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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,