Paul Lowell
Who they are
A fathers’ rights campaigner — one-time DI with the Middlesex Constabulary, lately Sylvester Monteith’s second-in-command at Black Arrow — who climbed onto a platform above the arch on London Wall before dawn, dressed as Spider-Man, with a hand-painted banner reading a fair deal for fathers. He wanted the evening news and got it: a man in a Batman costume, recruited through a message board, threw him eighteen metres to the road. He survived.
Book 3 — Real Tigers
- C00 — Climbs the arch in a suit too small for him, unfurls the banner, offers Batman his hand, and is punched, stamped at and dropped.
- C00 — The banner unwinds on the tarmac and soaks up rain and blood, becoming the image the broadcasts run: the protest works as theatre and not as argument.
- C09 — River’s briefing supplies the background — Middlesex Constabulary, then Monteith’s number two at Black Arrow — and names Donovan as the man in the costume. Lowell never knew who threw him.
Tells
The costume that does not fit, and the professional’s reflex underneath it: he rolls away from the edge and thinks about getting upright. The media arithmetic, worked out loud — superhero suits tick the right boxes. The hand still held out to a stranger.
Open questions
Whether he was ever told who attacked him, or ever charged anyone over it — the chapters say only that he never knew. And why a former detective and Black Arrow executive was spending his mornings in a Spider-Man suit: the banner gives the slogan and nothing of the man.