Royce Tanfield

Royce Tanfield is 41 and makes his living taking water where it needs to go. Born in Witney, the son of a plumber and a nurse, he learned the trade helping his father from age 12 and, at 20, opened his own shop on the street where he grew up. Today he does everything, from household faucets to artwork installations, and says water, unlike people, is good to listen to: it always takes the path of least resistance.

The shop is in a stone garage with an iron door, where copper pipes hang from the ceiling in bundles by diameter, boxes of brass fittings line a shelf and a dark wooden bench holds the blowtorch, the sandpaper and a cold cup of tea. He lives in a semi-detached house at the back, with a tiny garden he waters with an old hose. He speaks to customers by first name, and they call him Roy.

He is thin with strong arms, an angular face, a trimmed red beard and red hair shaved at the sides. He has an anchor tattoo on his forearm, which he got on a teenage trip to Plymouth, and wears a stained gray T-shirt, navy work dungarees, a green cap he carries in his hand and a cheap wristwatch he adores. He is friendly, talkative, proud of his work and quick to point out other people's mistakes.

About the exhibition, he says he installed the gold piece, with real plumbing underneath, working, because the artist wanted the public to use it, and that he was the one who hooked it up. After the installation, on Wednesday, he went back to Witney, to his shop and other people's faucets: a delivered job, to him, is a forgotten job. When asked how one takes a piece like that from its place, he says, by the look of it, with a sledgehammer and haste, brute work and not a plumber's.

Royce knows the plumber who installed the piece is the first remembered when someone rips it out. When the detective says he came back in the small hours, he stuffs the green cap in his pocket, the smile vanishes and he warns that he installs toilets and doesn't rob palaces, and that he will only speak in front of the union lawyer. A professional's indignation, or a friendliness that ends at the first awkward question: the cap disappears and the doubt remains.