“You are from the police?” he asked by way of confirming that some moulting tramp hadn’t simply wandered into the offices of GRAF magazine by mistake.
“You spoke to my sergeant,” Bryant confirmed. “I require fifteen minutes of your time, no more.”
Stamos led the way to a graceful white box with free-floating backlit walls and chocolate leather sofas. “Perhaps you’ll find this a little more comfortable.” He indicated a seat partially occupied by Lazarus, his snuffling Vietnamese potbellied pig, a retro-eighties pet accoutrement currently favoured by style gurus all over Hoxton.
“My sergeant tells me you’re the country’s leading expert on graffiti.”
“Street art is a movement with its roots in folklore. It protests against the system and creates beauty from dereliction.”
“It’s also illegal.” Bryant hefted the glossy fat copy of GRAF, flicking past the slick ads for Land Rover, Nike, and Nokia. “I can’t believe this retails at twenty quid a copy.”
Stamos decided he was dealing with an idiot. “It’s bought by art directors, fashion photographers, music video producers – they’re not buying it with their own money.”
“The examples of art in here are very beautiful,” admitted Bryant.
“They fetch high prices, too. Many artists have become highly collectible.”
“But their work is not what I see on the street.”
“No, ninety percent of that is admittedly bad. Tagging, piecing, and bombing over each other on trains and scratching on windows, that’s not the real stuff. Graffiti is about possession and ownership, making a name for yourself.”
“You said this was art from the street, but your magazine shows work in galleries and is full of ads placed by corporations. You’re encouraging kids without training to make the environment even more polluted, threatening, and ugly.”
“Who’s to decide what’s ugly?” said Stamos hotly. “Those seethrough posters for underwear that cover the backs of busses? That’s just corporate crap. Is graffiti any more of an urban blight than advertising? Public spaces are tightly controlled by capitalist interests. Unless you’re rich, access to public walls is blocked, and if you do get into a public space, chances are you have to be selling something. The average London resident is subjected to hundreds of ads every day, and at least ten percent of them are illegally sited. Graffiti is social communication from the heart. It creates folklore because every act of tagging has its own dramatic story of why and how it was sprayed.”
“Yes, I saw what kids did to the Olton Hall,” said Bryant. Graffiti artists had spray-painted several carriages of the elegant old Scarborough-to-York steam train, wrecking it and earning the outraged hatred of the public.
“Yeah, you can’t buy publicity like that.”
“Perhaps not, but your advertisers can discreetly sponsor it in your magazine.”
Stamos sighed. “No-one’s denying that the media is complicit. They see it as shorthand for cool. I presume you didn’t come here to give me a lecture on morality, Mr Bryant.”
“If I gave you a lecture, it would be on hypocrisy, Mr Stamos. Can you identify particular kinds of graffiti?” Bryant opened his scarred leather briefcase and pulled out the photographs Banbury had taken at the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. “I need to understand what these mean.”
“Graffiti means ‘little scratches,’ from the Italian graffiare, but it’s also from the Greek word graphein, meaning ‘to write’,” said Stamos, surveying the pictures. “Examples have been uncovered in Pompeii. Much of it was political, related to specific social events, and usually appeared under authoritarian governments. The state removes such graffiti in order to depoliticise the marginalised. After this, you get personalised graffiti, racial and sexual slurs from men, very little from females. Gang graffiti hit-ups convey identity and territorial supremacy. What you have here is the most common kind of graffiti, tagging, which began at the end of the sixties and is largely associated with hip-hop culture. The idea is to get up in as many places as possible to establish territorial rights. This is from central London, north side of the river, right?” Stamos examined each shot carefully. “Police try to create links between taggers and organised crime, carjacking, drug use, but in truth there are rarely any at all. You’ve got tagging and piecing here.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Tagging only takes a few seconds – it’s about sticking your signature somewhere. Piecing is rarer and altogether more elaborate. You can trace it back to the artist more easily, and it requires a lot more talent. It started within black subcultures but has moved out into a white middle-class arena.”
“Can you identify the gentlemen behind these markings?”
“That’s harder. Artists frequently change their tags. Not that they’re worried about getting caught; it only means a bit of community service, repairing bikes, folding leaflets, or power-jetting walls. But there are some telltale symbols here. What are you expecting to find?”
“My partner has a suspicion that the boys who created these signs may be involved in a number of serious crimes,” Bryant explained.
“I don’t think so. These elaborate arrows here? They indicate territory. These numbers, one eighty-seven, refer to the Californian penal code for murder. The large red-coloured K stands for Killer. Most of this style is just copied from the USA, American gun culture, reused by European wannabes. These drawings, a slice of bread and what looks like a duck and a chicken, are marks of disrespect against rivals who are trying to use the same area. The drawings of hands represent a personal warning. The arrow points to the initials NJ, which stand for ‘New Jerusalem,’ an immaculate Christian city where ‘nothing unclean may enter.’”
“From the Book of Revelation,” said Bryant, intrigued. “Chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-seven, if memory serves.”
“Then there’s the K wrapped around by the symbol for a rival gang. Finally, these tiny initials, NSED, are a mark of defiance and conviction. They stand for ‘No Surrender Every Day.’ So what you’ve got here is a reiteration that this is pure, or innocent, territory, with the arrows and initials pointing elsewhere. You could literally read the entire wall as follows: ‘We are not the ones who should take the blame. We’re wrongly suspected but we’re clean, and you should be seeking amongst the ranks of our enemy, because they’re hiding a killer.’ However, there’s also a confirmation that they will not help you by revealing information.” Stamos thought for a moment. “There’s another reading for the wrapped K – it could be the initial of the person you seek.”
Bryant sensed progress at last. “You’ve certainly been more helpful than I expected,” he said, somewhat ungraciously. “I’ll see myself out. Good luck with your magazine. I think it’s utterly hideous, but then I’m old and poor.”
The publisher’s choice of phrase had proven interesting. The message he had translated echoed the words stencilled on a wall in the East End, in Goulston Street, supposedly written by Jack the Ripper on September 30, 1888: The Juwes are the Men That Will Not be Blamed for Nothing.
As he stepped from the building, he considered the gang on the Roland Plumbe Community Estate in a new light. Not only were they aware of the police investigation; they knew the true identity of the Highwayman.
Now he was faced with a new problem: How on earth could he extract the information from them?
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
36