‘I want to get a sunset shot,’ Petra announced, putting down her glass and breaking the thread of my insane reverie. ‘Palm trees and rapids. Richard standing by the Congo River as the sun goes down. You know the sort of thing.’
We all followed her outside into the hot dusk and, helped by security guards from the hotel, we lugged the gear across the road to the riverfront promenade. I went along with it, allowing Sacha to tell me what sort of a piece to camera he wanted. I no longer cared much one way or the other, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do, and I stood on the broken pavement while Petra framed her shot.
Mosquitoes whined of the riverside vegetation and the soft boom of the falls filled the air. The sky above the vast river was a brilliant scarlet, as gaudy as a parrot’s wing, and the mist from the rapids foated blood red, blurring the lights of Brazzaville on the far bank.
The usual little crowd had gathered to watch, laughing Congolese kids and passers-by, keen for any kind of entertainment. Traffic slowed while passengers got a look at us.
I paid no attention until an elderly Datsun pulled up almost at the kerb in front of me. The driver wound down his window and looked me in the eye, his face a mask of contempt. He spoke a short sentence of Lingala, then wound up his window and sped away with a screech of tyres.
Andy glanced at the receding tail lights. ‘What was that all about?’
‘You want a translation?’ I asked him.
‘Sure.’
‘He said, “You fucking Westerners. You’ve stolen everything else, now you want our sunset too.”’
At noon the next day I sat in the ruined departure lounge of Kinshasa airport and stared out at the acreage of tarmac as it wobbled in the heat.
I had found a place for myself some distance from the others, and I was grateful that they – sensing I wanted to be alone – had respected my privacy. I was depressed. I seemed unable to get my mind in order. I was in part suffering a delayed reaction to the riot in which we had all so nearly died. But the image which kept coming to mind was not the screaming aggression of that day, but the picture of Londres standing forlornly between his aunt and his grandmother, a tearful and abandoned child.
I was desolate at the thought that I had opened a window onto his old life, without being able to offer him any way of escaping through it. We’d got our documentary, but what good would it do Londres? For that matter, what good would it do anyone in Africa? We had raised the kindoki issue and tried to show it for what it was. But would it make any real difference?
I gazed bleakly around the terminal. It was battered and bullet riddled, the seats broken and the glass cracked. I had been through here a few times now. During the riots of the early 1990s, when these bullet holes had been made, South African troops with machine guns had guarded the place against rebel assault while I saw of my wife and child from this spot. I remembered too the very first time I had come through this building, close to twenty years ago, a callow young man from the Home Counties. Then, I had been aghast at the confusion, the aggression, the shouting and chaos, but also seduced by the colour, heat and din. I had fallen in love with it all.
Had it all been worth it, my relationship with this place? What had it cost me and those around me? What had I really achieved? Had the sacrifice been worthwhile?
I thought of my two girls, buried 300 miles north of where I was sitting. And then I thought of Faith, sadly packing her bags to go and stay at her parents’ in Devon, not quite leaving me. Not quite. Just during the week, I should understand, because I wasn’t with her anyway. I was off trying to solve the problems of the world, problems which no one could solve, not alone. I missed her desperately. I missed her comfort, her love, her companionship, her warmth and affection.
I swore I wouldn’t come back to the Congo again.
I’d had enough.
40
Devon and Sheffield, August 2005–2007
Faith was waiting for me when I walked through the barrier at Tiverton Parkway station. We held on to one another for a long time, oblivious to the people we forced to edge and shuffle past us. Eventually she broke away and handed me the keys. She asked me if I wanted to drive. Her voice was unnaturally high and she kept her face away from me.
It was full, glorious, Devon summer, the trees still and heavy in the afternoon and the air as warm as a scented bath. We got into the car and I drove a couple of miles out of town before either of us spoke again.
‘I gather you had some trouble in Kinshasa,’ Faith said, studiously looking out of the window at the hedgerows and golden fields.
‘Yes. A bit.’
‘That’s what that mysterious call was about, was it? Saying you were all OK?’
I confessed that it was.
‘You know the most frightening thing in the world, Richard? It’s getting a phone call telling you not to worry.’
I told her I hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time. Apparently she knew what had happened, at least in outline: she had shouted at the girl from the production company until she’d told her. Now Faith wanted the full story from me, but I couldn’t face talking about it at that moment and I said so.
‘We have to talk about it sooner or later,’ she retorted, but something about my attitude was confusing her. She decided to change the subject. ‘Dad’s in hospital,’ she said. ‘Nothing too serious, at least I hope not. It’s to do with his diabetes. But the timing’s not great, with the hay all cut and just ready to be brought in, and this is the first spell of really good weather we’ve had. David Wood – the farmer up the road? – he’s going to bale it up for us, but he can’t do it all on his own. Mum’s running the farm at the moment, and we’re trying to hire someone for a day or two to help get the hay in.’
‘No need. I’ll give him a hand.’
She stared at me. ‘You?’
‘Yes, I realize I’m a bookworm of advancing years, but I might have a few days’ honest work left in me yet.’
