‘Twins,’ Sue said aloud. I hadn’t realized she was awake. ‘I knew I felt two of them kick. I knew it.’
‘A scan would have picked it up,’ I said. ‘Just a routine scan.’ I didn’t mean to sound bitter but I could hear it in my voice, and so could she. ‘I never even saw her. The first baby. It all happened so fast, and there was Abigail just born and . . . she was out of the room so quickly that I never saw her.’
‘I did,’ Sue said in a small voice.
I rolled over to look at her. ‘You did?’
‘When I got up, just after Abigail arrived. I found the little bundle in the kitchen. I don’t suppose they intended me to find her, but there she was, and I folded back the cloth. I saw her face.’ She groped for my hand. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No, I don’t mind.’ I lay back and stared at the stained ceiling. ‘How could I mind? I’m glad you saw her. I just couldn’t think of anything but Abigail . . .’
I knew I would always regret not seeing my first daughter’s face. And now it was too late. I thought of the pathetic mound of turned earth just 100 yards from the window, baking in the Congo sun.
For Sue, our first daughter was a person who had lived, no matter how briefly, and died. For me she was insubstantial, a presence I could never give form to, nor quite lay to rest. We didn’t give her an English name until well over a year later, when we decided to call her Judith. We had only expected one child, so we had only chosen one name, and naturally her younger sister had inherited that.
The lack of a name didn’t seem a problem then. In this part of the Congo twins are relatively rare. The elder is always called Mbo and the younger Mpia, titles which confer some status and which imply an indissoluble bond between the siblings. There is no need for other names. So for months we referred to our lost daughter simply as Mbo, when we could bring ourselves to speak of her at all. Mbo Hoskins was the name on her grave marker.
It didn’t strike me until much later that everything had been granted to the living sister and nothing, not even an identity, to the one who had died.
Sue was in a bad way after the dreadful events of that night and, though she showed great strength and courage, I did at first have rather more to do with the care of Abigail than I might otherwise have done.
I relished this responsibility, the knowledge that I could do something useful for her. I fed her through a tube and walked around with her strapped to my chest in a sling. I bonded with her in a way that I suppose would have been impossible under any other circumstances. Her eyes would gaze up into mine from her pouch. I had never loved anyone – or anything – so much.
The villagers called me a Tata Mapassa – father of twins – and as such I was eyed with much respect, but it was tinged with wariness, as if people felt it might be as well to keep their distance when dealing with me.
I was hardly aware of this at first. Or if I was, I thought the change might have been in me alone. For one thing, once Abigail had survived the first few months and was developing well, I began to travel more. I found myself driven by a relentless desire to visit the remotest villages, far away from Bolobo.
It seems strange to me now that I should have experienced this urge to journey away from the child who meant so much to me, but at the time it did not seem so. Sometimes when I was on my own in the house a sense of dread visited me like a presence. Having lost one daughter, I knew I could not bear to be near if the other was taken.
At the same time there was something much deeper at work. It seemed to me that if I now strove to do good for the people of this region, God would reward me. If I did what I thought was God’s will, surely He would protect my family?
I felt useful, bringing medicines and other supplies to the villages, bringing news, making contacts, learning every day. The villagers held white people in exaggerated esteem and would talk to me for hours about their problems, their fears and their dreams. Mostly, they just needed someone to talk to, but besides that they were influenced, I think, by the fact that I was employed by the Church. For some people I almost had the status of confessor, someone to whom they could unburden with safety. I relished the role and did my best to be worthy of it, but there is no doubt that the respect and deference of the villagers was a salve for my own pain.
I found relief in the sheer physical experience of travelling. Electricity was the stuff of fairy tales for this whole area and running water meant the nearest stream. At first I took the Land Rover, but that was only possible on the track to Nko and Mushie, and even that eventually disappeared in a giant quagmire. It wasn’t unusual for it to take seven or eight hours to cover a dozen miles or less, with endless stops to cut a new path through the forest.
I learned not to rely on machines. The long-suffering Land Rover, pushed beyond endurance, broke down several times. On one occasion I had struck out with Tata Mopanda for a remote cluster of villages known collectively as the Nkuboko. After passing Mushie, the track meandered through the forest for another 100 miles, little wider than people could pass in single file and yet the Land Rover was rammed through. After hours of grinding labour, the vehicle finally broke down with fuel pump failure. We spent about six hours trying to fix it and then walked a couple more to the nearest village. The monkeys screamed and gibbered in the canopy above us, ripping off fruit and letting it drop to the forest floor.
The village comprised eight shabby palm-thatch huts. Neither of us had eaten anything all day; we were filthy, exhausted and famished. There was no water to wash in and the villagers only had two eggs between them. I tried to turn them down but the villagers wouldn’t hear of it and graciously made us an omelette. I stretched out that night on rushes in one of the simplest huts I had yet stayed in, staring up through the gaps in the palm thatch at patches of sky between the treetops.
