Elan Vital and DLM have some notable followers in the world of religious studies. I’d known for a while that quite a few academics in my field had more than just a research interest in their subject matter. Even so, it was a surprise to find quite so many devotees of Eastern movements behind the study doors of Western universities.
Was the Nigerian Guru the man who had founded the DLM back in the 1960s, or someone else altogether? There was indeed a Nigerian movement known as the Divine Light Mission, but the present Maharaj Ji had no connection with it, and neither had the founders of the worldwide DLM. The Nigerian group had merely hijacked the name, and the name of the original DLM’s founder. By so doing they had given themselves an instant – though entirely spurious – pedigree.
I needed a contact on the ground in Nigeria. My academic contacts there had proved less than helpful. They either ignored my requests for information or advised me to back off. There was still a lot of resentment about the Yoruba link I’d made, and some fear. I was given some strong hints that this line of inquiry wasn’t likely to bring results and was very unlikely to do anyone any good.
Then I remembered Afe Adogame, a Ghanaian specialist on West African beliefs. I had met him a year earlier at a conference at the Institute for African Studies in Bayreuth, Germany, where he worked as a senior lecturer.
I told Afe as much as I thought I could about the Adam investigation, about my sacrifice theory and the cult that Joyce was supposed to belong to. I left room for him to protest, or perhaps even to hang up. He did neither.
‘I’m not getting much help on this, Afe,’ I said. ‘You can see the problem. This is a dreadful crime and there are people who will use it to smear the good name of Africans generally, and Nigerians and Yorubans in particular.’
He recommended contacting Blessing Adekunle, a young PhD student of religion at the University of Lagos.
I was concerned about putting her at risk, though, and left it a few days before I set about calling her in Nigeria. This took the best part of an hour. Despite the worldwide advances in technology, things didn’t seem to have improved much in Nigeria over the last decade. I grew increasingly anxious as I listened to the symphony of clicks and buzzes, the repeated disconnections and engaged tones and call diverts. I looked out at my English orchard as the rain started to slap down on the roof of the caravan. The phone cheeped and squawked in my ear and I wondered if I should forget the whole thing.
Then, miraculously, I got through.
‘Dr Adogame told me that you might call, Dr Hoskins,’ Blessing Adekunle said. She had a quiet, unhurried voice. ‘He has outlined the problem. Of course I will help, if I can.’
She sounded both competent and resolute. The people I was interested in, she said, were evil men who brought shame on her country, and she would be happy to help with any investigation of their activities. I stressed that some of these people were potentially dangerous, that what I wanted was strictly academic research, and I could pay her only a pittance.
Just then Faith pushed the door ajar and peeped in. She looked uneasy. ‘You’re going to think I’m nuts. It’s that damned mask. There’s something weird about it.’
I’d never liked the Chokwe death mask. I’d been uncomfortable when Faith had seen it on a trader’s table in the Brazzaville market. It would have been shaped around a dead girl’s face so that whoever wore it thereafter might draw up the spirit of the deceased. It was strangely beautiful, but the first night we’d had it in the room with us we’d both had chilling nightmares. We’d hung it on the wall of our home in Bath, and occasionally, when I’d been working late, the thing had given me the creeps.
‘I put it up on my study wall when I unpacked,’she said. ‘And I’ve been getting blinding headaches ever since.’
She hadn’t told me before because she couldn’t see how her headaches could possibly have anything to do with the mask. But as soon as she took it out of the room, the headaches stopped. As an experiment, she’d passed the thing on to her mother, for whom it had no connotations. But her mother had started to have awful nightmares in which the mask featured, and now she wouldn’t have it in the house.
‘And she smells,’ Faith went on, ‘of wood smoke. She always did a bit. But sometimes it’s really strong. Almost choking.’
I didn’t like the way Faith had called the mask ‘she’, as if it had a personality of its own. That wasn’t something I wanted to consider.
‘Burn it,’ I said.
‘We can’t do that, can we?’
‘It’s just a lump of wood,’ I said with as much conviction as I could manage.
She chewed her lip. ‘This shouldn’t be happening, should it? Two rational people . . .’
We’d both been upset by the phone calls, the emails and all the weird material we’d been digging around in. That was natural enough. But if we started thinking like this . . . It felt as if we were giving in to the very thing we were trying to expose.
I said, ‘If it really worries you, and you don’t think we should destroy it, then give it to me. I’ll keep it in here.’
‘Is that a really great idea?’
‘We have to draw the line somewhere, don’t we?’ I said, rather grandly. ‘It’s one thing to get the creeps, but it’s another to start believing.’
Within an hour I had set up the mask next to my computer screen. I’d forgotten how lovely it was, with its full lips, slanting almond eyes and hempen hair. When Faith had gone I spent quite a long time admiring it. It had stopped raining and the weather had cleared, and the mask was framed in the sunlit window with English trees shifting in the summer breeze.
The phone rang, making me jump. It was Will O’Reilly. Professor Ken Pye had finished his geological mapping. A meeting of key members of the Adam investigation team had been called at Royal Holloway College to hear the results.
