The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (11 page)

When Ann’s friend Lesley Henderson came over from her house across the road, Ann asked her what she thought. Lesley said it did look like Bobby, but it also looked like loads of other kids. Ann washed Bobby’s jacket, which
he had left out by the washing machine for cleaning.

That Sunday, 14 February, Bobby gave Lesley Henderson’s daughter Kelly a Valentine’s gift of a pink teddy bear with an imitation gold chain inside, which he had bought from the flower shop in the village.

He and Kelly and the other children all played out together that day, and in the afternoon they all ran back to Lesley’s with the news that the police had found the body of a man on the track, with no head.

When Bobby’s grandmother had died the family had been short of money to buy flowers. Ann had told Bobby that when you wanted to show special love for someone you just bought a single red rose. Bobby had bought a red rose for his grandmother, and placed it on her coffin. On Wednesday he bought a single red rose from the flower shop, and took it across to the embankment, where he placed it on the grass, among all the other floral tributes to James Bulger.

That evening, Ann asked Bobby if he had taken James Bulger. Was it you took that little boy out of the Strand? No. She threatened to take him across to the police station the next morning, thinking that if he had been involved this would frighten him into an admission. He said nothing.

14

Alan Williams called Jim Fitzsimmons at home on Saturday morning, just after eight. He and Colin Smith had been working all night on the videos. He’d got the stills; they weren’t very good but they were the best that could be achieved from the original recording.

When Jim Fitzsimmons arrived at Marsh Lane he called his immediate superior, Geoff MacDonald, a Detective Chief Inspector who was then acting up, in lieu of promotion to Superintendent. Geoff MacDonald was at home. We’ve got a bit of a job on. There’s a missing child; have you heard about it? No. Well, there’s a child gone missing; it’s unusual. If you get yourself ready and come down, I’ll brief you.

Other Superintendents were already at work at Marsh Lane, the HOLMES team was assembling, and uniformed and plain clothes officers were being drawn in from all the Merseyside divisions to assist with the inquiry. The underwater team had begun dragging the canal, and the OSD had organised sector searches of the Bootle area, working outwards from Stanley Road.

When Denise and Ralph Bulger arrived they had to be told of the discovery that James had been abducted. Geoff MacDonald and Jim Fitzsimmons spoke to them in the old television room along the CID corridor. They told them what the video showed, and tried to be positive about the implications. At least James had not been alone. He’s been taken by two bigger people. Perhaps it’s just a lark; maybe James is squatting somewhere with them. Denise and Ralph were at least a little reassured. They asked to see the photographs of the two boys.

Jim Fitzsimmons produced the pictures, and the couple studied them while he briefly left the room.

As he returned, Denise pointed out of the window, to the low building by the waste ground across Washington Parade. Look, over there, that’s the two boys. Jim looked, but could see no one. They were there a minute ago, said Denise, they must have gone behind that building. It looked just like them. Jim Fitzsimmons walked out of the station and across the road, and behind the building he found two boys, with a young girl, smoking. He asked the boys where they had been yesterday afternoon. They had been at
the Strand. He took them back for questioning.

Of course, they were not James’s abductors. It seemed to Jim Fitzsimmons that this was a nightmarish moment: the yearning expectation of Denise and Ralph, and an inquiry getting under way to find two boys, based on indistinct images on a video that might just about match every other young male on Merseyside.

It was hard to get a fix on the ages of the two boys on the video. The tape was replayed endlessly. Attempts were made to compare their heights with objects or people around them on the footage. By general agreement, they were around 13 or 14 years of age. A little older, quite possibly; a little younger, maybe. Most, though not all, of the witnesses who came forward with alleged sightings of the boys concurred.

Mandy Waller should have been on another 2–12 shift that day, but she came in early, around 11, and took over from the Crosby policewoman who had been sitting with Denise. Ralph spent much of the day out searching with other members of the family. They came and went from the television room, offering snippets of news and any reassurance they could muster. Mandy kept an eye on developments along the CID corridor, and endeavoured to be a filter for information emerging from the depressingly unproductive inquiries. It was a day of tea and sandwiches, and increasing despair.

