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

by Richard Hoskins

  ‘I don’t think I want to go,’ I said.

  ‘We both need to go home, Richard. We both need to move on.’

  ‘This is home,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to move on.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to stay here with Abigail. I want to be buried here beside her.’

  I was entirely serious. I did want to be buried beside my daughter, and at that moment I didn’t care how soon it happened. Indeed, I would happily have helped matters along, though I had the sense not to say that to Sue.

  ‘That’s precisely why we have to go home,’she said.

  The next day we lifted off in the Cessna with Dan once again at the controls. Normally so affable, he avoided looking at us directly, as if what he saw in our eyes was too painful to handle. I stared out over the canopy as the tiny plane banked. The endless forest stretched below with the silver river winding through it. Already the tiny green strip had been swallowed up. Bolobo itself had disappeared from view.

  The contrast could not have been more extreme. The Baptist Church found us a pebble-dashed semi-detached in Sidcup, in London’s south-eastern suburbs. And there we lived for six months or so, in a strange limbo, with no work and no particular view of the future; not quite able to believe that we were back in London, not quite sure why we were there. At first I spent the time idling, thinking of the past, wandering the grey suburban streets, staring at the television.

  I cried a great deal. I had never been a particularly tearful type, but now I was overcome at unexpected moments. These bouts of emotion were like ripples spreading out from that dreadful afternoon in Bolobo. I had no control over them and made no effort to exert any. I didn’t care what anyone thought. I was aware that Sue, now close to giving birth again, wanted and needed my support, but I had very little to give her. In its absence she got on with life, and managed it a good deal more stoically than I did.

  She found me one day, kneeling on the living-room carpet with a pile of newspapers and a pair of scissors in front of me. Gently, she asked me what I was doing.

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. I was cutting out the pictures of children who had been hurt or abused in some way. ‘I just thought I’d light a candle for them, that’s all,’ I explained.

  ‘Abigail’s gone, you know, Richard,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s going to be best for both of us if you accept it.’

  I didn’t answer and after a while she quietly left the room.

  Perhaps Sue called the Church in an effort to help me, or perhaps they decided to act on their own initiative, for at about this time a young man I didn’t recognize appeared at our front door. It was a late summer afternoon and I had been lounging on the sofa, watching the Test match. Cricket was one of the few things that brought me relief at the time. I loved the order of it, the esoteric rules and rituals, its very Englishness. So I pulled the front door open rather grumpily when the bell rang, resenting the intrusion.

  ‘Richard Hoskins? I’m Pete Swaffham, from the Church.’ He held out his hand and I took it reluctantly. He had an open, friendly face. ‘I’m here to see if I can be of any use to you.’

  ‘Of use to me?’ There was a ripple of applause from the TV and I glanced over my shoulder towards the living room, impatient to get back to the match.

  ‘I’m here if you’d like to talk through any . . . issues. Obviously you’ve had a very bad time in Africa and it usually helps to talk.’

  ‘I don’t even know you.’

  ‘It can be especially helpful to talk to a stranger, Richard. Neither of us can bring any baggage to the discussion, can we?’

  I looked at him and the irritation must have been apparent in my face. I didn’t need counselling, I thought, and he was interrupting my cricket. But he stood his ground and in the end I was not quite far enough gone to shut the door in his face.

  ‘Listen,’ I said at last. ‘I’ve spent three and a half years in the middle of bloody nowhere and this is the first chance I’ve had to watch a Test match. So if you want to do your Samaritans bit you’ll have to sit through the cricket first, OK?’

  He smiled broadly. ‘Sounds fair enough.’

  And to his credit he came in and sat beside me in the sitting room for a good hour. We swapped occasional comments about the state of the pitch and the English batting. I don’t now recall if we ever got round to talking through my ‘issues’, but his visit was the first useful input I’d had during this strange time.

  Autumn gave way to winter. Then in January 1990 our son David was born in the maternity wing of Sidcup General Hospital. I thought we might have been granted an easy birth after all that we’d been through, but that was not to be. David managed to get the umbilical cord wrapped round his neck, cutting off his oxygen supply more firmly with every push Sue gave. There were some terrifying moments we could both have lived without but this was a south London hospital and not the Congolese rainforest. The problems were overcome and soon Sue and our perfect son were both doing well.

  We were a family again, whatever else had changed. For the first time I began to feel a stirring of interest in the future. We returned to our limbo in Sidcup to take stock of what this meant for us. These were a strange few weeks for both Sue and me. We were aware of the fact that the gulf between us had widened. We didn’t fight, or even disagree, but each of us had reacted so differently, first to Judith’s death, then to Abigail’s, that we could not hide from one another the distance between us in outlook and belief.

  Life, however, seemed determined to go on. Here was a precious new child who needed both of us. And if life was not going to give up on us, we felt that we could not give up on life.

  The seasons changed again, and across the dull suburban gardens crept the first signs of spring. One February afternoon, Sue and I were sitting in the main room of the Sidcup house. Sue was feeding David and I was alternately reading the newspaper and watching the raindrops slide down the windows.