I was desperately lonely that night. My resolution faltered and I remember asking myself what I was doing there when I had a wife and child back in Bolobo. Was I really doing this for God, as a trade-off for my family’s protection? What kind of God would seek such self-denial from me, or impose such a price on Sue and Abigail? I couldn’t find an answer.
Nevertheless, for weeks and months a great restlessness drove me on.
I usually set off into the heart of the rainforest by bicycle, stopping every few miles to hammer the wheel back into shape after the latest buckling. When I came to the frequent streams and rivers that crossed my path I would either wade out with the bicycle above my head, or try and find a villager with a canoe who could ferry me across.
Small victories over big obstacles gave me some satisfaction, but my loneliness never left me. I had a pocket radio with me and in one extremely isolated stretch of rainforest, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a town, I picked up Brian Johnston commentating on the Lord’s Thest. Out in the middle of nowhere, the sound of his plummy, quizzical voice filled me with almost unbearable nostalgia.
I used a dugout canoe to travel on the river. By this time I’d become passably competent at handling it the Congolese way – standing up to paddle gondolier-like from the stern. On longer trips, though, I followed the example of the wealthier local traders and used an outboard motor. I found that if I headed upriver it was possible after a few miles to turn inland through the forest along the smaller tributaries.
Once, I made a month-long trip by canoe through a series of forest streams known as the Sangassi, almost on the Equator. Villages here were built on stilts, because the forest was flooded for most of the year. I stopped to wash my clothes in a brook, beating them against the stones under an extraordinarily hot sun, and as I did so some villagers gathered round me. They seemed amazed at everything I did.
‘What’s so fascinating?’ I asked in Lingala. ‘Never seen a man washing his own clothes before?’
They exchanged bashful glances.
‘It’s not that,’ one of them said at last. ‘We’ve never seen a white man before.’
I stood up, tilted back my straw hat
and wiped my forearm across my sweating brow. It was my turn to be amazed. I didn’t think villages still existed where a white man had never been seen.
I glanced down at my lean, tanned body, the rags I wore for clothes, my bare feet. I thought about how much had changed for me. Within the space of two years I had married and become a father, had a daughter and lost a daughter, learnt a new language with such fluency that I had trouble remembering English, and immersed myself so fully in an alien culture that I wondered if I would ever be able to find my way back to my own. I sometimes wondered if I would ever want to.
I returned down the Sangassi with a few Congolese fellow travellers. We had been paddling for hours through trees that arched over the waterway forming a solid canopy overhead. I had reached the stage of near-anaesthetic weariness I sought when, out of nowhere, a tropical storm blew up. The frail canoe was gripped by the wind and the current and in a few seconds we were swept right out into the main Congo River – a vast sweep of shining water all around and towering cloud above.
We were all awed at the sight, struck dumb by it. We stopped our ineffectual paddling and let the river whirl us on. We were impotent before its power. A man in the bow sat back on his haunches and spread his arms wide to the torrential rain. ‘Behold!’ he cried. ‘Look upon the greatness of God!’
I found myself envying his certainty. For if I had gained some comfort during these turbulent months of wandering, I had begun to lose something too: the belief that all this toil was supposed to bolster. I had encountered suffering on a scale that had not even featured in my worst nightmares. Children, wives, fathers, husbands, grandparents, brothers and sisters: no one was beyond death’s grasp. It was a perpetual echo of my own loss, but the full import of what I had seen was not fully driven home to me until I stumbled upon a tiny village called Ntandembelo, on the very edge of the rainforest.
I got there long after dark and the villagers greeted me with their usual hospitality. They sat me by the fire, brought me a bowl of cold water so that I could wash and then gave me a meal of tough chikwanga and tiny fish from the local streams. We then moved under the tin roof of the church, where I was told a number of local people would like to speak to me. I sat there all evening, chatting to one villager after another in the glow of a couple of oil lamps – people asking for news, complaining of illness, looking for advice on how to deal with a troublesome mother-in-law.
Then came a woman of perhaps thirty-five, although she looked older, burdened with the weight of care and grief. I never discovered her name. She came quietly into the open mud-brick church. It was close to midnight. The others had drifted away and I found myself alone with her in the darkness.
‘May I speak with you, Moteyi?’ she asked.
She addressed me as ‘teacher’. I usually tried to insist on ‘Richard’, but by now I was too tired to bother; so tired in fact that I had hoped to be left in peace. The church was no more than a tin shelter on poles with low walls open to the night and my ankles were being eaten alive by mosquitoes. But I knew she had probably been waiting in the shadows for her moment, and I didn’t have the heart to turn her away.
I said, ‘Of course.’
She sat beside me on the wooden bench.
‘I have come to you for help,’ she said.
‘In what way can I help you?’
‘You are from the Church.’
‘I only work for them, you know. I’m not an actual priest.’
I had meant the response to be self-effacing, but her silence told me she had no interest in such distinctions. In the light of the lantern I saw tears rolling down her cheeks. I pulled myself upright and listened.
‘I have brought nine children into the world,’ she said, wiping her face with the corner of her shawl. ‘Five of them are already in the ground.’
