A Tapestry in Eighteen Panels

Panel I: The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers

A shield quartered with dolphins and sea-lions, gold and azure, a trident piercing waves. Lions wear crowns, unicorns rear. Nothing here is real, but everything is serious. It hangs above the hall like a dream stitched by heralds drunk on salt.

"A conference at Fishmongers’ Hall is more than a meeting of minds – it’s a moment of influence. In a setting that has hosted visionaries and decision-makers for centuries, ideas are elevated, conversations flow, and connections take shape. With seamless service, historic grandeur, and modern event capabilities, your next industry-defining gathering starts here."

—Official website, conference page.

Panel II: The Killer of a Firefighter

Before the tusk, before the medal, Gallant was just a man with a hammer in a pub car park. A fight, sudden and stupid, ended with a firefighter dead on the tarmac, his friends trying CPR under sodium lamps that flickered orange. Gallant went to prison as “the lowest of the low.” The man who killed a saviour. He carried that title through years of cold metal beds, clangs of keys, hollow days of waiting. Murderer first, human second. A label that stuck like a tattoo.

Panel III: Khan’s Morning

Plastic knives taped to wrists. A fake vest strapped over his chest. He looked in the mirror, checking symmetry. He was a man rehearsing for martyrdom, or for theatre. The line was thin.

Panel IV: The Conference

Name badges on lanyards. Teacups ringed with brown crescents. The drone of fluorescent lights. PowerPoint slides about rehabilitation, with pie charts clipped from government reports. Folding chairs in rows. The day promised nothing but polite boredom.

Panel V: The Victims Before

Jack Merritt, 25. Graduate of Cambridge, warm smile, eyes set always towards justice. Saskia Jones, 23. Patient, meticulous, drawn to help others through law and learning. Both in that hall with notebooks and laptops, taking in the lectures, sipping weak coffee, never imagining the ordinariness of the day would be the last frame of their lives. They were the kind of people who still believed the system could be better. They listened with huge patience, ready to build lives out of service.

Panel VI: The Unicorn’s Horn

Once it was believed these tusks cured plague. Shaved into powder, sold as talismans. Monarchs locked them in treasure rooms. A narwhal horn was a relic of heaven, proof of unicorns at large. In Fishmongers’ Hall it hung as ornament, a trophy of empire and salt trade. On that day it became something else: a lance clutched by sweating palms, dragged down staircases, ready to meet knives. Arthurian relic by way of City livery, pressed into combat on a bridge.

Panel VII: The Pike

Ceremonial, more decoration than weapon. But iron still carries weight. A man gripped it as if born to it, though he wasn’t.

Panel VIII: The Trio

On the bridge they looked like actors in a miscast play: one with the narwhal tusk, one with the pike, one with a fire extinguisher. Against them: Usman Khan, knives fixed to his hands, a vest blinking false fire. It should have been farce. A Monty Python sketch. A Spitting Image puppet show. Yet no cartoonist touched it, no satirist claimed it. Perhaps because comedy relies on distance, and here the deaths were too close, too raw. Instead the scene became its own silent cartoon: the tusk, the pike, the white cloud drifting — London’s strangest joust, fought in earnest.

Panel IX: Rehabilitation (a digression)

In Britain, prison is popularly imagined as a place to suffer, to rot, to be punished. “Do the crime, do the time.” Yet the Ministry of Justice claims its purpose is rehabilitation — to return people fit for society. But how do you learn to live in freedom if you spend twenty-three hours locked in a concrete box? In Norway, inmates cook their own meals, attend classes, go home to their families on leave. Recidivism there is among the lowest in the world. In Britain it is among the highest. Gallant, killer-turned-hero, sat in that contradiction: proof of the system’s failure, then its unlikely success. A man both broken and, for one hour on a bridge, redeemed.

Panel X: Footage

Phones raised. Angles multiplied. Twitter feeds refreshed. Everyone a chronicler, everyone a witness. The tapestry wove itself live, pixel by pixel.

Panel XI: Bus Windows

Top decks halted at mid-span. Commuters pressed to the glass, faces white, mouths covered. They saw men grappling, knives glinting, powder clouds. The wind carried sound but no sense.

Panel XII: Lockdown of the Tower

In the Shard, London’s glass spear, alarms whispered through the lifts. Doors sealed. Office workers pressed against windows thirty floors up, watching the bridge from a god’s height. Below them, police cordons grew like concentric rings. They scrolled their phones to see the same scene shot from ground level, almost live, a hall-of-mirrors reality. Some sat on the carpeted floor, hugging knees, waiting for release. Medieval siege and modern livestream, twinned.

Panel XIII: Gallant’s Breath

Heavier now, every heartbeat echoing in the hollow where his crime lived. Redemption was not a word he trusted. But the tusk was in his hands.

Panel XIV: The Vest

Black, bulky, wires protruding. Fake but convincing. Enough to make men hesitate.

Panel XV: The Road

Tarmac flecked with autumn leaves, the Thames dark beneath. Boots slipping, shouts bouncing off stone balustrades.

Panel XVI: The Shots

Armed police. Rifles raised. Khan pinned, the tusk pressing him down, a knee in his back. Shouts everywhere: vest—bomb—don’t shoot—shoot now. A decision sharpened to seconds. Then cracks, four of them, louder than the wind through the railings. Witnesses flinched, some screamed, some filmed without lowering their phones. On the top decks of buses, glass shivered. On pavements, people crouched. On the bridge, Khan stopped moving.

Panel XVII: Silence

The strange silence that follows a gunshot. As if the city holds its breath.

Panel XVIII: The Medal

Months later, Gallant stood in a borrowed suit, a ribbon hung on his chest. The Queen’s Gallantry Medal. He thought of prison gates, of the firefighter’s widow, of the word murderer stitched to his name. He wondered what the medal weighed against all that.

Panel XIX: The Question

Can a murderer become a saviour? Can one moment erase another? Or are the threads always visible in the weave, old stains showing through new dye?

Panel XX: The Bridge Again

Stone arches. Wind off the Thames. Tourists with cameras. Buses rumble, cyclists weave. Life resumes, as if nothing had ever happened.