The Boy in the River (31 page)

‘You can’t beat it, can you?’ David said. ‘Working the land.’

The path home took me past the lake excavated by Faith’s parents, which was now well stocked with trout, close to the caravan where I had sat for weeks on end studying the Adam case. I stopped in the long grass, looking out over the lake and listening to the soft trickle of the stream that fed it. It was here that I’d been spooked by the Chokwe death mask. I had phoned Blessing in Lagos from that caravan, and briefed Will O’Reilly, and tried to help build the case that had come to determine the course of my life over the last five years.

‘Hello,’ Faith said. ‘You look as if you could use a drink.’

I hadn’t seen her, sitting on the bench by the water’s edge. There was a tray and a couple of bottles of beer on the seat beside her. She handed one to me as I sat down beside her.

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’ I looked out over the water. ‘When I was back at the flat the other day I took a call from Nick. He’d been trying to get hold of me while I was out in Africa. They buried Adam.’

Faith was startled. ‘I didn’t see anything about that on the news.’

‘No, well you wouldn’t have. Apparently there were only a couple of police officers present. They wanted it done without fuss. They just buried him quietly in an unmarked spot in Southwark cemetery.’

I pictured a tiny grave, a couple of thoughtful policemen standing to one side. Adam had been buried not a mile from where his body had been found, in the heart of the grey city that must have seemed so alien to him. I wished he could have known how much effort the people of that city had made to find justice for him.

After a while I broke the silence. ‘David Wood just told me that you can’t beat it. He’s right, isn’t he? This. The land. The countryside. It’s magical down here.’

‘Then let’s find somewhere not far from my parents. They could use our help around the farm.’

At that moment I wanted nothing more.

Over the next year I combined work on the farm with heading up the religious studies department at the local school. And, of course, coaching the under-13 cricket team.

One afternoon as the clouds lifted and the sun eventually broke through, I stationed myself at the bowler’s end. The distant horizon was dominated by the dark mass of Dartmoor, the foreground by green fields dotted with English oaks.

Callum marked his run-up for the first delivery. Jack, the new batsman, stood back to survey the fielders. I followed his gaze. Anna, Jack’s sister, was at fine leg. Picking her had been controversial. The boys had muttered darkly about girls playing cricket. One or two of the more sophisticated ones thought it was political correctness. I enjoyed their mild cheekiness but I knew I was right. Her first over of the new season she’d bowled out three of the top batsmen.

This game meant so much to me. Here was a chance for these children to do something as a team. This was a place where they could find the space to grow and, in some cases, to heal. I had heard their stories. Many were, of course, from loving and stable environments, but few were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and some had suffered trauma, tragedy, abuse or neglect. A fair number were from broken homes.

As Callum thundered forward I leaned in slightly, keeping an eye on the popping crease. Jack planted his back foot firmly outside his off stump and cracked the ball square to the boundary.

Elated, I signalled to the scorers.

In February 2007 I was summoned to Sheffield Crown Court to give evidence in a case I’d worked on a few years earlier.

I stood to the right of the defendant, Martin Paul Brown, not more than a few feet away from him. The jury returned their verdict of guilty for the 1988 murder of Keith Slater. Brown was jailed for a minimum of thirteen years.

Had I really been any help to all the people who had asked me to explain these horrors to them over the last few years? I certainly hadn’t found all the answers. All I could hope for was that they would never stop asking for one, never stop being shocked. God help us all if we ever reached the stage when this kind of behaviour seemed normal.

After I left court I was collared by BBC
Crimewatch
, who wanted to make a special feature on how the case was solved. As I concluded the final interview for the programme I vowed it would be my last, and then slipped back to Devon.

For six years I had been exposed to the darkest underbelly of human nature. The cases involving children had left me close to despair. I needed some distance. Devon was giving me that. Faith was now heavily pregnant; I had a new life on which to focus. I did my best to ensure that the police and social services could no longer track me down. Enterprising media types occasionally broke through, but I politely declined all comers.