When the trawl of the canal had been completed, and no body found, Mandy Waller, who had believed James would be found there, tried to make it sound positive, a good sign. For Jim Fitzsimmons, Geoff MacDonald and the other inquiry officers it only added to the uncertainties. Could a body have been carried elsewhere by the current? If so, in which direction? If he wasn’t in the canal, then where was he? Was the sighting on Berry Street good? Was James nearby, or was he one of the rising number of far-flung sightings? There had to be a chance that he was still alive, and the officers clung to this possibility, though rationally it was a remote hope.

Amid the speculation and the brainstorming lay the more methodical process of examining all the incoming information, selecting priorities, and initiating inquiries. Names of potential suspects were coming in; detectives were being dispatched to check them out.

On the Saturday evening, officers finally visited the elderly woman who had been walking her dog on the reservoir. Her description of the two boys was limited – she could only say that they were ten or eleven years old and spoke with local accents. She remembered James as two or three years old, with blonde hair and a round face. She remembered a dark anorak with orange coloured lining, light coloured trousers and white shoes. She was shown a photograph of James and thought it similar to the toddler she had seen. She said she had been on the reservoir just after quarter past four, less than an hour after James had been abducted.

It was by no means conclusive, but when the statement was read, back at Marsh Lane, it was decided that this was a sighting of James, even if the woman had apparently underestimated the ages of the two boys with him.

This suggested a fresh direction for the search, away from Bootle and into Walton, and opened up a whole new area for speculation. There were cemeteries, more stretches of canal, hospital grounds, old railway lines, open spaces, city farms …

Jim Fitzsimmons found Saturday a difficult and frustrating day, plagued by slow progress and uncertainty. They needed something, anything, to move forward. A direct line to the Pope.

Before clocking off at one o’clock in the morning he and Geoff MacDonald again spoke to Denise and Ralph, again persuading them that it was time to go home, again trying to sound reassuring. If James had been in the canal we would have found him by now. He must be in the custody of someone, things are positive. Denise said, ‘Do you think we’ve got a chance?’ Jim could see and feel her desperation. Holding on to the slightest hope. Yes, they could still find him, he could still be alive.

*

Albert Kirby was off that weekend, at home, and had been following the events that were unfolding in Bootle from news reports and the occasional phone call from officers of his team who had become involved in the inquiry.

He had been at work on Friday, at his desk in Canning Place, where he was the Detective Superintendent in charge of the Serious Crime Squad. He had heard of James’s disappearance that afternoon, and hoped the boy would be found. As time went on he began to wonder whether it might warrant his involvement. He had run through the options in his head – a relative, perhaps, had taken James; he was hiding somewhere; or being held against his will – but in his heart, as time went on, he knew those options were evaporating.

He had decided on Saturday that if James was not found by tea time he would go in on Sunday, either to help or to take over the inquiry.

Like a doctor on call, Albert always kept his black leather briefcase at home, packed and ready to go to work. It contained pens, writing pads, a pager, a mobile phone, and the latest in the series of red, A4 sized, spiralbound notebooks in which Albert chronicled his work. He often took a prepared lunch in with him as well, in a small Tupperware container.

Albert was a meticulous and controlled man. He had never smoked and had been teetotal for the past ten years, since giving up the occasional pint while in training to run the London marathon. People had once been nasty
about it, passing comments on his abstinence. Albert had concluded that they were responding to their own weaknesses and nowadays, when he sat with a Kaliber or a Barbican, everyone just accepted it.

He still ran, two or three times a week, in the streets around Blundellsands, at the north end of the city, near his home. If he was troubled by work he could run the problem out in half an hour. The coast, the sea, the fresh air and the occasional burst of sunshine made him feel tremendous, after a day at his desk. His heartbeat, when he was relaxed, would register at 36.

