I proved judge's guidance was wrong

I did not expect to prove the judge in the Damilola Taylor case wrong - but it was only too easy. Any local person could have told Mr Justice Hooper the route suggested in court was wildly circuitous compared with the short-cut across Burgess Park.

As an unfit 27-year-old, keener on sessions in the pub than the gym, I ran from the murder scene to the point where the telephone calls were made in six minutes 30 seconds. The route was lined with alleys and tracks, popular as shortcuts with schoolchildren, which could have shaved further minutes off the time.

A fit 15-year-old armed with knowledge of shortcuts and a pair of trainers could run from the North Peckham Estate to the Bermondsey sidestreet where the vital calls were made a lot faster than I.

Briefed by my office only to walk the route, it was not until I reached the fenced-off ruins of the estate where Damilola bled to death that they told me I had to run.

From the dilapidated tower in which Damilola died, 100 yards from Blake's Road, the killers could have sprinted through the north exit of the estate along Pearse Street and across St George's Way into Burgess Park.

In little more than a minute they would be in the park, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other kids running, shouting, screaming.

From the entrance on St George's Way they would cut diagonally across past the lake and leave the park through the exit on the junction of the Old Kent Road and Albany Road.

Turning right off the Old Kent Road on to Dunton Road, it had taken me only five minutes to reach the final stretch. Sweating, ungainly and cutting a bizarre figure in leather-soled slip-on shoes, a work shirt and jeans, no one even gave me a second glance as I ran through crowds of shoppers heading to the nearby Tesco.

And if I, followed by a photographer, attracted no attention, surely two teenagers sprinting from a murder scene would have been invisible.

From the start of Dunton Road to its junction with Grange Road, where the boys were seen seven minutes after the killing, took me all of one minute.

From there it took only another 30 seconds to the junction with Spa Road, from where the boys could have made the calls that the defence claimed proved they could not have been at the murder scene.

I was out of breath, but in six minutes 30 seconds I made it from the spot where Damilola was killed to where telephone records place the main suspects on the day of Damilola's death.

The terrifying and inescapable conclusion is that Mr Justice Hooper was wrong.

He was wrong to claim the distance between the two points could not be covered in seven minutes.