I keep thinking about a death. Journalists meet a lot of people, hear a lot of stories. Over the years, they generally recede into the long distance. But the odd one, it sticks. And I’ll never forget the day I found out that Tommy Cox had died.
The story starts six years ago – on Valentine’s Day, 2007 – on the Fenwick Estate just by Clapham North tube. It isn’t such a bad place. Completed in 1970 and home to 1,600 people in 400 maisonettes spread around a curved road, it has few boarded up windows and graffiti is sparse. It’s only a few yards away from the tube station and the million-pound town houses and trendy, expensive pubs that surround it. It’s certainly not the estate I read about after it happened: the estate of ‘Narrow hallways, the sound of barred doors clanging shut, not a blade of grass on the football field, just a few used condoms,’ according to a national paper.
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