The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  The question of how to interpret Stephen’s diaries is important. Because they are preserved in black and white, in his own handwriting, the temptation is to view everything on the page as Stephen’s considered final word. So if he writes that he would like to pay for laser eye surgery with some of the money he has stolen, then this must mean he is absolutely committed to doing so. Likewise, if he writes that he wants to start moon colonies, then this must mean he is completely delusional if not mad.

  But Stephen did not chisel his diaries in stone. They were not his final word on anything so much as a written record of a mind in motion: snapshots of thoughts and ideas as they passed through his head. If he imagined buying his own flat with some of the money he would steal, then there was a good chance he would write about it. If he imagined moon colonization or underwater cities as a solution to global overpopulation, then there was also a good chance he would write about it. It didn’t mean that either of these things were driving his actions the following day, or crossed his mind for the weeks or months to come. They were just things that occurred to him and which he wrote down. Like DI Fox says, brain farts. Everybody has them. Stephen just spent a lot of time committing them to paper. We also have to keep in mind that he went through periods of smoking a lot of cannabis. “That’s another thing to be aware of. Just because I wrote something doesn’t mean it is exactly what I think,” he says. “It might have been clouded by my weed smoking.”

  On the flip side, what you do see in his diaries is Stephen’s inability to lie to himself about himself. Even though he had created a world in which he was heroic, a new Robin Hood, he nevertheless confessed that one of his motivations was “power and wealth.” A fan of The Lord of the Rings, in one diary entry he compared the corrupting effect of crime and money to the dark lord Sauron’s ring of power. Frodo Baggins, a naïve hobbit from the countryside, sets off with the intention of destroying this evil only to find that the longer he is exposed to it, the more the evil whispers seductively. Stephen wrote that “the allure” of wealth was doing the same thing to him.

  Like the ‘One Ring’ it is subtle, so small—yet there is a draw in money—one which accompanies the feeling of getting momentary control.

  Then there was his mother to think about. In the spring of 2008, Stephen returned to Manstone Avenue for her birthday. He told her he was going to take her out for dinner to celebrate, and drove her down to the Sidmouth seafront, where he had made a reservation at the Hotel Riviera. A posh hotel that seemed to pride itself on belonging to another era, it had an imposing faux-Georgian façade and an atmosphere of hushed propriety. It was popular with the kind of affluent retirees Sidmouth had always attracted, as either residents or visitors, and was used to serving them. It was not used to serving schizophrenic women from local council estates and their socially awkward sons. But Stephen felt an overwhelming desire to do something special for his mother. So a waiter walked them to their table and left them there, facing each other, as the sea rolled and broke on the beach outside.

  Earlier that day, Stephen had returned to the quiet woodland outside of Sidmouth where he had hidden £1,000 in cash. He located the old oak tree and hoisted himself up, climbing its branches until he could see the nook where he had hidden the money. But after fishing it out and lowering himself back to the ground, he found that the plastic bag he had wrapped it in had done nothing to stop rain and damp reaching the now soaked banknotes. It was a warm morning, so he decided to dry them out in the sunshine, laying a long row of notes out on the grass. He sat beneath the tree, waiting contentedly. At one point, a pair of dog walkers passed within ten yards or so of him, but didn’t spot the money. They waved at Stephen. He waved back.

  He used £70 to pay for his mother’s birthday dinner. Back at the Hotel Riviera restaurant, the two of them looked at each other and smiled a little awkwardly. “This is nice,” his mother said after a while. Yes, Stephen nodded. It was nice. He ordered his mother a series of desserts, knowing that she was unlikely to eat anything else. He quietly asked the waiter if he could put a candle in one of the slices of cake, but when it arrived his mother was not quite sure what to say or do. People, Stephen noticed, were looking at them. His mother’s hair was frizzy and wild, her clothes bright and mismatched. “She didn’t know,” he says. “She always saw people in a very positive way, even when they were clearly not that, which used to frustrate me sometimes. But I didn’t say anything. I just tried to ignore them.”

