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London.
The young man lay propped alongside the rancid, overflowing wheelie bin in the piss-stinking and litter-strewn alleyway. Let’s face it, for a body of any sort - even semi-naked and definitely attractive - any alleyway off Soho’s Old Compton Street (whatever the time of the day) is not exactly the most salubrious of areas in which to be found. Especially when the body is both pissed, passed out and bleeding.
He was a young man, extremely good-looking, with well-groomed hair (David, at Stephen August in Chelsea, no doubt), smoothly shaven and immaculately dressed - at least the upper part of him. His tie, obviously Herms from the smart, brightly coloured patterned silk, was neatly knotted in the style created by the dubious Duke of that continuously scandal-filled House; his shirt, a perfect Turnbull & Asser cream cotton. The dark jacket to his suit was wildly lined in an appropriate scarlet silk - it matched the young man’s blood - a flamboyant trademark of Mr Parker at Henry Poole, the exclusive gentleman’s tailor in Savile Row. Someone, somewhere in the street - known to many as the Gay Way - had met up with this Mr Perfection, and come up with some arrangement to rendezvous in the alley where, to his cost, Mr Perfection had found fun turn into fallout!
It was from the waist downwards that the serious disarrangement began. The young man’s blood-splattered underpants (Calvin Klein) and suit trousers had been pulled down to reveal a pair of elegant suspenders (Turnbull & Asser again) and silk socks (Harrods). Both were crushed against his ankles, partly hiding the splattered gilt-chained Gucci loafers. Meanwhile, an oozing, congealing mass of darkening red was slowly covering the area where the young man’s genitals should have been. Could a vicious amputation, castration - or both - have taken place? On a closer examination by the slightly nauseous young constable who had been summoned to the scene by a hysterical couple of gays (themselves having sneaked into the alleyway for their own personal exploratory grope), the answer proved to be a definite ‘no’. Both the young man’s balls were there, tightly drawn up in their glistening scarlet sac. Also, barely viewable, was his shrunken penis, a sad, squat stump amidst the scarlet globules. Attached to the young man’s left eyelid was what at first appeared to be a piece of torn-off condom. On further examination, this turned out to be a wrinkled piece of wrinkled skin. In fact, it was noted a few minutes later that this was the young man’s own amputated foreskin. The foreskin had been wittily resited to his eyelid and then delicately glued on. The blood had come from the fresh wound on the head of the penis.
The torn-off foreskin - it was later established that the prepuce had been bitten off - had been attached to his left eyelid with what forensics later confirmed as a run-of-the-mill superglue. At the first viewing - as a detective arriving on the scene at the same time as the paramedics was to observe - it appeared as if the young man, though unconscious, had still managed to give his curious, unexpected audience a slow, welcoming, languorous wink.
