Notes from the Underground

[Juana]

Very intriguing, Cain. I look forward to more.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Cain, you're fucking with my mind here. Is this shit real or fiction, or fiction based on real, or real based on fiction? 

It reads like all of the above...which is weird as fuck. It's great.

[hirley0]

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Very intriguing, Cain. I look forward to more.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

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Very intriguing, Cain. I look forward to more.

Yes, this!

[Cain]

Cain, you're fucking with my mind here. Is this shit real or fiction, or fiction based on real, or real based on fiction? 

Yes.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Stop playing coy with me, m'laddo - I haven't had a wink of sleep for 14 days now

[Cain]

The previous investigation focused the minds of our group on the question of murder and London.  There is no doubt that, historically, London was the preferred hunting grounds of many deranged minds.  Jack the Ripper was of course the most famous, and most mysterious, but many lesser monsters also stalked the streets.  The city apparently brings out the worst in fragile and damaged minds.

There is a past drenched in blood, and mapping the patterns of the murders reveals much of interest.  But it was the present that interested us most.  London's blood-soaked past has receded into a more gentle present.  The murder rate of the city is very low, especially when compared with equivalent American cities.  New Orleans manages to have a higher overall murder rate, despite millions less citizens.  New York, a city of roughly equal size and considered relatively safe, nevertheless has over 340 additional murders in an average year.

For some reason, records for the modern era only go back to 1990.  Nevertheless, despite the vast change the city has undergone in 22 years, the murder rate has remained stable, at around 170 a year, or 14 murders a month.  There were two years that stood out as anomalies - 2003, and 2009, where the murder rate dropped significantly.  We tried numerous explanations for this - increased troop deployment overseas, economic factors, weather, but we could not account for it.

The stability of the murder rate was a curious, and unexpected find.  Especially given London has the quickest growth rate of any region in the UK, at 40% for the city as a whole.  Despite growing by over half a million in less than a decade, the murder rate remained stable.

K. posited that some of the murders could be serial in nature, and that the police had merely failed to catch the perpetrators, which would explain the reoccuring rate of killings.  This is a reasonable assumption, given the Met's inability to, for example, distinguish suicide from murder.  Yet, 90% of murders in London every year are solved, meaning someone is being convicted.   Furthermore, the pattern that distinguishes a serial killer is a decreasing cool-off period - the murder is equivalent to sexual release, and the more the killer indulges in his perverse desires, the stronger they become.  If there were uncaught serial killers operating in the city, the rate should have increased as their killing cycle accelerated.

R mentioned he had recently been looking into the Clapham Wood mysteries, a series of unusual happenings in a small village directly south of the city.  While he was convinced aspects of the story, especially the "Friends of Hekate" were fabrications or clever disinformation, he pointed out that London had plauged by ritual murder in recent years could not be denied.  There had been the case of "Adam" back in 2001, the torso of an African child between four and six years old, found floating in the Thames and with items in his stomach said to be of religious significance.  The murder was linked to a human smuggling ring, which of course made it very hard to be sure if Adam was the only victim or not, since the only proof of a murder of an illegal immigrant would be the material evidence of a corpse. 

Many so-called "honour killings" also had a ritual component, as in the case where the murderer was caught with the organs of the victim removed and placed around them, while chanting verses from the Koran.  However, the majority of them seem to be linked to the West African or Ugandan disapora present in the UK.

And although it fell outside the purview of our immediate frame of interest, K did mention the murder of Roberto Calvi in London in June 1982, which contained so many Masonic components to it as to almost be a parody of ritual killing.  Calvi was almost certainly killed by Camorra mafia figures, but his involvement with P2, the rogue Masonic lodge, could certainly explain the manner of his death.

It certainly no exaggeration to say that while the number of deaths is not high, the city seems to suffer from an endless low-level plague of lunacy, human sacrifice and religious fanaticism.  What can account for this, decade after decade?

[LMNO]

I am loving this.  This is the sort of thing I look for in a book.