Despite the command, Reggie did not fetch his sister. Rather, he told his mother to “do the bad thing to herself” (these are Michael’s words, as Reggie seems to have been more direct) and the boys left the house. Back in the street, however, they saw Rudy Arnold who, during the time they’d spent in the kitchen with Laura, had arrived by car and was “hanging ’bout outside, like he was afraid to come in.” He and Reggie exchanged a few words, which seem to have been largely unpleasant, at least on Reggie’s part. Michael claims he asked who the man was, assuming it was “his mum’s boyfriend or something,” and Reggie told him “the stupid git” was his father and followed this declaration with a minor act of vandalism: He took a milk basket from a neighbour’s front step and threw it into the street, where he jumped on it and crushed it.

According to Michael, he took no part in this. His statement asserts that at this point he had every intention of going to school, but that Reggie announced he was “doing a bunk” and “having some bloody fun for once.” It was Reggie, Michael says, and not Michael himself who came up with the idea of including Ian Barker in what was to follow.

At eleven years of age, Ian Barker had already been labeled as damaged, difficult, troubled, dangerous, borderline, angry, and psychopathic, depending upon whose report is read. He was, at this time, the only child of a twenty-four-year-old mother (his paternity remains unknown to this day), but he’d been brought up to believe that this young woman was his older sister. He seems to have been quite fond of his grandmother, who he naturally assumed was his mother, but he apparently loathed the girl he’d been taught to believe was his sister.