The Boy in the River (22 page)

32

London, October 2003–January 2004

The Jodi Jones case affected me profoundly and I began to think about turning away from this wrenching line of work altogether. I could have stepped back into the sheltered life of an academic – Faith would probably have preferred it if I had – but the abuse of children had become a high-profile media issue by this stage, especially when religion or ritual was involved. There were frequent television reports and articles in the newspapers and I was often asked to contribute, making backing away more and more difficult. Besides, I didn’t feel that I could be free of all this until the Adam case had been resolved. And that seemed to be taking longer than anyone had anticipated.

After the arrests of the previous summer everyone had expected more action to track down Adam’s killers, but there was little sign of it. Every time I called Nick Chalmers for news he was as confident as ever, but had little new information to share with me. Sam Onojhighovie’s lawyers were fighting his extradition to Germany tooth and nail, and there was every chance they’d be able to delay it indefinitely. In London there was talk of further surveillance operations with the promise of new arrests. But nothing seemed to happen. The only big fish to be reeled in so far – Kingsley Ojo the arch people-trafficker – remained in custody awaiting trial.

As the closing months of 2003 dragged by I grew steadily more frustrated, and Faith told me that she had been offered the chance to do a PhD at the University of Exeter. I knew this set the seal on her retreat from the work we had once approached together with such confidence.

The story of the eight-year-old later known as Child B started on a bleak day in late November.

A community warden, Kwame Agbo, who was patrolling with a colleague, spotted a child huddled alone on the steps of an apartment block in Hackney, east London. She was shivering in the cold, bruised and sobbing. She was softly spoken and clearly intelligent, but seemed to be unable to say why she was sitting alone out in the winter drizzle. Kwame Agbo did not press her for answers. Instead, he wrapped his coat around her and sent his colleague to a local café.

As he chatted to her, he noticed that her eyes were inflamed, blood-red and oozing. Mr Agbo’s colleague came back with a cup of hot chocolate and the child drank it gratefully, almost greedily. It was, Kwame Agbo was to recall later, as if nobody had shown her any kindness for a very long time.

When the girl had finished her drink, the two wardens led her to the nearby school, where she should have been in classes for the day. Over the next few hours the head teacher called in social workers and doctors to examine her. Finally the police were called. Child B had been subjected to horrific injuries. Forty-three separate wounds were found on her emaciated body.

‘I’m afraid I’m rather tied up at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ve a lecture to give in a few minutes, and after that I’m going away for the weekend.’

‘Anywhere nice?’

‘The West Country.’

‘Driving?’

‘No. Getting the four thirty-three from Paddington. That’s why I’m in a hurry.’

‘No problem. I can meet you for ten minutes in the British Transport Police office there.’ He waited, and when I continued to hesitate he said, ‘Dr Hoskins, I’ve heard about your work. This case has got your name all over it.’

The British Transport Police’s office at Paddington was just this side of squalid, with a lot of frosted glass, scarred pine tables and a permanent fog of cigarette smoke.

DC Morgan told me about Child B, a girl of eight who lived with her aunt and mother, apparently, and one other child. The family were Congolese. There was no father on the scene, but the aunt’s half-brother was a pretty constant presence. He slid a photograph of a pretty child with huge eyes across the table. She had been cut with a knife, beaten, starved, tied up in a garbage sack, threatened with drowning in the local river and with being thrown out of the window of the family’s high-rise apartment. Someone had also rubbed chilli peppers in her eyes.

Now I was sure where this was going.

‘Is this something to do with
kindoki
?’ I asked.

‘I’d never heard the word before,’ DC Morgan said, ‘And I thought I’d heard of most things. The girl says it’s her aunt and her mother, mostly, who did this to her. They’re born again, or something. Christians, anyway. They were trying to drive out this
kindoki
, the girl says. That’s like witchcraft, isn’t it? Like casting out devils? Is that the sort of thing they believe, these people?’

I didn’t answer at once. I was familiar enough with
kindoki
from my days in the Congo and I knew it was just as widespread a concept in other African countries. But to my knowledge there had never been anything sinister about it. It was seen as an affliction, often a passing one. It was a catch-all phrase that covered a multitude of minor ills, rather like saying one had the blues. A bout of depression or simple low spirits might qualify as
kindoki
, or some low-grade physical illness. It was usually quickly dealt with by a traditional healer who would offer a sympathetic ear and then prescribe herbal medicines. To describe it as witchcraft, as many Westerners did, was technically correct, but conjured up images of voodoo dolls and curses. In my experience
kindoki
was nothing like as dramatic.

Recently, though, through my contacts in the London Congolese community I had begun to hear whispers of exorcisms organized by revivalist churches for children affected by
kindoki
. It was more usually called ‘deliverance’ in African circles, but they were talking about exorcism all right. I hadn’t really credited these stories with much weight. Exorcism is not that outlandish a prospect in itself: most Western churches believe in the casting out of demons in exceptional circumstances. But I couldn’t work out how the church had come to see
kindoki
as the work of the Devil. In the African world view, virtually everyone suffered from
kindoki
from time to time. To talk about having it exorcized was a bit like having radiotherapy to treat a cold – it wasn’t necessary, it wouldn’t work and the treatment would be far worse than the disease.

All the same, I wasn’t about to scoff at such a notion. I didn’t like the reference to witchcraft, however mistaken it might be. Like everyone else I knew about Victoria Climbié. Victoria, an eight-year-old from the Ivory Coast, had died in London in February 2000 after the most appalling mistreatment by her family and carers. She had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and forced to sleep in a bin liner in an empty bath. When she had finally been taken to hospital it was too late to save her life; 128 separate scars were found on her body, all of them believed to be deliberately inflicted. In 2001 her great-aunt, Marie Therese Kouao, and Kouao’s boyfriend Carl Manning, were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

I had not been involved in that case, but I knew that her torturers had claimed to be trying to drive out demons from the little girl. They believed – or said they believed – that she was possessed, and that she was a witch. And it may have been pure coincidence, but they were also members of a new revivalist church. So it could happen, and it could happen to children in London.

