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

by Richard Hoskins

  She confirmed that she had bought the orange-red shorts, which witnesses in Germany had seen her eldest daughter wearing. She couldn’t explain where these shorts were now. First she said she had given them to a friend, then she said she had left them in her flat in Germany.

  By chance her former landlord in Hamburg had been unable to rent the flat after Joyce’s departure, and it was still exactly as it had been left when she had walked out. However, no orange-red shorts were found there when police searched it. When this was put to Joyce, she said that they must be in her place in Glasgow. But that flat had already been thoroughly searched by Mark Ham, Will and the team, and no orange-red shorts had been found there either. Joyce could not explain this. Nor did she know, she said, how identical shorts had turned up on Adam’s mutilated body.

  After the interview, and with the reluctant agreement of the Metropolitan Police, Joyce was released by the Nigerian authorities.

  30

  Dublin and London, June 2003

  On a hot midsummer morning, just after dawn, armed officers of the Metropolitan Police and their Garda colleagues broke down the door of a flat in Dublin and arrested Sam Onojhighovie and the woman claiming to be his wife. Both were taken to Dublin’s central police headquarters for questioning and their home was exhaustively searched.

  Onojhighovie seemed astounded to have been hauled in, almost as if he too felt he was shielded by some higher power. He denied having anything to do with Kingsley Ojo, although the latter’s contact details were found in his diary. He denied ever visiting London. He denied any knowledge of Adam’s murder, or of cults or rituals, and even denied knowing Joyce herself, even though he was or had been married to her.

  The German authorities, with the cooperation of the British police, began extradition proceedings.

  Two weeks later, police launched a series of dawn raids on nine addresses across London, a considerable feat of coordination involving more than 200 officers. Twenty-one people were arrested on suspicion of people trafficking, immigration and passport offences; ten men and eleven women. Two more were pulled in the following day. Nineteen of them proved to have direct links with Benin City. The raided premises were all searched and hundreds of suspicious items and artefacts were bagged and removed.

  Simultaneously, Kingsley Ojo was picked up by a joint force of Italian and British officers. Under constant surveillance, he had been followed to an under-age brothel in Brescia, which acted as a transit depot for juveniles he helped to smuggle into Europe. Some young people got no further than the brothel and worked there as sex slaves.

  Ojo was flown back to London and taken to Shooters Hill police station, the new headquarters of the Met’s southern area murder squad. He, like Onojhighovie, was thunderstruck to be re-arrested. He seemed to find it unthinkable that the police should be able to trace him and pull him in, even though he had made no attempt to hide his whereabouts.

  Faith and I sat in front of the midday television news.

  Will O’Reilly came out onto the steps of police HQ to face the cameras and field a barrage of questions.

  ‘This is the trafficking side of the Adam investigation,’ he said. ‘We have uncovered what we believe is a criminal network involved in people trafficking, particularly from mainland Africa, through Europe to the UK.’

  Shortly afterwards, Andy Baker also emerged. ‘Children brought into the UK on false documents are often used to carry out elaborate benefit fraud,’ he said. ‘Many arrive at British airports travelling alone, and once here they are used as slave labour, or forced into the sex industry.’

  Most of those arrested were small players and eventually deported after questioning. Several were charged and ultimately jailed for periods of between a few months and a few years for trafficking and passport offences. There was no doubt that the real prizes were Sam Onojhighovie, wanted for his previous offences in Germany, and Kingsley Ojo, whom police had already identified as the ringleader.

  Two Nigerian girls freed by the police raids told horrific stories of how they had been initiated into a cult in Benin City in a chamber draped with bright red cloth, forced to drink a potion and bound to the cult by secret spells and rites. They were told that they would die if they ever broke the vow of secrecy to which they had been sworn. They had to obey whatever they were told which, it soon became clear, involved enforced under-age prostitution.

  I got up and turned off the television. Moments later Will O’Reilly rang to ask if I could come over to Shooters Hill and take a look at the proceeds from the raids.

  ‘We’ve got a shed load of weird and wonderful stuff we took from these addresses.’He paused before answering my unasked question. ‘No missing body parts, I’m afraid.’

  Shooters Hill police station was an altogether more impressive building than the old Catford HQ.

  ‘Welcome to Aladdin’s cave,’ Will said. ‘Have a look at all the voodoo gear we’ve got for you.’

  He grinned. He knew I hated him calling it that.

  We were in a large conference room with a long table at its centre, heaped with exhibits in plastic bags – dozens of them; perhaps even hundreds. Large bags, small bags, boxes and bottles. Will told me that no one had touched anything since the raids. They had been waiting for Ray and me.

  ‘We know you get off on this kind of thing.’

  It took us all morning to work through the mass of material. It was an unpleasant and disturbing collection: powder and herbs, horseshoe nails wrapped in twine, bundles of plants, indeterminate pieces of dried organic matter, feathers, bones and a bottle of oil with a miniature cross floating in it. Probably the most striking object was the skull of a large rodent, probably an African cane rat, with a nail driven through it.

