished Adam’s body had been flushed out to sea on the Thames tide.

The service was moving and simple. The room was just below ground level and seated around a hundred people. TV crews crammed the back of the auditorium.

There was a reading from the Bible and an address from Commander Baker and Will O’Reilly, followed by some words of reflection from a police chaplain. Afterwards the TV crews moved forward like vultures, circling the desk beneath the Metropolitan Police crest. Will O’Reilly made his appeal for new information, reminding everyone that there was a £50,000 reward.

A short while later, as traffic on the river fell silent and bemused tourists looked on, Will and John leaned over the side of a police launch and cast a wreath on the water.

We moved on to a bar, a light and airy place with a view over the Thames. Mark Ham, Nick Chalmers, Will O’Reilly and Barry Costello, the wary DC who had accompanied Will to our very first meeting in Bath, were there with Ray Fysh. With a conjuror’s flourish, Mark produced a brown envelope and tipped a number of glossy photographs onto the table.

We all stared at the sequence of geometrical shapes and irregular patches of colour which bore testimony to the painstaking analysis of Ken Pye’s team.

‘Well, what it boils down to is that this stuff hasn’t got any nutritional value at all. Nick Branch says it’s bits of bone, and clay, and flecks of gold and things. It’s not food. It’s some sort of preparation.’

The clay apparently came from a river in West Africa. So the concoction, or its ingredients, had been brought into Britain and given to Adam right here, in London.

Will was not slow to grasp the implications. He called an urgent meeting.

26

Royal Holloway College and London, October 2002

This time there weren’t so many of us. Ray Fysh, Will O’Reilly, Mark Ham and I sat around a big table, while Ken Pye stood at the front of the room, flashing images up on the screen and tracing the outlines of the shapes with a laser pointer.

‘These are the clay pellets found in Adam’s intestines,’ Ken said. ‘In my opinion the clay came from a riverbank, or a flood plain or lake margin, and its composition is consistent with a West African origin. The pellets are very high in minerals and metallic particles, especially quartz and gold, and that might eventually give us a more precise location, even a specific deposit.

‘Among the other ingredients in this concoction are bits of ground-up bone. I can’t tell you yet whether they are animal or human, but we’ve contacted the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York. After the 9/11 attacks they gained a lot of expertise in analysing DNA from small pieces of bone. There’s also some plant material, but it’s too degraded for us to tell immediately what it is.’

‘Just for the record, then,’ Will said, ‘this is a preparation of some sort? It’s definitely not food?’

‘Hardly. It would have been a pretty revolting mixture. We have traces of carbon and they don’t match the normal sources such as coal, charcoal or charcoal filters. They’re almost certainly the result of the mixture being burned down in a pot, and that’s backed up by traces of tin we’ve also found.’

All the reports I’d gathered suggested these potions were ground up together and then burned down in a pot over an open fire. They were then fed to the victim, typically between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before he or she was killed.

‘A black, claggy, gritty mess,’ Ken said. ‘It would have tasted vile.’

‘Poor kid,’ Will muttered.

It had occurred to me that the cough medicine found in Adam’s stomach might have been used as a linctus, to help him swallow the potion. I’d originally thought that he must simply have had a cough, and his killers wanted to cure that before the ceremony, in order to make a perfect offering to the god. I wasn’t sure whether this made things better or worse.

Will asked if Ken could analyse the mixture any more precisely.

‘It’s not easy with the non-mineral content,’ Ken said, ‘despite Richard’s pointers. This material is very degraded. It’s possible we might be able to cross-reference with the samples you and Ray pick up in Nigeria next week.’

Will turned to me. ‘What kind of stuff was on your list?’

I explained that different deities had different offerings, and that a tasty morsel for one might be anathema to another. With hundreds of deities on offer, we might have to sort through thousands of unique ingredients. To start the ball rolling I’d picked out the likeliest deities, and suggested Ken should look for kola nuts, yams, palm fronds and various beans.

‘What about animal material?’ Ken asked. ‘You didn’t mention that.’

‘I don’t know how much of that could still be identifiable, but there could be bits of roosters – feathers or bones – or bulls’ or horses’ testicles. Then there might be bones from rams or dogs. Leopards, crocodiles, monkeys and various birds are also possibilities.’

