Raoul Moat – Endgame
So Raoul Moat was found in the Rothbury area, and has now “killed himself” while surrounded by armed police. Well I suppose there was no way they were ever going to let him come in alive, was there. In my more cynical moments, I suspect this was akin to ‘Operation Flavius’ by the SAS on Gibraltar many years ago
If he’s not carrying a gun when you kill him, make sure he is when everyone else finds him
Personally, I have to say I’m disappointed. I’d hoped that Moat was absolutely nowhere near Rothbury, and was just making the Northumbria Police look really really stupid by focussing on the area that he’d led them to by leaving a bunch of ‘evidence’ that he was in the area.
Well, either that or that he’d actually been serious about his “war on police”, and had left most of the ‘evidence’ booby-trapped in order to continue with his declaration of war.
As for the media carnival once the endgame started, that was just depressing- although again it showed up the amazingly crap nature of the “eye-witness”, and the cluelessness of people in general.
“From what I can see he shot himself. He lay down and shot himself.
“I think there was two, but there was certainly one shot.”
That’s just one example. There were others, but I can’t find them in print (yet)
All told though, just another sad story that didn’t work out the way it should’ve done.
Raoul Moat
At the time of writing this, the police around the North-East are continuing to search for Raoul Moat, particularly around the village/town of Rothbury.
Bearing in mind that Moat has ‘declared war’ on the police, I wonder if they’re conscious that focussing on one area like this must be like a red rag to a bull. Maybe they’re hoping he’ll shoot at another set of police officers, so they can catch him. Collateral damage, and all that.
I’m not too convinced that he’s actually still in or near Rothbury at all. In fact I kind of hope that he’s nowhere near that area, and that the car that was abandoned there (which Moat was allegedly using) is actually just a dirty great misdirection. After all, I’m not reassured by this comment from Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Adamson. He said
[He] had a “gut feeling” Moat was still in the Rothbury area.
Solid detection work at its best, obviously.
Mobility
Recently there’s been a big hunt going on, mentioned in all the national and regional media for a missing woman, Emma Ward. She disappeared at the start of April, but only got reported missing towards the end of May. Her husband’s been charged with her suspected murder, but the police haven’t found anything yet – and they’ve kept on searching, first the house, then the area. There’ve even been searches in the local ponds and ditches, but with nothing found so far.
The thing is, they seem to be making the assumption that any disposal is going to have been local, and I wonder why.
You see, out in these villages, pretty much everyone drives. There’s no public transport to speak of, and if you want to do much, you need a car. Most families have two cars.
Now if you’ve killed someone, even in a fit of fury, you need to dispose of the body. Maybe the normal thing is to dispose of it close to home, I don’t know. But when there’s at least one car in the equation, how do you know that they’ve still been disposed of locally?
Of course, you’ve got to be pretty fucking stupid to kill your partner (assuming he has, of course) and not report them as missing straight away. Not doing so isn’t smart – it just makes you look suspicious when someone else reports them as missing.
But if you’ve got a car, would you really run the risk of being seen walking down the road to the local pond in order to throw something in? I don’t think so. I know I wouldn’t. (Of course I realise I’m not in the same situation as a run-of-the-mill domestic one-off killer, but still)
If I’m disposing of a body, it’ll never be done nearby. Again in some ways I’m lucky because of the amount I travel for my work- although that’s why I made the choice to take this particular job- and stay overnight on the long journeys. If I’ve a body in the boot you can be damn sure I’m driving completely legally, not drawing attention. It gets me a long way away from home, removes the body from the situation, removes it from any other evidence. And then if I choose to go out late at night, somewhere deserted, somewhere wild, and drop off the body well, there’s no-one to see me.
Maybe one day I’ll be seriously unlucky, maybe be involved in an accident where the forces of law and order have to look in the boot of the car. Maybe one day someone will see me dropping a package in a canal, or in a sinkhole in the moors.
Maybe one day it’ll happen. Then all this will be over. But I’ll continue to ride my luck on that score. I’ve been doing this for years.