  Most of it was obviously juju related, and I classified it as well as I could, setting aside samples to go to Ken Pye for analysis. By the time we had completed the task our hands were filthy and the room foetid. As we were finishing up, a call came through for Ray Fysh from the Horticultural Society at Kew.

  Dr Hazel Wilkinson, the plant specialist who had been looking at Adam’s intestinal contents, had found traces of Physostigma, the Calabar bean. I knew it by another name: the ordeal bean. In anything but very small quantities, it was deadly poisonous. The bean was found in Adam’s intestine and not his stomach, which meant that he had digested it without it killing him. So he must have been given a very small amount, and some time before his death.

  ‘How long would it take to digest?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we reckoned the potion was swallowed between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before he was killed,’ Ray said. ‘But if this bean somehow speeded up digestion, it could have gone through in a matter of a few hours.’

  I could see that we were beginning to think the same thing. We agreed that before we spoke to anyone about this – especially to the press – we ought to do some further research. I called Faith. By the time I got home that evening, she had already found out a good deal.

  The bean was named after the Calabar region in West Africa where it grew, and had been used traditionally in cases of suspected witchcraft to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. It worked along the same lines as the old ducking stool. The victim was fed a concoction containing the bean, and if he or she vomited it up and lived, they were guilty. That was rare, however. Usually they died, which belatedly proved their innocence. Half a ripe bean would kill an adult, so whoever administered it could pretty well determine who was ‘guilty’ and who wasn’t.

  In small doses, though, the Calabar bean was known to paralyse the victim. It didn’t just knock them out: they would know what was happening to them, but they wouldn’t be able to scream or struggle. I didn’t like to think about that.

  One direct outcome of the Calabar bean discovery was that Andy Baker described Adam’s death as a sacrifice for the first time on the television news that evening. It was, I suppose, a victory of sorts, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I got up and walked
out onto our balcony. It was a warm summer night. A small child had breathed the same London air not so very long ago. He would probably have found it chilly, coming from where he did.

  No one had yet proved exactly what had happened to Adam. But in my imagination, as I stood on that balcony, I reconstructed his journey from what I knew and what I could reasonably assume.

  In my mind I found myself sitting with him in a stiflingly hot room in Benin City. What had they told him? That he was going to have a better life in Europe? Or had he been traded for the twenty-five dollars it costs to ‘buy’ a child in parts of Africa today? Perhaps they told him nothing at all, but drove him straight to the airport, leaving him to guess for himself how his life was about to change.

  Almost certainly Adam would never have been on a plane before. The flight would have seemed interminable, but I liked to think the stewardesses were kind to him, and that he dozed off before the night gave way to a creeping grey dawn. The plane landed in Germany, a country he had never heard of, on a chill morning.

  Sometime later he was probably taken on a ferry in Hamburg. He would never have seen a boat of such size, like a floating city. It was exciting. And his carers really did seem to care, though he had begun to notice something odd about them. They whispered a lot when he was with them.

  When the ferry arrived at its destination, two more strangers drove him away from the docks. Who were they, and why were they paying him so much attention? In a couple of hours they came to a huge city, and drove through endless streets to a house where he was told he would live for a while. After that they said he would have earned a special treat.

  He was kept in a room in that house for two weeks. It troubled him that they did not want to let him go outside. They always kept the curtains closed and the doors locked. He wasn’t sure about the food, either. Perhaps as a result of all the travel, but more likely because he was exposed to germs that were new to him, he’d developed a cough. It was keeping him awake at night, but his carers had brought him some good medicine.

  Then one night they drove him to another house. They seemed less gentle than before. He was jammed between two people in the back of a car with blacked-out windows. This time they made the journey in complete silence. His carers kept looking nervously around them.

  The next day he was given only water to drink. He grew very hungry, but nobody would listen to his pleas for food. In the early evening there seemed to be a lot of noise outside the door of his room. The door opened, and for the first time he felt real terror. For there in front of him was a babalawo, a gaunt man, half-naked and smeared with white chalk. He came into the room carrying a pot with a small spoon sticking out of it, flanked by two men Adam had never seen before.

  As the babalawo drew near, he muttered some incantations, took the spoon and gave Adam a black, paste-like mixture which made him retch. The two men stepped forward and grabbed his arms. One of them pushed his head back and forced a bottle of water to his mouth, to wash the black substance down his throat. The babalawo repeated the process twice more.

  I leaned against the balcony rail in the darkness. What had that poor child been thinking when he arrived in this city? Could he sleep that night? And on his last night how quickly did the drug begin to work, making his limbs leaden, numbing his hands and feet? I couldn’t dismiss his imagined face from my mind. I had no doubt that he had known something terrible was about to happen. The thought made me shudder.

  I turned away from the view, went back into the flat and slid the door closed behind me. I poured a couple of drinks. I could feel Faith’s eyes on me as I did so.

  At least I’d been able to do something, I told myself fiercely. Soon, I hoped, there would be more arrests, extraditions, convictions. Adam would get justice and I would have played some part in getting it for him.

  ‘Are you all right?’Faith asked.

  I looked at her. Was I all right? Well, yes. Yes, perhaps I was all right. Because if Adam could be laid to rest, then so could my own ghosts. Couldn’t they?

