'This is a city that never lets anyone feel alone'

In Liverpool yesterday people came out to share their grief and lend support

Liverpool, a city famous for its gifts of gab and melody, was yesterday struck dumb. Outside the Town Hall, in the shopping centres, on the street in Walton where Ken Bigley lived, a silence was kept for two minutes from noon.

After all the pleas, petitions and prayers, and after three weeks of watching and waiting - even daring to hope, right up to the end, that there might be mercy - there were no words left. The Bigley family had nothing more to say, for the moment.

Having campaigned so energetically and loudly even when the diplomats pressured them to shut up, Ken's brothers had asked that they and his mother should be left alone to grieve. There were no crowds and no cameras outside the family's terraced house in Bedford Street, just a lone police car and a pile of bouquets by the closed front door.

"You can't even talk about it," said an elderly woman waiting to sign a book of condolences at the Town Hall. "Dreadful," she muttered. "Dreadful, dreadful." There were other books at the Roman Catholic cathedral and the Bigleys' parish church.

"All murders are bad, like, but this is worse," said a man at the Town Hall who stressed, like many others, that Mr Bigley was "one of us". The man was dressed up sharp for a Saturday morning in town: Burberry check jacket, lemon sweater and oval sunglasses with a blue tint.

"Think about it," he said, shaking his head, "and you cry." The book was on a desk, next to a burning candle, a spray of lilies and a picture of Ken Bigley, smiling.

The next man in line lowered himself into the chair by the desk and hooked his stick over its arm. Over his head was a crystal chandelier. A marble bust of Gladstone was reflected in long mirrors with ornate gilded frames.

"He was coming home," the lady said quietly. "Ken. His job was finishing today." The man with the stick sniffed, lifted himself and shuffled away. "I have a lot of problems," he had written, "but this puts it into perspective. God bless you." The queue got longer. Young, thin, shaven-headed men, looking at their trainers. Women old enough to be their grandmothers, with plastic shopping bags, looking at their watches. They didn't want to miss the two-minute silence.

Outside, the union flag furled and unfurled at half mast against a grey sky. The Mayor, Frank Roderick, came out and walked slowly in a line with other dignitaries behind him, into Exchange Flags, the square behind the Town Hall that was half in shadow, half in sunlight.

The Mayor, the leader of the council and the High Sheriff stood in a line with their hands clasped and heads bowed. The television cameras faced them, also in a line. A hundred or so other citizens stood in groups around the square. The noon bells were faint in the distance, so whispers spread the word that the silence had started. A decorator stood in his white overalls, squinting in the weak sun. A girl of six or seven in a pale blue overcoat held her mothers hands on her shoulders.

The statue at the centre of the square commemorating the death of Nelson featured a bronze figure in chains, head in hands. Its resemblance to Ken Bigley, shackled in a cage, was chilling.

"The silence brought home the enormity of what has happened," said the Mayor afterwards. He would talk to the Bigleys later. "It's too soon for people like me to see them. They need time together as a family. I feel deeply for his mother: in the natural order of things it is not right that a son should die before his parent." He hoped the family would feel supported by the "immense" sympathy for them in the city. "Liverpool always responds to these situations," he said. "We never let anyone feel isolated or alone."

Anne O'Neill, 66, from Huyton, said: "We've been through it, haven't we? Hillsborough, Jamie Bulger, now this." She was observing the silence "for myself, for the Bigleys, and for my own family," she said. "Many of them are in Australia, they're expats like he was. When things happen back in their own city they want to be here." She did not know the Bigleys, except through the media.

"They have carried themselves with such dignity. I don't agree with the brother who says Tony Blair has got blood on his hands, but I know why he said it. You can understand it. All that anger."

A Muslim shopkeeper in the city centre, who did not want to be named, said he had been horrified by Ken Bigley's death but now felt afraid at what might be done to ordinary people of good faith in misguided retaliation. Dr Shiv Pande of the Merseyside Council of Faith agreed that there was a danger of a backlash against Muslims. But he trusted in the nature of his city. "I remember when Liverpool was in turmoil because of two religions - Protestant and Catholic.

"Now it is leading by example. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians, everyone, they have been united in their response to what has happened. Liverpool will come out of this."