The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (15 page)

Merseyside’s processer was at headquarters, where the equipment was kept in storage. Each of the Service’s seven divisions had one station which had been wired for the installation of the Bull hardware. There were no spare rooms kept ready for major incidents at the stations. The equipment came in, and the usual occupants of the rooms went out.

At Marsh Lane it was the Parade Room which became the epicentre of the Bulger inquiry, where the HOLMES terminals were installed. Nearby were rooms G/48 and G/49, normally used by sergeants and constables, now given over to receivers and allocators. Along the corridor was G/46, the Inspectors’ Locker Room, where shelving was built to take all the case exhibits.

The phones were ringing off their hooks, and boys’ names were accumulating in the Parade Room. Local police officers considered the troubled and troublesome youth of their neighbourhoods, and offered up the names of any who they thought might have been involved. Friends, neighbours, relatives – mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters – phoned in with their own suspicions. Some names came up over and over again. It was surprising that so many boys could be thought capable of such a crime.

Osty and Pitts, the two brothers who had found James, had a special notoriety, not helped by the unhappy coincidence that they had discovered the body. They were favourite TIEs. They were traced, without difficulty since they were already in the police station on the Sunday, interviewed at some length, and eliminated. Their Friday had meandered in similar fashion to their Sunday afternoon. But they had not been near the Strand.

There was a Bootle boy in care who was brought to Marsh Lane on Monday. His card was marked – literally, for card filing is the system used by Merseyside Police’s youth liaison officers to keep tabs on youngsters who come to their notice – with a series of allegations of previous offences. A sexual assault, a couple of physical assaults – he was said to have broken a teacher’s arm – and carrying an offensive weapon, an eight-inch knife. He was also suspected of having tied a baby to the back bumper of a taxi. He was known to have been the victim of a male rape in Anfield Cemetery.

He might have been prosecuted for any or all of his offences, had he not
been below the age of criminal responsibility at the time they were committed. He was now just ten years old.

There was no other boy whose alleged record more suited the killing. Albert Kirby said that if he wanted to fly by the seat of his pants, he’d say that this was the one. Case closed. But Albert did not fly by the seat of his pants. He preferred to keep his options open.

One of the officers assigned to interview the boy walked into the detention room where he was being held.

‘And you can fuck off.’

The officer, Phil Roberts, a detective sergeant with considerable experience of interviewing young people, looked behind him in mock puzzlement. There was no one behind him.

‘Who’re you talking to?’

Phil Roberts thought this boy was totally uncontrollable, but he was able to prove his innocence. He had been nicking a bike at the time of James Bulger’s abduction.

In any case, this particular boy’s age had counted against him as a suspect. He might have resembled one of the two figures in the video, but he was just too young to be convincing.

*

The caretaker at AMEC Building, the office by the roundabout on the corner of Hawthorne and Oxford Roads, had seen all the publicity about the killing of James Bulger when he went into work on Monday.

The firm’s premises were protected by a three-camera video surveillance system which ran 24 hours a day. Camera One was positioned on the front of the building, by Oxford Road. It looked down on the firm’s car park and was always trained on the manager’s car, wherever it might be parked.

When the caretaker got to work he thought it might be worth having a look at the recording Camera One had made on Friday afternoon. Sure enough, there were three girls, walking up the road towards AMEC, and two boys ahead of the girls, swinging a small child between them as they walked.

The caretaker called the police, and on Monday afternoon a detective called to collect the tape from him.

Albert Kirby, Geoff MacDonald and Jim Fitzsimmons sat and watched the recording. The quality was poor, poorer even than the material from the Strand, but there was no doubt it was the same three boys. As they walked past the AMEC office, they were directly alongside a low wall. It was possible to measure the boys off against the wall. It looked relatively high, above their waists.

