19 07 by 6796 BO1V-Cover D/I 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 ponytail 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, and 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 dad’s 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 dis appeared 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 ponytail 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.