  As he entered his teens, Stephen had tried to understand why his mother was like this. Was she born with schizophrenia? Or did she develop it somehow? Jenny had grown up in Paignton, a town thirty miles down the Devon coast from Sidmouth. Her father had worked in telecommunications and her mother had been a Labour councilor. Stephen’s mother had been considered a “rebellious” teenager by the standards of 1950s Devon and ended up spending time in some kind of “care home,” where she suffered abuse, the exact nature of which Stephen does not know. He remembers his father still being angry that Jenny’s parents had allowed her to be taken away. In the 1960s, she became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Devon’s hippie scene. It is possible, says Stephen, that a combination of abuse and exposure to psychedelic drugs exacerbated an underlying psychological issue.

  Equally, though, she may have simply inherited her schizophrenia. Her uncle Noel also had the condition. He once made the news for canoeing around the fountains in Trafalgar Square. “He was a really eccentric person apparently,” says Stephen brightly. “He ended up getting lost at sea. That was the demise of Uncle Noel.”

  * * *

  —

  At the Hotel Riviera, Stephen and his mother sat there, sharing ice cream. Because of her medication, normal conversation was impossible, but there was still a sense that they were both trying their best. “It was an effort on both our parts,” says Stephen. Perhaps they came close to feeling some kind of connection and intimacy, the kind that Stephen had only the faintest memories of but had craved his whole adult life. He enjoyed the act of paying for her dinner. He told himself that, with his father dead, he had an obligation to support his mother financially. At this moment in time he couldn’t really do that. But once the Organisation was up and running? Then he would. It was just another reason to keep going. Everything was.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In his room at Wyvern Hall, Stephen took a cardboard folder from a pile under his desk. It had the word ledbury written on it. He opened it and removed several printouts of maps and photographs that showed a picturesque old market town surrounded by fields and woodland, located some twenty miles southwest of Worcester. Circled, on a market square, was the Ledbury branch of HSBC. Elsewhere, he had marked the locations of potential changeover spots and drawn getaway routes that would see him quickly vanish into the trees. He had many of these folders, each with the name of a different location in and around Worcester—hereford or pershore—carefully researched and prepared and ready for whenever he needed them. “They were like a pack of cards,” Stephen remembers. “Do I do this one or that one?” And on a crisp, bright morning in early March, he chose Ledbury.

  He made the thirty-minute drive down into Herefordshire, rattling down narrow country lanes in his old Rover. He felt anxious. It had now been over two months since his last successful heist, the Lloyds TSB in Seaton. There was a part of him that wondered if he had been shying away from his mission ever since his arrest and confinement in Holland, his first real exposure to consequence. It made sense. The easiest thing in the world would be to simply…stop. To forget the heists and dreams of the Organisation, to keep his head down, focus on his degree, and see the Holland arrest for the urgent reality check it was.

  But then, what was reality anyway? He had made his own, and he was not going to turn away now when there was so much at stake, so many lives that could be lifted out of poverty and exploitation if only he could see his task through. Stephen gri
pped the steering wheel tightly, pressed his foot down, and overtook a tractor. He wound his window down. The air was cold and fresh with just a faint tang of manure. It reminded him of Devon.

  About a mile outside of Ledbury, Stephen parked on a quiet road adjacent to some woods. He slipped into the trees and, after walking for ten minutes or so, spotted what he was looking for: a tall tree with branches that make it possible, though not easy, to climb. Checking that nobody was around, he took off his backpack and produced a disguise. He put on a shaggy auburn wig, styled in the manner of a 1960s pop singer, plus a stick-on goatee and a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses. He hid his bag, then hiked through the woodland until he reached a large grassy common. He knew from his maps that this was Ledbury Park. All he needed to do was cross it, then follow the high street north, passing rows of crooked Tudor and Stewart buildings, until he came to the HSBC.