On Tuesday morning, after looking at the video again, the three men
took the tape round to Hargreaves, a local supplier of professional video equipment, to see if they could enhance the quality of the tape. Despite all their high-tech hardware, Hargreaves could do little to improve the recording. The officers decided then to drive up to AMEC and see the location for themselves.

They parked, and walked over to the flower bed. Albert Kirby stood by the wall and put his hand against his leg, level with the top layer of brick. His hand was at the top of his calf, just below his knee. He had expected it to be quite a bit higher. He sat down on the wall.

‘Christ, these are small kids.’

It was apparent, for the first time, that the two boys could be much younger than they had thought possible. They had been misled by the Strand video.

That afternoon, at five past four, a policewoman at Marsh Lane took a call from a man who said that the picture of the lad was the twin of his son and he didn’t know what to do. His son looked like the dark-haired one. Other people had even said it was him, but the boy wouldn’t talk about it. He just went up to his room. The man didn’t want to come to Marsh Lane because there were too many cameras. He said he was calling from a friend’s house, and would call back in half an hour. He’d rather not say his name.

The policewoman, in a state of some excitement, went rushing to Geoff MacDonald’s office, and Geoff MacDonald went to share the news with Jim Fitzsimmons.

By the time the man phoned back, nearly an hour later, the policewoman had a tape recorder attached to her phone. He again said he thought his son was responsible. He said he had been passing the Strand on a bus on Friday, and seen his son there when he should have been at school. The man said that his wife and mother-in-law also knew, and were trying to protect the boy by washing his jacket, to destroy evidence. On the Friday evening he had come home to find his son trying to wash his own jacket, and now it was at the mother-in-law’s home. The man gave his Christian name and again agreed to call back.

He phoned for the third and final time at twenty past five, and this time the call was being traced. The man said he would bring his son in, he just wanted it sorting. His wife didn’t know he was doing this, and she would stand by the son. He had no idea who the other lad might be, but his son was in the Strand a lot. He had been given a game for Christmas that needed batteries, and the father didn’t have the money for batteries. His son was thirteen. He wasn’t at school on Friday, though his mother would say he was. The man finally agreed it would be better for the police to go to his son, and gave the home address: Snowdrop Street in Kirkdale. The call was traced to an address in Bootle.

There seemed to be no time to lose, and no reason to wait. Jim Fitzsimmons called together a team of detectives, and they all left Marsh Lane twenty minutes later, in a fleet of three unmarked Serious Crime Squad cars.

At Snowdrop Street one car went round to the street at the back of the house, another parked some way down the road, and Jim Fitzsimmons parked 20 yards from the front door. It was tea time, and the street was quiet.

Knowing there were two other children in the house, Jim Fitzsimmons went to the door with two male detectives and a policewoman. The mother led them in and stood there as he told her son he was being arrested on suspicion of involvement in the killing of James Bulger. The boy became upset, screaming, so Jim Fitzsimmons put his arm around the boy as he led him to the car. The mother went too, and they drove to St Anne Street station in the city centre, leaving the policewoman and other officers in the house, awaiting the arrival of an OSD search team.

There was a knock on the front door of the house, not long after Jim Fitzsimmons had left. An officer opened the door to find himself illuminated by an arc light and facing a television crew.

‘Are you a police officer? Have you just arrested somebody here for the murder of James Bulger?’

By now, other people in the street were alert to the fact that something was going on. A crowd began to gather. The crowd grew and grew, and turned ever more unruly. The media gathered and watched, as the crowd’s anger fermented. More police were turned out to control the crowd, and there were arrests for public order offences. It made an unhappy spectacle on the evening news.

The police brought in a van to protect the departure of the remaining people in the house. The father was collected from Bootle, and also taken to St Anne Street station. He caught up with his son while the doctor was taking the boys intimate samples. Go on, the father said to his son, tell ’em you’ve done it. I know you’re responsible.

The father was adamant, and so was the mother. The mother was adamant that her son was not, and could not have been involved in the killing of James Bulger. She offered an innocent explanation for the washing of the jacket, and went with officers to her mother’s home to collect it.

