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

by Richard Hoskins

  I knew that something was wrong as soon as I walked through the door. It was about a month after Tata Mpia’s visit.

  Abigail always filled the whole house – filled it as only a small child can – with noise and laughter and mischief. But today everything was quiet.

  I closed the door behind me and dumped my gear in the corridor. I looked around for Sue, but could not immediately see her. It was a stiflingly hot African afternoon and the sun was like a battery of searchlights mounted outside every window and beating heavily on the tin roof.

  I walked on through the house with growing unease. The front room was empty. In Abigail’s bedroom her toys were strewn around in cheerful disorder, as if she had just been called away. The silence became oppressive. It was unthinkable that our chattering eighteen-month-old daughter, our little noise machine, our Abigail, could possibly be here and allow such silence to exist.

  And suddenly there she was. My heart swooped with relief. She was all right. Of course she was all right. She was standing at the window in our bedroom, her finger in her mouth. She never came in here, but nevertheless, here she was.

  ‘Abigail?’ I stepped towards her. ‘What are you up to?’

  She turned her head, and the expression on her small face – normally as bright as a new flower – made me stop dead and lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. There was something in her eyes I had never seen before. Something that made her look old beyond her years.

  Without a sound, she turned away from me to stare out of the window again.

  I realized then what held her attention so completely. This was the only point in the house from which it was possible to see the graveyard.

  Beyond the railings a haphazard collection of canted headstones and sun-bleached crosses clung to the side of the hill, shrivelled by the heat, overlooking the Congo River. They marked the final resting place of those who had lost their lives here, in a place that suddenly felt very far from home.

  Abigail died in July.

  That dawn – a grey, sultry morning of dry-season summer heat – I kissed my little girl goodbye and left the house as usual. She had another very slight fever – I could feel the flush of it on her cheek as I kissed her – but she seemed fine and fevers were nothing new to us out here.

  Unusually, I came back to the house at mid-morning for a wash and a rest. I found Abigail full of her usual vitality once again, running to me with her arms outstretched.

  ‘Dadda!’ she called. ‘Dadda!’

  I swept her up in my arms and swung her gently, thinking, as I always thought when I held her in my arms, that it could not be possible to love another being so much.

  I went back to work for a while and by the time I came home for some lunch Sue had put Abigail back in her cot for a sleep. After lunch, Sue and I stretched out on our own bed for an hour.

  Some time later I awoke and dressed, washed briefly and left the house without a sound, trying not to disturb the two of them. Even so, I knew Sue would be up and about at once, despite being several months pregnant and needing her rest. I was not surprised to hear her moving in the house behind me as I padded away down the earth track.

  ‘Richard!’ Sue cried suddenly from behind me.‘Richard!’

  Her tone froze my heart. I had heard her cry out in just this way once before. I had hoped then it was pure imagination, but now as I wrenched myself round I knew the impossible truth: it had been a foreshadowing of this moment, the moment I had dreaded. I ran back around the bend of the track and saw Sue standing with her hands hanging by her side in the doorway of our house, her face slack with shock. I stopped in front of her, unable to move.

  ‘It’s Abigail,’ she said, quietly. ‘I think she’s died.’

  I rushed past Sue back into the house, desperately shouting Abigail’s name. I barged through to her room and found her cot empty. Sue had laid her on our bed, and as soon as I found her there – eyes and mouth open – my rational brain knew that all hope was gone. I had seen enough death to be in no doubt.

  But just the same I swept her up in my arms, calling hopelessly to her, ‘Abigail! Abigail! Come back to me, my darling! Come back!’

  The small body was still warm from sleep, her last ever sleep, and even as I clutched her against me I saw the blood drain from her face and her sun-browned skin turn first to chalky white and then to blue.

  The warmth of life ebbed from her at last and I could not replace it, no matter how close I held her or whatever prayers I screamed to my God. The child in my arms was quite cold by the time someone – I don’t even remember who – was able to persuade me to lay her body down.

  I’m not sure what happened over the next few hours. I was utterly helpless with grief and could maintain no sort of composure. I was long past the point of caring what anyone thought. I was aware only of certain vivid images, of certain events unreeling in front of me and around me.

  Evening fell. Word had spread already and I watched, trembling and bewildered, as our friends from the village began to arrive. I sat in that darkening room, dumb with pain, by the bed where Abigail lay, vaguely aware that I had seen all this before so many times in the villages and yet had not dared to believe that it could happen to me. The scene grew into an African wake, just as I had witnessed so often over the past couple of years, the men sitting with me and the women with Sue, as tradition dictated.

  Outside the light failed and cicadas began their bandsaw chorus in the trees on the banks of the Congo, the same chorus they had sung every night for thousands of years, and would sing for thousands more, long after all of us – black and white, adult and child – were gone. Men and women wept in the darkness around me. Someone moved past me and gently dressed the child’s body, murmuring to me as she did so. It was beyond my comprehension that this could happen to Abigail. She had been not so much full of life as a manifestation of life itself. It was impossible that she could die without taking all other life with her.

