The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (6 page)

They left the road at the reservoir, climbing up the big stone steps, the two boys carrying the child, Jon holding James’s legs, Bobby with his arms around James’s chest. When they reached the top of the reservoir, long ago a water repository but now a grassy plateau, Jon and Bobby sat on the last step, with James between them.

When a woman who had been walking her dog on the hill manoeuvred around them and onto the steps, James was laughing. As she climbed down, the boys stood and made their way to the far embankment, overlooking a row of houses.

James was punched here, by Jon, as the light began to fade. A woman closing her curtains in one of the houses below looked up to see Jon gripping James by his shoulders, close to his neck, and shaking him briskly, as if trying to quieten him down. A neighbour saw Jon and Bobby holding James’s hands; they appeared to be helping him up the incline. She watched as an elderly woman walking her large black dog, regulars on the reservoir, approached them.

The elderly woman was immediately concerned because James was sobbing.

‘What’s going on?’

‘We just found him at the bottom of the hill.’

She saw then that James had two bumps, one on his forehead, and one on top of his head.

‘Do you know him?’

‘No,’ said the boys.

The woman told them that James’s injuries needed attention, and they asked her the way to the police station. She directed them to the station at Walton Lane.

The neighbour who had been peering from her window watched as the elderly woman gesticulated, and guessed that the child was lost. She was surprised when the boys seemed to walk off in the opposite direction to the way the woman had indicated, and thought the woman must be uneasy
when she turned back to the boys, apparently shouting after them.

The elderly woman was indeed uneasy, though somewhat reassured when she saw and spoke to a friend who was also out strolling that afternoon. This was the woman who earlier had seen James laughing with Jon and Bobby on the steps. The woman told her elderly friend that James had been all right when she saw him. She had imagined the boys must all be brothers.

8

Ser.
No.
925BO2V Rec.
Tel.
by
3642
at
1621 12/02/93
Class
86,91.

Message
–
we
have
a
3
yr
old
male
–
James
Patrick
Boulger
who
has
been
missing
on
the
New
Strand
for
30
mins
–
area
searched
scanned
with
cameras
–
no
trace
location
–
mother
now
at
reception
New
Strand,
Washington
Parade,
Bootle.

Informant
–
Strand
Security
944
2222.

Remarks
–
announcements
have
been
made
over
tannoy
system
without
response.

Action–1622
by
3642
BO2V
–
Resource
sent,
BM 11.

The B Division command control’s computer log chattered in response to the phone call from Peter Beatham, the Strand’s security guard.

PC Mandy Waller was working a 2–12 shift, patrolling around Bootle in Bravo Mike One One (BM 11), a Fiesta hatchback Panda car, responding to calls from divisional control. She had been on driving duties for only a month, since passing the driving test.

When the job came through on her radio – missing child at the Strand, please deal – Mandy went first to Marsh Lane to pick up a set of MFH forms. ‘Missing child,’ she thought. ‘Oh, send a woman.’

It galled her that the police sometimes made assumptions about women’s work. If they locked somebody up and there was a child involved, Mandy would be called in to look after the child. Mandy had no children of her own, and no maternal instincts to speak of. I don’t mind kids, she would say, I just couldn’t eat a whole one. Some of the lads with kids of their own were better at those jobs than her, she reckoned, and she’d had frank discussions about it with sergeants in the past: why call me, like, ’cause I’m no better at it than anyone else? Mandy was from South Yorkshire, a small village near Barnsley. Working on Merseyside for nine years had not yet blunted her accent.

Until a year or so ago Mandy had actually lived on the Strand, in one of the low-rise flats near Marks and Spencer. It had been even more popular then than now as a haunt of shoplifters and bag-snatchers. This had been in the days before and during the transformation of the Strand into a fully
fledged mall; before the arrival of the security cameras, and while the absence of doors at the entrances made for an easy escape. Mandy had made the occasional off-duty arrest in the walkway outside her own front door. Still, it had been great having M&S as her corner shop.

This year was the Strand’s 25th anniversary, though not, as events were now unfolding, much of a year to celebrate. A quarter of a century ago it had been a model of the newly imported American concept of precinct shopping. In a competition to name the centre sponsored by a local newspaper, Little America was narrowly defeated by New Strand, after Strand Road, which crossed Stanley Road at the site of the precinct.

It was opened in 1968, with due ceremony, by the Burgomaster of Mons, the Belgian town with which Bootle was twinned, and Mons gave its name to the New Strand’s main square. There were grander plans, in those days, to pedestrianise the neighbouring stretch of Stanley Road and create a major new through route on the other side of the centre, which was Washington Parade. The New Strand’s main entrance, the Hexagon, was therefore built facing Washington Parade. When the grand plans fell through, leaving Stanley Road as the main artery, the Strand was left stranded, somewhat back to front.

The original design was almost entirely concrete, with canopies extending from the shops, leaving wide areas of walkway exposed to the elements of nature. There were no doors and, especially by night, the New Strand was also exposed to drunks and the more unruly elements of human nature.

By the time of the big refurbishment in the late Eighties, the psychology of shopping had made great advances. It was one of the duties of the New Strand’s manager, Peter Williams, to take the chore out of shopping, and he oversaw a transformation into something approximating the American mall, which is usually pronounced ‘maul’ by Americans.

The redevelopment was designed to create an ambience of comfort and security which would enhance the shopping experience. The whole place was enclosed by roofing, with the addition of some glass to retain a degree of natural light, and doors were added. Much of the concrete disappeared behind reflective aluminium planking, which gave a bright, warm impression, not unlike chrome; Italian ceramic tiling replaced most of the old flooring, with granite tiles in Mons Square.