  ‘We can’t just sit here doing nothing indefinitely,’ Sue said abruptly, shifting the baby’s weight in her lap.

  ‘No,’ I agreed, folding the paper. I did this carefully but it seemed to make a large sound in the quiet room. ‘No, we can’t.’

  ‘It reminded me, having David,’ she said. ‘The help we got, the care. It reminded me how many people don’t get any help at all. It makes me feel selfish. And here am I, a qualified midwife with all this experience, doing nothing. I don’t think that’s what God put me here to do.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Sue and I went back to the Congo in March 1990 and spent another eighteen months working there, trying to rebuild our lives and to find our common purpose once more. Then, in September of 1991, events overtook us in explosive style. We were in Kinshasa when the capital was sacked by rebel soldiers. Sue – now heavily pregnant again – and David were abruptly evacuated to Britain via South Africa, whilst I stayed on, attempting to hold the fort. But after a few weeks I too had to flee, under gunfire, across the river.

  Sue met me at Heathrow with David on her hip and she and I embraced awkwardly. We didn’t speak for a while. Neither of us quite knew what this new life in Britain had in store for us. We had been through so much together that it was hard to imagine ourselves fitting into anything like a normal life. In many ways things should have been hopeful and positive for us. We had a young child and another baby due shortly, and we were, after all, still young. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel that way. Once again we were faced with rebuilding our lives, and I think we were both beginning to ask how often two people could be expected to do that. It was as if we feared the English suburbs might prove more of a challenge to us than the Congolese rainforest.

  Still, we entered into our future as positively as we could. It seemed to me that this was the ideal opportunity to return to the point at which I had left off all those years before and try to get a degree. Rather to my surprise, I was accepted by Oxford to study theology. It wasn’t that I was hoping to re
build my own battered faith – I didn’t believe that I could ever lose my faith, because to do so would have made a nonsense of Abigail’s death – but my relationship with Christianity had certainly come under enormous pressure. Partly because of that, the nature of belief itself – not merely Christian belief – had become intensely interesting to me, so theology as an academic discipline seemed the obvious choice.

  It would be some months before I was due to start at Oxford, and meanwhile Sue and I rented a place in South Norwood, near Croydon. It wasn’t much of a home but we thought we could return to some normality there after the lunacy of the Congo, and perhaps find a way of moving forward together. Those winter months brought us their share of joy. In November 1991 Sue gave birth to our beautiful daughter Elspeth. Mercifully, this time everything went well and we were overjoyed to be parents of a daughter again.

  Early in 1992 I was invited back to the ravaged Congo, this time for a month to see if I could help get vital supplies up-river from Kinshasa to Bolobo. I travelled on my own, spending a gruelling time in a country that was on its knees. Whilst there the United Nations asked me if I would go to work for them on the Congo–Rwanda border. I agonized over the decision, but my place at Oxford beckoned and I knew that it would be my last chance to go to university. I turned down the UN job and came home.

  Oxford proved to be the most liberating and therapeutic experience of my life. I loved studying and regularly worked until three or four in the morning in our tiny flat opposite Pusey House. I did well at my studies and it quickly became clear that I had found my métier in academic life. At the same time, and despite myself, my work at Oxford had a profound effect on the development of my own quest for meaning. I relished the opportunity to scrutinize the foundations of faith and, under the glare of rigorous scholarship, found them shaken once again.

  Despite this, I was unable to kick the door firmly shut.

  I discovered that Compline with Benediction was held in the chapel of Magdalen College at ten every Sunday evening, and I never missed it when I was in Oxford. There would seldom be more than a handful of us, and in the dim light of the candles and gently rising incense I would listen to the words in awe: ‘Brethren, be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Whomso resist, steadfast in the faith.’

  When the monstrance containing the sacrament was held aloft in front of us in an act of solemn blessing it felt both sensual and surreal. Though I didn’t make the connection at the time, it was in its way very African, right down to the fearsome lion, prowling beyond the circle of firelight, scenting his prey. I could never sit through this service in the ancient chapel without experiencing a sense of something supernatural, numinous, beyond the mere comfort of ritual. Intellectually, I tried very hard to argue myself out of it, but nothing quite worked.

  Sue was pleased with my academic achievements, but she saw very little of me at this time and couldn’t really see what my quest was about. For her faith was simply faith: it didn’t need to be justified by rational arguments, nor did it find expression through clouds of incense. As a result, my studies at Oxford drove the wedge more and more deeply between us.

  I left Oxford with a Double First and went on to a doctorate at King’s College London. After that I considered a position as an academic theologian through the church, but finally decided I didn’t have the temperament, nor really the faith, for it. In mid-1999 I was offered a lectureship in African religions at the University of Bath Spa, and I accepted. But my move there, while opening up a new direction for me, also signalled the formal end of our marriage. Sue and I had been living almost as strangers under one roof for some time, and we both knew a separation was now inevitable. We had agonized over it, trying to spare the children the worst of the pain, but in the end I moved to Bath without the family for the start of the first semester in 1999.

  16

  Lower Congo, April 2002

  For a few weeks around Easter I was able to take a breather from the Adam case.