‘But I thought you’d have to get straight back to London after the weekend. What about your casework? You won’t have time.’
I had deliberately chosen the back road home from Tiverton. We were deep in the Devon countryside now, narrow lanes bordered by high hedges of beech and hawthorn, white cow parsley dense on the verges. I wound down the window so the soft air flowed over my face. When I saw the lay-by ahead I pulled over.
‘What are you doing?’ Faith asked slightly nervously.
I felt in my pocket for the police mobile, the one the new cases came through on. I weighed it in my hand for a moment and tossed it into the hedge. Then I slammed my foot firmly to the floor, the soft gravel spinning behind me as we pulled away.
Faith twisted in her seat and looked out of the rear window, as if she might be able to pick out where the mobile had fallen. After a moment she turned back to face me.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ she said.
‘I put the London flat on the market.’
‘You did what?’
‘Just before I got the train down here. I went back to the flat and I looked around and I knew I couldn’t live there – we couldn’t live there – any more. I called the agents and put it on the market.’ I looked at her. ‘I know I should have discussed it with you first, but somehow I felt I didn’t need to.’
‘No,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘You didn’t.’
We began work at noon the next day, when the heat of the morning sun had dried the cut hay. For hours I followed the tractor as it bumbled and clanked across the dusty field. The tractor was supposed to be fitted with an appliance for loading the bales, but naturally it didn’t work, so it was left to me and Faith’s mother to load the trailer by hand.
All through that afternoon I heaved bale after bale off the ground and into the trailer, then unloaded them again in the barn and stacked them eight high. Mice and voles scrambled away to safety and crickets bounced from under my feet. Faith kept up a steady stream of lemon squas
h and tea throughout the day, laughing at me as I wrestled with the heavy bales.
Finally, David silenced the tractor’s engine and walked over to me, his boots crunching on the stubble. He was a lean, thoughtful man of about my own age, not much given to talking, which was just as well, because his West Country accent was so strong I could barely understand him. We stood in companionable silence. The sun was low above the western horizon, and the first bats began to flicker from the wood.
‘You can’t beat it, can you?’ David said. ‘Working the land.’
The path home took me past the lake excavated by Faith’s parents, which was now well stocked with trout, close to the caravan where I had sat for weeks on end studying the Adam case. I stopped in the long grass, looking out over the lake and listening to the soft trickle of the stream that fed it. It was here that I’d been spooked by the Chokwe death mask. I had phoned Blessing in Lagos from that caravan, and briefed Will O’Reilly, and tried to help build the case that had come to determine the course of my life over the last five years.
‘Hello,’ Faith said. ‘You look as if you could use a drink.’
I hadn’t seen her, sitting on the bench by the water’s edge. There was a tray and a couple of bottles of beer on the seat beside her. She handed one to me as I sat down beside her.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’ I looked out over the water. ‘When I was back at the flat the other day I took a call from Nick. He’d been trying to get hold of me while I was out in Africa. They buried Adam.’
Faith was startled. ‘I didn’t see anything about that on the news.’
‘No, well you wouldn’t have. Apparently there were only a couple of police officers present. They wanted it done without fuss. They just buried him quietly in an unmarked spot in Southwark cemetery.’
I pictured a tiny grave, a couple of thoughtful policemen standing to one side. Adam had been buried not a mile from where his body had been found, in the heart of the grey city that must have seemed so alien to him. I wished he could have known how much effort the people of that city had made to find justice for him.
After a while I broke the silence. ‘David Wood just told me that you can’t beat it. He’s right, isn’t he? This. The land. The countryside. It’s magical down here.’
‘Then let’s find somewhere not far from my parents. They could use our help around the farm.’
At that moment I wanted nothing more.
Over the next year I combined work on the farm with heading up the religious studies department at the local school. And, of course, coaching the under-13 cricket team.
One afternoon as the clouds lifted and the sun eventually broke through, I stationed myself at the bowler’s end. The distant horizon was dominated by the dark mass of Dartmoor, the foreground by green fields dotted with English oaks.
Callum marked his run-up for the first delivery. Jack, the new batsman, stood back to survey the fielders. I followed his gaze. Anna, Jack’s sister, was at fine leg. Picking her had been controversial. The boys had muttered darkly about girls playing cricket. One or two of the more sophisticated ones thought it was political correctness. I enjoyed their mild cheekiness but I knew I was right. Her first over of the new season she’d bowled out three of the top batsmen.
This game meant so much to me. Here was a chance for these children to do something as a team. This was a place where they could find the space to grow and, in some cases, to heal. I had heard their stories. Many were, of course, from loving and stable environments, but few were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and some had suffered trauma, tragedy, abuse or neglect. A fair number were from broken homes.
As Callum thundered forward I leaned in slightly, keeping an eye on the popping crease. Jack planted his back foot firmly outside his off stump and cracked the ball square to the boundary.
Elated, I signalled to the scorers.
In February 2007 I was summoned to Sheffield Crown Court to give evidence in a case I’d worked on a few years earlier.