22
Royal Holloway College, July 2002
It was a swelteringly hot July day, one of the few England produces that reminded me fleetingly of the tropics. The train ground to a halt at Sunningdale. Sunshine on the tracks, perhaps. I hailed a cab outside the station.
The college is a vast Victorian red-brick pile set in extensive grounds at the end of a sweeping drive. I hadn’t been there before but despite my wanderings I still found myself standing outside Professor Pye’s room half an hour early. I opened the door on to a tiny office stacked with files and folders. A computer and two or three microscopes jostled for space on the narrow bench. Ken and his colleague Nick Branch greeted me warmly and we filed into a conference room where we were joined by Ray Fysh, looking as if he’d just got out of a sauna.
The police contingent was the last to arrive. Will O’Reilly introduced me to another member of his team, DC Mark Ham, who I hadn’t met before. Ray Fysh began by describing the killing: ‘Adam was held horizontal or upside down, and his throat was sliced in such a way as to cause maximum blood spillage . . .’ He put Adam’s murder in its forensic context and then indicated that I should take up the baton.
‘As I said at The Hague,’ I began, ‘I’m sure that this crime is strongly linked to West African religious beliefs, and that it was in fact a sacrifice—’
‘I don’t like that word,’ Commander Baker cut in. ‘I’m not comfortable with it.’
I’d known at the time that I had dropped something of a bombshell at the Europol conference, but this was the first time I’d been confronted openly.
Andy nodded at Ken Pye.
Ken set out the principle behind his geological mapping, starting with the basics Ray had sketched out to me in Holland. Every individual on the planet carries levels of mineral and other deposits in their bones which are determined by the environment in which they live, picked up from the plant and animal foods in their diet. Isotopic data testing made it possible to determine the levels of strontium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and neodymium.
Since every environment leaves its own unique geophysical signature, it is theoretical
ly possible to match the mineral content of bones to an exact location anywhere on the planet. Ken explained that isotope levels take years to change. He’d developed a number of specific tests which gave an accurate record of where someone had lived over a period of up to ten years. The problem was that whilst isotopic databases existed for most Western countries, only patchy information was available elsewhere.
He’d analysed the samples taken from three sections of Adam’s bones.
‘One thing we can say straight away’, Ken said, ‘is that Adam wasn’t brought up here. The strontium levels in his bones, and traces of copper and lead, are about two and a half times higher than for a child of the same age brought up in south-east England. The Caribbean and the rest of Europe are completely ruled out for similar reasons: his strontium levels don’t match. So we looked elsewhere. If Adam didn’t come from London or the Caribbean, there was a good chance he came from Africa. But Africa is a big place and the isotopic information available is extremely sketchy. The question was where to look. Initial indicators suggested South Africa, but that began to look less likely as the investigation progressed. Then Will told us to look in West Africa, where we do have some isotopic information.
‘Some places leave a more characteristic signature in the bones than others. It’s not always possible to be sure where an individual has come from. However, I am confident of our results. The West African information precisely matches the geological composition of Adam’s bones. Moreover, there are three relatively small areas of Nigeria that match the results very closely indeed: between Kano and Jos; the highlands towards Cameroon; and the Yoruba Plateau. The evidence points most vigorously to the last of these. With further soil samples from that area I should be able to determine within a very small radius where Adam spent most of his life.’
I caught Will O’Reilly’s smile.
‘We also tested the carbon levels in Adam’s bones,’ Ken said.
Carbon will show up after a much briefer exposure; even a short stay in the UK would have left its mark.
‘From these results, Adam could not have spent any length of time here in the UK. He might have been in the country for six months at the very most, but probably for a considerably shorter time than that.
Nick Branch got to his feet, looking slightly overawed. He explained that as an archaeopalynologist – a pollen archaeologist – he was more used to working on old cases. Very old cases, in fact, including bodies found preserved in peat bogs. Most of his ritual killings dated from the Iron Age, but the same principles of detection and analysis could be applied to modern bodies. He had found pollen spores in Adam’s lower intestine which could only have come from British or other north-western European sources – most notably from the alder tree. The fact that these spores were found in the lower intestine meant that they couldn’t have made their way in from the Thames after the body was dumped. Adam must have ingested them, and some time must have subsequently elapsed for them to have got that far down his intestinal tract.
‘This doesn’t help us determine the upper limit of his time in this part of the world,’ Nick said, ‘but it does give us a lower limit. It means that Adam was in the UK or north-western Europe for at least three days prior to being killed.’
A picture began to emerge of a child who had been brought all the way to London from Nigeria, and had been kept here for between three days and a few weeks before his murder. I think the same thought occurred to all of us at that point: given the meticulous nature of the crime, it was likely that Adam had been brought to London for only one reason. I was overcome by a sense of the loneliness of his final days, and I wondered at what point he had begun to realize the true purpose of his great adventure.
I wondered what else Adam might have ingested. If they could test for pollen grains, why couldn’t they analyse the other material in his gut?
