The Boy in the River (16 page)

Worst of all, I became conscious of colour for the first time in my life. For all the years I had spent in Africa, for all the friends I had made there, for all my love for the continent and its people, I started to see black people, and particularly West Africans, as a potential source of threat. I was furious with myself about this. I found it profoundly shaming. But whenever a man of West African origin got into the lift beside me or passed me in the street I felt my heart beat a little faster.

21

Devon, July 2002

The university granted me sabbatical leave ostensibly to allow me to continue my research on the Kimbanguists, but actually to allow me to concentrate on the Adam case.

Faith’s parents owned a fifty-acre farm in rural Devon, and offered us use of a cottage, so on a hot summer Friday we crammed ourselves and as much of our gear as we could into the Land Rover and headed down the A39.

Within a couple of days I had established my Adam site office – an old caravan in an orchard – and filled it with my books and dossiers on the case. Faith’s dad, a computer buff, amused himself by installing a phenomenal communications system so that I actually had faster and more reliable contact with the outside world from this tatty little cabin than when I had been part of the university’s high-tech network.

Faith settled herself in the farmhouse a few hundred yards away. Every now and then we would convene in the garden or at the caravan and compare notes.

Andy Baker’s prediction at The Hague conference began to come true. The occasional request for advice from the Met and elsewhere began to escalate to a point where I was more and more deeply engaged with the machinery of police work. I was becoming fixated on the role of religion in crime.

These developments were not altogether healthy. Nothing in my life had prepared me for continual exposure to such violence and depravity, and I was wrong to assume that Faith and I could involve ourselves in these investigations without cost. At the time, though, I was intrigued by the intellectual challenges that were being presented to us, and encouraged by our success in dealing with them. Every academic must wonder from time to time about the usefulness and relevance of their work in the ‘real’ world. At least we had no doubts on that score.

The stream of new cases began with an approach from the Norfolk Police. The violated body of a young woman, Domingas Olivais, an asylum seeker from Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, had been found in the River Bure. It was quickly established that the injury had been inflicted after death, and they thought there might be a ritualistic angle.

I could see very little sign of it, and told them so. I thought the killer’s behaviour had more to do with his own state of mind. It turned out that the woman’s partner, Filomeno Lopes, had strangled Domingas because he suspected she was having an affair. He’d dumped her body in the river, probably hoping it would float out to sea and never be found. A jury at Norwich Crown Court found him guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

My involvement with the case was relatively confined, but it indicated that the idea of ritual murder had taken root. A couple of years earlier no one would have considered it. I made a mental note to discourage the people I was dealing with from seeing it as exotic and bizarre, and reminded anyone who would listen that there was no need to invoke ritual crime just because the victim was African – or to discount it if they were not.

Despite the stream of cases, work on the Adam investigation remained my priority. Since Nick’s request a couple of weeks earlier I had been trying to find out about the cult to which Joyce Osagiede’s husband apparently belonged.

I’d brushed up my knowledge of the original Guru Maharaj. He was an Indian mystic who founded the Divine Light Mission in 1960. His son took over as head of the movement on his death in 1966, even though he was only nine. In due course the son took the title of Maharaj Ji. He was recognized by his followers as the latest
satguru
in a line that included Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Mohammed.

The 1970s was a vintage decade for mystical Indian movements. For the gurus themselves those years were good karma and big business. A few of the sects – such as the movement led by the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh – gained a high profile by attracting celebrity adherents, most notably members of The Beatles. So in 1971, hoping to carry forward the Divine Light Mission (DLM) on the crest of this wave, the very young Maharaj Ji undertook a world tour. He briefly became a controversial figure in the United States where, like some other spiritual leaders, he found self-indulgence more attractive than the self-denial he recommended to his followers. His tour was a financial disaster following a doomed attempt to launch the New Age at Houston Astrodome in 1973.

In the mid-1970s, faced with financial ruin, Maharaj Ji moved away from the DLM. In response, his mother back in India deposed him as leader. Maharaj Ji changed the name of his movement in the USA to Elan Vital, and associated himself with the realization of human potential rather than with the preaching of any recognized form of religion. Maharaj Ji long ago renounced his status as divine guru and now lives quietly in the States. Elan Vital has about 75,000 followers worldwide. The Divine Light Mission, which continued to have its spiritual base in India, claims about 250,000 adherents.

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 theoretically 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.