At the age of nine, he was considered old enough to learn the truth. However, it was a truth he did not take well to hearing, especially as it came hard on the heels of Tricia Barker’s being asked to leave her mother’s house and being told to take her son with her. In this, Ian’s grandmother now says she was doing her best to “practise the tough love. I was willing to keep both of them-the lad and Tricia, too-as long as the girl worked, but she wouldn’t hold on to a job and she wanted parties and friends and staying out all hours and I reckoned if she had to bring up the boy on her own, she’d change her ways.”

She didn’t. Courtesy of the government, Tricia Barker was given accommodation, although the flat was small and she was forced to share a tiny bedroom with her son. It was evidently in this room that Ian began to witness his mother engaging in sexual acts with a variety of men and, on at least four occasions, with more than one man. It’s worthy of note that Ian consistently refers to her neither as his mother nor as Tricia, but rather through the use of pejorative terms such as slag, cunt, gash, tart, and minge bag. His grandmother he doesn’t refer to at all.

Michael and Reggie seem to have had no trouble locating Ian Barker that morning. They did not go to his house-according to Reggie “his mum was pissed most of the time and she yelled abuse out the door”-but rather they came upon him in the act of shaking down a younger boy on the route to school. Ian had “dumped the kid’s rucksack out on the pavement” and was in the process of going through its contents to find anything of value, but most particularly money. There being nothing of value for him to take from the child, Ian “shoved him meanlike against the side of a house,” in Michael’s words, “and started going at him.”

Neither Reggie nor Michael attempted to stop the harassment. Reggie says that “it were only a bit of fun. I could see he weren’t going to hurt him,” while Michael claims he “couldn’t see ’xackly what he was up to,” a rather doubtful claim as all of the boys were in plain sight on the pavement. Nonetheless, whatever Ian’s full intentions were, they came to nothing further. A motorist stopped and demanded to know what they were doing, and the boys ran off.