Her friend thought the boys seemed in a hurry and that it looked out of place, a child entrusted to the care of boys who were themselves so small.
Jon and Bobby turned right by the SOGAT building and into Church Road West. As they walked down they were accosted by two older lads, Stephen, who was 11, and Ibrahim, 12, who were standing outside the newsagents on the other side of the road.
Ibrahim knew Bobby by name and by sight, and had seen him that morning, with Ryan, apparently on their way to school. He knew Jon from the area, though not his name. Stephen, who had left: Jon and Bobby’s school last July, recognised them both, but did not know Jon by name.
Ibrahim was playing with a pair of handcuffs, which he had bought from the Army &C Navy Stores. He and Stephen thought it would be a lark to put the handcuffs on the boys over the road, and give them a fright.
When they approached them they saw that James was upset. Ibrahim saw the bump over his eye, and thought he looked sad. Bobby and Jon held on to James’s hands, and did not let go.
“What happened to the lad?’
‘He fell over at the top,’ said Bobby.
‘Where?’
‘The top.’
Ibrahim took this to be the top of County Road.
‘Look in his hair as well,’ said Bobby.
‘You all right?’ Ibrahim said to James. He turned away and began crying. Ibrahim could see red dots and lines under James’s hair.
Who is he?’
‘His brother,’ said Bobby, nodding at Jon.
Where you taking him?’
‘Home.’
‘If you don’t take him home I’ll batter you.’
The boys walked on then, having escaped a handcuffing, and turned right into City Road, heading towards the Everton ground, over the broo that bridged the railway line.
As they reached the bridge they were level with a young woman pushing her baby daughter in a pram. She was late on her way to her mum’s but noticed the boys, how they were holding James’s hands, and thought they were young to be in charge of such a small child. She pointed James out to her daughter.
‘Look, Lori, there’s a little boy.’
The daughter turned to look, but there was no reaction from Jon or Bobby. The boys crossed the road, and turned down the entry along the side of the railway.
They were only a few yards into the entry when Jon snatched the hood from James’s anorak, and threw it into the tree. They walked on, heading for the road at the far end, Walton Lane, with its police station directly opposite.
As they reached the bottom of the entry a motor bike turned into the alleyway immediately in front of them, from one of the side roads. The boys started at the apparition, a red Yamaha XS250 ridden by a man disguised beneath a black one-piece suit and a gleaming white crash helmet. He manoeuvred the bike into the back yard of his home, thinking that the boys had seemed very jumpy.
James was crying again when they got to the far end of the entry. Jon and Bobby loitered there, and James was close to one of them when a man walked past, and heard a moan or a sob from the child. The boy next to James looked straight at the man and said, ‘I’m fed up having my little brother, he’s always the same.’ He turned to the other boy and said, ‘I’m not bringing him again.’
As he walked on by, the man guessed that the two boys had been looking after the child since coming out of school at four o’clock. It was nothing unusual. Just another little boy crying with his big brother.
Jon and Bobby walked out of the entry and on to Walton Lane, facing the police station, with the railway bridge on their left. A teenager saw James laughing as she walked towards them. One of the boys was pushing James into the road. James was laughing. When the boys saw the teenager, who was with her father, one of them ran up the alleyway, while the other retrieved James from the road and picked him up, arms around his chest. James was still laughing as the boy carried him into the entry.
When they came back to Walton Lane, one of the boys stood at the edge of the pavement, holding James by the hand. It appeared to a woman who was walking past that they were trying to cross the road. The other boy was hanging back, near the entry. When they saw the woman looking at them the boys turned back into the alleyway with James. The woman was five minutes from home, coming back from seeing a friend in the village. She thought fleetingly about the dangers for a small child, being out in the dark with young lads on such a busy road.
When she arrived home the woman looked at her watch. It was 5.30 p.m.
10
1907 by 6796 BO1V-Cover DU Mr Fitzsimmons bleeped at request of DS Dolan.
It was his first weekend in charge of the divisional CID. Jim Fitzsimmons had started at nine that morning and was due off at eleven that night. Monday had been his first day as a Detective Inspector, and the duty rota had put him on cover for the weekend.
At seven minutes past seven that evening, when the radio pager on his waistband went off, he was sitting at home in Crosby having a cup of tea and a sandwich before continuing his tour of the stations in the division.
As he left Copy Lane police station, he had decided to pop home on his way up to Southport. There was nothing pressing and, on such a long shift, he liked to get back to see the family, if only briefly, when the opportunity arose.
It should have been a short introduction to his new job. He was due on a six-week management course in Preston, starting next Monday. There was just time to familiarise himself with the current crime, the new computer system and the CID staff.
Tonight was typical of all the tours he would make on his future weekend covers. Going from one station to the next, seeing who was on, if there were any problems, what prisoners they had in, anything out of the ordinary, anything he should know about. Walking talking management, as his old boss Albert Kirby would say.
When the bleeper bleeped, Jim picked up the phone and called in to control. There was a child missing, a two-year-old at the Strand. Okay, nothing terribly unusual about that. He asked the questions. Who was the child, where was he from, how long had he been missing? He was James Bulger, from Kirkby, and he had been missing for over three hours.
