Manchester: A deadly feud that's very personal

Neil Tweedie reports on the atmosphere on Manchester's bleak streets where two female constables were killed this week

Lanterns sit outside the house in Folkestone Road East, candles flickering in the fading light. There is a white cuddly toy, bouquets of red and white roses, and a photograph of father and son in a laughing embrace.

"In loving memory of my boys," reads the note. This shrine, in a quiet road in the Clayton area of east Manchester, is dedicated to the victims not of a car crash or other random family misfortune but of assassination. Mark Short, the son, was shot in the neck as he bent over a pool table in the Cotton Tree pub in Droylsden, a mile and a half away. That was on May 25 this year. He was 23.

On August 10, David Short, his father, was shot at the house in Folkestone Road, the family home. Short senior, 46, is believed to have taken to wearing a bullet-proof vest in the weeks before his death, knowing that he was a target, having promised revenge on his boy's killers. Just to make sure they had completed their task, Short's assassins rolled a grenade under his body, which exploded. A grenade. On a residential road. Britain, 2012.

The same kind of weapon, manufactured in the former Yugoslavia, is believed to have been used in the killing of two female police constables, Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes, in nearby Mottram on Tuesday morning. It was a crime of rare cruelty and ferocity which appalled the country, the women being lured to a house on the pretext of a burglary before being shot and showered with shrapnel. Armed with batons and a Taser, they didn't stand a chance.

Dale Cregan, 29, has been charged with all four killings, and four attempted killings. Until he turned himself in at Hyde police station shortly after the attack on the two police officers, he had been on the run, a pounds 50,000 reward on his head. No one appeared keen to claim it.

"Naughty," says a neighbour in Folkestone Road, when asked about the use of a grenade so close to his home. The remark is not intended to trivialise the attack on the Short household. Understatement, the knowing smile or professions of complete ignorance, are standard responses here when questions are asked about a long-running feud that has now turned deadly.

The language used this week in relation to the killings in east Manchester has been of gang warfare - drugs, turf, protection rackets, Bigs. But the people involved in the feud are not eminent enough criminals to be known across Manchester; and Manchester is not that big a place. This is a local affair, a long-running clash of personalities, involving threat and counter-threat to family members, with explosive consequences.

"The Shorts were always known as a handy family in the area," says someone familiar with the feud. "They knew how to box, that kind of thing. Bullies, really. They've been rowing with another lot - I'm not going to name them - for years. Each side has friends, followers. Threats are made to each side's women, children, things get out of hand."

Out of hand is one way to describe it. The Prime Minister was in Manchester yesterday, promising Greater Manchester Police (GMP) anything it needs to help combat gang crime in the city. The killings, dreadful in themselves, will depress the population for the shadow they again cast over the economic and cultural capital of the North. Manchester has cleaned up its image since the "Gunchester" days of the 1990s, when sub-machingun fire echoed around Moss Side and other gang battlefields.

In 2004, GMP began Operation Xcalibre: every single discharge of a firearm was analysed in an effort to track down gang members, while backstreet engineering operations responsible for turning replica weapons into usable ones were busted.

According to police, there has been a year-on-year decrease in firearms incidents since 2004. Such crimes, says the force, stand at an "all-time low". In 2006-7, there were 120 firearms discharges in Greater Manchester, resulting in five deaths and 44 woundings. In the year to last April, there were 39 discharges, resulting in four deaths and 13 woundings.

Spray attacks, involving automatic weapons fired at groups, often from vehicles, have given way to a few targeted shootings. The four deaths recorded since then - the only four in Greater Manchester due to gun crime - are those of PCs Bone and Hughes and David and Mark Short.

The picture for the country as a whole is similar. Thirty-nine people died from gunshots in the United Kingdom in 2011, down from 96 a decade earlier. Guns have become much harder to come by and therefore much more expensive on the street, costing between pounds 2,000 and pounds 4,000. Ammunition is similarly expensive, resulting in crude homemade rounds.

Still, weapons find there way into Britain, including grenades from Eastern Europe, where they are plentiful. There are more grenades in east Manchester and police have warned the warring factions that they are potential targets.

"Terms such as 'gangland killings' and 'organised crime' have been banded about in relation to recent events," says Rob Ralphs, a criminologist at the University of Manchester, who has made a study of his city's gangs. "I would urge caution in the use of such terms. In Manchester, we have witnessed an obsession with Moss Side and surrounding areas of south Manchester, which have a history of gangs and gun crime.

"But Moss Side's original gangsters are now in their thirties and forties and have not been involved in crime for many years.

"What this series of events has demonstrated is that there is access to weapons in other parts of Greater Manchester. For many years I have been hearing reports of firearm access and individuals and families with a reputation for violence and a willingness to resort to violent acts in areas such as Clayton and Droylsden," says Ralphs.

"For many residents, the fact that weapons have been used will come as no surprise. It appears to be a very localised dispute involving associated families and friends."

"Nice neighbours; always had a smile," says another neighbour of the Short family. "No trouble."

The Cotton Tree pub, where Mark Short was gunned down, has been closed by order of the council, an explanatory notice on the door stating that it was a haven for serious crime and disorder. Neighbouring shop owners describe it as a low-key local. "Quiet. A few old regular drinkers," says one.

Across the road, at the offices of the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, the Union flag hangs at half mast.

"Dale?" says the girl in Sutton Drive, Cregan's home in Droylsden. "Yes, he lived here. But he had other houses." The road is neat and respectable and full of twitching curtains. Residents, particularly elderly ones, are dismayed at their newfound notoriety.

How was Cregan as a person? That knowing smile, again. "His family are really nice. He was fine. If he liked you."

Drugs may have been involved in the killing of the Shorts, she thinks. Cocaine was sold at the Cotton Tree. There may have been ''turf'' issues in addition to family and clan pride. A police four-wheel-drive cruises past slowly. The police have mounted armed patrols to deter reprisals.

There are facts and figures on crime, and then the quiet reality. East Manchester harbours some bleak places - bleaker still as the nights draw in - and there are some hard families living on its unpleasing estates.

Such places, with their seemingly intractable problems, are usually ignored by the more affluent sections of British society, but now and then they come back to remind us that they are still there.