As statements were taken from the boy, the father and the mother, Jim realised that all was not as it should be. It felt wrong. It seemed that the father, for whatever reason, had mistakenly convinced himself of his son’s guilt.

The boy was held overnight. Jim Fitzsimmons went home at three in the morning, and was back on at seven thirty. The truth emerged that morning. The boy had sagged school, and the father had seen his son as he passed the Strand on the bus. But this had been on the Thursday, not the Friday. When
confronted with this, the father conceded that he might have got his days mixed up. The boy was released.

Later, after the family had been forced to leave their home, there was criticism of the police, the suggestion that their heavy-handed treatment had caused the family suffering. Jim couldn’t help taking this criticism personally. He believed it was misplaced, but still he was angry and hurt.

*

By Wednesday evening, the inquiry had seen 55 TIEs and, though there were lingering suspicions over one or two names, the police did not feel any closer to finding the boys. It seemed inconceivable that no one had put them in, and yet, despite all the footwork, the press conferences, the re-runs of the video footage on television, the thousands of phone calls, sometimes 200 an hour or more, their identities remained a mystery.

There was disappointment after the drama of Snowdrop Street, and frustration at the criticism being made. There was also political concern within the Merseyside Police that the criticism could undermine public confidence and support. The pressure for a result was enormous, there was intense national and international scrutiny of the investigation, and the last thing the service needed was the erosion of its image by the growing perception that it was over-zealous or bungling.

The senior officers did not have much time, or inclination, to watch TV and read the newspapers. It was like working in a vacuum. But they could hardly fail to notice the ever-swelling ranks of photographers, camera crews and reporters on duty outside Marsh Lane, swarming all over the story. They were in Albert’s face three times a day at the press conferences.

He was also getting letters from people he’d never met and people he’d locked up years ago who were not in regular correspondence. They had seen Albert on the news. He was a figurehead for the inquiry, and a listening post for their views on the degraded state of society, the breakdown of the family. Albert was not entirely out of sympathy with these opinions. He was touched, really quite emotional, that people had seen fit to communicate with him.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, and again on Thursday morning, he went out, surveying the scene at the railway, examining the likely walk the boys had taken. People kept approaching him, offering help and encouragement, and their best wishes. They all recognised Albert. He felt the encroaching burden of responsibility, the sense that he was public property.

Still, Albert would not be daunted. He knew the boys would be found. If no teachers, friends, relatives had identified them, then it was unlikely that the boys were being shielded by parents. Albert wondered if he was dealing
with a freak incident in which two boys had come from outside the area. He wondered if adult paedophiles had been involved, after all.

All the evidence now suggested that the boys who had abducted James had been responsible for his death. Albert had taken the counsel of Paul Britton, a consultant psychologist he had worked with in the past, who was developing the theory and practice of offender profiling. Britton concluded that the boys would live near the location of the killing. It made sense, but there were no certainties.

Albert was going down to London on Thursday afternoon, to appear on BBCl’s
Crimewatch
that evening. Perhaps that would do the trick.

Jim Fitzsimmons was pretty much on his own, at about ten thirty on Wednesday night, when a uniformed lad came through to his office with a tear-off sheet from a message pad. A woman had just called in to say that her mother’s friend had a son, Jon Venables, who had been sagging school on Friday with another boy, Robert Thompson. The friend’s son had come home late with paint on his jacket. The woman had seen the video, and thought there was a similarity between the figure in the light jacket and the friend’s son. She had given her name and address but did not want to be contacted again. She didn’t want to get involved.

Normally, the message would have gone into the system, been passed to a receiver, on to HOLMES, and out for an action. At this late hour, the system could be by-passed. Jim was sitting there reviewing a couple of TIEs rejected earlier in the week; he was brooding a little on the Snowdrop Street saga.