The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London

by Richard Hoskins

  There was a slight pause, and I was suddenly anxious that I had overstepped the mark.

  But then Commander Baker said easily, ‘Leave that with me, would you, Richard? I’ll see what I can do.’

  13

  Bolobo, 1988-1989

  Despite the odds stacked so heavily against her, Abigail grew into a delightful impish toddler, noisy, inquisitive and affectionate. In mid-1988, when she was six months old, we took her to England.

  It was our first trip out of the Congo and almost our first out of the Bandundu region, and it gave me respite from my doubts and fears, reminding me of how lucky we were to have Abigail and one another. There were new sights, the joy of homecoming, and the warmth of friends and family. If these influences did not entirely banish my uncertainties, they certainly pushed them back into the shadows.

  We showed Abigail off to her relations, and then – one of the prime reasons for the trip – had her thoroughly checked out at a London clinic. It was strange to sit in a cool surgery, surrounded by gleaming equipment and crisply uniformed medical staff, while the reassuring London rain beat against the tall windows. I couldn’t help thinking of the last time Abigail had received any serious attention from the medical community, when she’d been wrenched into the world by the light of an oil lamp, while the rainforest screeched and gibbered outside.

  ‘Well, Mr and Mrs Hoskins,’ the doctor stood back and shook her head in admiration, ‘you’ve got a remarkable child there. She’s perfectly healthy as far as I can see. Perfectly.’

  Abigail, at her most coquettish, gurgled up at the doctor as if she were as pleased with herself as we were.

  There were those among our family and friends who urged us not to go back to the Congo, but we didn’t seriously entertain the idea of staying in England. That would have seemed like a capitulation to us and would have made Judith’s loss meaningless. With her death, Sue and I had given something irreplaceable of ourselves to Africa, and we both considered that we belonged there for the next phase of our lives. We had come through. Our child had come through. We had all three endured and we had all three suffered, but we were the stronger for it. We could have asked for no more potent symbol of that than Abigail herself: laughing, healthy and strong.

  We returned to Bolobo in the same tiny plane that had taken us there two years earlier.

  As we taxied to a halt, nothing seemed to have changed. The long grass around the fringe of the airstrip swayed in the gentle breeze. The cloying heat pressed in on us the moment the plane stopped moving. Children who had run from the neighbouring settlement were lined up near the plane, grinning and jostling one another. Our pilot Dan – sandy-haired American Dan who had co-piloted us the first time – killed the engine, and I could see adults gradually joining the throng. This time, however, the wary expressions had given way to huge smiles of welcome.

  I grinned back happily as I scrambled out of the tiny cockpit. My feet touched Bolobo soil once more and I swung round so that Sue could pass Abigail down to me. When I turned back all semblance of formality broke down. People pushed forward to shake my hand. Some of the younger ones even threw their arms around me – a remarkable breach of protocol. Out of the corner of my eye I could see some of the women and girls jostling forward to see Abigail. They smiled at Sue and two of them reached forward to stroke Abigail’s cheeks.

  I was suddenly aware of people reluctantly moving aside to allow someone through, and in a moment Papa Eboma appeared, smiling broadly. He came a few steps closer and cleared his throat, but if he was hoping to deliver a formal welcome his words were lost as excited chatter broke out once more. He moved closer to speak to me more privately.

  ‘Richard, you’ve come back!’

  ‘Of course, Father. Didn’t I say I would?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But people say these things, you know. It’s when they come to pass that you believe them. You’ve come back with your wife and baby when you could have stayed in your own country. Now we know you love us.’

  ‘Father, aren’t we forgetting something?’

  ‘What, Richard?’

  ‘Losako, Papa.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully before replying, ‘Motema sanduku.’

  The heart is a box. He’d responded with a proverb that he thought apposite for our return. What did it mean? Was he saying that what a man stores within shows in his actions? Maybe. Or did he mean that a man’s heart will be found in the place where his most precious treasure is stored? What was my treasure? My dead daughter Judith? or was he being less literal?