I stood to the right of the defendant, Martin Paul Brown, not more than a few feet away from him. The jury returned their verdict of guilty for the 1988 murder of Keith Slater. Brown was jailed for a minimum of thirteen years.
Had I really been any help to all the people who had asked me to explain these horrors to them over the last few years? I certainly hadn’t found all the answers. All I could hope for was that they would never stop asking for one, never stop being shocked. God help us all if we ever reached the stage when this kind of behaviour seemed normal.
After I left court I was collared by BBC Crimewatch, who wanted to make a special feature on how the case was solved. As I concluded the final interview for the programme I vowed it would be my last, and then slipped back to Devon.
For six years I had been exposed to the darkest underbelly of human nature. The cases involving children had left me close to despair. I needed some distance. Devon was giving me that. Faith was now heavily pregnant; I had a new life on which to focus. I did my best to ensure that the police and social services could no longer track me down. Enterprising media types occasionally broke through, but I politely declined all comers.
In the late summer of 2007 Faith gave birth to our son Silas and I felt more settled than at any time since Bolobo. Tucked away in our West Country idyll, I had successfully shut out the ‘madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ and it seemed as if my life was complete once more.
41
Devon, 2007–January 2011
The police hadn’t entirely abandoned their attempts to find Adam’s killer. With some audacity they had secured an early release for Kingsley Ojo, hoping that they could persuade him to work undercover for them. Although Nick and Will believed Ojo’s denials about his involvement in the actual sacrifice of Adam, despite his involvement in trafficking, they hoped he would take them to the killers. But for the next year, Ojo led them on a series of wild goose chases, then disappeared back to Africa.
With what seemed like the last throw of the dice, Nigerian police traced Joyce Osagiede in the spring of 2008. They interviewed her under caution, hoping that she might help them trace Adam’s movements during his final weeks. She gave them a lead about the boy’s true identity, and aimed the British police towards a potential new witness in Germany. It proved to be another blind alley.
With that, Will O’Reilly and Andy Baker retired from the force, Nick Chalmers was given new responsibilities, and it seemed as if the last vestiges of the investigation had melted away. Desperately disappointed, I withdrew still further from the world of murder enquiries. Teaching consumed much of my time, and the rest I was able to devote to family.
At the start of the new school year a notice appeared in the staff common room asking for runners to join the 2009 London Marathon in aid of the Joint Educational Trust, a National Children’s Foundation charity that places kids who are at risk of abuse, trauma or tragedy in healing environments.
I’d never run a marathon before. In fact, I had done little running of any kind since my schooldays. I was overweight, unfit and in my forties. But the aims of JET so perfectly matched the goals that had been central to my life for so long that I couldn’t turn my back on the challenge.
A few weeks later I was in training. I began to run to school in all weathers, along the winding Devon lanes, and lost four stones in the process. I’d discovered the ultimate stress reliever. I never ran to music; the rhythms of running and breathing generate their own entirely natural and refreshingly meditative cadences. As April arrived I was fitter than at any time since my first few months in Bolobo. I raised a couple of thousand pounds for the cause and managed to run the marathon well inside three hours and fifteen minutes, which guaranteed me a place for the following year. Running was becoming addictive.
The whole student boarding body was waiting up to greet my return to north Devon. I stood there feeling sheepish, sore and ridiculously proud as the pupils cheered and applauded. It was one
of the great moments in my life.
We moved into a house on the farm itself and added two Kunekune piglets and a cat to the family circle. I kept up the running and, of course, the cricket, even dusting off my boots to play for the local side.
Then, early in 2011, I received an email from an ITN address. A freelance called Rienkje Attoh had tracked me down through my former head of department at Bath Spa University. I emailed back politely, putting her off.
Or so I thought.
Her response arrived two minutes later. As the leading expert on the case, it claimed that if they didn’t interview me about ‘the sensational story’ their reporter Ronke Phillips had uncovered, the piece would be the poorer for it. They had intelligence from a key source, which supported all my theories.
I couldn’t resist responding: ‘Which case are we talking about?’
‘Adam.’
I sat at my desk and stared out of the window. It had been bitterly cold. Like much of the country, north Devon had taken a battering from blizzards and severe frost. Now it was as if a switch had been flicked and spring had suddenly appeared. I stared out at the mulberry tree that seemed to have sprung straight out of a nursery rhyme and taken root in our front lawn.
I’d already hesitated a fraction too long.
I knew Ronke Phillips, a highly educated Nigerian with dual citizenship, from the Child B case. As ITV’s crime correspondent she’d covered the darker side of London’s rich and varied multicultural criminal tapestry. A few days later, we settled into a café near Waterloo Station.
Will O’Reilly had called her. He’d retired at around the time I’d gone into hiding, but he still had sleepless nights about the Adam case. ‘It’s the one that got away,’ Ronke said. ‘It’s the only unsolved child murder in the capital. He knows they should have solved it. He knows they let one of the chief suspects slip through their fingers.’ She paused. ‘But I’ve found her.’
The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London Page 24