The Boy in the River (3 page)

Sue handled all this much better than I did. A previous trip to Africa had given her some idea of what to expect. I had none at all. I looked around for the exit but the ordeal was not over yet.

‘Hey! You two – over here!’

I turned to Sue a little wildly. ‘For God’s sake – what now?’

‘Richard, it’s Customs,’ she said. ‘Just do as they say and everything will be all right.’

A bad-tempered officer in a sweat-stained uniform made us unpack everything. He held up our cameras accusingly. ‘Have you taken photographs?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘If you have taken photographs, I will confiscate these.’

‘No, no. We haven’t.’

He looked at us suspiciously, itching to confiscate the cameras, then laid them aside and rummaged on through our few things. The Land Rover driveshaft caused a good deal of mirth. Apparently this was unusual even for Kinshasa Airport, and we soon had a group of grinning brown-shirted officers examining it and passing comments – presumably unflattering ones – on anyone stupid enough to bring such a thing in their hand baggage.

It was Sue who finally extricated us: she gave the Customs officers a handful of absurd mementoes of London: fridge magnets showing Tower Bridge in a snowstorm that she had brought for just such an eventuality. The senior officer took them without comment and waved us through.

I lugged my half-packed case out into the sweltering night.

I looked back, still unable to believe it. ‘This whole place is completely crazy.’

‘After my last trip,’ Sue muttered, ‘I vowed I’d never come back. Now I remember why.’

‘You never told me you felt that way.’

She gave me a significant look. ‘Right now I wish I had.’

I realized she wasn’t concerned for herself; she was worried about me. I was still thinking about this as we stepped outside. We were greeted by a driver called Joseph, who piled our bags into a Land Rover and took us the jolting fifteen miles over nightmare roads into the city. Soon, we were installed in a second-floor apartment in the Baptist Mission compound.

It was a plain enough place, but it was clean and there was a fan, the lights worked and there was running water. Neither of us said much until we had got inside and closed the door behind us, regaining some semblance of peace and privacy. For a few minutes we busied ourselves unpacking, then we sat at the little Formica table in the kitchen.

‘We don’t have to go through with this, you know,’ she said.

‘What?’ I tried to laugh it off.

‘You were never supposed to be going into the bush anyway,’ she said, ‘let alone for two years. If it hadn’t been for us getting married, you’d have been working in Kinshasa for six months, and then you’d have been going home to university. Maybe that would have been OK for you. The way you were at the airport . . .’ She paused. ‘It’s not a competition, Richard. If you don’t feel right about this it would be better for everybody if we pulled out now.’

‘Go back to England?’

‘If necessary. Or maybe apply to stay in Kinshasa, the way it was originally planned. Look, it’s different for me. As a medic I was always going to be sent out into the bush. But that wasn’t what you signed up for. I won’t think badly of you. You know that. But we have to be a bit sensible.’

We said no more about it that night, but went to bed early and clung together in the stifling darkness, listening to the sirens and horns of this alien city. There was another sound too, the dull, insistent rumble of the Congo River.

In the daylight, some of the jaggedness had faded. It helped that the Baptist Mission compound occupied one of the most spectacular sites in Kinshasa. It was perched on the banks of the Congo, just above the start of those awesome rapids down which the river plunges for 400 miles on its way to the sea – rapids which to this day no one has conquered. Rainbow curtains of mist hung in the harsh sunlight above the falls.

We didn’t have time for the sights of Kinshasa just yet, though. We had a meeting with Andrew North, the Church’s head of logistics, whose office was inside the compound not far from our apartment block. I hoped, I suppose, for some encouragement after the bruising my ego had taken the night before.

His office and the lock-up next to it certainly looked the part. There was a Land Rover parked in the garage area and the floor and shelves were piled with bits of machinery, tools, drums of fuel and boxes of medical supplies. I proudly added my much-travelled driveshaft to the collection.

The office itself was dominated by Andrew’s enormous kidney-shaped desk made of local wenge hardwood. On the wall hung a huge coloured map of the Upper Congo region, marked with villages, airstrips and tracks. Such maps, I was to learn, were worth several times their weight in gold, as Mobutu restricted their distribution for security reasons. There was also a CB radio, yellowing lists of call-codes pinned up above it, a fan circling lazily overhead and an impressive safe.