  It was a sorry little procession that made its way up to the cemetery the next morning. I had not slept – I doubted I would ever sleep again – and I could not stop weeping. I simply could not stop. I must have looked a wild figure indeed – half-mad and stained with tears – when I laid Abigail’s body in the red earth next to her twin sister. The sister who had summoned her to the shadowlands beyond the grave and who now had her for evermore.

  I settled her on her last bed and looked up at the circle of anguished black faces above me. Many of them, like me, were in tears and made no attempt to hide it. Eventually someone helped me up and the gravediggers stepped forward to cover my daughter’s body.

  My eyes met Tata Mpia’s as he sank his shovel into the soft soil. He stopped and, releasing his grip on the shovel, leaned forward to rest one hand on my shoulder. He avoided looking down into the grave.

  ‘Mr Richard,’ he said, ‘now you are truly an African.’

  His expression carried that unique combination of unspeakable sadness and fatalism I had seen so often in this place. But I read no trace of condemnation in his eyes, and I did not need to. I could manage that all by myself.

  14

  London, April 2002

  The Embankment glistened that wet spring lunchtime.

  I was nervous. I had looked into my own past during the preceding week or two, probing into dark corners I had never wanted to visit again. I knew the conclusion I had reached had a vital bearing on the Adam case, but I didn’t like it. I was now clear that Adam’s killing was indeed a sacrifice. I had gone over and over this, but when I reflected on my own experiences in the Congo, and then cross-referenced that with my academic work, I knew there was no other conclusion. The meticulous nature of the crime; the precise manner of the cut to the neck and the draining of blood; the fact that clothing of a particular colour had been placed on the body after death; and that the torso had then been disposed of in a flowing river . . .

  Being confident about this didn’t make the idea any easier to handle. The thought th
at a young boy could be the victim of a human sacrifice – here in London, one of the great capitals of the Western world – simply beggared belief. Sacrifice was quite different from muti killing and it was important to understand how.

  Muti was all about the harvesting of plant and animal parts for later use in medicines. No one cared much how those parts were taken or whether the victim died or lived. Sacrifice was all about the blood. It was about a transferral of power via the spilling of blood, the life force. The killers cut the victim’s throat very precisely. The blood was then in some cases splattered on the ground, in others over the effigies of the deities concerned, which would be standing on an altar. Occasionally those involved would even drink the blood, sometimes out of the severed head. Officially human sacrifice was banned throughout Africa. It crossed the divide into sorcery – black magic, known as juju in much of West Africa – and most on the continent would condemn it. But since the sacrifice of animals was rife I knew it could be a relatively short step to killing a human in the same way. The only crumb of comfort was that the victim’s death was usually relatively quick.

  I paused for a moment, turning to look over the wall at the swirling river below. I knew no one would want to hear this. There was bound to be some resistance.

  However, I also knew that my sacrifice theory would offer the detectives crucial new lines of inquiry, and that I would be able to help with them. I had narrowed down the areas of Africa from which Adam might have come. Despite the theoretical ban on human sacrifice, there were regions where it persisted. If muti had its stronghold in South Africa, then human sacrifice resonated most strongly with the West.

  I had spent the last fortnight poring over every document I could lay my hands on that dealt with the ethnic groups of West Africa. There were some fringe possibilities – one or two groups in Ghana, perhaps; another in Senegal – but one in particular had stood out for me, and the more I considered it the more convinced I became: the Yoruba of Nigeria and their immediate neighbours.

  The Yorubans are a very powerful group, mostly from the centre and south-west of Nigeria. There are about 90 million Yorubans worldwide, with roughly a third living in Nigeria, where they are dominant in society and provide many of the country’s professionals, politicians and business leaders. Many Nigerians living abroad are also Yorubans, and they wield powerful influence in some African-derived religions, particularly in the United States. In their African homeland they have about the most complex and sophisticated religious belief system of any ethnic group on the continent.

  Many Yorubans believe in a high, but distant, God – Olorun (also called Olodumare). According to their traditions, Olurun commanded Orishala to create the earth, but he was delayed in this act of creation, so his younger brother Odudwe completed the work. Subsequently a further sixteen deities, known as orishas, descended to the earth. Many other orishas were added to the pantheon later on. The orishas are extremely important in Yoruban religion, for they act as the bridge between this world and higher realms. Some say there are 401 of them, but many Yorubans believe there are far more. Most of them are ancestors – living dead who had lived such great lives that they were elevated to the status of gods and now have huge power and influence. Each and every orisha has his or her own favourite colours, foods, drinks, plants, animals, precious metals, stones and feast days, and the delight of one could be the poison of another.

  All the orishas require sacrifice. Not necessarily human sacrifice, of course, and especially not nowadays, but there was no doubt that the practice persisted in some deviant offshoots of Yoruban religion, especially, so it was rumoured, in Edo State in the south-west of Nigeria, and among their near-neighbours the Igbo.

  I had other reasons to link Adam to the Yoruba area.

