We stayed in bed kissing, touching, talking. Amaka told me funny stories from her childhood. She seemed to have been everywhere in the world, just like Mel. She asked about my life in London. She guessed right that I was a public school boy. I went to St. Pauls. She wanted to know why I gave up law to become a journalist. If I liked what I did. If, like her, I had come to realise that one lifetime is just not enough to be all you want to be. I cheesily asked who she got her button nose and pink lips from: her mum or her dad. Did she miss not having siblings? How many children did she want? We lay in bed, her head on my chest, my fingers curling her braids.
Between kisses, she made calls to try to track down the girl who had called her that morning. With each call, she spoke differently, switching between the way she talked to me, to pidgin, to a local language. She spoke quickly at times, almost as if she was upset with the person on the line; at other times she took time to ask how the person was. She soon became so engrossed that I had to let go of her.
I lay beside her, watching. She was about the same age as Mel, I guessed, but while Mel had a great job as an analyst in the City and a nice flat in Maida Vale to show for it, Amaka’s job meant more. The increasing worry on her face as she ended each call and dialled the next, was not angst over a half a million pound mortgage, or an increasing waistline. Watching her propped against the headboard, just doing what she does, I could not imagine her having enough spare time for things like exhibitions in Cairo, or retrospectives at the Barbican, or boyfriends.
I shimmied over to her, put my arms around her shoulders and buried my head in her neck. She shrugged away and, without looking up from the message she was typing said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, moving strands of braids from her neck.
She looked at me as she continued typing. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you start working on the story?’
‘How?’
‘Google Otokoto Hotel,’ she said, then she spelled it out.
The first page I opened had a picture of four shirtless men sitting on the ground in front of what looked like a decaying head set upon an upturned plastic bucket. I leaned away from the screen. Could that really be a human head? Who were the men? How on earth could a website publish that picture? I turned to look at Amaka. She was waiting for someone to answer her call. I continued reading, trying not to look at the picture.
A syndicate of ritual killers was exposed in 1996 when the Nigerian police arrested a man named Innocent Ekeanyanwu, in Owerri, in south-eastern Nigeria. He had a parcel on him. The severed head of a young boy, Ikechukwu Okonkwo, was in it. The police found the torso buried on the grounds of Otokoto Hotel, owned by a certain Chief Duru, a respected wealthy local businessman, and his gang was uncovered. Their business was the sale of human parts. Violent protests, looting and burning of properties belonging to the ritual killers followed, then a trial, and in February of 2003, the suspects were sentenced to death by hanging.
How many more such syndicates had managed to avoid arrest? Dreading what I’d find, I searched for ritual murders. The first five results on the search engine mentioned Nigeria. There was a piece on the BBC website about something that happened in London in 2001. I remembered the story. The police recovered a headless body floating in the Thames, near Tower Bridge, not far from where I work. They named the unknown boy Adam. They believed he was victim of a ritual killing. Forensics led detectives to south-west Nigeria. The case was never solved.
There were other stories about ritual killing syndicates in the country and in Tanzania, Liberia and Malawi. Body parts – heads, eyes, tongues, breasts – sold to witch doctors for up to ten thousand dollars apiece; tempting money in a continent with serious poverty. Apparently, witch doctors use the organs in rituals at the behest of their clients, to ward off misfortune, cure diseases, grant good luck and defeat enemies.
The more I read, the more I grew worried and the more I appreciated the vulnerability of the women Amaka looked out for and why it was so important to her to do something about this. How such a dark practice had survived into the twenty-first century perplexed me.
She crept up behind me and leaned over my shoulder to see what I was doing.
‘Do Nigerians really believe in magic?’ I asked.
She sat next to me on the edge of the bed.
‘Everywhere you look in Lagos, there’s a church,’ she said. ‘New churches appear every day. The people are poor, they are desperate. They turn to God for help, and when that doesn’t work, they turn to crime. The young boys become fraudsters, armed robbers. The girls become prostitutes. Some turn to black magic. Just like they believe in God, they also believe in the devil. God asks them to be patient but the devil says, “I will give you what you want; you only have to do one thing in return.”’
‘What is the government doing about it? Can’t they outlaw black magic, ban witch doctors, make arrests?’
‘What can they do? The police don’t have forensic labs like CSI, and even if they did, people don’t talk to the police. Most victims are never identified and the witch doctors do not exactly go about announcing that they use human body parts in their rituals. What can the police do?’
‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ I said.
‘A lot of things here don’t make sense. You know, it’s not just the people who kill that bother me. One of the girls I work with, let’s call her Florentine. She was picked up on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway walking naked like a zombie. She had been beaten so badly, it was a miracle she was alive. The people who found her took her to a hospital but the doctors wouldn’t admit her. They wouldn’t even give her first aid. They asked for a police report. They said she was either an armed robber or something of the sort for her to have been beaten like that.
‘Luckily for her, one of the nurses knew about Street Samaritans and told them to take her to our office. When I saw this girl, I cried. And I don’t cry that often. Anyway, we took her in. We took her to a hospital that doesn’t ask questions and we paid for her treatment. All through, this girl refused to tell anyone who she was, why she was on that road, or why she had been beaten like that. The gossip around the hospital was that she had escaped from a mental institution.
‘I needed to know what I was dealing with so I told her that since she was getting better, the police would be coming to take over her case. I didn’t have the intention of doing any such thing, but it worked. She opened up. According to her, she was a “guest” in a place known as the Harem, a mansion deep, deep in the forest somewhere outside Lagos. What she told me about that place still scares me till today. The Harem is a sex club run by some guy they call Mr Malik. It’s a secret affair. The girls are taken to the house in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and they stay there for months without any contact with the outside world. Big men, members of the club, go there every weekend to have their pick of a dozen or so girls.
‘Apparently, this Mr Malik pays them well. Some of them, when they eventually leave the Harem, leave as millionaires. But I can only imagine what they must have gone through to make all that money.
‘In Florentine’s case, she had a regular customer who decided to beat her up one day. He beat her till she was unconscious then Mr Malik helped him dump her body on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. They thought she was dead. So many bodies turn up naked on that road and people assume it has to do with rituals but sometimes it’s just a sadistic bastard who likes to beat up young girls.’
‘This Mr Malik, do you know him?’
‘Nope. I’m still trying to find him, and when I do he’s going to pay for what he did to that girl. I’ve already found his friend.’
‘The one who beat up the girl?’
‘Yes. I took care of him last night.’
‘How do you mean?’ I remembered she had been away during the night.
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you about it someday.’
Talking about ritual killings and brutal men filled the room with a heaviness. She had insisted that we could not see Aunty Baby till very late at night – I didn’t ask her why; I somehow already knew I would trust her with my life. She asked if I wanted to get something to eat. It was about seven p.m. and we had skipped both breakfast and lunch. I didn’t realise how hungry I was until she asked.
‘Yes. Should we get some room service?’ I turned to find the phone by the bed.
‘Nah. I’m taking you somewhere nice. You’ll love it. Then afterwards I’ll take you to a decent bar. Not like Ronnie’s.’
She winked when she mentioned the pickup joint. I managed a smile, but truth be told, I would have preferred to stay in the safety of the room rather than tempt fate in another Lagos night. But I could see she was excited by her idea, and when I thought about it, I still wanted to see the Lagos I’d heard so much about.
Amaka had sent her clothes down to the hotel laundry and they had been returned. She rolled up her blouse sleeves and left the top three buttons undone.
I chose a pair of blue denims and a white short-sleeved linen shirt but couldn’t help feeling that no matter what I wore, I would still look second-rate next to her. The last time I felt this way was back in school when, by some anomaly in the order of things, I found myself dating Betty Stewart, the daughter of a millionaire MP and also the most beautiful girl in our year. It lasted two weeks – before Timothy Spencer-Rye started telling everyone my father was originally Polish and Collins was really my mother’s surname.
We drove to a boutique hotel in Ikoyi called Bogobiri. In the small bar area of the hotel a light-skinned man walked up to us. Amaka was busy with the waiter and the food menu and didn’t notice him.
‘Hi,’ he said, holding out his hand. Close up I realised he was mixed race. His dark curly hair had streaks of grey but his clean-shaven face didn’t look that old.
‘Gabriel,’ he said with a wide smile. He had a strong grip.
‘Guy.’
Amaka looked up from the menu.
‘Gabriel.’ She practically jumped into his arms. He lifted her off the ground and rocked her body from side-to-side. From their excited talk I gathered that he had just returned from a trip to London, someone had told her he was doing something in Ghana, and they hadn’t seen each other in almost three months. Three months didn’t seem to me long enough to miss someone so much. I took a closer look at him.