The Boy in the River (27 page)

‘Where to now?’ Faith said, as I folded away my mobile for perhaps the tenth time.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘There’s so much still to be done.’

‘There is.’ She reached across and took my hand. ‘But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s your responsibility to do it all, will you?’

The mobile buzzed again.

‘No, no,’ I said distractedly, releasing her hand to pick up the phone. ‘Of course not.’

37

London, July–October 2005

On Friday, 8 July 2005 Mr Justice Moss identified Sita Kisanga as the instigator of the worst of Child B’s abuse and sentenced her to ten years, the longest jail term allowed by law for her crime. The girl’s mother got the same sentence, and Pinto got four years.

It should have brought closure of a sort, but I found that it did not.

As further cases continued to come my way over the next few months, I grew increasingly unhappy. I was depressed by the sheer nastiness of the crimes I examined, and frustrated by my inability to do anything significant about them. I never became hardened to what I saw and heard.

Faith watched this change in me, and gently pointed out that I was always working, and that even when I did take time off I was increasingly introverted and strained. I knew she was right, but I seemed unable to do anything about it. I began to feel I was marooned in the flat – still living high above London, but no longer part of it. Not really part of anything, in fact, except the distressing landscape of my work.

I was working late as usual one evening, having appeared for long enough to eat dinner in silence before going back to my desk. Faith brought me a cup of cocoa and put it beside me on the blotter. I discovered it there, cold and congealed, when I looked up hours later. Faith told me that she had spoken to me when she’d brought it in, had even put her arms around me and kissed the top of my head. I had no recollection that she had ever been there.

My life was getting more surreal by the day. A bright young woman from a production company called me with a proposal. They wanted to make a reality TV show in which I would set up a bogus religious cult.

‘Pardon?’

‘We want you to act as the guru. The idea would be to show how easy it is to get people roped in, and to believe everything you say. And to see how far they would obey you, too. You might tell them, for instance, to sign over all their worldly goods.’

‘Are you quite mad?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ she protested. ‘It would just be a bit of fun. We’d give everything back afterwards, obviously.’

Quite apart from such foolishness, the lack of progress on the Adam investigation was a continuing source of tension. But I called Nick Chalmers every month or so, and he remained upbeat. There was talk of renewed surveillance, of fresh suspects, of Joyce Osagiede’s imminent return to the UK, of breakthroughs in identifying Adam’s family. Everything was always on the point of happening within the next fortnight, and each new proposed initiative was garnished with a mass of procedural detail. But nothing actually happened, and I could feel the investigation losing what was left of its momentum.

I continued my research into child exorcism, and even began to wonder whether it was becoming a personal obsession, but exchanges with people in the communities echoed my convictions. I still saw Claude regularly. One Wednesday in September, as he sat opposite me in the steamy café, wearing his trademark white baseball cap, I decided to be straight with him.

‘Maybe I’m getting carried away with this exorcism thing, Claude,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m not seeing things clearly any more.’

‘No,’ he said in his calm but formal way, sipping his Coke. ‘Matters stand just the way you think they do. In fact, I believe the situation may be getting worse.’

He reminded me that when we had first met I had asked him to listen out for London children being sent to Kinshasa for exorcism, as had so nearly happened to Andrew. He told me that he now had strong evidence that this was indeed happening. My heart sank. I remembered the lost children in the church compounds, waiting to be bullied, starved and cut until they achieved deliverance.

‘You know of an actual case?’ I asked.

‘I’ve heard of thirty or so.’

‘
Thirty
?’

‘Yes: kids who’ve either been sent, or whose families are preparing to send them. I think there are probably a lot more.’ He took out his spiral-bound notebook. ‘Here. I made a list.’

The names were in a column down the left hand margin. I stared at them. Most stood alone, but beside one, a boy called Londres, was an address.

‘That’s his uncle’s place in Kinshasa,’ Claude said. ‘Where he’s been sent. One of his relatives let it slip.’

For days after meeting Claude the thought of this boy gnawed at me. For an ordinary London child to be trapped in an alien city and forced to undergo what I had seen those Kinshasa children go through seemed like a kind of hell to me. I racked my brains for some way I could help him or draw attention to his fate.