Andrew North was a big, dark-haired, lugubrious man with heavy glasses, rather formally dressed in slacks and a light blue bush shirt. He was in his thirties and fairly recently married.

‘If you’d taken the original job you were offered, here in Kinshasa,’ he told me, ‘I’d have handed over to you by now and be back home.’

I knew he wasn’t impressed with what he saw of me. I was obviously a complete greenhorn, and he took it as an insult that someone so utterly inexperienced should be sent to tackle problems ‘up country’, where life was thought to be a hundred times harder than in Kinshasa.

‘Don’t be afraid to say so if you can’t make it work up there.’ He looked hard at me through his heavy, dark-rimmed glasses.

It was clear that he didn’t think I’d last two weeks. I felt myself bridle, but managed to thank him for his advice and quickly changed the subject.

‘While we’re here in the city,’ I said, ‘we’d like to pick up some stuff at the Kinshasa market. I’ve read you can make your own water filter with a couple of plastic buckets and—’

He stared at me through his terrifying glasses. ‘You want to go to the Kinshasa market?’

‘Yes, apparently it’s a good place for—’

‘It’s not a good place for anything,’ he snapped. ‘You’d be mad to go there. None of us ever does.’

‘But we need some rice and some lamps and some other provisions,’ Sue said. ‘We heard you could get all that there.’

‘Yes, you can get all that,’ Andrew said abruptly and looked back at me. ‘You can also get your wife kidnapped.’

‘Kidnapped?’

‘And sold into white slavery. She’ll end up in some market in Dubai. You obviously don’t know what you’re suggesting.’

‘I want to go to the Kinshasa market,’ I said in a reasonably steady voice. ‘We both do.’

He glared at me for a moment.

‘All right,’ he said, with a sigh of resignation. ‘On your own heads be it. At least I can send a Congolese driver to pick you up.’

‘
M’sieur
! You like monkey?’ A toothless man grinned at us over his blood-spattered table, holding up some indescribable gobbet of meat, black with flies. ‘Try a bit of this one! Very tender! Or maybe you want crocodile?’

People crowded around us, shoving and shouting, thrusting fruit, vegetables, handicrafts and pots at us.

‘I’m not sure this was such a good idea,’ Sue said anxiously as we shouldered our way through the mêlée. ‘Maybe we’ve seen enough.’

‘I want my plastic buckets,’ I said.

Everything was for sale here: every shape and colour of vegetable and fruit; the butchered remains of goats and cows and forest animals I couldn’t identify; cheap tin household goods; sacks of grain; bundles of herbs; tools; bolts of brilliant cloth; bicycle components; fish and eels; carvings; sandals cut from truck tyres. Traders sold roasted maize, slices of cooked fish on skewers and globules of flour fried in palm nut oil called
minkati
– sweet, tasty and very, very unhealthy.

The din was deafening and the smells exotic, pungent and often revolting.

But I loved it.

Sue – unflappable until that moment – did not. She had an urge to be gone, especially once we had bought a couple of hurricane lamps and some rice. Although I was just as intimidated as she was by the seething throng, I glimpsed for the first time the adventure I had come for.

‘Do you have plastic buckets?’ I shouted across at one stallholder.

‘Of course,
M’sieur
! All sizes! All colours! Very fine.’

‘Good,’ I said, triumphantly. ‘I want two. Big red ones.’

Kinshasa at the time was something of a halfway house between the West and the heart of Africa and not yet the hellhole it has since become. If it was pretty rough around the edges, it did have electricity most of the time and running water, which was sometimes clean. It boasted some impressive buildings, stores and shops that actually had stock to sell, as well as truly chaotic traffic. The famous boulevard built by the Belgians along the south bank of the Congo was grand, sweeping and shaded by fine trees, and well-dressed people promenaded along it every evening with something approaching elegance.

We had been invited to swim at the British Embassy pool, a favourite haunt for expatriates at the weekend. The terrace was crowded with white people lounging on sunbeds and sitting around the metal tables while their children splashed and screamed.