  He strode across Ledbury Park, trying to visualize what was about to happen, when he heard something behind him. It sounded like a laugh, hard and pointed. He ignored it, but then came a shout.

  “I like your hair!”

  Stephen turned around. Sitting underneath a tree about ten yards away was a group of teenagers, about four or five boys and girls. They were wearing baseball caps and smirking. Some of them were whispering to one another and laughing, keeping their eyes on Stephen the whole time. The boy who had spoken repeated himself.

  “I said, I like your hair. Is it real?”

  “Can I touch it?” shouted one of the girls.

  “Nice beard!” said another.

  Stephen stood there on the common, paralyzed by the sudden scrutiny. He tried to concentrate on what they were saying. As they continued to call out to him, sarcasm slowly giving way to outright insults, he understood what was happening. “I was basically being taunted by a group of kids,” he says with a soft sigh. “I’m surprised, in hindsight, that I didn’t realize that such an overt disguise was going to be detrimental. At the time I thought it had been a good disguise. Now I can see that it was overkill. But there you go. We get absorbed in stuff.”

  He made his way into the town. As he walked, he burned with self-consciousness. Those teenagers in the park had left him rattled and jumpy. Did his disguise look obvious? He glanced at the people he passed on the street, mostly older couples, and wondered if they considered him suspicious or unusual looking. From their expressions, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t really see too well through the sunglasses anyway.

  The HSBC was now in sight. He walked into the branch and it was quiet, with just one elderly man being served at a cashier’s desk. This, Stephen tried to reassure himself, was good. He walked to the second cashier’s desk and slipped her a piece of paper under the Perspex screen. It had been written on a paying-in slip, the kind you filled out with your name and account number when depositing checks or cash at your local branch. Only Stephen had altered this slip. He had amended “Paying In” to read “Paying Out.” The sum he had written was £8,500 and the name he had provided was “Robin Hood.” The woman on the other side of the screen looked at the note and looked up at him. He then placed his imitation pistol on the counter. The woman took the slip and quietly said she would be back shortly.

  So Stephen stood there, at the empty cashier’s desk, in his wig, goatee, and sunglasses, waiting for the woman to return with the cash. Later, the police would release stills of CCTV footage from inside the branch. With his wig, reflective sunglasses, and soul-patch goatee, he looked like a Las Vegas street magician, albeit one in baggy blue jeans and a black waterproof jacket. He says that the “paying-out” slip made to “Robin Hood” was not just a whim or conceived to be funny. It was, he says, a very serious part of his methodology and designed to underline the ideological cause behind the heist. “I felt I had to adhere to this kind of modus operandi,” he says. “Maybe it derives from the Asperger’s, but I had to follow this very defined methodology I couldn’t deviate from. It was the same with the coins I would leave and the way I would mark the banknotes with ‘RH.’ I felt that if I went outside of that, I would just become a normal robber, I guess.”

  Because the Ledbury branch was small and out of the way, he had already decided against trying to force his way to the safe on the grounds that it was unlikely to contain a large amount of money, making the potential risk greater than the potential reward. Which was why he used the note. He frowns and says he cannot remember why he specifically asked for £8,500, although it may have had something to do with the maximum amount of money he believed would be kept in the cashier’s register. A minute passed. Then another, and Stephen was still standing at the empty desk. The quiet sounds of a rural bank branch drifted around him: a low, unhurried conversation between a clerk and an elderly customer, the tap of computer keys, the soft clack and thud of checks being stamped. It felt airless and stuffy. His goatee seemed to be coming unstuck with perspiration. Where was the woman with his money?

  He knew, already, that he had failed. He had not been forceful enough. His confidence had been terminally ruptured by the teenagers in the park. Simply handing over a note asking the bank to pay Robin Hood £8,500 and then displaying a replica pistol had not been enough. Maybe the cashier thought it had been a joke. Or a drill. Where had she gone? He had just allowed her to walk off. Had she been afraid? Panicked? Compliant? Stephen could not tell. He could not read her emotions at all.

