A Lovely Way to Burn

Prologue

London witnessed three shootings that summer, by men who were part of the Establishment. The first was the Right Honourable Terry Blackwell, Tory MP for Hove who, instead of going to his constituency as planned, sat in a deck chair on the balcony of his Thames-side apartment one sweltering Saturday in June and shot dead six holidaymakers.

The first five were neatly dispatched, with shots to their heads. Terry Blackwell had been a sniper in his army days, and tourists, ambling by the river in bright summer clothes, were easy targets. The sixth was running for cover when Blackwell hit her in her right knee. He waited until the girl, Marina Salzirnisa from Latvia (visiting the city on a language course which her father hoped would improve her English), had almost dragged herself to the safety of a café, and then shot her four more times, wounding her in her left knee, both thighs, and finishing with a shot to the spine which wasn’t guaranteed to kill her, but did.

After Marina, the MP had lost his touch, or perhaps people had simply succeeded in running for their lives, because although Terry Blackwell kept the streets and buildings in range pinned down for the rest of the day, he didn’t kill, or even wound, anyone else. Around six o’clock he botched his own shot to the head, lingering on alone, on the floor of his apartment, where the Rapid Response Team eventually found him. Police negotiators had located Blackwell’s ex-wife, Cynthia, and later there was speculation in the press that it had been her voice on the answering machine, telling Blackwell she still loved him, that had prompted the MP’s coup de grâce.

Towards the end of June, John Gillespie, a hedge-fund manager for the Royal Bank of Scotland, let rip in an Underground carriage on the Circle line, with a gun he had concealed in his briefcase. Gillespie was known for his canny ability for risk assessment and had chosen a not-quite-full carriage between rush hours. He managed to kill all fifteen occupants before the train reached its next station. Gillespie waited for the doors to open, and the oncoming passengers to see the carnage, before turning the gun on himself. Witness statements mentioned the banker’s smart suit and neatly knotted tie, the professional smile he gave as he pulled the trigger.

The following week the Reverend Matthew Sheppard, vicar of St Alban’s parish church in Ealing, mounted the altar, took a shotgun from beneath his cassock and attempted to gun down his congregation. St Alban’s worshippers were ageing, and had it been a normal Sunday, the Reverend Sheppard might have succeeded in sending them all to what they presumably believed was a better place. But it was the week of Aimee Albright’s christening and the church was packed almost to capacity. Aimee’s Uncle Paul, who had never been good enough to turn professional but had captained his local cricket team for the past eight years, bowled his hymnbook full square at Sheppard and knocked the gun from his grasp. Aimee’s father was wounded in the shoulder, but he and two of his brothers managed to wrestle the vicar who, now that he was unarmed, seemed dazed, to the floor. The Reverend Sheppard had remained dazed to the point of catatonia, right up to the moment when he succeeded in hanging himself with a sheet in the prison cell where he was on suicide watch.

On the surface, the shootings were nothing to do with what happened later, but they stuck in Stevie Flint’s mind. Their details returned to her during the months ahead and she would begin to think of them as a portent of what was to come, a sign that the city was beginning to turn on itself.