rectangle window of wired glass. I was brought turbid brown tea in a mug with a faded Metropolitan Police badge on it – ‘The Badge of Courage’ the inscription read – and handed a buff folder by a detective sergeant whose ‘Sick bastard’ seemed as if it could apply to me as much as to the person in the smudges. It was a transaction loaded with these kinds of ambiguities, and I was aware of his physical closeness, of the close eye-balling he was giving me – on the look-out for some crotch action? any attempt to palm one of the slippery eight-by-tens? – as I undid the string-tie.
The penis in the pictures was that of (probably) a white male – the uncertainty was due to the fact that it was mottled, brown and pink; piebald like a horse. But the weird pigmentation wasfar from being the most distinctive feature: the shaft – and, in the later pictures, the glans – was pierced with bullet-headed silver studs, making it look notched, only semi-organic, and lending it the appearance of some kind of museumised medieval weaponry. The number of studs varied from picture to picture, but they didn’t keep sequence with the attacks. They shone with the same value metal sheen as the gold in the declivities of the carved inscriptions of the stubby, phallus-shaped memorials against which they were carefully, semi-erectly posed.
*
This square is a favourite route for taxis going in to the West End from the south and west. There is a steady black stream, sluggish and black as oil, conduited along the northern side and off into the narrow channel to Regent Street, making the turn at the exact spot where WPC Yvonne Fletcher was mowed down, shot in the back, and killed.
The memorial that stands here, the first of the police memorials to go up in London, is white with a granite plaque bearing the standard inscription ‘Here fell…’, with the name and date. After ten years, the white of the stone is so very white it looks like a keyhole of light projected on to the railings and the tough green-black plants ranged behind it.
Because it is June, it is too early for the overhead trees to be slaked with dust and particles of carbon, but late enough for the young, lush leaves to throw a cooling shadow, trapping the air underneath. Even on the brightest day the white stone to Yvonne Fletcher has the fluctuating quality of light flickering at the back of a cave.
It has not been violated. It doesn’t feature in the pictures. It is maintained in its pristine condition by a woman, a stranger unknown to Yvonne Fletcher at the time of her death, who makes regular expeditions from the small south-coast town where she lives to wash the stone and polish up the granite and set fresh flowers at the memorial’s base.
It is an activity that she feels no compulsion to explain. Attempts were made to get her to sneeze it out in the first monthsafter the memorial was unveiled, but she had made a commitment to remaining silent and wouldn’t be budged. And in the intervening years, so far as I know, she has been free to go about her janitoring undisturbed. But these are slow newsdays (Scott McGovern’s death is still pending; the story will be stale buns soon). The coincidence of violent death and violent sex at the memorials is irresistible. It is a story that has to be kept at a rolling boil. Sebastian-Dominic dredged up a recollection of the woman at morning conference at the beginning of the week. A couple of calls to the budgie at the bill shop supplied likely days and times. And here I am, parked behind the cool, stone pillar of a shuttered building with an unobstructed view of the Yvonne Fletcher memorial, poised to invade its guardian’s anonymity, ready to pounce.
I had anticipated that she would be approaching from Regent Street to the west, or Piccadilly to the north, which narrowed it down to three streets (and two pubs – the Tom-all-Alone’s and The True Sun, from where I haven’t long returned – a final adi ó s to the
The penis in the pictures was that of (probably) a white male – the uncertainty was due to the fact that it was mottled, brown and pink; piebald like a horse. But the weird pigmentation wasfar from being the most distinctive feature: the shaft – and, in the later pictures, the glans – was pierced with bullet-headed silver studs, making it look notched, only semi-organic, and lending it the appearance of some kind of museumised medieval weaponry. The number of studs varied from picture to picture, but they didn’t keep sequence with the attacks. They shone with the same value metal sheen as the gold in the declivities of the carved inscriptions of the stubby, phallus-shaped memorials against which they were carefully, semi-erectly posed.
*
This square is a favourite route for taxis going in to the West End from the south and west. There is a steady black stream, sluggish and black as oil, conduited along the northern side and off into the narrow channel to Regent Street, making the turn at the exact spot where WPC Yvonne Fletcher was mowed down, shot in the back, and killed.
The memorial that stands here, the first of the police memorials to go up in London, is white with a granite plaque bearing the standard inscription ‘Here fell…’, with the name and date. After ten years, the white of the stone is so very white it looks like a keyhole of light projected on to the railings and the tough green-black plants ranged behind it.
Because it is June, it is too early for the overhead trees to be slaked with dust and particles of carbon, but late enough for the young, lush leaves to throw a cooling shadow, trapping the air underneath. Even on the brightest day the white stone to Yvonne Fletcher has the fluctuating quality of light flickering at the back of a cave.
It has not been violated. It doesn’t feature in the pictures. It is maintained in its pristine condition by a woman, a stranger unknown to Yvonne Fletcher at the time of her death, who makes regular expeditions from the small south-coast town where she lives to wash the stone and polish up the granite and set fresh flowers at the memorial’s base.
It is an activity that she feels no compulsion to explain. Attempts were made to get her to sneeze it out in the first monthsafter the memorial was unveiled, but she had made a commitment to remaining silent and wouldn’t be budged. And in the intervening years, so far as I know, she has been free to go about her janitoring undisturbed. But these are slow newsdays (Scott McGovern’s death is still pending; the story will be stale buns soon). The coincidence of violent death and violent sex at the memorials is irresistible. It is a story that has to be kept at a rolling boil. Sebastian-Dominic dredged up a recollection of the woman at morning conference at the beginning of the week. A couple of calls to the budgie at the bill shop supplied likely days and times. And here I am, parked behind the cool, stone pillar of a shuttered building with an unobstructed view of the Yvonne Fletcher memorial, poised to invade its guardian’s anonymity, ready to pounce.
I had anticipated that she would be approaching from Regent Street to the west, or Piccadilly to the north, which narrowed it down to three streets (and two pubs – the Tom-all-Alone’s and The True Sun, from where I haven’t long returned – a final adi ó s to the
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