In the late summer of 2007 Faith gave birth to our son Silas and I felt more settled than at any time since Bolobo. Tucked away in our West Country idyll, I had successfully shut out the ‘madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ and it seemed as if my life was complete once more.

41

Devon, 2007–January 2011

The police hadn’t entirely abandoned their attempts to find Adam’s killer. With some audacity they had secured an early release for Kingsley Ojo, hoping that they could persuade him to work undercover for them. Although Nick and Will believed Ojo’s denials about his involvement in the actual sacrifice of Adam, despite his involvement in trafficking, they hoped he would take them to the killers. But for the next year, Ojo led them on a series of wild goose chases, then disappeared back to Africa.

With what seemed like the last throw of the dice, Nigerian police traced Joyce Osagiede in the spring of 2008. They interviewed her under caution, hoping that she might help them trace Adam’s movements during his final weeks. She gave them a lead about the boy’s true identity, and aimed the British police towards a potential new witness in Germany. It proved to be another blind alley.

With that, Will O’Reilly and Andy Baker retired from the force, Nick Chalmers was given new responsibilities, and it seemed as if the last vestiges of the investigation had melted away. Desperately disappointed, I withdrew still further from the world of murder enquiries. Teaching consumed much of my time, and the rest I was able to devote to family.

At the start of the new school year a notice appeared in the staff common room asking for runners to join the 2009 London Marathon in aid of the Joint Educational Trust, a National Children’s Foundation charity that places kids who are at risk of abuse, trauma or tragedy in healing environments.

I’d never run a marathon before. In fact, I had done little running of any kind since my schooldays. I was overweight, unfit and in my forties. But the aims of JET so perfectly matched the goals that had been central to my life for so long that I couldn’t turn my back on the challenge.

A few weeks later I was in training. I began to run to school in all weathers, along the winding Devon lanes, and lost four stones in the process. I’d discovered the ultimate stress reliever. I never ran to music; the rhythms of running and breathing generate their own entirely natural and refreshingly meditative cadences. As April arrived I was fitter than at any time since my first few months in Bolobo. I raised a couple of thousand pounds for the cause and managed to run the marathon well inside three hours and fifteen minutes, which guaranteed me a place for the following year. Running was becoming addictive.

The whole student boarding body was waiting up to greet my return to north Devon. I stood there feeling sheepish, sore and ridiculously proud as the pupils cheered and applauded. It was one of the great moments in my life.

We moved into a house on the farm itself and added two Kunekune piglets and a cat to the family circle. I kept up the running and, of course, the cricket, even dusting off my boots to play for the local side.

Then, early in 2011, I received an email from an ITN address. A freelance called Rienkje Attoh had tracked me down through my former head of department at Bath Spa University. I emailed back politely, putting her off.

Or so I thought.

Her response arrived two minutes later. As the leading expert on the case, it claimed that if they didn’t interview me about ‘the sensational story’ their reporter Ronke Phillips had uncovered, the piece would be the poorer for it. They had intelligence from a key source, which supported all my theories.

I couldn’t resist responding: ‘Which case are we talking about?’

‘Adam.’

I sat at my desk and stared out of the window. It had been bitterly cold. Like much of the country, north Devon had taken a battering from blizzards and severe frost. Now it was as if a switch had been flicked and spring had suddenly appeared. I stared out at the mulberry tree that seemed to have sprung straight out of a nursery rhyme and taken root in our front lawn.

I’d already hesitated a fraction too long.

I knew Ronke Phillips, a highly educated Nigerian with dual citizenship, from the Child B case. As ITV’s crime correspondent she’d covered the darker side of London’s rich and varied multicultural criminal tapestry. A few days later, we settled into a café near Waterloo Station.

Will O’Reilly had called her. He’d retired at around the time I’d gone into hiding, but he still had sleepless nights about the Adam case. ‘It’s the one that got away,’ Ronke said. ‘It’s the only unsolved child murder in the capital. He knows they should have solved it. He knows they let one of the chief suspects slip through their fingers.’ She paused. ‘But I’ve found her.’

