The Boy in the River (5 page)

Our ragged little choir was led by a prancing
animateur
, a kind of compère. I was to learn that he was a party spy who would report anyone who showed less than total enthusiasm to the authorities. We concluded with a rousing rendition of the national anthem as the flag of the Congo rose up the pole. Except that it had mysteriously gone missing some time before, so we all stood rigidly to attention in the middle of the rainforest watching the whole process in mime. I later came to suspect David of having purloined the flag himself, though I could never get him to admit it.

The ritual was absurd, grotesque, laughable, but the consequences of not taking it seriously could be dire indeed. Perhaps I sensed the dark side of this picture even then. Once it was over, David hustled me through the dispersing crowd.

‘Keys to your department,’ he said as he unlocked a pair of blue-painted doors and swung them wide.

The ramshackle Land Rover which had collected us the previous day stood inside, leaking oil on the stained concrete floor. Around it were stacked boxes of spares, drums of oil, paraffin and aviation fuel, a hand pump, bags of hardening cement, bits of timber, scattered tools. The space stank of diesel. David kicked the nearest crate.

‘Vaccine fridge,’ he said. ‘Just come up on the riverboat. Need to get that installed sometime soon.’

I sensed a pet project. I had very little idea what a vaccine fridge was and no idea how to install one. ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Install that?’

‘That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

He stared at me for a moment and then gave up.

‘Staff,’ he said, and jerked his head to where an uneven line of half-a-dozen Congolese men in green overalls had formed up behind us without me noticing. He singled out one of them, a tall, wiry, glum-faced man of about sixty. ‘Tata Noah. Foreman. Speaks some French. None of the others do. Lingala or nothing for them.’ He tossed me the keys. ‘See you around.’

He left me and the ill-favoured Tata Noah to eye one another with mutual suspicion.

My life as logistics officer at the Bolobo Medical Centre had begun.

Sue and I learned quickly over the next few weeks. We acquired new skills and got to know new people. We both, inevitably, fell ill and got well again. We established routines. We began to find our way around.

Sue could not start work until she had completed an induction course at a hospital near Kinshasa, and that couldn’t be scheduled for some weeks, so most of the domestic work fell on her shoulders. There was plenty of it.

When we had first unpacked our things the house was covered in dust and grime. Fine reddish grit coated every surface and gathered on the skin. An infestation of small scorpions – rumoured to be deadly – meant that we quickly learned never to go barefoot and shook our shoes and sandals before slipping them on. There were other tenants, too: tribes of chunky chestnut-brown cockroaches, spiders the size of a fist, and dozens of brightly coloured lizards. Mosquitoes, the scourge of Africa, were audible everywhere and all the time, not simply after dark. I often only felt or saw them after they were withdrawing from their latest feast.

Among our more engaging houseguests were two enormous rats that lived in the wood stove. Somehow they would elude us when we or Tata Martin came to light the kindling, but they would always return to bask in the heat afterwards and pick up any scraps that happened to be lying about.

Our staple diet quickly became beans, rice and eel. The eels came from the river and had an extremely strong taste and texture. Guavas, mangoes, paw paws, avocados, bananas and pineapples all flourished within a stone’s throw of the house.

The people here lived much as they have always lived. They fished the great river from dugout canoes and hunted in the forest with spears and, for the last century or so, with muskets, often temperamental locally made weapons more dangerous to the hunter than their quarry. They traded where they could, carrying what few goods they had up and down the river to other villages by canoe or on their backs along rainforest tracks.

At Bolobo the Congo was some ten miles wide. In the dusty haze of the dry season it was impossible to see the far side, so that, as I walked along the shores in those first weeks, I had the strange impression of living by the sea. Despite its girth the river flowed fast enough to drag silt up from the riverbed and to make swimming any distance from shore very dangerous. An endless flow of hyacinth islands drifted past. Introduced from Europe a century ago by a homesick missionary lady, the plant had spread the entire length of the Congo, blocking travel even by canoe and strangling the propellers of the riverboats. Only the leeches loved it.