Was it happening again? Was Victoria Climbié’s awful death part of some unspeakable new trend?

DC Morgan hefted a bulky document case onto the table. I didn’t want to touch it, but a few minutes later, as Paddington station slipped away behind us, the case lay on the seat beside me.

I didn’t call Jason Morgan, so he finally called me. I bluffed. He asked me to ring him back. I didn’t. He rang again: I recognized the number and ignored the call.

Faith saw the effect this was having on me. She was on her way out of the apartment one morning in January of 2004 when she turned back to face me.

‘I don’t want you holding back on my account,’ she said. ‘You know you won’t rest until you’ve tackled this.’

Without waiting for an answer, she walked away down the corridor.

I went straight into the study, hauled the case onto the desk and opened it. Four hours later I was still reading.

Child B had lived in Hackney with her mother, who could not be named for legal reasons, and with the woman whom she had known as her aunt, Sita Kisanga. Kisanga’s half-brother, Sebastian Pinto, also stayed in the tiny apartment, as well as Kisanga’s young son. All of the adults were asylum seekers, the two women were Congolese nationals and Pinto was apparently Angolan.

When found, the girl had bruises all over her and the scars of several knife cuts; she was also severely malnourished. As DC Morgan had told me at our first meeting, someone had rubbed chilli peppers in her eyes, causing the most acute agony. She told a story, echoing that of Victoria Climbié, of being left to sleep in the bath, cold, terrified and alone. She had then been bundled into a sack, which was zipped up, and her mother and aunt had discussed throwing her of the third-floor balcony, after which she was to be drowned in the nearby canal.

The adults, while all quick to blame one another for abusing the girl, were quite clear about why Child B had been so cruelly treated. She was infected with
kindoki
. They knew this because one night Kisanga’s son had been visited by Child B in a dream and she had threatened to fly back to the Congo with him.

Sita Kisanga was a member of a fundamentalist Christian church known as Combat Spirituel. Founded in Kinshasa, it now had a branch in Hackney and was enthusiastically patronized by members of the Congolese community. Notes made in Kisanga’s Bible confirmed that she was a worshipper there. In her early statements she suggested that she had gone to her church for guidance about Child B’s
kindoki
.

The police interviewed Pastor Raph, who headed up Combat Spirituel’s operations in London. He didn’t know Sita Kisanga, he said, or any of the others. Perhaps they had attended his services: he had a large congregation and could not be expected to know everyone, but Sita Kisanga was not personally known to him. Pastor Raph told police that she was certainly not a prominent member of the church community, as she had at first claimed. In any case, he said, Combat Spirituel would never have condoned frightening a child in the name of deliverance, far less hurting her.

It seemed clear that the two women and Pinto were clutching at any straw to defend themselves against the charges.

Two days later I took the tube to Seven Sisters, an area I knew well as I’d been a spurs fan for years.

Jason Morgan led me up to a small meeting room at Tottenham police station and introduced me to Detective Inspector Brian Mather. The two made an intriguing contrast – DC Morgan portly and casual, DCI Mather tall, lean and immaculately turned out. I was to learn that Jason Morgan was a master at interviewing children, able to put them at their ease with his gentle, affable style, while Brian Mather was the hard-edged investigator of the partnership.

‘The fact is, Richard,’ Jason began, ‘we don’t know anything about this sort of stuff. To us, abuse is just abuse.’

‘To me too,’ I said.

‘I’m relieved to hear you say that,’ Brian Mather said. He’d evidently expected a different answer, perhaps something more culturally correct. ‘But just the same, we need to understand what drove them to do this sort of thing to a young girl.’

I had been here before. I remembered Will O’Reilly grappling with the concept of sacrifice, and Craig Dobbie asking me to help him understand how anyone could do what Luke Mitchell had done to Jodi Jones.

‘Would they do this sort of thing where they come from?’ Brian went on. ‘Would they consider it . . . normal? In Africa?’

I tried to explain that there was nothing African about this crime, that Africans love their children and generally take a great deal better care of them than we do of ours. Nor was there anything particularly weird about
kindoki
. It was a great mistake, I said, to believe that because people held unfamiliar beliefs they were somehow predisposed towards child abuse, or any other crime. What we were seeing was the perversion of a belief system that was otherwise benign: it was the perversion we should be looking at, not the belief.

Furnished with a handful of addresses, I left the police station and began walking the streets of north-east London. I wanted to get the atmosphere of the place, to catch a favour of what life must have been like in this alien and often hostile city for these Congolese migrants. I wondered if it might give me a sense of what had gone so badly wrong here.

I visited the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney where Child B had been found. It was a dismal place, bleak tower blocks with washing on balconies and litter blowing in the courtyards. After that I took the train to Dalton Kingsland station, crossed the A10 and walked through Hackney’s Ridley Road market.

In contrast to the rain-swept streets and concrete overpasses, the market was a mass of vibrant colour, thronged with shouting people. The place reminded me strongly of markets in Kinshasa, except that every possible ethnic group seemed to be represented here: Indian and Pakistani traders selling clothes, Thai and Chinese food stalls, a Caribbean steel band, tables of West African produce. I wondered if Sita Kisanga and the others had come here for their shopping, searching out the okra and pawpaw that reminded them of home.

Certainly they’d have passed through on the way to their church, for according to the police, Combat Spirituel’s Hackney branch had been situated just across the road, though it had since moved. I went looking for the building.