The calabar would have caused his blood pressure to rise painfully, followed by convulsions and conscious paralysis; his screams imbuing the magic with a rare and terrible strength. Then his throat was slit and his torment ended by a final blow to the back of the head. Once dead, the butchery began. The blood was drained from his body and preserved; his head and limbs removed, along with what is known in muti as the atlas bone: the vertebra connecting his neck to his spine, where the nerves and blood vessels meet.
The boy’s genitals, still intact, suggested that it wasn’t his body parts the killer was after. It was his blood, drained slowly and carefully from his hanging corpse. Adam died to bring somebody money, power, or luck. Perhaps the slave traffickers who brought him to London. His journey probably began when he was snatched or sold in Benin, and continued through Germany before reaching these shores, his final destination.
Somebody had cared for Adam before he died — there were traces of cough medicine in his system. Who knows whether he was brought here with sacrifice in mind, but had he not been marked for death, he might have ended up working as a slave, or as a prostitute. At least then he’d have had a chance.
Despite arrests in London, Glasgow, and Dublin, and prosecutions for human trafficking, nobody was convicted of the boy’s murder. Heldon had burned with frustration for months, but he had managed to keep it together, unlike others in the team. The three-year investigation had taken its toll on O’Brien, the detective in charge. He’d quit the force a nervous wreck at what should have been the peak of his career. Heldon had been his deputy on the Adam case; he’d seen the strain, the shards of paranoia puncture O’Brien’s hardman armor.
And now there was another corpse.
Aniweta was right. They had called her Eve.
The girl had been mutilated like Adam, her torso wrapped in a child’s cotton dress; white with red edging. Dustmen had tipped her out of a wheelie bin on December 5, four days ago, outside a dry cleaners on White Horse Street, near St. James’s. She was probably six years old.
“What can you tell me, Ani?” Heldon asked the san-goma.
“I can tell you that this one is different.”
“So far, forensics suggest that she was killed the same way as Adam.”
“Yes, but she is different. Powerful.” Ani nodded his head, impressed. “The red and the white on the dress are for Ayaguna. He is a young orisha, a fighter. You know him as St. James, and when he comes, he rides a white horse. Now she rides with him. He likes the girls, you see, he likes them young like this. Their blood is clean. This is strong juju. You’ll find things inside her: clay, gunpowder, silver, maybe copper.”
“Anything else?”
Ani, who had been staring at the stains on his tabletop, turned to look directly at Heldon.
“Yes, my friend, I can tell that you’re not sleeping well.”
Heldon was caught off guard. “Well, you might say I’m taking my work home with me.”
“Like O’Brien?”
“No. And I don’t intend to end up like him. But yes, this has shaken me up. I didn’t expect another one so soon. And then I suppose there’s the war.”
“There is always war, that is Ayaguna’s business. But there will be no war where this girl came from. She is one of their own. A peace offering.”
“I was talking about Iran, but yes, we think the girl was another Nigerian.”
“No, she is not one of ours. She is from the Congo,” replied Ani, with a certainty that Heldon could not question. “That’s where the trouble is. But for now there will be no war. She died to end the fighting. She will keep Ayaguna happy for a while. How long depends how well the sangomas know him. If they know him well, she will have died with six fingers and six toes. Her skin cut six times with a blade and burned six times with a flame.”
“If she died to prevent a war, why was she killed here and not in her home country?”
“The sangomas don’t like war. It upsets the balance. So much death creates problems for everybody. Now the smart ones are over here.”
“Makes sense. I don’t like war either. Okay, thanks, Ani. We’ll be in touch.”
Heldon returned to the night. The cats were gone.
Forensics showed that Ani was right. Mineral analysis of her bones revealed that she was indeed Congolese. The girl had swallowed, or been forced to swallow, a mix of gunpowder, silver, copper, and clay. She had been bound and stabbed several times, then scorched with a burning twig from the iroko tree. They had not found her limbs, so they couldn’t count her fingers and toes; but Heldon suspected that if they ever found them, there would be six of each.
African newspapers revealed that the Congo had been on the brink of another bout of bloodshed, but in the past few days an agreement was reached between the warring factions. With over three million already dead, you would think they were tired of killing.
The story hardly made the UK nationals; the situation in Iran was worsening, despite the fact that things in Iraq had hardly improved since the Allied pullout eighteen months earlier. And now they were regrouping, preparing to flex their muscle against a defiantly hostile Iranian leadership. The mid-term government disingenuously declaring that the opportunity for peace lay in the hands of the Iranians, not the combined forces amassing at the nation’s borders.
More dead children.
Rather than desensitizing him to death, Heldon’s work had revealed to him its full horror. He knew what a bullet meant: the torn, seared flesh; the shattered bone; the screaming; the smell of blood. He had no children of his own, but he knew that the statistics of war weren’t just numbers. They were a thousand Adams, a thousand Eves. Blasted, mutilated, lying in rivers, in puddles, in the arms of their parents; caught in the camera’s lens, denied over breakfast, ignored on the train.
As an inevitable war loomed once again, the antiwar protests had grown incandescent, seething with fury and frustration. Heldon took part as often as he could. He didn’t tell his colleagues, just as he didn’t tell them everything that Ani had told him. It was easier that way.
He didn’t tell them about his other research either. There was no need. And he hadn’t told Ani. Again, why bother? He probably already knew all about the killings anyway. They had occurred throughout Europe and Africa over the years. Many, like Adam, were for power. Terrible as they were, they no longer interested Heldon. He was only interested in the others; the others like Eve. They were different. And they had worked. The evidence was there on the record — brief respites in long histories of warfare. Powerful juju.
She is one of their own... different... powerful.
Ani’s words drove Heldon onward as he strode through the car park behind Kingsland Shopping Centre. Smooth, smothered by concrete, a no-man’s-land between road and rail. Few people entered the mall through this back way. Once past the main entrance to Sainsbury’s, the shops tail off into a mirror of what’s available outside on Kingsland High Street.
A gray mid-morning on a school day. Any kids around now are avoiding something.
Now she rides with him.
He found her under the outdoor metal stairwell. Hood up. Not doing anything.
She was one of our own.
He had thought about this moment over and over again. Can a death ever be justified? Is one unpromising life worth ten thousand others? If it works, then yes, it is. Suddenly, Heldon knew exactly what he was doing.
“Hi. Shouldn’t you be in school?”