The Boy in the River (8 page)

I glanced down at my lean, tanned body, the rags I wore for clothes, my bare feet. I thought about how much had changed for me. Within the space of two years I had married and become a father, had a daughter and lost a daughter, learnt a new language with such fluency that I had trouble remembering English, and immersed myself so fully in an alien culture that I wondered if I would ever be able to find my way back to my own. I sometimes wondered if I would ever want to.

I returned down the Sangassi with a few Congolese fellow travellers. We had been paddling for hours through trees that arched over the waterway forming a solid canopy overhead. I had reached the stage of near-anaesthetic weariness I sought when, out of nowhere, a tropical storm blew up. The frail canoe was gripped by the wind and the current and in a few seconds we were swept right out into the main Congo River – a vast sweep of shining water all around and towering cloud above.

We were all awed at the sight, struck dumb by it. We stopped our ineffectual paddling and let the river whirl us on. We were impotent before its power. A man in the bow sat back on his haunches and spread his arms wide to the torrential rain. ‘Behold!’ he cried. ‘Look upon the greatness of God!’

I found myself envying his certainty. For if I had gained some comfort during these turbulent months of wandering, I had begun to lose something too: the belief that all this toil was supposed to bolster. I had encountered suffering on a scale that had not even featured in my worst nightmares. Children, wives, fathers, husbands, grandparents, brothers and sisters: no one was beyond death’s grasp. It was a perpetual echo of my own loss, but the full import of what I had seen was not fully driven home to me until I stumbled upon a tiny village called Ntandembelo, on the very edge of the rainforest.

I got there long after dark and the villagers greeted me with their usual hospitality. They sat me by the fire, brought me a bowl of cold water so that I could wash and then gave me a meal of tough
chikwanga
and tiny fish from the local streams. We then moved under the tin roof of the church, where I was told a number of local people would like to speak to me. I sat there all evening, chatting to one villager after another in the glow of a couple of oil lamps – people asking for news, complaining of illness, looking for advice on how to deal with a troublesome mother-in-law.

Then came a woman of perhaps thirty-five, although she looked older, burdened with the weight of care and grief. I never discovered her name. She came quietly into the open mud-brick church. It was close to midnight. The others had drifted away and I found myself alone with her in the darkness.

‘May I speak with you,
Moteyi
?’ she asked.

She addressed me as ‘teacher’. I usually tried to insist on ‘Richard’, but by now I was too tired to bother; so tired in fact that I had hoped to be left in peace. The church was no more than a tin shelter on poles with low walls open to the night and my ankles were being eaten alive by mosquitoes. But I knew she had probably been waiting in the shadows for her moment, and I didn’t have the heart to turn her away.

I said, ‘Of course.’

She sat beside me on the wooden bench.

‘I have come to you for help,’ she said.

‘In what way can I help you?’

‘You are from the Church.’

‘I only work for them, you know. I’m not an actual priest.’

I had meant the response to be self-effacing, but her silence told me she had no interest in such distinctions. In the light of the lantern I saw tears rolling down her cheeks. I pulled myself upright and listened.

‘I have brought nine children into the world,’ she said, wiping her face with the corner of her shawl. ‘Five of them are already in the ground.’

I said nothing. My own sadness illuminated her greater one with a stark clarity I had never experienced before. The endlessly repeated tragedy of Africa became, in that instant, personal to me.

‘I am a good Christian.’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Tell me, can the Church help me to protect the babies I have left?’

She could see I had no answer.

‘You know of the
ngangas
?’ she asked hesitantly.

‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said.

Ngangas
are diviners and healers who use traditional methods in their practices – the equivalent in these parts of the South African
sangomas.
You might go to a
nganga
for a problem involving
kindoki
, the usually low-grade witchcraft with which many Congolese felt themselves to be afflicted from time to time. He would almost certainly cure you of that with a harmless herbal draught and a few words of wisdom. Or you might go to a
nganga
for guidance on more serious questions. Questions of life and death.

‘I love my children with all my heart,’ she said. ‘I would do anything to protect them. I could not bear to bury one more of them.’

I knew what she was about to ask and I knew what I was supposed to say in response. I knew at least what I was supposed to think, what any sane young Western man was supposed to think. I was silent.

‘Would it be very wrong,’ she went on, looking once more into my eyes, ‘if I were to ask the
nganga
to help guard my babies from harm?’

I stared back at her, struck dumb by her intensity. She was terrified. The hardship and danger I flirted with was her birthright. She had nothing but her surviving children and she knew as well as I did that she might lose them too. Whatever my devotion to this place, I could leave any time I wanted. She was condemned to stay.

I couldn’t find a single thing to say to her. Nothing I’d been taught to believe would be of the slightest use to her. No faith of mine could make sense of her and her nation’s tragedy. I had travelled hoping God would protect my family, but if he wasn’t protecting this woman or the millions like her, how could I dare expect special treatment?

Could I forbid her to go to a
nganga
? What did I have to offer instead? In the face of such desperation weren’t all courses permissible?

She read her answer in my eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She stood up and moved back quietly into the night. As she vanished straight-backed between the trees, on her way to meet whatever grim future awaited her, I felt my own faith tremble.

12

Bath, March 2002

The papers and reports that Will had given to me in Catford were stacked each side of my keyboard. I’d worked through them over the past few days.

Mike Heath, the pathologist, believed that Adam’s torso was put in the water up to twenty-four hours after his death. He estimated that what was left of the little boy had been floating in the river for anything up to ten days before it was found.

Tidal experts reckoned that it would have taken just one more day to wash Adam’s body out to sea. They were still trying to identify the exact point where he could have been dumped, but had only narrowed it down to a twelve-mile stretch of the river. There was CCTV coverage of certain parts of the bank, but without a specific focus, examining it would have been a Herculean task.