  While Will O’Reilly and Andy Baker were in South Africa, Faith and I were planning a research trip of our own in central Africa. I wanted to take a closer look at a black Messiah movement known as Kimbanguism, which had its heartland in the south of the Congo, and Faith would accompany me as my research assistant. We scheduled an additional fortnight at the end of the trip so that she could pursue her own research into bonobos, the rare primates that survive in the Congolese rainforests.

  I knew the problems of the Congo had worsened even since our visit the previous year. President Mobutu Sese Seko, whose praises I had sung under the bare flagpole that first morning sixteen years earlier, had fallen from power some years before. A brutal, half-mad despot, he survived only with the covert backing of Western powers. They – we – had turned a blind eye to human rights atrocities in return for cold war support and minerals.

  With the end of the cold war came the end of Mobutu’s usefulness to the West, and in 1997 Laurent Kabila’s forces from Rwanda swept him from power. Mobutu fled to Morocco, leaving behind in his palace a pathetic detritus of imported Western luxuries and porn magazines, but not much else. He died of cancer a few months later.

  Mobutu’s disappearance had created a power vacuum, and now, five years on, the country was still embroiled in civil war that had dragged in a host of neighbouring nations. Many parts of the country that I’d freely traversed in the Eighties and early Nineties were under the control of rebel soldiers. Even places that Faith and I had visited the year before were now off limits. Dark rumours of atrocities filtered out of the country, and someone who had been into rebel territory had recently told me tales of cannibalism in the interior. For Faith it was to be very tough – the rebel area coincided with the only natural bonobo habitat in the world. If humans were eating other humans, there was little hope for our ape cousins.

  Even as we cleared customs in Kinshasa it quickly became obvious that the country was in chaos. There were new bullet holes in the walls of the arrivals lounge. The airport officials wore weariness on their faces and apparently no longer struggled to repel would-be intruders from foreign lands. The noisy aggression of my first arrival here had been replaced by despair.

  As we walked out of the remains of the terminal, something resembling a taxi approached. It might have been yellow once; now it was many shades of rust-brown. The rear of the car scraped along the ground, like a dog with worms. By pointing the nose at a forty-five-degree angle the driver kept to a mostly straight line. We said very little in the cab, but stared out towards the distant city, where a deadly fume-laden fog hung over the corrugated rooftops.

  Kinshasa had sunk into abject squalor and lawlessness. In the city centre, mounds of garbage towered skywards, blocking roads and pavements. There were people everywhere. Wiry and wild-eyed from hunger, they stalked the streets in search of something . . . anything. Something to eat, something to steal. Most, I knew, would find little enough before disease or violence cut short their miserable lives.

  And now a new killer moved among them, more deadly than any of the diseases that had already ravaged the Congo. Roughly 20 per cent of the population of Kinshasa was estimated to be HIV-positive, of whom half had full-blown AIDS. Some 10 per cent of all Congolese people were thought to be infected, and across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa there were at least a million AIDS orphans.

  The children, of course, shocked me most profoundly. As we drove into the city centre they lined the roads. Everywhere. Children on their own or in feral packs, orphaned or simply abandoned. Evening was falling and we could see them under the dim city lights, rummaging through piles of rubbish in search of food, or curled up exhausted under sparse trees or in the gutters, presumably hoping the rain would hold off. It would not.

  Most distressing of all, some of them – as young as five or six years of age – offered themselves to us, seeking to barter their bodies for a day or two of survival.

  At le
ngth we reached the Kimbanguist visitors’ centre in the middle of Kinshasa. It was oddly reminiscent of arriving at the Baptist Mission sixteen years before. Two wrought-iron gates, the right one hanging precariously, opened onto a cracked concrete drive, which led to a large house with a green tin roof. There was a parched lawn in front and a couple of fishponds behind, with a prayer ground to the left.

  We were shown to one of a row of single-storey rooms to one side of the main house. There was a small anteroom with a broken overhead fan, a bedroom and a bathroom. There was no running water but someone had kindly put a full bucket in the bath for us. Despite swarms of mosquitoes there was no net, but thankfully we’d had the sense to bring our own.

  By the time we got this far, I was uncharacteristically depressed and angry – emotions I now seldom afforded myself in Africa. We unpacked in silence. After a while, Faith straightened up from her task and looked at me very directly.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘Talk about it?’ I burst out, startling both of us. ‘It’s an outrage!’ I happened to be holding my shoes at that moment and I hurled them against the wall. ‘Did you see those kids? Does anyone give a damn what happens to them?’

  I stared out at the city, its lights quivering in the stifling tropical air. I wondered what atrocities were going on out there right now in those filthy streets. I thought again of the investigation back home, and determination surged inside me. If I could do something, no matter how small, to help solve this case, would it not bring some justice to the landscape?

  We set off for the headquarters of the Kimbanguist movement, which was located in a tiny forest village called Nkamba, two days’ drive to the southwest of Kinshasa. I had to use my most languid Lingala to avoid some potentially nasty situations at roadblocks. We also drank some decidedly dodgy water and were both sick as a result.