I said nothing. My own sadness illuminated her greater one with a stark clarity I had never experienced before. The endlessly repeated tragedy of Africa became, in that instant, personal to me.
‘I am a good Christian.’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Tell me, can the Church help me to protect the babies I have left?’
She could see I had no answer.
‘You know of the ngangas?’ she asked hesitantly.
‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said.
Ngangas are diviners and healers who use traditional methods in their practices – the equivalent in these parts of the South African sangomas. You might go to a nganga for a problem involving kindoki, the usually low-grade witchcraft with which many Congolese felt themselves to be afflicted from time to time. He would almost certainly cure you of that with a harmless herbal draught and a few words of wisdom. Or you might go to a nganga for guidance on more serious questions. Questions of life and death.
‘I love my children with all my heart,’ she said. ‘I would do anything to protect them. I could not bear to bury one more of them.’
I knew what she was about to ask and I knew what I was supposed to say in response. I knew at least what I was supposed to think, what any sane young Western man was supposed to think. I was silent.
‘Would it be very wrong,’ she went on, looking once more into my eyes, ‘if I were to ask the nganga to help guard my babies from harm?’
I stared back at her, struck dumb by her intensity. She was terrified. The hardship and danger I flirted with was her birthright. She had nothing but her surviving children and she knew as well as I did that she might lose them too. Whatever my devotion to this place, I could leave any time I wanted. She was condemned to stay.
I couldn’t find a single thing to say to her. Nothing I’d been taught to believe would be of the slightest use to her. No faith of mine could make sense of her and her nation’s tragedy. I had travelled hoping God would protect my family, but if he wasn’t protecting this woman or the millions like her, how could I dare expect special treatment?
Could I forbid her to go to a nganga? What did I have to offer instead? In the face of such desperation weren’t all courses permissible?
She read her answer in my eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She stood up and moved back quietly into the night. As she vanished straight-backed between the trees, on her way to meet whatever grim future awaited her, I felt my own faith tremble.
12
Bath, March 2002
The papers and reports that Will had given to me in Catford were stacked each side of my keyboard. I’d worked through them over the past few days.
Mike Heath, the pathologist, believed that Adam’s torso was put in the water up to twenty-four hours after his death. He estimated that what was left of the little boy had been floating in the river for anything up to ten days before it was found.
Tidal experts reckoned that it would have taken just one more day to wash Adam’s body out to sea. They were still trying to identify the exact point where he could have been dumped, but had only narrowed it down to a twelve-mile stretch of the river. There was CCTV coverage of certain parts of the bank, but without a specific focus, examining it would have been a Herculean task.
The initial Forensic Science Service (FSS) examination had come up with very little. The upper intestine was empty, which meant that Adam had not eaten for a while, and the lower intestine contained indeterminate material which had not yet been tested. His stomach contained virtually nothing, except traces of pholcodine, an over-the-counter cough mixture, and non-indigenous pollen residues. The Thames is full of them, but this provided an indication at least that Adam might recently have spent time outside the UK.
The body contained very little blood – none of which was fresh – owing to the child’s injuries and his immersion, which also made it impossible to test effectively for antibodies that could have indicated past illnesses and might have given a clue to his origins.
The FSS had Adam’s DNA, but he wasn’t on any known DNA database and no candidates had presented themselves.
A number of other tests were currently under
way. One was on what they called ethnic inferencing; another on the mitochondrial DNA, which, unlike DNA from the nucleus of cells, is passed only through the female line, so people sharing the same mitochondrial DNA must also share a female ancestor. Ray Fysh and the FSS team also planned to test cultural mutation against known databases, and were hoping to focus on the Y-chromosome in the male line.
Good old-fashioned police work had come up with some results on Adam’s shorts. They were labelled ‘Kids’n’Co’ and manufactured in China. Only 800 pairs had been made, exclusively for the Woolworths chain in Germany and Austria, where they were marketed as girls’ clothing rather than boys’. So it looked as if Adam might have passed through Germany before coming to Britain – but we were still a long way from pinpointing the boy’s original home.
Why would someone have placed bright orange-red shorts on the torso after death? Did the colour have any significance? If randomly chosen, they weren’t exactly inconspicuous. And why the river? Did Adam’s killers think the body would be washed straight out to sea, not taking the tidal rip into account, or was there some other resonance behind their method of disposal?
Commander Andy Baker rang the next morning to invite me to a conference the following month at the headquarters of Europol, the Europe-wide police agency, in The Hague. ‘We’d like to ask you to be keynote speaker,’ he said.
He wanted me to go into some detail on the background to this killing, and outline my cultural analysis. ‘I’ll say a few words of introduction. Will’s going to give a presentation on the police perspective of the case. Then it’s over to you. After lunch we’ll ask Ray Fysh to present an overview of the forensic analysis. We’ll fly you out business class and put you up in a decent hotel. It’ll be a chance for you to meet some other members of the team – and perhaps have a bit of a break.’
‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to bring my partner, Faith. She’s been following the case closely.’
The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London Page 6