Since the blaze of publicity surrounding the Child B case I had received regular calls from journalists and TV documentary producers. One of the more persistent had asked if I’d be interested in fronting a film about Britain’s ‘child witches’ for the BBC. The project would involve a trip to Kinshasa.

I had been cool about this up until now. I knew Faith wouldn’t want me to go back to Kinshasa merely to make a TV programme. I wasn’t anxious to go myself, but my meeting with Claude put a different complexion on things.

Three days later I found myself sitting in the production company’s North London offices. I told them that I wanted to shine a spotlight on the abuse of children in the name of Christian deliverance, and especially to draw attention to the fact that London kids were being shipped back to Kinshasa for exorcism. There was one child in particular I had heard about who had been sent on that journey and I wanted to follow him there. Sacha, a slender and thoughtful director in his early thirties, was enthusiastic.

Faith, however, was distraught – more upset than I’d seen her at any time in our relationship.

‘The boy’s name is Londres,’ I said. ‘London. Funny name.’

‘I know what it means. Why do you have to go to Kinshasa?’

We had been over this several times.

‘To talk his relatives out of putting him through exorcism.’

‘And you think you can do that?’

‘I managed it once before.’

‘That was different. The boy wasn’t already there. And besides, what makes you think this is your responsibility?’

‘He’s fourteen years old. He’s spent most of his life here in London. He
is
a Londoner. I’ve seen what they do in Kinshasa. Can you imagine being put through that as a child of fourteen?’

‘Richard,’ she sighed, ‘you can’t just make this all right.’

But I was in full flight by then. I told her I knew his uncle’s address in Kinshasa. I could go straight there and talk to the relatives. Perhaps they’d even let me bring the boy back. We’d do a little filming and maybe we’d be back in a couple of days. The rest of the documentary could be done in London.

Faith walked over to the window. She stood with her arms crossed, silhouetted against the night-time city.

‘I’m worried about you, Richard,’ she said at last. ‘Truly I am. What kind of sense does it make to go charging out to the Congo to try to find one child? A child you’ve never even met?’

‘I’ll be there with a film crew. And the documentary’s for the BBC. That gives it some weight, even in Kinshasa. It’s not as if I’ve launched into this all on my own.’

‘You’re not some sort of superhero in red tights, you know, swooping around the world righting wrongs.’

‘But I know the place. I speak the language. I understand the problem. And I know where this boy is. Who else can say all that?’

‘I think you’re pushing your luck going there again,’ she said. ‘I know how important this is to you, but I don’t want you to go. I’m serious. I have a very bad feeling about it.’

She stood there in silence for a long time. I thought perhaps there were tears in her eyes.

Then she said, ‘Richard, I’m not sure I can take a lot more of this. Seeing you getting chewed up by every new case. You have no life outside your work, and so neither do we. Can’t you see that I’m really, really unhappy? I hate London. I hate the way we live here.’

I stared at her. While I was still groping for a response she said, ‘I want to stay down in the West Country during the week. Just during the week, that’s all. But I need some space, away from here.’

‘But . . . we’ll hardly see one another . . .’

‘We hardly do now.’ Her voice was heavy with sadness. ‘I could go and stay with my parents in Devon. They’d enjoy having me around.’

38

Kinshasa, August 2005

Sacha met me at Heathrow and introduced me to the crew. Soundman Andy was tall, lanky and relaxed, with designer stubble and wearing T-shirt and jeans. Camerawoman Petra was his virtual opposite, a tough, direct and highly experienced professional who specialized in filming in war zones. I took to both of them at once.

The trip began to go wrong from the start. There were endless hassles getting our gear checked in. An over-eager snifer dog took an entirely misplaced interest in one of Andy’s bags, so that we were interviewed at some length by customs officers and barely made the flight.

When we were finally on the plane and strapping ourselves in, Sacha joked a little nervously that someone must have put
juju
on our journey. I wished he hadn’t said that.