Both his parents had died of problems related to high blood pressure when he was still a boy. They had married as first cousins, from a family in Widnes, and been living in Liverpool, where his father was a seaman, when Albert was born. They had moved to Barrow-in-Furness when the father had become a harbour master, and he had died there, on Albert’s fourth birthday.

When his mother died five years later, Albert had been taken in by an aunt who sent him to boarding school. He had been fortunate to be cared for so well. The school had been full of boys who were either orphaned or had only one parent.

Albert did not associate the loss of his own parents with his attention to fitness and well-being, but he had found that, at boarding school, he had developed resources, such as the ability to identify other people’s strengths and weaknesses, which had served him well throughout his police career.

As a young man he had been envious of contemporaries from conventional family units, especially those with a good father and son relationship. He had been pleased to be able to replicate that in his own marriage. A son, Ian, was now 21 and studying at St Andrew’s University – conveniently for Albert, who had recently taken up golf.

His wife, Susan, had been a police officer when they met and married, but after the birth of Ian she had developed a chronic and disabling rheumatoid arthritis. She had endured seven or eight major operations for joint replacements, including her wrists and shoulders.

Albert was distressed by his wife’s suffering and his inability to ease it for her. He hated the irony of their extremes: Susan in so much pain, Albert so fit and healthy. He had the greatest admiration for her continuing cheeriness in the face of such agony.

The church, and the support of the friends they found there, helped. They had both been raised as Catholics but had begun attending the local Church of England when they moved to their current home. Roy, the vicar, knew and accepted the origins of their faith, and had become a good friend. The values of Christianity, of course, were universal. Quite frankly, Albert thought, it didn’t matter a toss what religion you were. He would quote Dave Allen from the television: ‘May your God go with you.’

Albert worked with men who were very strong practising Christians, and did not believe it was unusual among police officers. Going back a few years, it might have been frowned upon as a mark of weakness, but not now – not in this day and age.

He was not obligated to go to work that Sunday but, Albert being Albert, it was the kind of thing he’d do. It was about responsibility and commitment, even devotion to the job. Albert knew when he had to go to work, and his wife, Susan, understood this, after nearly 25 years of marriage.

Albert was lucky in that respect. Susan had at least learned to live with the unpredictability and the disruption. It was a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week job, after all. He knew the pressures on CID officers and had seen the damage that it inflicted on their relationships. The failed marriage was by no means rare, and Albert thought there was a hard truth in the joky notice he had seen on the desk of one of his detectives: ‘You only get one chance in the CID – but you can have more than one wife.’

Unusually, Albert had been a detective for nearly all his years in the police service. He had been a cadet at sixteen, and a serving policeman at nineteen, in Liverpool city centre. That was in 1964, and within two years he had been moved to plain clothes work … vice squad … CID … and, with one brief interlude as a uniformed inspector, he had remained in plain clothes ever since.

As a manager, Albert saw himself as merely the leader of a team. He always said he didn’t detect the offences; it was the officers on the ground who were responsible for getting the job done. He simply believed that, in life, people worked better with leadership and direction. He had been brought up in that creed, and had always responded to it as a youngster; he didn’t see any reason why the adult world should be different. Applying those trusted principles, he could get results.

He knew that people accused him of being rude, of being arrogant and abrupt. But that was how he was. It was his style; in management and in life, he was always the same. He liked to think people knew where they stood with him. He would say what he thought, and if he bollocked the arse out of somebody one minute for some misdemeanour, once he’d said his piece it was done and over with. He didn’t hold grudges.

His colleagues said of him that Albert was not a man to cross. He could be fierce, with his chilly, deep-set eyes and tightly drawn lips. Titty-lip, he was sometimes called. To most people he was not Albert, he was Mr Kirby. But he was not without humour and warmth, not above the banter and the storytelling, and, above all, he was a good detective and a positive manager.