This was more alarming, a child missing for so long, and so far from home in an unfamiliar environment. What did they have on the disappearance so far? Jim was told of the ponytail man and the other child, who could not be traced, who claimed to have been enticed by a man in a white coat. A search was under way, and detectives were aggressively pursuing the pony-tail man at known addresses and contacts. Okay, good, I’m on my way. Jim set off for Marsh Lane.
Though he had acted up in the senior post often enough in the past, the promotion, from Sergeant to Inspector, had been a long time coming, mainly because he had made a diversionary career move. Four years ago, at the age of 32, Jim Fitzsimmons had entered Liverpool University as an undergraduate — still salaried as a police officer, still carrying his warrant card, but now just another student, albeit a mature one, on campus.
Normally, officers returning to study would have resumed policing duties during the long summer breaks. Jim had chosen to add a Spanish option to his combined Management and Policy Studies degree. It had meant spending his summers in Spain, for the good of the course, naturally.
He had worked hard at the Spanish, but struggled with the grammar. This had brought him a 2:1 BA Honours degree. He had finished on 3 July last year and resumed his career as a Detective Sergeant the day after, working out of headquarters at Canning Place. He had passed for promotion in September, been notified of his new posting in January, and started on Monday.
Going back to work had not been difficult, although he had been so long away from the job. He had not stopped thinking of himself as a police officer, because he didn’t think of himself in those terms to begin with. He thought the experience of the degree had changed him in some way he couldn’t quite articulate. Something to do with broadening his view of life, probably.
Jim’s father had been a docker, an
d Jim had been the eldest of six children. A large and extended Catholic family from Bootle was no rare thing. A close community, overflowing with children. Jim was the dreamy, dizzy kid with a passion for football and Anfield, and not much talent for playing himself.
His dad bought him a season ticket when he passed his eleven plus. Or rather, Jim was given his dads own ticket for the stand, and his dad bought a ground ticket for himself, because he couldn’t afford two for the stand. Jim went to matches on the back of his dad’s Honda.
After a couple of years at a Catholic grammar school, the Salesian College, Jim had begun to develop quickly, finding skill as a sportsman, especially football, and signing schoolboy forms with Liverpool before being taken on as an apprentice professional at sixteen.
His father, who had always smoked heavily, contracted lung cancer, when Jim was thirteen. Jim’s father, who was 40, never acknowledged that his illness was terminal. He simply made his eldest son promise that he would never smoke. Jim was in the boys’ pen on The Kop when his father died, because he wasn’t wanted at the hospital. Jim remembered the loss, but not the grieving. He thought of his father as a strong man.
As the family wage-earner, his apprenticeship to Liverpool was a godsend. Twenty pounds a week plus twenty pounds keep, which he gave to his mum. He had been signed on by Bill Shankly, and imbued with the great man’s philosophy of the game, and of life. He learned to play football the Liverpool way: simple, play it simple, push it and move. That was the word of Shankly. Every successful thing in life is done simply.
At the end of his apprenticeship, Jim was released by Liverpool. He had never made the first team, and accepted that he was not destined for glory as a footballer. He was gutted — but he needed a job.
The father of his then girlfriend — now his wife, Fran — was a police officer. Jim liked his future father-in-law and, on the basis that he couldn’t face the thought of going indoors to work, he applied for the police and the fire services. He was accepted by the police, and sent for training in November 1975 — His first posting was to Anfield.
He worked at Walton Lane after that, and went into the CID, before being promoted back into uniform as a sergeant. Before long he was back in the CID again, first on special duties at headquarters, which was a euphemism for the Special Branch, then working around the country, even going into Europe for occasional enquiries, with the Regional Crime Squad.
Jim was 36 now, married for some fourteen years, with two boys, Daniel, twelve, and Joe, ten, and a six-year-old daughter, Louise. A family Pools win, a few years ago, had made life more comfortable. The eldest boy was at the Merchant Taylors’ school in Crosby; their home a little nicer than it might otherwise have been.
He was a stocky, solidly built man, still playing football for the police and coaching a team of youngsters. Warm and easy-going, he favoured a laid-back style of management in the force. He was known universally to colleagues as Jim or Jimmy Fitz.
In that Shankly way of seeing football as some kind of metaphor for life, Jim saw himself at half-time, and was looking for a good second half. Hence the return to academic study. He continued to believe in simplicity as a policy, and he liked honest players, true people.
As he made Marsh Lane in his Cavalier, Jim had time to reflect on his own wanderlust as a child. He had once disappeared out of the old Woolworths on Stanley Road, while shopping with his mother, and been found 20 minutes later, on the way to Liverpool city centre. There was the time he had hopped on a bus and been found in Allerton. And when the Hornet had printed a picture of the Liverpool team, he had walked off and called at every newsagent from Bootle to the south end of the city, trying to buy a copy of the comic. The police had spent two and a half hours looking for him. Hopefully this, or something like it, would be the story with James Bulger.