We’d leapt through these hoops in 2008. The Nigerian police had elicited some sort of statement from Joyce under oath, but it had petered out through lack of corroborating evidence. I was beginning to regret having come.

‘She’s confessed to the whole thing: bringing him in from Germany; handing him over to someone here.’

She told me how at the end of the previous year she and Will had flown out to Lagos at ITV’s expense. With a bit of robust journalism Ronke had tracked down Joyce’s brother and then Joyce herself. The interview had contained some prompting and Joyce had appeared a little short of marbles, but Ronke was in no doubt about the weight of her confession to the trafficking. She corroborated my theories about the preparation for and act of sacrifice, as well as the ritual deposition in the river. And she repeated her claim that she knew the boy’s identity.

‘She has given me an actual name.’ Ronke looked at me expectantly.

I leaned forward.

‘Ikpomwosa.’

I repeated the name slowly, separating each syllable: ‘Ik-pom-wo-sa.’ If Joyce was to be believed, the boy in the river now had a name.

She then passed me a photograph.

It was the one the police had seized from Joyce, taken in Germany at the time she was trafficking him to London. The image will always be etched on my mind: a young boy in a blue buttoned-up jacket, with innocent eyes and a smile that carried all the cheekiness, delight and zest for life a boy of six should have. Joyce had kept it because her own two children, now in care in the UK, were standing alongside him.

42

Devon, February 2011

‘Phone call for you.’

Faith leaned out of the window.

‘Very bad moment. I’m teaching Silas how to play a Pietersen chip through mid-wicket. Tell them I’ll call back.’

I placed the plastic ball on the grass in front of us and together we pinged it into a nearby rose bush.

‘He says it’s really important . . .’

The voice at the other end of the line sounded strangely euphoric.

‘Dr Hoskins? I’m Simon Metcalfe and I’ve spent the past three years looking for you. You did an excellent job. Kicking over the traces, I mean.’

I racked my mind. Metcalfe?

‘Are you familiar with the National Policing Improvement Agency?’

I confessed that I wasn’t.

He explained that the NPIA pulled together all the major cases in the UK, and sometimes beyond, then sought specialist assistance for the senior investigating officers.

‘There’s been another African child murdered in London. Witchcraft case. The
kindoki
thing you used to talk about. Terrible torture; days and days of it. We need you back. Please. For this poor little bugger’s sake.’

I stared at the picture on the desk in front of me. Those sparkling eyes gazed back.

I sat down and nudged the mouse. My computer screen flickered into life. I nestled the receiver under my chin and clicked the Word icon. Without quite realizing it, I was about to start taking notes.

‘You . . . are . . . joking . . .’

I shook my head weakly.

‘I knew he was a police officer. I just knew it.’

I nodded.

She looked down at Silas. ‘Flipping heck. After all these years.’

‘It’s another African boy, in London. A
kindoki
exorcism.’ I lowered my voice so Silas might not hear. ‘It’s very, very nasty. They say they need me . . .’

‘All I ask is that you don’t bring it into our lives like you did last time. I don’t mind, honestly. If they really need you, they need you, and you must help. But keep it separate this time, OK? Keep this as . . . well,
this
.’ She nodded from me to Silas.

‘That seems reasonable,’ I said quietly.

‘No, I mean it. Keep it away from here. From him. From us. Find a place to work on it, and then have your fix here. Just don’t bring the darkness back into our family life. Or our marriage.’

As a coping strategy, it suddenly seemed blindingly obvious.

43

London, March 2011

It was a warm day in early spring as the DLR train approached Royal albert Dockside station. The Olympic stadium rose like a toadstool from the flat wasteland of the East End. Brash developments were interspersed with sections of marshland and rows of houses unimpressed by the sudden presence of flash new money. New-builds looked as if they had been parachuted in, untouched by their surroundings. The ExCel Centre glistened in the sunshine.