  Yoruban males are circumcised soon after birth. I remembered the footage I had seen of a naming ceremony on the outskirts of Lagos a few years earlier. The circumcision that accompanied the service had welcomed the child into the family of Yorubans. Small offerings of salt and gin were made to the living, the dead and the relevant orisha. The infant whose circumcision I had seen was only a few days old. By the time he was Adam’s age the scar would have healed completely – just as Adam’s had.

  Marshalling the facts in this way fortified me. I turned away from the river and headed with renewed determination towards the Strand.

  I found Will and Nick already ensconced in armchairs in the Wellington pub with pints of lager in front of them. Nick passed me a bottle of San Miguel and an envelope. ‘Two economy tickets to Holland.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I slid it into my pocket. ‘It’s really useful for me to have Faith alongside, but I was a bit uncomfortable about asking.’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought,’ Will said. ‘It works out cheaper than one business-class fare in any case. We just have to be a bit careful how these things look.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s the media,’he said. ‘Have you seen what the papers have to say about this South Africa trip? You can’t win. If you don’t pursue leads they accuse you of not working hard enough, but when you do they say you’re off on some overseas junket at the public’s expense. It’s to be expected, of course. But the fact remains that we’ll have to come up with something fairly soon, or people will start making a serious fuss about police time and resources.’

  ‘I might be able to help,’ I said. ‘I think I know what sort of killing this was.’

  He sat very still.

  ‘Will, I’m almost sure it was a sacrifice.’

  The detectives looked at each other and then back at me.

  ‘Sacrifice?’ Will said. ‘How does that make a difference? The poor kid’s still dead, when all’s said and done.’

  ‘No, Will, it’s critical. Look, muti – that’s just harvesting. It’s the collection of parts to be used in medicine. But sacrifice is different. It’s all about the pouring out of the blood. It creates a transferral of power in the minds of those performing it.’

  I explained that a sacrifice required much more preparation than a muti murder. It had to conform to established rituals, from the selection of the victim through to the ceremony itself and the deposition of the remains. There had to be a group involved – at least a handful of people, and maybe quite a few. ‘It makes sense of everything we know,’ I insisted. ‘Like the shorts being placed on the torso after death, the choice of their colour and the fact that deposition was in the river. I still think the victim and the perpetrators came from the same ethnic group or same geographic area. And I’ve an idea that might be West Africa.’

  ‘West Africa?’

  I could see Will hacking through the operational tangles that would spring up if West Africa emerged as a firm front-runner days before their visit to South Africa.

  ‘Any chance of being more specific?’he asked.

  I had hoped to avoid this. I knew how easily it could be misrepresented if I went about naming ethnic and religious groups, especially when I had no hard evidence. ‘Adam was circumcised as an infant. Circumcision at that age is common among the Yoruban people, and not very common elsewhere. The Yoruban homeland is in central and western Nigeria. And there’s some evidence that human sacrifice is still practised by certain Yoruban cults. They’re probably not the only ones who do it, but there’s a strong historical association.’

  ‘So if I ask Ray Fysh to get the boffins to start searching for matches in West Africa, and especially Nigeria, are you confident they may find something?’

  ‘The sacrificial victim is often forced to drink some kind of potion before the ritual act itself. That can be very specific in its make-up, depending on which deity is involved. We ought to get the contents of Adam’s intestines carefully analysed with that in mind. Not his stomach. His intestine. If he was given any sort of concoction, as I’m suggesting, he probably would have been forced to drink it a day or two before the killing, so it would already have gone through his stomach and into the gut.’

>   ‘I’ll see if we can push it up the list of priorities.’ Will blew out his cheeks and sat back in his chair. ‘Nick, while you’re on your feet, why don’t you get the cultural adviser another beer?’

  15

  Bolobo, Oxford and Bath, 1989–1999

  Sue turned to her faith for the support I could not give her. She submitted to the tragedy as the will of God and found that in this way she could come to some level of acceptance.

  My own response was anguished and confused. I felt betrayed by God for not keeping his side of the bargain I thought we’d made, and sometimes my mind seemed locked in one long howl of protest against his very existence. I tried to deny him on the grounds of human suffering – not just mine but the suffering I’d observed in the lives of the people of the Congo.

  And yet here I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. For if I did not believe in something, if I did not allow the existence of some purposeful pattern in life, how could I make any sense of my daughter’s death?

  So, despite everything, I clung to faith for the time being. I could no longer even attempt to conceptualize what sort of God it was in whom I believed, but I had to believe nevertheless. I could not allow myself – not even for a moment – to entertain the thought that I had returned to the Congo with my beautiful daughter for no reason. Even worse, gnawing away underneath was the constant doubt about what might have happened if I had made the sacrifice as Tata Mpia had urged me to. Surely that way madness lay.

  The Baptist Mission reacted to our loss by arranging for us to be sent back to the UK on extended compassionate leave.

  On our last night before leaving Bolobo, Sue and I sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table and looked at each other through the glow of the hurricane lamp. Our hands were on the tabletop but they did not touch.