The Boy in the River (2 page)

I started to tell her about the photos as we walked through to the sitting room. When we sat down on the sofa I started to cry. There was nothing now to hold me back and the tears streamed down my face unchecked. She put her arms around me.

After a while she said, ‘It’s not just this boy, is it? It’s not just Adam . . .’

I shook my head.

2

Kinshasa, April 1986

I walked as nonchalantly as I could to the Swissair check-in at London Heathrow’s Terminal 2. It wasn’t easy; my cabin bag contained a Land Rover driveshaft and it was as much as I could do just to pick it up.

You needed this sort of thing in the Congo, or so I’d been told. The girl behind the desk wished us a pleasant flight and I hauled my burden away towards the lounge. I was wildly excited. I was breaking free. I was twenty-two years old. I was going to Africa with my new wife.

There was little to see of N’djili Airport as we rolled to a halt, just one small building and a few lights flickering uncertainly in the kind of darkness you could reach out and touch. We stepped off the plane into a wall of lung-crushing heat.

The Congo basin sits in a bowl astride the Equator. Unlike East Africa, it has nowhere high enough to enjoy relief from the constant tropical temperatures that sap the strength of everything that moves, and quite a few things that don’t. The rivers snake their way from the mountains in the east to the ocean in the west, and a vast tract of dank, steaming forest lies in between. That forest is all but impenetrable and rainstorms lash the land almost daily, sweeping away all attempts at road building in torrents of muddy floodwater. That, and the fact that the dictator Mobutu was bent on keeping the country in the Dark Ages, meant there was virtually no development outside Kinshasa. But I knew that place was going to change my life for ever.

3

Bath, February 2002

I didn’t know much about police procedure, but even I could see that they were floundering.

Will O’Reilly and his team couldn’t even be sure whether Adam had set foot on British soil while he was alive. They had nowhere to start; no one they could question, no potential witnesses, no alibis to check, no addresses to visit, no deposition site to search. They had the child’s DNA but no one to link it with. They had no fingerprints. They didn’t even have a face. That meant no dental records, no database searches, no photofit pictures.

And they had no motive. What could provoke someone to murder an innocent child, dress the mutilated torso in bright new clothes and throw it into the Thames?

I could see how the
muti
theory had caught on. Against a backdrop of bafflement and confusion, somebody had pounced on a possible answer. The police didn’t know anything much about
muti
– they kept talking about voodoo – but a bizarre African cult killing could explain away a great deal. Just putting a name to the crime would be progress of a sort.

But I was uneasy about it.

In the following days I worked solidly on the Adam case, both at home and at the university. I didn’t have a heavy teaching schedule and had already prepared my lectures for some weeks ahead, so I was able to give it my full attention.

African peoples are as different as their landscapes. In my travels I had encountered every sort of terrain, from barren desert to lush rainforest, from flat savannah to towering razor-backed mountains, and every variety of dwelling, from mud and palm thatch huts to gleaming city blocks of marble and glass. The sacred beliefs and practices of each ethnic group are every bit as diverse, and there are thousands and thousands of them. Now, somehow, I was supposed to try and unravel which of them might have been responsible for this atrocity, and why.

In 2000 I had attended a big conference in South Africa at which almost everyone who was anyone in the world of African religious studies was present, and I combined it with a research trip around KwaZulu-Natal Province.
Muti
had figured significantly. I had interviewed traditional
muti
workers, had visited the
muti
market in Durban and had spent some time with Robert Papini, the anthropologist curator of Durban’s
muti
museum – the only one in the world.

Muti
is a Zulu word, which literally means ‘medicine’. The practice centres on the belief that parts of certain plants, animals, and sometimes even humans, have special curative powers. Row upon row of animal parts and plants were offered up for sale in the Durban
muti
market. Many had been smoke-dried but the smell was still intense. Among the items on display I could identify animal organs – heads, testicles, brains, hearts. And some of the animals looked to me like primates. Under a tarpaulin, more mysterious objects were being kept away from inquisitive eyes. When my camera was spotted there were mutterings around me and a small group began jostling me.

I backed away but couldn’t keep my eyes off the indistinct shapes I saw under the cloth. I had heard stories that human organs were regularly used in
muti
, and this was just the kind of place a devotee might be expected to come looking for such things. But I would not be allowed to find out.

Now, sitting at my desk in Bath, I decided to go back to basics and to replay some of the interviews I’d recorded with
sangomas
, the traditional South African healers, after that market visit.

That evening I settled in front of the TV with a pile of videos. As I put the first one into the machine, I felt suddenly uneasy under the heavily lidded gaze of the Chokwe death mask, which hung on the wall behind me. I turned back to the job in hand, cross with myself. The last thing I needed right now was to start opening the door to superstition.

One interview proved particularly significant. Moses was a tall, wiry figure with prominent eyes and enormous hands, which he used to illustrate everything he told me. I rewound his tape and replayed it. His cramped and dimly lit house in downtown Durban appeared once more on the screen. I could see plant and animal parts stacked around the room and phials of traditional medicine ranged on shelves. In a dark corner was an altar covered in white cloth on which stood two large red candles, a bell and what looked like a tribal chief’s fly whisk. Fading pictures of international surfing champions hung incongruously on the wall alongside a portrait of Gandhi.

‘There are many different plant parts from all over South Africa that we put in our medicines,’ the
sangoma
explained. His voice was surprisingly deep for so spare a man. ‘We also use animals, which give power to us when we pray over them. Different parts have different powers. So when a man who is impotent comes to me I may use the genitals of a powerful animal in my remedy, because this will help cure him. If I grind down even a fragment of this and pray over it, he will be healed. Or suppose a woman comes to me who lacks the courage to do something for her good. I may give her some special medicine that will contain part of the heart or spleen of a particular animal like a leopard or a lion. These will give to her the courage she needs.’