The initial Forensic Science Service (FSS) examination had come up with very little. The upper intestine was empty, which meant that Adam had not eaten for a while, and the lower intestine contained indeterminate material which had not yet been tested. His stomach contained virtually nothing, except traces of pholcodine, an over-the-counter cough mixture, and non-indigenous pollen residues. The Thames is full of them, but this provided an indication at least that Adam might recently have spent time outside the UK.

The body contained very little blood – none of which was fresh – owing to the child’s injuries and his immersion, which also made it impossible to test effectively for antibodies that could have indicated past illnesses and might have given a clue to his origins.

The FSS had Adam’s DNA, but he wasn’t on any known DNA database and no candidates had presented themselves.

A number of other tests were currently underway. One was on what they called ethnic inferencing; another on the mitochondrial DNA, which, unlike DNA from the nucleus of cells, is passed only through the female line, so people sharing the same mitochondrial DNA must also share a female ancestor. Ray Fysh and the FSS team also planned to test cultural mutation against known databases, and were hoping to focus on the Y-chromosome in the male line.

Good old-fashioned police work had come up with some results on Adam’s shorts. They were labelled ‘Kids’n’Co’ and manufactured in China. Only 800 pairs had been made, exclusively for the Woolworths chain in Germany and Austria, where they were marketed as girls’ clothing rather than boys’. So it looked as if Adam might have passed through Germany before coming to Britain – but we were still a long way from pinpointing the boy’s original home.

Why would someone have placed bright orange-red shorts on the torso after death? Did the colour have any significance? If randomly chosen, they weren’t exactly inconspicuous. And why the river? Did Adam’s killers think the body would be washed straight out to sea, not taking the tidal rip into account, or was there some other resonance behind their method of disposal?

He wanted me to go into some detail on the background to this killing, and outline my cultural analysis. ‘I’ll say a few words of introduction. Will’s going to give a presentation on the police perspective of the case. Then it’s over to you. After lunch we’ll ask Ray Fysh to present an overview of the forensic analysis. We’ll fly you out business class and put you up in a decent hotel. It’ll be a chance for you to meet some other members of the team – and perhaps have a bit of a break.’

‘There’s just one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to bring my partner, Faith. She’s been following the case closely.’

There was a slight pause, and I was suddenly anxious that I had overstepped the mark.

But then Commander Baker said easily, ‘Leave that with me, would you, Richard? I’ll see what I can do.’

13

Bolobo, 1988-1989

Despite the odds stacked so heavily against her, Abigail grew into a delightful impish toddler, noisy, inquisitive and affectionate. In mid-1988, when she was six months old, we took her to England.

It was our first trip out of the Congo and almost our first out of the Bandundu region, and it gave me respite from my doubts and fears, reminding me of how lucky we were to have Abigail and one another. There were new sights, the joy of homecoming, and the warmth of friends and family. If these influences did not entirely banish my uncertainties, they certainly pushed them back into the shadows.

We showed Abigail off to her relations, and then – one of the prime reasons for the trip – had her thoroughly checked out at a London clinic. It was strange to sit in a cool surgery, surrounded by gleaming equipment and crisply uniformed medical staff, while the reassuring London rain beat against the tall windows. I couldn’t help thinking of the last time Abigail had received any serious attention from the medical community, when she’d been wrenched into the world by the light of an oil lamp, while the rainforest screeched and gibbered outside.

‘Well, Mr and Mrs Hoskins,’ the doctor stood back and shook her head in admiration, ‘you’ve got a remarkable child there. She’s perfectly healthy as far as I can see. Perfectly.’

Abigail, at her most coquettish, gurgled up at the doctor as if she were as pleased with herself as we were.

There were those among our family and friends who urged us not to go back to the Congo, but we didn’t seriously entertain the idea of staying in England. That would have seemed like a capitulation to us and would have made Judith’s loss meaningless. With her death, Sue and I had given something irreplaceable of ourselves to Africa, and we both considered that we belonged there for the next phase of our lives. We had come through. Our child had come through. We had all three endured and we had all three suffered, but we were the stronger for it. We could have asked for no more potent symbol of that than Abigail herself: laughing, healthy and strong.

We returned to Bolobo in the same tiny plane that had taken us there two years earlier.

As we taxied to a halt, nothing seemed to have changed. The long grass around the fringe of the airstrip swayed in the gentle breeze. The cloying heat pressed in on us the moment the plane stopped moving. Children who had run from the neighbouring settlement were lined up near the plane, grinning and jostling one another. Our pilot Dan – sandy-haired American Dan who had co-piloted us the first time – killed the engine, and I could see adults gradually joining the throng. This time, however, the wary expressions had given way to huge smiles of welcome.

I grinned back happily as I scrambled out of the tiny cockpit. My feet touched Bolobo soil once more and I swung round so that Sue could pass Abigail down to me. When I turned back all semblance of formality broke down. People pushed forward to shake my hand. Some of the younger ones even threw their arms around me – a remarkable breach of protocol. Out of the corner of my eye I could see some of the women and girls jostling forward to see Abigail. They smiled at Sue and two of them reached forward to stroke Abigail’s cheeks.

I was suddenly aware of people reluctantly moving aside to allow someone through, and in a moment Papa Eboma appeared, smiling broadly. He came a few steps closer and cleared his throat, but if he was hoping to deliver a formal welcome his words were lost as excited chatter broke out once more. He moved closer to speak to me more privately.

‘Richard, you’ve come back!’

‘Of course, Father. Didn’t I say I would?’

‘Yes, yes. But people say these things, you know. It’s when they come to pass that you believe them. You’ve come back with your wife and baby when you could have stayed in your own country. Now we know you love us.’