In Kinshasa, the crew had been booked into the Memling, one of a tiny handful of places in the capital that still functioned roughly like a real hotel. It had lifts that worked most of the time, the food on the menu was quite often available in the restaurant and prostitutes were only permitted in the lobby by invitation.

It was evening by the time we got there. I saw the others into their rooms, grabbed a quick meal with them, then took a taxi to a much less salubrious hostel downtown. I had an urge to be close to the real Kinshasa, and the Happy Day Hotel was just that, a run-down rest house patronized entirely by Africans – traders, travellers and people visiting relatives.

The large woman at reception was startled to see a white man check in, but when I greeted her in Lingala my arrival was met with huge good humour and I was shown of to guests and staff like the curiosity I was.

The Happy Day was a ramshackle three-storey structure roofed in corrugated iron, built around a courtyard with ill-matching tables at which men lounged in the hot darkness drinking beer. Fitful electric bulbs hung from a neem tree in the centre. Guests could get French fries in the dining hall, if they were lucky, or maybe rice or cassava and beans.

My room was a cubicle on the first floor with a small balcony that looked directly down onto a chaotic road junction packed with people, traffic and vendors’ stalls lit by oil lamps. I leaned on the rail, perched just above the heads of the passers-by, listening to the cries of traders and the blaring horns of the traffic, returning the amused shouts of greeting from people who spotted me there, a lone white man in the heart of a black city. The smoke from my cigarette mixed with exhaust fumes, rotting garbage and the reek of burning tyres from a dump on the far side of the junction.

Immediately below my window was an informal drop-off point for taxis and taxi-buses. Kinshasa cabs were supposed to be yellow, though the interpretation of this rule is subjective. Every few seconds battered vehicles in all shades from ochre to canary to acid lemon would pull up and disgorge their passengers while drivers bellowed for new fares, bawling their destinations into the hot night –
N’djili! Kimbanseki! Ndolo!

At about midnight I tossed away my last cigarette, turned away from the window, and crawled under the tatty mosquito net. I lay there sweating in the darkness for a long time. I had left the balcony door open, partly to help with the heat, but really because I enjoyed the anarchic din of the street just below, especially the cab drivers’ cries, with their promise of action, movement and adventure:
N’djili! Kimbanseki! Ndolo!

It went on all night, and every now and then I would surface into full wakefulness and listen to it. Tomorrow we would go to find a boy called Londres. Maybe this would all work out well after all.
N’djili! Kimbanseki! Ndolo!

By the time I got back to the Memling Hotel the next morning, Sacha, Petra and Andy were busy loading their gear into the back of a glossy white Land Cruiser with tinted windows. I eyed the car and the pile of gear that lay around it uneasily.

Sacha handed me a new Nokia mobile phone he had bought on the street for twenty dollars, with unlimited calls for another twenty. He’d got one for each of us. Sacha was pleased with this bargain, and wondered how the locals managed to provide such a service.

I wasn’t so sure. The sheer mass of expensive equipment worried me – cameras, lenses, tape recorders, microphones and palmtops. I saw too that the vehicle itself was a mistake. I could hardly blame the team: I had given them the contacts to hire the car, and they had picked something that seemed to make sense. It was large, air-conditioned and powerful, and its dark windows hid the equipment from prying eyes and would even allow Petra to film undetected.

I liked the look of the driver who had come with the vehicle, a quiet, capable man called Apolossa. But the Land Cruiser itself was impossibly opulent for the slums we were due to visit. A single tyre would have cost more than a poor Kinshasa family would earn in a year. It was a platinum pan-zer, money on wheels, and would mark us out at a glance as rich foreigners. Voyeurs. Exploiters. Targets.

I tried to put these thoughts behind me, though, and within a few minutes we were heading of through the loud and glaring morning with Apolossa at the wheel. Away from the main streets the city was just as I remembered: a riot of low concrete buildings, broken storm drains, tin roofs and daubed grafti. Crudely painted shop signs of startling explicitness advertised butchers, dentists, haemorrhoid specialists. Most vividly of all from my time living here I remembered the people, crowding everywhere on the broken footpaths, dressed in hectic colours, loafing on crumbling concrete walls, cramming the empty shops, weaving between the potholes on elderly bicycles.