Will made some notes. ‘Ken’s already identified bits of bone. Do you know anybody who could make a stab at identifying which animals they might have belonged to?’

I said that the Natural History Museum would be an obvious place to start, and that Faith probably had some contacts there.

Ray and Will asked me to stay behind for a few minutes after the meeting. They wanted some tips for their trip to Nigeria. I ran through a list of recommendations, which seemed second nature to me: they should take their own mosquito nets, drink only bottled water wherever possible, never neglect their anti-malarials. I threw in the occasional cautionary tale: the Englishwoman I had met on a riverboat on the Congo who told me that she did not need anti-malarial pills because she had natural immunity. The other passengers had buried her on the riverbank three days later. I didn’t mean to be alarmist, or to play the old Africa hand. But I did want to get across to them just how different it was out there.

Mark Ham seemed to be hugely amused by Ray Fysh’s lack of enthusiasm for the idea of bucketing around Nigeria in a four-wheel drive for nearly three weeks. ‘If you go the same way,’ he called, ‘can I have your stereo?’

After searching the Scottish social services files, he came up with two addresses for Joyce before she moved to Glasgow. One was in south London, the other in the East End. Though she had supplied these details herself, Joyce later maintained that she had only ever lived at one of them. She had heard of the other, but never lived there.

Armed with a search warrant, Nick Chalmers and Mark Ham arrived at the south London house on a wet day in mid-October. It was a dingy brick Victorian place in a nondescript street. The occupant, a West African woman, struck them both as shifty and scared. They could get little sense out of her, so went inside and began to turn the place over.

They made some interesting finds.

Among them were a number of forged travel documents and tickets, and Nigerian and British passports. One was in the name of Omovbiye Joyce Airhiabere, giving her date of birth as 14 June 1971. The picture inside was of Joyce Osagiede. The others were in the names of various men and women, apparently West Africans, none of whom rang any immediate bells with the police, but whose activities and legal status would obviously need checking out.

Nick and Mark also found a video labelled ‘Wedding of Joyce Airhiabere to Samuel Onojhighovie’ and dated February 1997. When they played it at the station they weren’t too surprised to see that Joyce and Sam had celebrated their wedding with the sacrifice of a live goat, whose blood was spattered over an altar in an offering to the gods.

Now that Samuel Onojhighovie’s name was confirmed, the detectives ran it through the Europol database, and came up trumps almost at once. Onojhighovie was a wanted man in Germany, where he lived under yet another alias, Ibrahim Kadade. The Bundespolizei had been after him for some time for a variety of serious offences, including forging travel and immigration documents, and for trafficking illegal migrants. He had jumped bail and been sentenced in his absence to seven years in jail. The Germans had information on Joyce, too. She was known to them as Bintu Kadade, had lived in Hamburg with her two daughters and drawn benefits there.

At the same time as the south London raid was under way, police visited Joyce’s other previous address in the East End. They were able to establish that the occupant was a Kingsley Ojo, but the premises were empty when they arrived and Ojo never returned to it. There was nothing of interest to be found inside.

A few days later, just before ten o’clock on a grey London morning, I climbed up the steps of the Natural History Museum. I glanced impatiently at my watch. Mark was late and I was growing edgy. I particularly wanted this meeting to go well as it was the first day I’d be charging the police for my time.

I pulled out my mobile.

‘I’m at the front entrance to the museum,’ I said, ‘And you aren’t.’

‘You’re right about that,’ he agreed. ‘I’m a bit lost in here.’

‘Describe where you are and I’ll come and find you.’

‘I’m standing next to a bloody great lizard. Does that help?’

I tracked Mark down in the dinosaur hall. Our bone specialist, a severe woman with brown hair and large glasses, eventually appeared in the foyer to collect us. She didn’t look happy that we were late.

We followed her through an unremarkable door into a hidden world of corridors and tiny offices. Hers was a cupboard-like space on the second floor, piled with journals and tagged plastic bags of bone samples.

I explained the situation briefly. Mark, after his adventure with
Tyrannosaurus Rex
, was finding the whole situation more amusing than she did.

‘The concoction we’ve been able to extract from Adam’s intestine seems to be made up of bone residues and plant matter, plus some minerals,’ I said. ‘We wondered if you could help us work out from which animals the bones came.’