  31

  London and Dalkeith, July–September 2003

  For a while it seemed that they could. Faith and I were married that summer.

  After the ceremony we spent two blissful weeks in Europe, travelling to Perugia, Florence, Venice and Verona. In contrast to the time I had spent in the murky netherworld of the Adam case, the days now seemed full of sunshine and hope. On our return to Britain we sealed our good fortune by buying our first proper home, a flat with a view over the Thames near Putney Bridge.

  I felt I had reinvented myself and turned my back on a grim past. For her part, Faith had finished the research for her Masters, and it seemed a good moment to cement the idea that we could work together in a formal capacity as a husband and wife team. Our skills seemed complementary, and Faith had overcome her earlier reservations. The work we’d done on the Adam case was becoming well-known in police circles. Just married, and full of confidence that we could make anything work if we tackled it together, we decided to give it a try.

  I was unpacking, still very much in holiday mood, wearing shorts and a luridly coloured shirt. People had not yet discovered I was back in London and right now the only thing on my mind was finding my favourite CDs in the pile of boxes that blocked the hallway.

  And then the phone rang.

  The caller spoke with a Scottish accent, quiet and formal. He almost made me feel inappropriately dressed. The Scottish National Crime Faculty wanted to know if I would be willing to help on a high-profile case involving the murder of a child, which possibly had a religious aspect. If so, I would receive a call shortly from the senior investigating officer.

  Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie came on the line soon after. He wanted to talk about the brutal murder of a schoolgirl called Jodi Jones. It had taken place while we were away on honeymoon, and I had missed the headlines. Within a few days Faith and I were taking the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. It was glorious weather, holiday weather. We spent some of the time re-reading the case notes that Superintendent Dobbie had faxed us, which outlined the events with harsh brevity.

  Jodi, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, had been murdered at around 5 p.m. On 30 June – just a couple of weeks earlier. Her body was found off a well-used woodland path known as Roan’s Dyke, outside the Lowland Scottish town of Dalkeith. She had been mutilated. Some seventy cuts and slashes had been inflicted on her body. Murders involving frenzied attacks were not unknown to the police, but according to the forensic officer some of the cuts to Jodi’s body had been made, with apparent precision, after she had died. Rumours of the extreme brutality of the crime had leaked to the press, but no precise details had been released.

  I closed the file, sat back in my seat and tried to concentrate on the sunlit countryside slipping past the window.

  We stayed at the Balmoral, a rather grand old hotel in the centre of Edinburgh, and that evening we dined in the hotel’s dark, old-fashioned restaurant. We were to see the police at Dalkeith the next day. I wasn’t sure what that meeting would bring, but we were both calm and resolute. We were going to play our part.

  When the cab arrived the next morning we were ushered out by a uniformed doorman as if we were A-list celebrities rather than on our way to a murder inquiry.

  ‘Have a good day, sir, madam,’ the commissionaire smiled.

  I felt a frisson of discomfort. Everything about us – our clothes, our Italian tan, and even our attitude, seemed out of kilter with reality. We drove out of the city and into the wooded countryside to the southeast. Faith hadn’t spoken since we had got into the car and I felt sure she was having the same doubts as I was.

  Dalkeith proved to be an unlovely town built of grey stone. The police station was a squat modern block set back from the main road. The sergeant at the desk was a hard-faced man in his forties who told us gruffly to wait and made us a truly vile cup of coffee. He kept looking from me to Faith. She was wearing a red jacket and bright red lipstick and seemed to set t
he room on fire.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later we were shaking hands with Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie.

  He was just as I had pictured him: capable, quiet, softly spoken and as solid as granite. One of the most senior police officers in Scotland, he had been assigned to the West Lothian force to take on the highest profile murder investigation in the country.

  He sat us down at a large table in the incident room. A drowsy bluebottle buzzed against a window that looked out on lowland fields and farms. Rather to my surprise, Superintendent Dobbie suddenly stood up, asking if we would excuse him for a few minutes.

  I glanced around at the walls – maps and charts, large arrows and photographs, and several whiteboards with names and numbers written on them in coloured felt-tip – as he conferred with a group of officers in the corridor. The knot of men kept looking over in our direction, while Dobbie spoke earnestly to them. I had the distinct impression he was trying to reassure them about the bearded academic and his attractive young wife.

  Superintendent Dobbie returned to the table with several of his colleagues in tow. Within minutes the room was a hive of activity. Faith and I had taken seats at opposite ends of the table, and watched a large pile of material appear between us. Nearly everything was in clear plastic bags, and I glimpsed clothing, books and one or two items that looked stained, perhaps bloody.

  Finally, Craig Dobbie set a large folder down in front of me and told us that he was going to leave us alone for a while. He delegated a Detective Sergeant Campbell to help if we needed anything, and pointed out a small collection of books and papers, which weren’t sealed in evidence bags.

  ‘They’re Jodi’s diaries and some personal papers. I’d like you to look at them as well. If you want to examine any of the items in the bags, Sergeant Campbell will call me over and we’ll go through things for you.’