  I looked up quizzically at the kind old face marked with the lines of tribal identity as well as by life’s trials, and I nodded in acknowledgement and thanks.

  The plane fired up and rumbled away before gradually lifting off. Sue, Abigail and I stood alongside the villagers shoulder to shoulder, watching together as the Western world receded once again into nothing.

  Our return and our welcome restored the balance to our lives in Bolobo. In particular, Sue and I established a new equilibrium. We both enjoyed being back in the village and I found myself travelling away from home less often.

  In those first few weeks, only one small incident troubled me.

  I had come back to the house for lunch as usual. I was on my way back to the medical centre afterwards, walking between the trees and trying to keep to the shade, when I distinctly heard Sue calling me from the house in a mournful wail.

  ‘Richard! Richard!’

  I spun round. There was no sign of Sue on the track and I could not see the house from where I stood, but I had an overwhelming feeling that something was wrong with Abigail. I dropped the tools I was carrying and ran back through the trees, arriving at the door, sweating and breathless. Sue came out and looked up at me, surprised to see me back.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Richard. I was going to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘Why did you call me?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  I pushed past her. Abigail was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, happily playing with Marmalade, the stray kitten we’d adopted. She looked up and cooed at me. She hadn’t a care in the world and was very obviously as right as rain. I picked her up and kissed her, relieved and feeling a little foolish.

  After that, life settled into its slow rhythm and soon I had all but forgotten about the incident. Weeks passed, then months, and Sue became pregnant again.

  Then, one day, I had a visitor.

  Abigail was running a slight fever; nothing very alarming, but I knocked of work in the middle of the afternoon and came back to the house.

  As I passed the kitchen I heard Tata Martin locked in his perennial struggle with the stove.

  ‘Mbote, Papa,’ I called.

  ‘Mbote, Richard.’

  I could hear Abigail giggling as I stuck my head round the door of the back bedroom. Abigail adored Marmalade. She was playing with the poor animal’s tail; the idiot creature seemed to enjoy the game as much as she did.

  Abigail grinned and held up her hands – the signal for a cuddle – and as I bent down and hugged her I could feel the heat from her forehead.

  At that moment I heard a voice from the front door.

  ‘Ko-ko-ko!’

  I sighed and set Abigail down. ‘You be nice to Marmalade, OK?’

  She giggled and instantly picked up the kitten’s tail again.

  ‘Ko-ko-ko!’

  I walked back through the house. A man stood there deferentially; he wore a stained white T-shirt and shabby brown trousers. I knew him reasonably well – Tata Mpia, a carpenter who quite often worked around the centre. He was a respected member of the Motendi tribe. I walked past his modest house almost every day and we would exchange greetings, but I wouldn’t have expected him to come here.

  I opened the screen. ‘Tata Mpia . . .’ I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice.

  He stood there silently for a moment. ‘Mr Richard, may I spe
ak with you? It is an important matter.’

  ‘Of course. Come in. Come in.’

  I ushered him through to the main room and showed him to a chair. He sat on the edge of it. He had, I noticed for the first time, the most compelling face, lined with age and wisdom, and perhaps grief.

  I could not begin to imagine what had brought him here, but I knew better than to rush him. I offered him something to drink. He declined. I made some inconsequential small talk. He gave minimal answers.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Mpia Hoskins is not well, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Abigail? Just a slight fever, that’s all.’

  There were very few secrets in the village; he must have heard about my early departure from the centre that day. All the same, I began to feel as uncomfortable as he looked.

  ‘You know that I too am called Mpia?’ he said. ‘Because I am a younger twin.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘So . . .’ He paused. ‘I understand these things.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What things?’

  ‘She is being called.’

  I felt the air in the room thicken around me. There was something almost menacing in his tone.

  ‘My Mpia? My Abigail?’ I leaned forward. ‘What do you mean, called?’

