Revenger

48

It was as if the events at the O2 had never happened. The demonstrations, the apparent assassination attempt, Mark Adams’s speech — in an instant, they’d all been put to the back of the media queue; footnotes at best to the headline story of the riot in Netherton Street. There were almost as many outside broadcast vans as emergency vehicles parked in the area, clustering as close as they could get to the scene-of-crime tape that cordoned off more than a hundred metres of the street itself, and a couple of residential side roads, too.

The police had set aside a small area for TV crews. It allowed reporters to stand in front of their cameras with a suitably dramatic scene of urban devastation behind them, without allowing them to get close enough to impede the work of the myriad people investigating the riot and dealing with its victims. The individual stars that viewers saw on their screens were lined up almost shoulder to shoulder, each delivering an apparently unique perspective on events, while standing within easy touching distance of someone else saying almost exactly the same thing.

‘The scenes here are by far the worst that London has seen since the seven-seven bombings in July 2005,’ pronounced a grim-faced brunette with an Irish accent, representing the BBC. ‘Fifty-two people as well as the four bombers died that night, and the final death toll here may be even higher. We know that the staff of an Indian restaurant, the Khyber Star, were massacred, as were several customers at a pub, the Dutchman’s Head. But the worst carnage was reserved for the mini-supermarket behind me, the Lion Market.’

‘It is still not clear precisely what happened here,’ said the man from Sky News, his eyes narrowed like a hunter surveying the horizon, his voice clipped and authoritative. ‘But I have been able to piece together some key elements in the story. The rioters made a concerted attack against a small group of people who were taking shelter in the Lion Market. A garbage truck stolen earlier in the evening was rammed into the shop’s security shutters, smashing them. Rioters flooded into the store, and very soon afterwards there was some kind of explosion. At this stage, no one knows precisely what caused it.’

‘Just a few minutes ago, I spoke to one of the policemen at the scene,’ revealed a rosy-cheeked young man from ITN. ‘He told me that when he arrived at the store it was filled with people coughing and vomiting up blood. They were struggling for breath and were clearly in great distress. Some of them, he said, were little more than children. The first ambulances arrived no more than five minutes later. And by then, the policeman said, every single one of those people in the supermarket was dead.’

The BBC woman said, ‘Senior police commanders are genuinely shocked by what has happened here. We have been suffering riots and disorder for so long that we have, perhaps, become numbed by them. But the horror of the Netherton Street killings is so extreme that it is taking us into a whole new realm of violence. And now, back to the studio…’