When he arrived at Marsh Lane Jim was brought up to date by the uniform bosses. Nothing seemed to have been overlooked in the response to James’s disappearance, but now, with increasing concern for the vulnerability of such a small child, it would become a CID matter.
Jim phoned round the stations in the division and called in all the available detectives, leaving just one for cover at each location. He began running a manual control, which would be the prelude to a computerised HOLMES major incident enquiry, should that be necessary.
A final and thorough search of the Strand was planned, and the keyholders of every shop were called from their homes to re-open their premises.
Ralph Bulger had also arrived at Marsh Lane by now. He had only heard of James’s disappearance when he called at his mother-in-law’s home, expecting to meet Denise and James, back from the shops. He went straight round to see Ray, his brother-in-law, because Ray had a car, and could give Ralph a lift into Bootle.
Mandy Waller and another officer were asked to take Ralph up to Kirkby, to search the Bulgers’ home. Ralph could not understand the necessity for this — James was hardly likely to have made his own way back — but accepted Mandy’s explanation that it was a standard procedure when children went missing.
Ralph had some recent photographs of James on a roll of 110 film, which they brought back to Marsh Lane. Other members of the family were also coming into the station, offering support and help with the search.
The pony-tail man finally turned up, at the front desk of the police station, having found out that the police were looking for him. He had been at the Strand that day, but it became apparent that he had not been involved in James’s disappearance. He was then the first TIE of the enquiry — he had been traced, interviewed and eliminated.
11
Afterwards, Jon and Bobby came down from the railway on Walton Lane, just the other side of the bridge from the police station. They clambered down the embankment, following the slope of the supporting wall of the bridge. At the top of the wall they reached out for the lamp-post, and slithered down it to the ground. A drop of some ten feet.
They crossed into the village then and hung around, roaming through the entries. They decided to knock for Gummy Gee, but there was no answer, so they sat on the steps near Gummy’s house for a while, until another boy they knew came along and told them Gummy was in. No, they said, we don’t think so. But they knocked for him again anyway, and there was still no answer, so they walked back up Gummy’s street and into Walton Village, going in and around the entries for a bit, until they came out by the video shop in the Village, and decided to go inside.
Like many of the local children, Bobby was often in the video shop, sometimes chatting to one of the young women who worked there, sometimes propped against the counter watching a film or a cartoon, sometimes being cheeky and getting thrown out. His house was only half a dozen doors along the road and his mum was a member of the shop. Bobby sometimes rented films himself, on his mum’s membership.
The two women in the shop worked alternate nights. Dorothy opened on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, and Joanne took the other nights. Bobby sometimes ran errands for Joanne, in return for money. He often went in to see if she wanted anything from the chip shop. Joanne had noticed that he was usually mucky and untidy, as little boys are when they have been out playing. Tonight she immediately saw Bobby’s fingernails were dirty and his face covered in muck. He had what looked like a fresh scratch on his face, which was also caked in dirt. This was not strikingly unusual, and she thought he seemed as normal. She did not know or recognise Jon.
After a couple of minutes she asked them to run a message for her. There was an overdue video at 2 Haggerston Road. They owed £4.75 in fines, and if Jon and Bobby could get the money or the tape, or both, she’d give them 50p each for going.
The boys went out and, not long after, Joanne’s workmate Dorothy came in for a chat.
Jon and Bobby walked up Walton Village and turned right into Haggerston Road. Karen at number 2 had rented the video Rosie and Jim, a children’s drama series featuring two rag dolls that come to life, earlier in the week. She knew it was overdue but her
son wouldn’t let her take it back.
Karen hadn’t long got in from work when there was a knock at the door. Jon and Bobby were on the step.
‘The video shop’s sent me. You owe £4.75.’
Karen left them standing there and went inside for the money. She came back with three pounds.
‘And make sure you give it to them.’
The boys walked back down Walton Village, past the video shop to the Chinese chippie on the corner. Bobby waited outside while Jon went in. Then they both went back to the video shop, and Bobby handed Joanne the three pounds.
Joanne took the money, and separated a pound coin. She had it in her hand, passing it over the counter to Bobby when the door opened and Jon’s mother came in. She was angry, shouting at the boys about sagging school, and telling them they were going to the police. She grabbed Jon by the hair and Bobby by the wrist, and dragged them both out of the shop.
Joanne still had the pound coin in her palm.
Jon’s mother, Susan Venables, had seen the boys as they walked down Walton Village, and had watched Jon going into the chippie. She had been out looking for Jon, with her eldest son Mark, and had immediately hidden when she saw him — in case he saw her and ran off. Once Jon and Bobby were in the video shop she pounced, knowing there was no escape.
That morning, after Jon had left for school, she had gone shopping with her ex-husband, Neil. They had eventually made their way to her mum’s, and in mid-afternoon her mum had given them a lift back, dropping Neil at his home so that he could meet Jon from school, and taking Susan on to her house in Norris Green, ready to meet Mark and Michelle when they arrived back from their school on the bus.
The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case Page 5