‘How do you know the right ingredient to use?’ I heard myself ask.

‘It takes us years and years to get this knowledge, Richard. I myself was an apprentice for eight years under a wise elder
sangoma
before I began practising. Then we also pray to our spirits for discernment of the illness and its cure.’

‘What about human body parts?’ I said. ‘I’ve heard they are sometimes used. I’ve even heard of
muti
murders. Does that happen?’

‘It’s true that sometimes a
sangoma
will use human body parts,’ Moses acknowledged. ‘They will get these parts from mortuaries.’

‘But that isn’t always true, is it?’ I queried.

He looked at me uncomfortably, glanced down at his lap and then back at me. ‘No. No, you’re right that there are also
muti
murders where a bad
sangoma
will kill someone for
muti
parts. This is very bad sorcery and I have nothing to do with it. When they kill this way, they often take the parts while the victim is still alive. They think the parts get greater power from the victim’s screams. These are very bad people who do this.’

It took me two nights to get through all my video interviews. I finished the last one in the small hours of the morning. Perhaps unsurprisingly I found it hard to go to sleep that night.

‘As far as we know.’ He sounded surprised at the question. ‘The pathologist seemed pretty sure that the neck wound was the first, and that all the others were inflicted after death.’

‘What precisely did the pathologist’s report say?’

‘Hang on a sec. Here we are. “The instrument came into the neck from the side or slightly from the rear and was then brought forward.” That’s a very unusual manner of killing, by the way. “It was then removed and another series of cuts were made.”’

‘Is that all the report says?’

‘No, there’s more.’ I could hear him riffling through papers. ‘OK, the pathologist thinks that the instrument was probably sharpened after each cut. He believes that the body was drained of its blood, so it’s probable the child was held either horizontally or even upside down.’

‘God Almighty,’ I murmured.

‘Something here doesn’t sit right with you?’

I could hear how much he wanted me to tell him that everything fitted perfectly, but I couldn’t do that. I fobbed him off with some vague response and a promise to call him back.

Taking out a blank sheet of A4 paper I wrote ‘
Muti
murder?’ at the top. I drew a line down the middle of the page. I headed the column on the left ‘Similarities’, and on the right, ‘Differences’.

Then on the right I wrote, ‘Manner of death: cut to the neck.’

The fact that the incision had been so careful didn’t fit. The perpetrators of a
muti
killing don’t care how body parts are removed. If they had wanted Adam’s head for some ritual purpose they could even have decapitated him with an axe. In the same column I added ‘Severance of limbs’.

Moses had told me that when bad
sangomas
take body parts from humans these parts are rendered more powerful if they are harvested while the victim is still alive. This was the opposite of what had happened with Adam. His limbs were hacked off after the neck had been so precisely cut.

And then there was the question of internal organs, a third addition to my right-hand column. The body parts most keenly treasured by
muti
men were the internal organs such as the kidneys, heart, spleen, liver and above all the genitals. But none of Adam’s had been removed.

4

Kinshasa, April 1986

Sue and I walked into the airport building past a line of scruffy soldiers and officials, who eyed us with a mixture of contempt and wariness. Most of them were armed with old French bolt-action rifles or pistols in webbing holsters.

‘Keep in line!’ a soldier shouted at us in French, gesticulating at the door. ‘Go straight through there!’

I stared at him. I didn’t much like being ordered around. I’d come here to help. I hadn’t expected a welcoming committee, but I thought a degree of politeness might have been in order.

‘What’s the matter with these guys?’ I asked Sue. ‘Are they expecting trouble?’

‘You!’ the soldier shouted, getting agitated. ‘Keep moving!’

‘Just stay calm, Richard,’ Sue said under her breath. ‘We’re in Africa now.’

She fixed a smile on her face, took my arm and steered me through to the terminal.

The place was bedlam. Shouting men without uniform or insignia of any kind descended on us and demanded our papers, passports, references, vaccination certificates – and when we protested they tried to grab the documents from us. There was no telling who was official and who was not. There was no sign of any system whatsoever.

We fought our way through to what was optimistically called the baggage reclaim area. The carousel hadn’t worked for years, and luggage was thrown to the crowd through a hole in the wall, at which point everyone would scrum down to find their bags, or, if that proved impossible, to grab someone else’s. When I finally saw one of ours I pounced on it in triumph, but so did a small fat man in a safari suit.

‘
C’est à moi
!’ he shouted over and over again. ‘That’s my bag!’

I had physically to wrest my suitcase from him and then fight off more predators when the rest of our luggage came through. I was sweating, outraged and confused. I had never seen anything like this. To be forced to fight and curse in defence of my own property upset me. I had never been aggressive. I had been, as they say, well brought up in the Home Counties. I thought that if you treated people with courtesy, they would, on the whole, return it. I saw now how far school, a brief spell in the Army and my whole background had protected me from what passed for real life. Kinshasa airport was a very rude awakening.

The concourse was stiflingly hot and full of noise, jostling and barely suppressed violence. Hugging our bags we found ourselves bundled up against a frosted glass screen, from behind which someone demanded our passports.

‘I’m not letting you have my passport.’ I turned for help to a soldier who lounged against the wall, smoking, but he looked at me with glassy indifference.

‘Just give it to them, Richard,’ Sue pleaded. ‘Just do as they say.’

A hand appeared from under the screen and seized our papers, which disappeared while another official pretended to check vaccination certificates. I felt helpless without a passport, wondering if I was supposed to bribe someone to get it back, knowing I was losing my cool, knowing I was doing everything wrong. I agonized for the best part of an hour before our papers were wordlessly returned.