Читать книгу Raoul Moat - Vanessa Howard - Страница 10

FRIDAY 2 JULY

I wanted more, but I didn’t know what.

– from Raoul Moat’s letters

The drive is short, under half an hour, once you leave Durham prison and head towards the A1 and it doesn’t take long before the signposts for Gateshead and Newcastle appear. It is a journey just shy of 17 miles but one long enough for Moat to have pondered again what lay before him. He would meet up with friends: he would need to as he had nowhere else to go.

There are only so many details that can be written about at present, since the investigation into what happened in the hours after Moat’s release is still ongoing. The police would come to suspect that the ex-prisoner received help from some of his acquaintances, but it is yet to be determined if others were caught up in the bloody events. Anything that is written now cannot be seen to prejudice future trials, therefore journalists have to tread carefully when setting out what they know and what they have been told.

What can be said is that in the first 12 hours after Moat’s release, there was a strange sense of unreality to all that the man did and the steps he took to enact his warped plan of action. Raoul himself was aware of how his rage could alter him. He would write: ‘It’s like the Hulk, it takes over and it’s more than anger and it happens only when I’m hurt, and this time I was really hurt.’

As most people know, The Incredible Hulk was the fictitious alter ego of Marvel Comic’s scientist Bruce Banner. It is safe to say that the character’s appeal isn’t the accident in the laboratory with the Gamma bomb, but the mild-mannered Dr Banner’s transformation into a raging humanoid beast. It is a transformation that only occurs once Banner is distraught either through grief, anger or more potently, both. To quote the big green man, ‘The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.’

The character had particular resonance with its audience, boys and young men, and the fantasy that rage can be transformative has its attractions. The conceit is that if cornered by difficult emotions and situations, smashing your way out with superhuman strength and endurance is essentially blameless because the character is transformed (and later remorseful, calm and worthy of sympathy once more).

That is not to overstate the impact the comic or TV series that aired in the late 1970s had on Raoul but it is interesting as a motif, shorthand to explain that a man can be transformed when pushed to an extreme and emotional state of mind. Rage takes over.

There can be little doubt that Moat had, however, moved beyond anger and into thoughts of revenge on the day of his release. He was meeting and facing friends with his life in disarray. He’d lost custody of his daughters from an earlier relationship and, as a result, it was unlikely that he’d be able to keep the family home social services had allocated to him. Now, with Sam’s visit, it was clear that he was in danger of losing access to his youngest daughter.

Losing a girlfriend can be heartbreaking but when children are involved, the fallout can be far greater, more destructive, and, for many men, an emotional firestorm. The last decade has seen the rise of fathers’ rights campaign groups, a response to what many male parents have seen as an unfair bias in family courts. Although there are a number of groups, and a number of controversies, broadly speaking, campaigners would like to see parity of rights for fathers to see their children, for family courts to become ‘open’ and for courts to move away from the assumption that the primary carer should be the mother in all instances.

Needless to say, the issues the groups raise are far from straightforward. Whilst there was huge frustration that family courts were ‘closed’, it was done so as to protect the identity of children in often traumatic cases. When reporting restrictions were lifted in 2009, still with caveats that the identity of vulnerable children be protected, it became clear just how fraught some of the cases the courts have to deal with are.

On the month that restrictions were lifted, reporters attended a session where a council were petitioning to remove a four-year-old boy and a baby into care. There had been suspicion that abuse had occurred and social services had difficulty tracking the family as they moved from borough to borough. This was a far from straightforward case as it became clear that the young mother was the stepdaughter of the man who became the father of her children. Despite advice that she should break off relations, and attempts to do so, she admitted to still being in love with her stepfather.

It is these complex family issues that the courts find themselves faced with and it is almost impossible to reach decisions that will satisfy all those involved. Practical arrangements can be made but that can barely begin to accommodate the often fraught emotional needs and can, in some instances, inadvertently exacerbate them. A court’s ruling can be read as inflexible and absolute, a judgement of your worth as a parent.

The child’s needs are prioritised. In the first instance that means that the environment the child is placed in must be deemed to be safe and so where would that leave Moat? A man that now had not only served a custodial sentence, but whose alleged crime was for assault against a minor. Without Sam’s active and positive decision to include him as part of their daughter’s upbringing, he stood little chance of courts deciding that he should play a full parenting role in her life.

And no doubt Sam’s decision to introduce another man to his daughter, another man taking his place in her bed and in her heart would have been like pouring petrol onto flames. This interloper could take his place in both his girlfriend’s and his daughter’s life – the latter was young enough to have few memories of who in fact her father was. How could Moat make sure that she would never forget him, never forget how much he loved her?

This toxic mix of self-pity, anger, frustration and remorse drove the anguished man to push his thinking into a tighter and tighter descent into destruction on that Friday afternoon. In allowing his wounded pride full expression, his options narrowed to one bleak endgame.

Amongst friends, he could have found shoulders to cry on, men to go out drinking with, when he could drown his sorrows with like-minded characters who’d agree that he’d been dealt a tough hand and that his ex didn’t deserve him and who would try and assure him that things would get better. But Moat could not accept that this was the type of friendship he needed at that moment. He did not want pity. He had always cast himself as a self-sufficient man, someone who was capable, powerful even. Someone to look up to. A man of action, not words.

