After all is said and done, there is not one shred of evidence that Damilola Taylor was murdered - that is, stabbed by someone with intent to kill. The Home Office pathologist said at first that he was stabbed with a knife; when shards of glass were discovered, with blood stains all over, the story changed.
From the very beginning, the Daily Mail polluted the evidential atmosphere. Damilola was murdered by a Caribbean assailant, it said, because there was constant, violent conflict between West Indians and Africans. Their reporters hotfooted it to Nigeria to find Damilola's father, Richard Taylor, and rammed down his throat this nonsense about an intertribal war.
When the Mail offered 50,000 pieces of silver as a reward for anyone who would finger a black kid, every African-Caribbean teenager with half a conviction was interrogated. The parasitic oligarchy who rule the roost in race relations swooped down to dissect this new phenomenon of black-on-black violence, Nigerian versus West Indian, as if anyone but an expert on facial characteristics would know the difference between Ian Wright and John Fashanu.
Dustbins, abandoned cars, flats and stairwells were bugged. Not a single incriminating word was heard; but the investigators just would not accept that there was nothing to be heard because there had been no stabbing. Rather, they created a new fantasy about Caribbean boys: omerta had penetrated deeply among 14-year-olds, rougher than the Sicilian Mafia.
Enter Bromley. The only fact offered by the young woman (I am sure she skipped childhood) was her name. Now even that is in doubt. Rechristened Bromley to protect her identity in court, I understand she prefers her new name. She identified, as being at the scene of the crime, a person who was in an Oxford hospital at the time. Courtenay Griffiths, that imperious son of Africa, defending Boy A, a white boy, did not spare her. He lit a bonfire up Bromley's backside, as my granny would have said. Many a time, I thought, it was on her lips to call him "a black bastard", but she managed to hold it back.
Griffiths envisaged Damilola sprinting desperately to get home on time after spending too long on the library computer. The child bolted across the open space - vulnerable to the sharp and jagged edges of whatever stood in his way. No murder, just an accident. That is the version I believe.
