Ten Dead Girls

Word got out, as quick as any killing.

Mothers and whores were screaming for protection, urging their men on to display their potency, to show they could look after their own.
Tom and George and the boys from “The Crown” marched on “The Hope and Anchor”, where, after a scuffle, they joined together and set themselves against the market streets.
Idle chat about who’d been seen out late in places they shouldn’t turned to accusations and proof enough, and progressed to immediate repercussions via the use of blunt weapons. And on to the next.

The scenes of conflagration were so close they merged into one churning stew of batterings, cuttings, burnings.
All contained within the sites marked out by the ten dead girls.

These simultaneous explosions of violence bled the newborn Met too thin, and they dribbled back to their stations, limping, dragging their comrades, leaving some behind.

The small contingent of police sent to Grebe Street came up against Charlie, who’d come down with his brothers when they’d heard tell of their mother wailing in the street.
Their only sister, Katie, was dead, and laid out at the crossroads, all ripped up.
As they stood there swearing and looking about for someone to swing at, the shout went up from the end of the street, and Charlie reached out and grabbed the lad who’d coming running from down that way, and he shook the story out of him: there was a girl, all ripped up, lying at the crossroads of Tredegar Road and Sender Lane, and what do you make of that.
They knew her family: they’d fought them for trade space, for stealing the pitch on Whitechapel market.
That was put aside, so when the police rolled up there were two sets of brothers.
Charlie’s lot were known as a handful; a rowdy lot on a Saturday night. And now that there’d been murder they were murderous too, and their numbers were swelled by the vengeful Finnegans.
The police, all two of them, wisely turned and fled.
The evidence was all washed away in the tide of galloping hobnail boots, booze, blood and spit.

And half a mile away, the fires were being lit; the lads were strutting and striding out. The shops down by Wisty’s had all gone up, and the remaining glass blew out and sliced through a pack of roaring men.
The rats were up on the roofs, avoiding a singeing.

There was a dead girl to be found on every corner.
And now a barricade; they sealed the bastards off, and left them to hack into each other.
It happens sometimes.
It keeps the numbers down.
They won’t be crying for any of them.
That patch of London, east of Shoreditch and south of Finsbury Park, was hermetically sealed all the way down to the river.
And no-one got in or out.
Unless, one happened to be above such trivialities as the laws of London.

But some didn’t venture out of their homes. Some had seen the fickle nature of the mob before. Some knew it was a matter of time, and it wouldn’t be long, before it turned on them.
They made preparations.