He was on the precipice but did not perhaps understand how close to the edge he was. As he hatched his plan, maybe he did not realise that by choosing to express his despair violently, everything that he claimed mattered in his life would be lost to him forever. All he could see was the need to do something, something big, and something that would show Sam that he wasn’t to be messed around with and then discarded.

Moat wrote on his Facebook page and his anger and his despair is evident. He wrote:

Friday 11.21am Just got out the slammer to a totally fucked life.

11.32am Lost my business. Kids to s services. Gonna lose my home and lost my mrs of nearly 6 years to a copper. Like they havent fucked my life enough over the years.

11.37am Well she aint the lassy I thought she was. Cant win the kids, as police have fucked me over there too.

11.44am Mate this ones a hard knock. Its that whole rebuilding life from scratch thing. I aint 21 anymore.

11.54am Fucking strange how someone youve spent so long and treasured can turn on you like a pitbull. If Id fucked of with someone else id feel pretty shitty and definately twist the knife etc this ones a double hard knock.

12.22pm yea when its over its all a pile of chaos. How did a guy who had it all end up in this situation.

12.30pm Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so if a lass can really love you and treat you right, then they can also swing the complete opposite way eventually.

As Moat made his preparations staff at Durham prison were completing theirs. Moat was no longer in their charge but following the requirements to flag up any concerns they may have had, the Security Information Report was completed, signed off and was making its way through official channels. The concern was simple enough – Moat had made threats about his ex, there was a risk that he could seek to harm her.

Again that brings us to a point where ongoing investigations limit what can be said here. It is known that the Security Information Report reached Northumbria police and it would be the temporary Chief Constable Sue Sim who would come to say as much. Whether that information was acted on as fast as it can reasonably be expected is open to conjecture. More importantly it is subject to an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation. That means that contempt of court again becomes an issue; nothing that goes on record can be seen to prejudice proceedings.

So to tread carefully, beyond an acknowledgement that the Security Information Report was received, nothing more can be stated and it is interesting to note that IPCC investigations can take as long as two years before they reach their conclusion.

Off the record however, the police have spoken about the practical assessments that have to be taken when reports are received. It is worth remembering that the high numbers of those released from prisons each year will mean that an evaluation as to who poses an immediate risk is inevitable. Looking into the record of past offending is one approach: those with a long history of convictions for violence against others will top the list of those in need of monitoring.

The question of police resources is pertinent and not quite as straightforward as it at first appears. Despite year-on-year increases in police budgets and the recruitment of additional officers, Sir Denis O’Connor, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, announced in July 2010 that an average of only 11 per cent of officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) are able to meet frontline demands. In his role as police watchdog, he also stated that in some forces only six in every hundred officers are on a duty visible to the public during peak Friday night hours. So with greater numbers than ever, now standing at over 140,000 officers, as well as bigger budgets, how is it possible that the officers aren’t visible and available in numbers?

As a former Met assistant commissioner, Sir Denis understands more about modern policing than most and he blames the low availability on a number of factors. He highlighted the reliance forces now have on PCSOs, who are an essential resource but do not continue their duties after 8pm. Shift patterns will also account for a large percentage of officers ‘not available’ but Sir Denis points to other trends in policing that are significant, namely risk management and bureaucracy.

Complaints about the time spent attending to paperwork are not new. In fact, two years before Sir Denis’s report, The Home Office commissioned Sir Ronnie Flanagan to report into the future of policing so as to find ways of cutting bureaucracy. He warned that officers were being overburdened with red tape and noted that each officer could end up spending half their shift dealing with the process of arrest and detention, even if an offence is minor.

The paper trail is, however, a necessity, should a case come to court. Crown lawyers know that the defendant’s legal representatives are adept at pulling cases apart if processes aren’t followed clearly and diligently and cases can quickly collapse if the police can be shown to have failed to account for every detail.

The tension between effective frontline policing and the demands of case load management means that the assessment as to what has to be prioritised becomes inevitable.

As a rule, repeat and violent offenders receive longer sentences and that will mean access to the probation service and a stricter list of conditions once they are released. But Moat fell between the cracks. He was neither a long-term prisoner nor a man with a record of the worst and most serious of offences. He was known to the police but not as the totally different man he was fast becoming on that Friday: a brutal and calculating killer.

Did he recognise that man in himself? If there was a final step to take towards the transformation, it was a physical one. Moat shaved his hair. This was far more than a simple issue of disguise, after all, he was not being sought at this point – the manhunt would begin later. And even if he expected to go on the run, a Mohican haircut has to be one of the few grooming styles that can guarantee to attract attention, rather than allowing you to blend with the crowd. No, this was Moat going to war, and the iconography he chose is revealing.

Travis Bickle isn’t a name that at first sight inspires fear but it was well chosen by Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver. If the Hulk appealed to juveniles, Travis spoke to the angry and alienated man. Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film may not have had immediate box-office appeal but it has gone on to become a revered classic and of course it was instrumental in launching the career of Robert De Niro. The actor gave perfect expression to the frustrated and misunderstood Bickle, a lonely ex-Marine and a man who saw himself swimming against a tide of all that was wrong in society.