‘First time in Kin?’ a man from British American Tobacco asked me, sipping Heineken from the bottle.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Poor old you.’ He gave me the kindly-wise look I soon grew to detest. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find there’s bugger all you can do to help these people. Won’t help themselves, you see? You’ll find out what I mean when you’ve been here as long as I have.’

It struck me as intriguing that a man from a tobacco company was concerned with helping anyone.

‘Going up country, are you?’ a red-faced Scots engineer exclaimed, joining the group. ‘Well, bloody good luck to you is all I can say. It’s dreadful up there in the villages. The whole country is a complete bloody shambles. I don’t know why we bother with it.’

‘Why are you here if you hate it so much?’

‘Dunno. Beats me most of the time. But have you been to Glasgow recently?’

I was later to discover that most people who spoke with such world-weariness of the hardships of the bush never got out of Kinshasa. Quite a few of them never moved further than the security fences of their own compounds.

Even at the time I wasn’t convinced by the knowing glances they exchanged, and the endlessly repeated advice about what you couldn’t do – trust anyone, eat the local food, expect to achieve anything. I hadn’t come to Africa for this.

5

Bath, February 2002

A little before noon on my next free day – a Wednesday – the anonymous silver police car drew up again. The detectives had come to the house this time.

DI O’Reilly had a new companion, Detective Sergeant Nick Chalmers. Nick was taller than Will and slighter and younger. When he spoke it was as if he were measuring the weight of each word.

We decided to go straight to lunch.

‘Someone has clearly handled this killing with great care,’ I said. ‘That may sound like a bizarre way of putting it, but it’s extremely important. It’s also a bit puzzling.’

‘Puzzling? Why?’ Will’s coffee sat untouched before him.

‘Because when body parts are needed as ingredients for
muti
medicine, there is usually no need for any great precision in their removal. In
muti
murders, parts are taken from dead bodies, or even while the victim is still alive. Either way, they don’t need to be removed with precision. I know this sounds pretty horrible, but there are even people who believe that the medicine is empowered by the victim’s screams. I know of a case in South Africa where a woman remained alive for more than two hours. They started by slicing off her breasts.’

Will was visibly shaken. I realized that whatever atrocities these men might have encountered in their day-to-day activities, we were now entering a different world.

‘Adam’s neck wound is precise, and it killed him. If this was
muti
, I would have expected them to start chopping pieces off him while he was still alive, and, when he finally died, to take not only his head but his internal organs and genitalia too.’ I told them I wanted to do some more work on the manner of death, and on his circumcision.

Will agreed, then began toying with his coffee spoon. He shifted in his seat. ‘You probably know that the police sometimes use mediums. To help locate bodies and so on. Not everyone agrees with doing it, but . . . Well, what we want to know is, what would you think of us going to an African witch doctor to see if we could get him to find out who did it? My boss Commander Baker wants to know if you think we should. And, if so, how would we go about it?’

I could see why Will was uncomfortable, imagining how a tabloid newspaper might report such a move. Until that point, I’m not sure I’d understood quite how far they were prepared to go to find justice for this unknown boy.

6

Bolobo, April 1986

‘How are we going to get all our gear in?’ I eyed the Cessna’s under-slung luggage pod, considerably smaller than the average car boot.

‘Yeah, that could be a challenge,’ the pilot said. ‘But don’t worry, anything that doesn’t fit can come up by riverboat.’

‘How long’s that going to take?’

‘Oh, not more than a few weeks.’

In the event, there was only room for a suitcase and a bag in the hold. Everything else – our rice, most of our clothes, many of our books – would meander after us along 300 miles of the River Congo. I had one small victory: I managed to hang on to my red plastic buckets.

The tiny plane bumbled along the potholed tarmac and lifted uncertainly off the ground. Although Sue and I were crammed closely together in the back of the cabin, the din of the engine was so deafening that conversation was virtually impossible.

Within minutes we were out over the vast Malebo Pool. The Pool marks the point at which the river disgorges from a narrow gap in the Bateki Plateau to the north, before being sucked into the rapids below Kinshasa, which we had seen and heard from the Baptist Mission.