Murder in black and white Britain

Camilla Cavendish:

THE MURDER of Tom ap Rhys Pryce has really got under the skin of London’s professional class. When a 31-year-old Cambridge-educated lawyer is viciously stabbed to death in a Tube station for no apparent reason, it plays to our deepest fears of what happens when parallel worlds collide.

“I live on the Bakerloo Line too,” I’ve heard many say this week. “He was me — all of us.” The optimistic young man on his way up, living with his fiancée on the fringe in Kensal Green — not wealthy Kensington — carrying his downloaded wedding plans. The archetypal City worker whose death was apparently treated so lightly that a black man in a white pork-pie hat nonchalantly produced his Oyster card the following morning, then just ambled away when the ticket machine rejected it. A shocking, grubby finale to an unspeakable event.

We cannot shake it. The grainy CCTV shots of Mr ap Rhys Pryce’s last unsuspecting moments ride on top of an accumulation of other recent images in our minds. The banker John Monckton and his wife, struggling in vain to close their front door against a junkie on bail and a murderous thug on early release. The security chain swinging loose, his shouts of “No, no no!” and all the futile gestures that intelligence makes when confronted with dumb brutality. Richard Whelan, 28, stabbed six times on the upper deck of the No 43 bus for standing up and politely asking a black youth to stop throwing chips at his girlfriend. The street lights passing on the Holloway Road, the fatal lunge, the dizzy shock of collapse.

These images run like a constant commentary in my head. I, born and bred in London and used to blithely wandering the streets, now see would-be attackers out of the corner of my eye. I grasp the keys in my pocket in a pathetic, premature gesture of defence and defiance. Statistically, I know that these horrific events are still highly unusual. But they are amplified because they feel so close. They loom large in monochrome: black on white killings, fitfully sketched on CCTV. An Irish-born businessman told me this weekend that he felt London was turning into Johannesburg. An overstatement, surely, but heartfelt.

We abhor randomness. We search for motive where there is none. We seek to engage rationality, but find only hate. In a city driven by ambition, this violence does not fit the lexicon. It is senseless, gratuitous, the desire to strike even when all the cash is handed over. The realisation that this brutality is not negotiable — that there was nothing the victims could have said or offered to stay alive — brings on a queasy vertigo. I feel a heightened consciousness of the fragility of intelligent life, a sudden tenderness towards bicycling professors, nerdy executives, even the witnesses behind the windows in Mr ap Rhys Pryce’s street.

What are we supposed to conclude? That we must stand stock still in the face of violence, as the Asian man did who was robbed by the same gang 30 minutes before Mr ap Rhys Pryce was killed? It is possible, although we do not know, that the lawyer did try to fight back in some way. Some of my neighbours recently hired a private security firm after a spate of muggings. But is that really the answer in the long term, to seal off the community? Should we all run from the station to one’s front door, gripping our keys and holding out our wallets to strangers?

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