Killing Live Music
The weekend, and a trip into the city centre. This time the shopping centre was filled with the noise of a badly-played trumpet along with some kind of backing tape. The player was in the centre atrium, filling the entire place with his awful row.
The derringer is my own design and manufacture. Two barrels, one next to the other, both fired with the one trigger. It’s chambered for a .25 bullet, and the ones I use are low-powered subsonic rounds. The barrels have been drilled out similar to the Mag-Na-Port system (that’s where I got the idea from, after all) to reduce the noise and recoil even further. They’re surrounded by a case with baffles and wadding, to further absorb the noise of shooting the thing. Firing two shots at the same time, it’s quieter than a conversation. In a busy shopping centre it might as well be silent. There’s a bit of muzzle-flash to it, but not enough to worry about.
The barrels are both smooth – rifling leaves marks on the bullets, makes it easy to identify the gun used. I’m not going to make it easy for anyone investigating this.
Of course the accuracy of the derringer is awful. Low-powered low-calibre bullets, ‘porting, silencing, smoothbore barrels – it all adds up. Much more than six feet away it’s a toss-up, but I’m closer than that.
I walk past the trumpet player, derringer in my hand. It’s small enough to be not easily noticed – not like it’s some hyper-chromed big .45 auto or anything.
As I walk past, I simply raise my right arm and pull the trigger. Walk on. Behind me someone screams at the sight of the player’s blood and brains.
I don’t think he’s going to be playing his trumpet any more. Maybe I should get an award for services to live music.
New York, New York
As always, I have a bit of an issue with the entire New York car bomb ‘plot’. Like the one in London, it’s a supposed car-bomb which fails to do anything.
What it does do though – if we’re to believe the entire over-arching terrorism theme of the last decade – is bring it all right back into the limelight (again) but with no casualties, no body count, no negative press, just front and centre in the media and stories where terrorism (yet again) paralyses a city.
I wrote my marketing thesis about terrorism and PR which made the same kind of points, that if terrorism is about keeping one’s cause in the media, then the ‘best’ way is to do so without causing damage or loss of life. That way it’s all about how people are reacting to the threat of terrorism, not to the reality of terrorism. There’s a world of difference between the two.
After all, if you can “design” a device/event that can be the lead story in world-wide media for a week, and paralyse a city (even if only for a few hours) and do no damage whatsoever, that’s quite an achievement.
Even better, when people then go on TV to make big press/media announcement about how their country and their people won’t bow down to terrorism and it’s in response to something like this then I’m sorry, but terrorism’s won. You’ve already bowed to it, made people aware of those causes, and kept it in the mind. That’s how terrorism plays the media game and wins.
Hitching A Ride
Have you ever noticed, it’s become rarer and rarer to see hitch-hikers now? I don’t know why it is – although I can guess that some of it is the public worry about safety, the way hitch-hikers can disappear with no trace. Particularly when those hitch-hikers end up with someone like me.
I was driving along today, and came across a hitch-hiker, trying to get her next lift. Only about eighteen or nineteen from the look of her, shoulder-length brown hair, total faith that she’ll live, that she’ll be fine, that no harm can come to her.
I pull in, let her come up, open the door and get in. She tells me where she’s heading, does up her seatbelt, and settles back, ready to carry on travelling. She doesn’t really worry about how far she’ll go with me, confident that she’ll get another lift soon after I’ve dropped her off.
As soon as the seatbelt fastens, she’s mine. The seatbelt catch is one of my own making, custom – it won’t release without the special touch, my soecial touch. Of course I change it when it comes time to get the car serviced or MOT’d, it’s a five-minute job to unbolt my one, replace it with the original and get going. Once the car’s serviced, the catch gets replaced and job done. I don’t take passengers often. If I do, the catch must be broken – I must remember to get it fixed.
And that’s it. We drive off, I head back towards home. As we get closer, and go off the route that she’d planned on taking, she starts to panic, tries to undo the seatbelt, but it holds firm. It always does. The Criminal Justice Act is my friend again, preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying a blade, meaning that my people have no chance of escape.
We drive in to my double garage, the remote door-opener doing its job just fine.