To correct the Strand’s reversed polarity between Stanley Road and Washington Parade, a series of arches, known as barrell vaults, were created over the Stanley Road entrances.

There were bench seats, pots of flowers and children’s rides. A public address system was installed, to relay piped music and the occasional message about a missing child. There were sprinklers, smoke detectors, and closed circuit television: 20 cameras, though only 16 actually recorded; each one of the 16 cameras supplying a tape with a single still image every two or
three seconds. The tape could be decoded to display all 16 images at once on a monitor, or one image, or any combination in between. A private security firm, Guardrite, supplied a small team of men in rubber-soled shoes with walkie-talkies for additional protection.

The New Strand now became the Strand Shopping Centre, and a logo was adopted, an anchor, to emphasise the nautical theme employed in naming the centre’s walkways: Esplanade, Mariners Way and Medway. There were other walkways – Raven Way, Palatine and Hexagon – but these were more obscure nautical references.

Peter Williams organised a Grand Opening Extravaganza for the relaunch in the autumn of 1989. There were personal appearances by Garfield the Cat and Rupert the Bear, and live entertainment in Mons Square, and this tradition had been continued, with occasional performances by groups of Morris Dancers or the Bootle Village Pipe Band. The Square was also useful for the occasional community service promotion, and this emphasised the centre’s links with the local people. The bulk of the Strand’s customers, after all, came to shop there from within a three-mile radius.

The Strand had 114 shops, but the big three were Marks & Spencer, TJ Hughes and Woolworths. It was a sign of the times that there were a growing number of discount stores. As Peter Williams said, you traded at a level that suited the area, and the Strand wasn’t Harrods. A few miles up the road in Southport, where the people were posher, you might be able to buy a good quality ladies fashion suit, but in Bootle there wasn’t a lot of call for that.

Peter Williams was an admirer of the new combined shopping and leisure centres like the Metro in Gateshead, with its cinema and bowling alley, its fountains and ponds. There was real theming in Gateshead – Peter particularly liked the Roman Forum – but the Strand could never accommodate something of that nature. It just wasn’t big enough to theme. The Metro attracted several million people every year. The Strand was doing all right on 120,000 a week. It was busiest on Saturdays, and at weekday lunchtimes when the local office workers turned out.

Like all centres, the Strand was a popular refuge for the elderly and the young. Older people sat on benches and passed the time of day. Youngsters gathered in groups and, yes, sometimes they were truants, and sometimes they were up to mischief. The Guardrite men kept watch through the cameras, or on patrol, and many of the shops now had their own security, but shoplifting was prevalent.

The Strand did its best to promote protection and safety. In September of last year, Peter Williams had initiated a campaign targeted at children, warning them of the dangers of strangers. The centre had given away dozens of small items of school equipment, such as rulers and plastic pencil cases, embossed with the slogan, Don’t Talk To Strangers.

*

Mandy Waller pushed the buttons on the Cyfas terminal in her car as she arrived. The code 04 automatically logged her arrival time at the Strand with Divisional Control. 16.37. By this time Denise was sitting in the centre manager’s office. As Mandy noted details and description, completing the MFH forms, it became apparent that James had been missing for longer than 30 minutes. It was an hour by now, which was already ominously long. Usually, Mandy knew, they were found before the police needed to be called, or clipped round the ear by relieved parents by the time the police arrived.

Mandy radioed through a description, emphasising the time James had been missing. She then went back into the Strand with Denise for another search. They concentrated on places, such as the pet shop, that might have attracted a small child.

Denise, very distressed, could not understand how it had happened so quickly. ‘I was only in the shop for a few seconds. I turned round and he’d gone.’ She was full of guilt and self-blame. If only she hadn’t done this … she shouldn’t have done that. Mandy, who did not regard herself as a natural sort of person for giving comfort, tried hard to be reassuring. The machinery of a police search was being mobilised. Everything that could be done was being done.

One of the Strand’s cleaners came up to the office with the news that another child, a four-year-old, had gone missing at around the same time as James. The four-year-old had been found and told his parents that a man in a white coat had tried to entice him into a car.

When James’s disappearance was reported on the local radio news bulletins, an anonymous caller told the police that they had seen a man with a pony-tail at the Strand earlier that day whom they suspected of being involved in the abduction of children. The pony-tail man was known to the police, and a search began to find him.

Another caller thought he had seen James in a car in Southport, 40 minutes up the road. This too was followed up, without success.

The quest to find James gained momentum quickly and methodically. Calls went out to the local media, taxi firms, and bus and train services. Officers began searching on foot and by car, through the Strand and outside, along and around the canal and in the streets immediately surrounding the centre: the walkways, the car parks, the neighbouring shops, the amusement arcades.

Denise suggested that if James had been able to find his way out of the Strand, he would start walking, and just keep on going. But it was reasonable to presume that a two-year-old could not go far unaided.

Perhaps, as is sometimes the case when children disappear, it was a domestic matter? Nicola’s Ford Orion, still in its space on the ground floor of the multi-storey car park, was examined, the boot opened and checked. A visit was made to the home address given by Denise. Ralph was still out. He didn’t yet know what was happening.

The command control log was busy, recording the requests, the actions, the information, and the negative responses.

1731
by
6796
BO4V
–
Multi
storey
car park
checked
no
trace
from
7208.