Fullalove by Gordon Burn

has been torn away. But that was then.
    It’s now three years since Larry Brown, a policeman, was shot at point-blank range in a courtyard at the front of Orwell Court, a litter-strewn block of flats on the Suffolk Estate in Hackney. The man who ambushed and then killed him gave as his reason the fact that his girlfriend had dumped him the night before. He told detectives: ‘I blew your copper away because my girl blew me away. I just did it. The first thing that came into my head was to kill a policeman.’
    It’s much longer – almost eighteen years – since anotherpoliceman, Stephen Tibble, was gunned down by an escaping IRA terrorist on a quiet street in Baron’s Court in west London. He was shot twice in the chest and died two and a half hours later in hospital. (Helen’s hand, looming out of the blackness, securing a picture of the dead policeman, captioned ‘Victim’, against the photocopier, has something of the aspect of a blackened hand gesturing from a shallow woodland grave within earshot of motorway traffic.)
    Ronan McCloskey was on his fifth day of unsupervised duty as a policeman when he stopped and breathalysed a twenty-two-year-old man driving a Capri in Willesden High Road one night in May 1987. On the pretext of locking up the car, the man sped away with PC McCloskey trapped half in and half out of it. He drove at high speed for half a mile before crashing through a fence at the corner of Dudden Hill Lane and Denzil Road, NW10. Constable McCloskey was hurled against a concrete post and died of head injuries before he reached hospital.
    Half the thirty-strong A-shift at Chelsea police station were killed or wounded in the IRA bomb that went off in Hans Crescent, adjacent to Harrods, just before Christmas, 1983.
    PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death with knives and machetes during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham in October 1985. (An attempt was made to hack off his head, with the intention of parading it on a pole.)
    And at the sites of these and other police murders – Braybrook Street, Shepherd’s Bush, W12; Montreal Place, off Aldwych, WC2; Higham Hill Road near the junction with Mayfield Road, Walthamstow, E17 – permanent memorials have been erected in recent years: small funerary monuments of Portland stone and granite and white-veined marble; important materials in unimportant, sometimes tawdry, settings; desolate reminders of solitary death in bright hospital rooms; of sudden death on the pavement.
    Although there are people who bring them flowers, holly wreaths at Christmas, and small potted plants, there were always others who, even before the events of recent months, saidthe memorials were a source of negative energy which they claimed to have experienced as fields and waves of radiation and soft singing static. They believed there was something fetishistic or cultic about them (one woman told me the memorial close to where she lives had been put there to spy on her), and would cross the street in order not to have to pass too close to the bad juju they were generating.
    The first attack happened in April last year, in the vicinity of the stone erected in memory of PC McCloskey in Willesden: a young woman gagged and raped in some nearby bushes while walking home from a friend’s house. The second rape took place in a mews at the rear of Harrods, and this time a knife was used. The rapist struck for the third and fourth times in Hackney and Tottenham, very close to where the officers Blakelock and Brown were killed.
    The connection between the attacks and their locations remained speculative until the arrival of a set of pictures from the attacker whose existence has been withheld from the public but which I was given sight of thanks to a long-standing sweetheart deal between my paper and the police.
    I turned up at the appointed time at the enquiry headquarters and was shown into a cubicle room lined with battered file envelopes on industrial shelving and lighted by a huge