‘I’ll avoid the S-word,’ I said, glancing across at Commander Baker, ‘but I think it’s more than possible that Adam was deliberately fed something. Victims are often given a potion or preparation of some kind before they’re killed, to make them a more acceptable offering to the deity in question. Have we had a chance to look more closely at whatever else was in Adam’s lower intestine?’
‘There is something there,’ Ken said. ‘But we haven’t completed our analysis yet.’
I told them that if Adam had been given such a potion, and we could analyse it, it might help us understand what happened, and why. If the ingredients were sourced from Nigeria, they could corroborate the derivation of the victim and killers. The potion could in fact provide us with the signature of the person who prepared it.
I explained that in Yorubaland such potions were prepared by traditional healers, usually after cooking them for hours in a small pot over a fire. These healers were the equivalent of South African sangomas and Central African ngangas. In Nigeria they were known as babalawos. It sometimes took up to twelve years to train as a babalawo. Apprentices were assigned a mentor, a senior babalawo, with whom they spent considerable time, often in the depths of the rainforest learning the ways of nature and the properties of animals and plants, perhaps studying just one tree variety, learning how to harvest its sap, bark, leaves or roots for use in medicine.
If a healer had prepared a potion for Adam to swallow, it would have had his own signature. The particular ingredients, the quantities and the manner of preparation would be distinctive. I told Ken I could give them some pointers; certain plants, animals and minerals which stood a fair chance of finding their way into the mix.
We concluded the meeting by agreeing that Ray and a police officer would head for the Yoruba plateau to gather samples of local soils, local foods, animal bone and tissue, and so on.
Andy Baker took me to one side before I left. ‘Maybe I came on a bit strong. It’s just that “sacrifice” is such a powerful word. And we had scientists present . . . I don’t want them to go bandying that word about to anyone who asks . . .’
23
Glasgow and London, July 2002
The police raided Joyce Osagiede’s Glasgow flat one afternoon later in the month.
It was on the first floor, up a couple of flights of steps. Will O’Reilly, Nick Chalmers and DC Mark Ham arrived with two Glasgow policemen. Nick thumped on the door. There was confused and aggressive shouting from inside, and then silence.
The police knew more about Joyce Osagiede than Nick had let on at the Japanese restaurant. Glasgow officers had gone to see her twice before the raid. Joyce had allowed them into her flat. They didn’t have enough evidence to arrest her, but while they were trying to persuade her to give a DNA swab, Jo Veale, a sharp-eyed female detective constable, noticed a letter bearing a London address. She memorized it. A few days later Nick and DC Mark Ham sought it out: a run-down terrace, the home of another Nigerian woman and her family.
She denied knowing Joyce Osagiede, but admitted to recognizing the woman in the picture from Joyce’s social security dossier. She said that Joyce had appeared at her door one day looking for a priest. When the officers pressed her for more details she remembered that Joyce had mentioned that she’d recently been in Germany.
Outside Joyce Osagiede’s Glasgow flat a decision was taken. The door was smashed open.
Joyce stood against the far wall. A big woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a baggy brown blouse and blue trousers, she was alone and seemed frightened.
Mark Ham walked into the back room. Clothing was tossed over the unmade bed and across the floor. There was a cupboard against the wall; Mark tugged it open. Tucked away at the bottom, out of sight, were some more odds and ends. He held them up to the light.
Their washing instructions were in German. Their labels said ‘Kids’n’Co’. Mark and Nick had seen this label before, on a pair of orange-red shorts.
Nick asked, ‘Can you explain where you got these clothes, Joyce?’
‘I bought them,’ she said. ‘I was living in Germany. I bought them there.’
&
nbsp; ‘Where would that be in Germany, then? What store?’
She looked from one to the other in confusion, perhaps trying to gauge the advantages of answering honestly.
‘Woolworths,’ she said at last.
Mark unearthed more hidden items of clothing, all with the same German markings.
‘Mrs Joyce Osagiede,’ Nick said, ‘I am arresting you in connection with the murder of a young boy known as Adam in London during September 2001. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
It was a long way from a conviction or even from a charge, but it was the first arrest and, after nearly a year of painstaking work, it was the first moment when everyone involved thought they might at last be on the trail of Adam’s murderers.
The police brought Joyce back to London for questioning. She clammed up at first and then began to talk in a confused and illogical way. The duty solicitor encouraged her to respond ‘no comment’, as was her right, and the police got very little out of her.
Now that she was under arrest, however, they did get an all-important DNA sample. Forensics got to work on it at once.
Joyce was taken back into the interview room with her solicitor the next morning. The detectives faced her over the plain wooden table. Nick Chalmers took the lead. This time, Joyce spoke more freely.
She said she was from Sierra Leone, but that she had moved to Nigeria to get married and lived in Benin City. From there she went to Germany, where her two children were born. She’d lived near Hamburg, where she had bought the clothes. No, she had never claimed benefits in Germany. She hadn’t needed to. She had lived with her husband.
The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London Page 13