  ‘Mr Richard, do you understand what we mean by the living dead?’

  ‘Well . . . only vaguely.’ Trying to shut out images of B-movie zombies, I sounded more bewildered than I’d intended.

  ‘You must understand this, Mr Richard. It is very important. We – you and I and everyone – we are the living living. The living dead are those whom we once knew on this earth, but who have passed on to the shadowlands beyond the grave.’ His expression became still more intense. ‘They guard us, Mr Richard. But they can also harm us.’

  ‘You’re talking about what we would call ghosts?’

  ‘No, no. Your ghosts are dead. We have such ghosts too. They are the long dead – the people who died so long ago that no one can remember them. I am not talking about them. Our living dead are more alive than we are. We remember them when they were with us, and now they are beyond the grave they have much more power than we have.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The living dead control this world and everything in it, Mr Richard. They have a hundred times more power than you or me. They are all powerful. They can build up or destroy. They bring life, and they take it away . . . And they speak to us, Mr Richard, they speak to us. They tell us what to do.’

  ‘They speak to you? How?’

  ‘They appear to us all the time,’ Tata Mpia said. ‘The head of my family is my living dead grandfather. Sometimes my grandfather visits me at my house. I can be sitting down and he will walk in. Sometimes I just hear him speaking to me. Other times I am dreaming and he will come and speak to me in my dream. He tells me what must be done to look after my family; he tells me what I must do to keep the living dead happy. He tells me who is trying to harm me, and how I can stop them.’

  ‘But . . .what’s this to do with my Abigail? You said she was being called? What . . . what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Ah.’ Tata Mpia nodded his head slowly. ‘She is a twin. She is a Mpia – a younger twin – like me.’

  I felt the heat of Abigail’s fever on my own forehead.

  ‘Twins have a special power, Mr Richard. They call to each other and you must listen to their call. Mbo is calling your Mpia to come and join her in the shadowlands. I am sure of it.’

  ‘Her twin sister? Calling her? But she’s—’ I stopped myself.

  ‘No, Mr Richard,’ Tata Mpia said gently. ‘Mbo is not dead. That is the thing I am trying to say to you. She is one of the living dead. And she is calling out to her twin sister, calling her to the world of the living dead.’

  ‘Where are these shadowlands?’ I heard myself ask.

  ‘They are very close, Mr Richard. They are very close to us.’

  I stared back at him, unable to speak, swamped by conflicting emotions: outrage; horror; anger; a surge of good old-fashioned righteous Western indignation. I didn’t want this vile superstition in my home.

  Yet I could see it had taken great courage for Tata Mpia to come and tell me this. He was well aware of the reaction he might provoke. He must have had absolutely no doubt that what he said was true.

  And I realized he too was scared, scared for me, scared for my family.

  ‘You need to see the nganga,’ Tata Mpia went on urgently. ‘The nganga will call upon the living dead to give your first daughter rest.’ He had the look of a man coming to the end of a long and painful journey. I knew that he had one final burden he needed to remove from his shoulders. ‘You must spill some blood, Mr Richard.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It is the only way. If you spill blood it will satisfy the living dead and they will cut Mpia free from Mbo’s call to join her beyond the grave. This is how it works with us. You must understand this.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ I asked wildly. ‘Spill blood? How?’

  ‘If you do not wish to lose your daughter,’ he said, ‘you must perform a sacrifice.’

  Sacrifice?

  I stood up. In something of a daze I found the courtesy to thank him, and told him I would consider carefully what he had said. I showed him to the door and watched him walk away down the path. I went back inside and sat down heavily, but what I wanted to do was run. In the background I could hear Abigail’s giggles but I didn’t want to hear them now. I had to think.

  I stood up and walked quickly to the outside kitchen.

  ‘Tata Martin, can you do something for me?’