But it is Bickle’s decision to act that proved to be the most compelling aspect of the mind of this disintegrating man. Armed and possessed of a new sense of purpose, he shaves his head into the distinctive Mohican and acts out his new persona in front of a mirror in his room. Looking into the glass he is lost in a fantasy where an imaginary and unfeeling foe challenges him. In one of the most memorable scenes yet produced on celluloid he asks:

‘You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?’

In a fluid motion, the gun he has concealed on a sliding mechanism of his own creation slides into his hand as he enacts the role of a mild-mannered man who has been pushed and provoked and who is now ready to retaliate with terrible vengeance. So enacted, Bickle is ready to take his retribution to the street and track down and hunt his enemies.

This isn’t Charles Bronson in Death Wish or Gregory Peck in Cape Fear, two characters who have a clear motive – an eye for an eye as their loved ones are killed or terrorised. Taxi Driver is far more haunting because Bickle’s pain is real but misplaced, his enemies are everyone and no one, and the girl he kills for no longer recognises or understands him. His violence is futile and self-defeating. He is not the hero he believes himself to be, nor is he in control of the heroic persona he imagines will free him. All he leaves is carnage.

If there is a message that violence is futile and self-defeating, it wasn’t the only one the film seemed to impart. Taxi Driver hit the headlines five years after its release when John Hinkley, Jr, attempted to kill US President Ronald Reagan. Hinkley was obsessed with Jodie Foster, an actor in the film, and in a moment where mental instability blurred the boundaries of reality and fantasy, he carried out his assassination attempt, an imitation of Bickle’s attempt to kill a politician in the film.

Destruction, bloodshed, carnage – scenes, even imagined ones that we may recoil from – take on a dark attraction in the minds of those who are sufficiently disturbed. When all has been lost, and the pain is beyond containment, why should it not be made real for all to see and all to feel? Moat will have played with these dark thoughts, such as: If I cannot have her, then no one will. If he thinks that he is the new man in her life, he did not reckon with me. If she thinks I can be cut out of her life so easily, she will live to regret it.

With each fantasy came momentum. Moat standing over the man who took his girl from him, fear in Samantha’s eyes and the eyes of her family. His thoughts would be: They will learn to fear me and that I am all powerful, never to be messed with. It was irrational, childlike almost in its reasoning, but utterly potent. The sense that this would be a road walked that could not be undone seemed beyond Moat’s reasoning. All he could see was his pain and the desire to avenge.

Without overstating his transformation into a Bickle-like character, it is easy to see how he would identify with the creation. Bickle says: ‘Listen you fuckers, you screwheads, here’s a man who would not take it anymore, who would not let… a man who stood up against the scum, the cons, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up.’

This was exactly the mental terrain that Moat now inhabited. A man floored by circumstances beyond his control. Now he was standing up.

He’d lost weight over the last few weeks. His distress had suppressed his appetite and he had not been taking his usual array of supplements to maintain his shape and so was leaner than he had been for some years. Moat took pride in his physique. Now with his new haircut, he selected a bright orange tee shirt, a pair of dark jeans, white trainers and headed out to the Scotswood Road. Again, orange isn’t the colour a man would choose if he was aiming to stay unnoticed. This was a statement colour, complete with Mohican. Standing at 6ft 3in, he felt ready to head back into the world and begin gathering the tools he would need for the job.

He would soon be in possession of a shotgun – how he acquired this has yet to be ascertained through the course of the ongoing investigation and the courts. In reality, Moat had existed on the fringes of various criminal networks for years, therefore getting a firearm would not pose much of a problem. The availability of firearms has been escalating for some time. By 2005 it was estimated that over four million guns were in circulation in the UK and, perhaps not surprisingly, between 1998 and 2008, the rate of gun crime had doubled. When it comes to the numbers of injuries, there were 1,760 gun-related injuries or deaths provisionally recorded for 2008/09, compared with 864 in 1998/99.

This has inevitably meant that the police have had to respond and Armed Response Units are part of policing teams across all forces. Moat would have known this; he would have known that firearms units have access to Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, capable of firing 800 rounds a minute, and Glock semi-automatic pistols. But he was beyond caring. He knew that he would be able to do what he had planned and that it would be some time before they had any idea that he had started a war.

Raoul Moat headed to the hardware store B&Q on the Scotswood Road – he knew the DIY retailer well and it was only a few miles from his house in Fenham. There he picked up the items he’d need over the next few days. He’d already amassed other equipment, it was all part of his plan of action. If he had to go on the run, then so be it. He would keep busy until the time came, itemising what might be of use to him, playing out various scenarios and contingencies.

With the basics taken care of, all he had to do now was work out where Sam would be and when. That shouldn’t prove too difficult. He knew where she liked to drink, who she’d talk to on a night out and, more pertinently, he had her parents’ address. She’d be easy to track, easy to corner. He was calm, perhaps for the first time in a very long while.