  She had probably already hit a button that alerted the police, he told himself. Armed response units were probably already being scrambled. He needed to move. Now. And so Stephen turned on his heel and walked out the door, back onto the main street.

  He didn’t run. During the getaways from almost all of his robberies, successful or otherwise, Stephen resisted the very urgent human instinct to flee as fast as he could. He knew from his hours of online research that running out of a bank would, quite logically, only attract attention. During his escape from his first attempted robbery, the Lloyds TSB in Exeter, he’d felt an overwhelming compulsion to sprint, and he very nearly did. Ever since then, though, he had maintained a steady, even pace, walking away from each target toward a changeover location, and then walking a steady, even pace away to safety.

  Stephen walked back through Ledbury and then vanished into the woodland. He found the tree with his bag of clothes, quickly changed, then emerged on the other side of the woods to find his car. He got in, started the engine, and then turned the Rover around and drove back to Worcester. A few days later, images of Stephen in the HSBC would be printed in local newspapers along with a call for witnesses. “We would like to speak to anyone who saw this man that day,” said Detective Inspector Rich Rees of Herefordshire CID in the appeal. “He would have made quite a distinctive sight.”

  The following day, Wednesday, March 5, 2008, Stephen attempted another heist. He cannot remember whether he had always planned to carry out consecutive raids, or whether his failure in Ledbury prompted him to act quickly, to chase his loss like a gambler trying to break a losing streak. The target was the same branch of Barclays bank in Worcester he’d tried and failed to break into late one night the previous November using his battery-powered angle grinder. Stephen had spent hours studying and surveying this particular bank—located only a mile away from Wyvern Hall—since he began university. He had been inside many times, pretending to browse through leaflets about personal loans while scanning the interior and memorizing the layout. He had walked the streets around it over and over again, plotting escape routes, changeover locations, everything.

  The bank itself is a solid, unremarkable Georgian building beside a run-down launderette and opposite a Citroën garage. But Stephen knew it was more than that. It was many different things. It was a substation helping to power a global grid of income inequality. It was a small temple to an economic system that demanded constant growth and constant expansion, even at the cost of the planet’s finite and diminishing resources. I
t was, above all else, a repository of stolen wealth. And he was going to steal it back.

  At 12:40 p.m. he walked into the branch wearing the same wig, sunglasses, and clothes he had worn the previous day. A few minutes later, he left, walking briskly but not so quickly as to attract attention. About fifty yards behind the bank was the St. John’s Sports center, a public gym with squash courts, a weight room, and soccer pitches. He entered the shower rooms, used a key to open a locker, and quickly slipped into a change of clothes. He then left and collected his bicycle, which he’d left locked nearby. As he unchained it, he saw police officers approaching the leisure center, and his heart skipped.

  He pushed off, rounded a corner, and then began pedaling as fast as he possibly could. Swerving into an intersection, he missed a moving car by just a few inches. A horn blared behind him, and the shock nearly knocked him off his saddle. He didn’t look back, but just kept pumping his legs until he was back on the University of Worcester campus. Knees shaking, he managed to dismount and then hurried into one of the buildings. Moments later he arrived, breathing heavily, in a lecture theater. He took a seat in the back. As the lecturer began to speak, Stephen attempted to review what he had just done.

  The heist had not gone how he had hoped. In his backpack, between his feet on the lecture room floor, he had £4,100, handed over to him by a nervous clerk. But again, this was not what he had wanted. He had wanted the bank staff to open a door behind their cashiers’ desks, which he felt sure would lead him to a safe or a vault or at least somewhere he would find the thick stacks of banknotes he had always envisioned accessing. “I tried to get them to open it,” he remembers. “But they wouldn’t do it.”