The encircling rainforest threatened to push Bolobo into the water. Trees seeded themselves near houses and grew tall within weeks. Roots wormed under foundations and forced open gaping cracks. Creepers snaked unnoticed up the mudbrick walls, and tore them down. Giant grasses choked footpaths and engulfed anything left untended.

The rain cascaded over the village from the forest canopy, driving down so hard and flooding so fast that the water carved gorges fifty feet deep in a matter of hours.

The larger forest animals kept their distance but exotic birds felt confident enough to fly into the village clearings. The colours were vivid and dazzling. I saw kingfishers of every iridescent hue, flycatchers hovering in brilliant shimmers and sometimes spectacular bee-eaters.

Nature dictated the rhythms of life. The days and nights were of equal length here on the Equator, whatever the time of year. There was a short dry season from mid-June to mid-August, when the skies grew misty and a delicious breeze blew up the river in the morning and evening. But even in this relatively cool season the temperature remained in the eighties by day and – exhaustingly – by night too.

Outside of the dry season the sky was clear sapphire blue. I’d watch the majestic equatorial sunrises and blood-red sunsets with a wonder that never diminished. During the day giant clouds mushroomed heavenwards as the wet land was slowly broiled by the heat of the sun. Then the air turned murky, the wind whipped into a ferocious roar, and within minutes rain lashed the ground. Then the sun pushed aside the clouds and burned down once more, repeating the endless tropical cycle.

Night was a clammy embrace. Our mattress quickly acquired a rank stench of stale sweat that we could never quite eradicate. We soon gave up trying, or even noticing.

There were no roads here, no signposts. There was nothing to tell you where you were; you knew only that you were here, now, part of the vast rhythm of forest and river. The people knew this and accepted it. They did what they have always done: build homes, have children; watch many of them die and a few of them prosper. They survived as well as they could.

And, whatever they told you, in some corner of their hearts they still believed what they have always believed. While most of the inhabitants would profess to be Christian, they’d still sacrifice a chicken or a goat to bless any new enterprise – the building of a house, for example, or the launching of a business. And everyone believed in the idea of
kindoki
– it was a catch-all for every manner of ills, anything, in fact, which disturbed the balance of body and mind.

Even though I was a Christian, I didn’t find these belief systems difficult to tolerate. I thought they were rather an elegant way of viewing a capricious and often dangerous world. Perhaps I was slightly patronizing about them. Killing a chicken was no big deal, after all, and anyway it got eaten afterwards. And the normal recourse for
kindoki
was to go to a local healer, a
nganga
, who’d usually prescribe some herbal remedy and offer the Congolese equivalent of tea and sympathy. It was no great surprise, given the power of suggestion, that these treatments were often completely successful.

8

Bath and London, February 2002

I tilted back my chair and surveyed the fields outside my office window. It was a cold, misty winter’s morning, still as the grave, and the dew hung in shrouds across the grass.

I now had my own library of
muti
documents in order, but getting other academics to cooperate had proved unexpectedly difficult. I knew that
muti
wasn’t a popular subject among researchers, but I was shocked when a much-respected colleague and friend suggested I should quietly sweep the whole thing under the carpet. He seemed reluctant to dwell on the darker side of anyone’s beliefs for fear of being labelled a cultural or moral imperialist. But the more I went through the research material, the more certain I was that Adam’s killing had nothing to do with
muti
.

I sipped my third coffee of the day.

The child’s blood had been drained. That wasn’t typical
muti
either. The killers had made the fatal cut with precision – even sharpening the knife after each stroke. Why? Why was that part of this grim performance so important to them?

Then, after he’d been killed, his limbs had been severed, with less precision. Was this to hide his identity? If so, why dress the body in bright orange-red shorts and throw it into one of the busiest rivers in the world, where it could be seen by any one of half a million passersby? A hare dashed across the winter field, the first movement I had seen in that bleak landscape. Though it wasn’t yet 8.30 a.m. I picked up the phone.

The Connex train crawled through south London’s dullest suburbs. It was raining. Catford felt like that kind of place. I walked up the slip road to where DS Nick Chalmers waited in a blue, unmarked Ford.