The garage has been extended – legally, of course, with planning permission and everything. Fortunately, the sound-proofing and tool lockers didn’t need permission, so they got installed by myself once the building regs were checked and the building work was done. The window is covered, but from the outside it looks like an empty room. I took a photo of the empty room, printed it, stuck that in the window so it looks like it’s just empty.
With the garage doors closed, it’s a self-contained area. I take Suzy – my name for her, that’s all – out of the car into the room, take the chloroform cloth from its place on the workbench, use it to knock her out. She goes down, and while she’s out I take the time to gag her and chain her to the chair. The chain goes down to a hoop set into the concrete floor, the chair’s bolted to the floor.
Suzy won’t be going anywhere for a while. She’ll only leave here when it’s time for disposal.
England Captaincy
So John Terry did end up getting sacked as captain of the England Football Team and replaced with Rio Ferdinand.
Purportedly the sacking is because of Terry’s shagging around with the ex-girlfriend of a team-mate, which somehow makes it impossible to be a captain, as it’s a bad influence on the players, and the perception of the England team. Or something.
And then you get to this part of the BBC story…
Ferdinand, 31, is currently serving a four-match ban for violent conduct after only just returning to action following a three-month lay-off because of a back injury.
So, replacing a “bad influence” with someone currently serving a four-match ban for violent conduct. And that is the message we want to send out to the impressionable people who follow football and (apparently) model themselves on the behaviour of footballers.
Shagging’s a terrible thing, but violence? Oh, that’s OK.
Newsworthy?
Today a lot of the mainstream media are bleating on about the England captain, John Terry. Apparently he’s had an affair, and the other person was the girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend – sources vary currently) of another player at Chelsea (Wayne Bridge, if that means anything)
Now bear in mind that I couldn’t identify John Terry in a line-up. Hell, I didn’t even know he played for Chelsea. He’d be a fun target to kill, but not a likely one – and frankly I really don’t want to raise my own profile to the kind of level where the media and the public are interested in finding me.
All the same I don’t see how this is newsworthy. Yes, Terry has been a fuckwit – what else would you expect from a professional footballer, for heaven’s sake?. Being a fuckwit by cheating with the partner (or ex-partner) of one of your team-mates is even more fuckwitted. But is it news? No, not really.
Is it something people care about? Probably not. Surely I’m not the only person in the country who doesn’t give a damn where a footballer dips his dick.
So why is it in every paper? There are tons of relevant stories every day – but John Terry really isn’t one of them.
Meeting Hell
Mondays are always designed to be shit. In this case the week starts off with a meeting about the company buying in a new computer system to manage the corporate website.
I’m not a computer geek – I work in marketing, although I’m not a marketing geek either. I know my way round a website, and know more about them than I do about most things, so it’s a bit harder to bullshit me – but the sales guys from Omnikronic don’t know this. To them I’m just a Marketing turd, there to be sold to, there to be bullshitted.
“So tell me, can you integrate your system into a b-spline SQL database?” I ask them
“Yes, of course.“, is the reply from Mike, the main sales-twerd.
Now I know they’re bullshitting – there’s no such thing. And that’s not a good move. In fact, over time it could turn out to be a lethal move.
I don’t know what I’ll do with Omnikronic yet. Only time will tell.
Resolutions
I started writing this as a promise to myself. Where it will go, I don’t know.
You see, I’ve started to forget the details, the little bits that mean so much. I don’t glory in my work, but I do remember it – I go through it in my head, working out if I made mistakes, and when I have made mistakes, whether they’re big enough to worry about.
But over time, the details disappear. Was the homeless man done in Bracknell, Birmingham or Bingley? I can’t remember. I know it started with a B, but that’s it. Was it June or July when I put the tripwire in the stairwell of that carpark?
If I write the details down – or at least enough of them that I know where I’m referring to, and what happened – then I can go back, see what happened when.
And of course there’s the little side-bonus of waiting for this to be found, to see what you people think of it, think of me.
Maybe one day this will be used as evidence of what I did, seeing as how I’m incriminating myself with every word. But maybe all of this is part of one big plan, building up to one great final blowout.
Time will tell.
