Snow began to fall over the city late on Thursday night, in mean little flakes at first, but then in plump silent gobbets. By dawn, when the security guard reached the school at the end of Cockpit Lane, the whole of London lay under a muffling blanket of white. As he checked the gates and fences he noticed what looked like a fresh trail leading through the snow beside the empty garage building next door, as if something had been dragged from its rear door. He was very much inclined to ignore it, but the garage was technically part of the school premises, and there had been a spate of fires recently. Investigating, he found the door slightly ajar. Inside, his flashlight picked out two figures curled up together on the bare concrete floor. He took them for children and might have said they were asleep, except that it was far too cold to be lying like that without blankets. They didn’t respond to his challenge, and he noticed a spatter of dark stains all around them on the floor. When he moved closer he made out plastic tape binding their wrists, and then the shocking wounds in the backs of their heads.

The murders in Cockpit Lane might have passed without much public notice except that the victims were two young girls, only sixteen years old, both shot through the head. They had also died in the constituency of Michael Grant, Member of Parliament for Lambeth North and a vigorous campaigner against crime in his inner South London community. The youngest black member of the House of Commons, Grant was a charismatic speaker whose compelling voice and handsome face were soon all over the media, describing the Cockpit Lane girls, Dana and Dee-Ann, as only the latest in a long series of tragic victims of,as he put it,an evil alliance of poverty, drugs, guns and criminal business interests operating in the district.

The press immediately dubbed the shootings a ‘Yardie’ massacre, despite police reservations about the use of the term, which implied the involvement of Jamaican immigrants. To the press it was Yardie because it was violent, guns and drugs were involved (crack cocaine was found in the girls’ pockets), and both the victims and just about everyone else in the neighbourhood were of West Indian origin.