“It was all quite surreal,” said Helen Lee, recalling the week in which the quiet market town she called home became ground zero for one of the biggest manhunts in British history. “There were so many reporters … police with machine guns. We were told if we wanted to go home that it was in our own hands.
“Later we had people coming here asking: ‘Do you know where Raoul Moat shot himself?’,” she added. “People came with flowers and all sorts, it was just appalling. One lady came on the bus with her two children to show them where it happened … it was sick.”
