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In less than an hour and a half, Ryan’s murderous rampage left 14 dead and 15 wounded. But the police would soon be closing in on the quiet Berkshire village whose name would soon be synonymous with mindless murder.

At 12.40 p.m. Mrs Kabaub Dean, the cashier at the Golden Arrow service station, had called the police. But she thought the shooting incident was just a robbery until much later when she heard about the bloodletting in Hungerford on the radio. Five minutes after her call the Wiltshire police alerted the neighbouring Thames Valley force assuming that Ryan would have moved into their jurisdiction.

At 12.47 p.m. the Thames Valley police got their first 999 call from Hungerford. The caller reported a shooting in South View, the street where Ryan lived with his mother. Shortly after 1 p.m. Police Constable Roger Brereton arrived in South View. At 1.05 p.m. he radioed the message: ‘Eighteen. One-oh-nine. One-oh-nine.’ It was the code for ‘urgent assistance required, I have been shot’. No more was heard from him. His body was later recovered from his police car near Ryan’s house. He had been shot in the back. He left a wife and two teenage sons.

By 2 p.m. the killing had stopped. Then the caretaker at John O’Gaunt Secondary School reported seeing a man enter the school building at around 1.52 p.m.

Michael Ryan had attended the school ten years before. It had done little for him academically. He had remained in the C-stream for pupils of below average achievement. The headmaster David Lee could not recall him. Lyn Rowlands, who had been classmates with Ryan at Hungerford County Primary School and John O’Gaunt Secondary School, said that he never seemed a very happy child. He was always on his own, always on the sidelines. Other children would try to include him in their games, but he was always moody and sulky. Eventually people left him to his own devices. But she did not remember him ever being nasty in any way. He was not the kind of boy who got involved in fights. He was very introverted and ‘a bit of a mystery’.

Another of his schoolmates, Andy Purfitt, told much the same story – that Ryan was a loner. He never mixed with anyone and did not play football with the other boys. But Purfitt remembers that Ryan was picked on by the other children a lot. As if to compensate for this bullying, Ryan developed an interest in guns. Even at the age of 12, he used to fire a .l77 air gun at the cows in the fields behind the house, a neighbour recalled. Later, he went out at nights shooting rabbits. One night he met a man who was much bigger than him. The man got a bit stroppy, so Michael pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at the man. The man turned on his heels and ran.

‘That just goes to prove the power of the gun,’ Ryan boasted.

He collected ceremonial swords, military badges and medals, and military magazines. School friends say he preferred guns to girls. When he left school, one of the first things he did was get a small-arms licence.

During his last year at school, Ryan hardly ever turned up for classes. He left with no qualifications and drifted through a number of labouring jobs. Now, after his murderous rampage through his home town, Michael Ryan was back at school and – as ever – alone. The Chief Constable of the Thames Valley police, Colin Smith, claimed that prompt action by armed police officers prevented Ryan from killing more people than he did. But it was not until 5 p.m. that the police confirmed that Ryan was in the school. They surrounded it.

The local police admitted that they did know Ryan, but only in the way that most of the inhabitants of a quiet, friendly market town know each other. He had no criminal record. A local constable had visited Ryan’s home in South View in June, just two months before the massacre, when Ryan had applied to have his licence extended to cover the 7.62 calibre automatic rifle. Ryan already had a firearms licence and, when he registered his new Kalashnikov,