they were going to be late. Doubtless, they knew this, as Michael's interview details an argument that Reggie had with his mother following her instructions to him: "Reggie started whingeing about how it would make him late, but she didn't care. She told him to get his bum upstairs and fetch his sister. She said he was to pray to God and say thanks that he wasn't like the other two," by which she likely was referring to the disabilities of his brother and sister. This last remark from Laura Arnold appears to have been a common refrain.
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. 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."