  ‘Certainly, Richard.’ Then he caught sight of my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I paused. ‘Nothing . . . I’d just like to go out for a couple of minutes. Could you watch Abigail?’ As I spoke her name a knot tightened inside my stomach.

  ‘Of course.’ He looked at me uncertainly. ‘But are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘You should not be outside for long. The rain is not far away.’

  I left the house and headed up towards the graveyard, but stopped when I was still some distance from the railings that now seemed to mark the dividing line between me and Tata Mpia’s mysterious shadowlands. I turned and walked down between the trees to the banks of the Congo. There was a storm brewing. It was very hot and the whole village was bathed in the bronze twilight that precedes a tropical downpour. The wind was starting to whip up. That gave me about ten to fifteen minutes before the rain. I was in turmoil. I desperately needed to think.

  I had found out a little more about the ngangas and how they worked after my meeting with the despairing mother all those months before. Though sometimes called witch doctors, they were really traditional healers or shamans. I’d seen their sacrifices and had always tried to remain detached from them. I remembered the time the nganga had told Mama Lutondele that she needed to offer a goat to the living dead before starting to build her house. She’d asked me to come along and join the celebration. The goat had been tied upside down some time earlier. I could hear it bleating piteously as I approached the compound. The blade of the nganga’s knife was about eight inches long, with a white bone handle. The animal was crying like a baby, and seemed to know its impending fate.

  Those cries still rang in my head. I could hear the nganga chanting to the living dead that the offering was theirs. I could see him lift the knife, then bring it down and draw it across the goat’s throat. There was one final cry and a spurt of blood. The animal kicked weakly as he drew the knife across the wound once more, this time pressing deeper. Blood poured on to the ground and, with several further strokes, the head was severed. Mama Lutondele was hugely pleased. She knew that the living dead would give their blessing to her house.

  I couldn’t possibly get into this. The very idea was absurd. Sue, I knew, would be utterly outraged at the mere suggestion and I decided at once
not even to tell her. I wasn’t sure whether she would be more scandalized at the idea of sacrifice, or at the realization that I had not instantly dismissed it.

  For I found that I had not. Not out of hand. Perhaps I had spent too long out in the villages. And besides, I loved Abigail so. Could it really do any harm to cover all the bases? No one need ever know, not Sue, not even Tata Mpia. I could go out to one of the remote villages and find a nganga there and get it done. What would it matter if a part of me abhorred the ceremony? For the cost of a single goat, it would be over and done with. Back in England, in time, I would laugh about it at dinner parties.

  But I knew that it would not be as simple as that.

  There is a bridge to be crossed when stepping into a strange culture, and once crossed there is no way back. I would be going native if I agreed to this, and would never entirely recapture the solid middle-class British persona I had inhabited all my life. If I made that sacrifice, I would cease to be entirely Western. I would open a door in my mind – and perhaps in my soul – to alien demons.

  I wrestled with my conscience as the vast brown river slid past. But I knew I was not prepared to cross that bridge.

  I walked back to the house, my mind made up. There would be no sacrifice.

  Abigail recovered in a day or two, as she always had.

  But in the weeks that followed I thought often about Tata Mpia’s visit – more often than I wished to, even though his strange warning was never mentioned again. Tata Mpia continued to carry out occasional jobs for us at the centre, and I saw him almost daily, just as before, as I passed his house on the way to work and back. We spoke as we always had, and when we did I was friendly and courteous, while he was quiet and respectful. Neither of us referred to his visit.

  It did worry me that his warning kept coming back to me, not just in the lonely reaches of the night, when I might have expected it, but at unpredictable times: when I was fixing a pump in the workshop, or eating, or watching Abigail at play, her blonde hair bobbing as she ran after the hens or the cat.

  It weighed on me too that I had never told Sue about Tata Mpia’s visit. We had always shared everything, no matter what we had been through, but I had kept Tata Mpia’s words from her so that they would not trouble her. As a result, they did more than trouble me: they haunted me.