The headquarters of the Serious Crime Squad for South London was a low office block tucked down a miserable side street behind security barriers. I was ushered into an overheated, open-plan office with a score of computer terminals, only about three of which seemed to be in use. Paper, empty coffee cups, ashtrays and tabloid newspapers littered most of the desks. There were only half a dozen people in the room, all men, all in plain clothes. Two were calling crossword clues to one another. One of them gave me a rueful look and tossed the tabloid into the bin.

An air of stagnation seemed to have settled upon the investigation. I couldn’t claim to be entirely surprised. A few days earlier a TV journalist had called me for some background. He had told me that the Met were thinking about shelving the Adam investigation and moving on to cases with some prospect of solution.

Nick sat me down outside Will O’Reilly’s office. A minute or two later Will ushered me into his room. Behind his desk were wall-mounted whiteboards with procedural details of a handful of operations in coloured felt-tip. Most of them were crammed with information – phone numbers, photos of suspects, details of leads. All that was stuck under ‘Operation Swalcliffe’ – the codename they’d given to the Adam case – was a police handout with a picture of the orange-red shorts and a large question mark. Will seemed distracted. I asked him to rate the chances of a successful outcome for the case.

‘We’d have solved the toughest investigation in British criminal history,’ he said simply. ‘But Commander Baker is keen for us to give it a go. He wants you to join the team. And he’s prepared to resource the investigation if we can progress it.’

Baker was the Met’s head of homicide.

Nick Chalmers appeared and I pulled out my notes. ‘The more I look into this,’ I said, ‘the more certain I am that it isn’t a South African
muti
murder. And if I’m right, it’s likely that Adam doesn’t come from there either.’

The detectives exchanged glances, but neither spoke.

I went on to tell them that the people responsible probably came from the same tribe or ethnic group as their victim, and that Adam’s circumcision could help identify which, and that, in turn, could point to where he came from.

Will remained silent a moment longer, then told me that he and Commander Baker were planning on going to South Africa to see if they could make some kind of appeal and possibly even enlist Nelson Mandela’s support.

I read him loud and clear. They were committed to an expensive, high-profile initiative. Senior London policemen would be photographed shaking hands with the most famous man on the planet. And then I come along, suggesting that they might be barking up the wrong tree. ‘It’s got to be a good idea,’ I said. ‘Whether it’s a
muti
killing or not, whether Adam’s from South Africa or not, Mandela’s word carries real weight.’

Will stood up. ‘Let’s go and get a coffee.’

The coffee room was through several double doors and down a series of neon-lit corridors. Plastic chairs were scattered around a scored table. A draining board was crowded with ill-matched mugs. Will searched for a couple of clean ones.

He seemed keen to talk. He’d never been to South Africa, and he asked me about the country, its people and the local religious practices.

They weren’t heading for the
muti
heartland of KwaZulu-Natal this time around, so I recommended that they visit the
muti
market in Johannesburg. I also suggested that they visit a traditional healer, and gave Will the name of a prominent
sangoma
who sometimes received Western visitors.

‘And what about your witch doctor?’ I asked.

Will looked a bit sheepish. ‘Commander Baker rather took to heart your point about negative publicity.’ He gave a hint of a smile. ‘So we’ve decided to put that line of inquiry on hold, pending the outcome of more routine procedures.’

‘I want you to put what you’ve told me in writing,’ he said as we were about to part. ‘Give me a short report I can show to my bosses, stating why you don’t think the
muti
angle is right – and what you think really happened to this kid.’

9

Bolobo, June 1986–1987

David Masters didn’t give me long to settle in. I’d been in the job for about a month when he came bustling into the workshop and suggested it was about time I installed the vaccine fridge at Nko, some fifty miles away.

I felt a stab of panic. I’d just about got used to finding my way around Bolobo. I dreaded to think how the ancient Land Rover would perform on forest tracks with a heavy vaccine fridge and half my workers on board. And from my elementary studies in Lingala I already knew that the word ‘Nko’ meant something like ‘bloody minded’. It sounded like a bad omen.