In the early hours of Sunday morning, not long before five, a British Rail train driver was picked up from Orrell Park by the staff bus and taken to Formby station to start work. The loco there had been used overnight to bring materials from Tuebrook sidings for some engineering work.
The driver waited while a crane was detached from the engine and the engine was run around on to the up line. When the guards and the conductors were aboard he set off, at about seven o’clock, leaving the Liverpool–Southport line at Bootle junction and crossing to the Bootle branch line. The other men were in and out of the driver’s cab. The driver made sure he kept to the speed limit of 20 miles per hour.
The branch line to Edge Hill had been a freight-only route for many years. The line had been built in the 1860s, and in 1870 a station had opened at Walton Lane bridge. The station was originally called Walton for Aintree, and later renamed Walton & Anfield. It was quiet, just two small buildings with chimneys facing each other across the tracks, awnings above the doors. On winter nights after matches at Goodison Park, lamp-posts that ran the length of the platforms would illuminate supporters returning to meet their football specials after the game.
During the Second World War, all the US servicemen arriving in Britain by sea had been transported down this line, and though passenger services had long since ceased to use it, the track was still on an MoD list somewhere as a key transportation link in time of war.
The station was closed in 1948 and the buildings demolished. The raised brick of the platforms, overgrown with bushes and rough grass, remained, and were just shielded by the foliage from Walton Lane Police Station, whose yard backed on to the embankment.
Rarely, nowadays, would more than a dozen trains a day go through, mostly to and from the docks of Gladstone and Seaforth. Some collected and delivered containerised goods for or from Southern and Northern Ireland; others transported open carriages of Colombian or Polish coal to Fiddler’s Ferry, the power station in Warrington.
Sometimes, as on this Sunday morning, British Rail ran its own engineering services. For most hours of the day the ralla was quiet, and it had been a shortcut and a playground for successive generations of local children, despite increasingly determined attempts to fence off the line and deny them entry. Successive generations of the ralla’s adult neighbours had found the noisy presence of playful kids an irritation.
If the line had any criminal use, other than trespass and being a good place to sit and smoke dope, it was as a vantage point for assessing the burglary potential of neighbouring houses. It was possible to gain access to properties at certain places, and the line was useful as a getaway route.
The driver of the early-morning train kept watch ahead as the engine trundled out of the cutting at Walton, heading towards Edge Hill, still travelling no faster than 20 miles per hour. He was on the up line, on the far side from the police station as he crossed the bridge, his seat in the cab also on the far side. He noticed something lying on the ground near the other track and leaned forward to get a better view.
The object looked like a dummy or a doll. Kids were always putting things like that across the tracks.
When the train arrived at Edge Hill the driver was told to take the engine to Arpley sidings in Warrington to pick up a couple of wagons. He went to the sidings and shunted the wagons, and then drove back to Edge Hill. The driver was relieved there by a colleague, but stayed aboard the engine for the journey back to Formby, on the down line. He stood at the rear of the driver’s cab as they came through Walton, and did not think to look at the track again as they passed the old station there.
Yet the sighting of the object on the track played on his mind. Something about it was not quite right. He had seen and remembered the press coverage of the lad going missing. Later, that evening, when he called the Transport Police to tell them, he realised exactly what it was he had seen.
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On Sunday afternoon Beckett’s mum dropped him by the Rileys. Osty came to the door when Beckett knocked, and said they weren’t ready yet. They were just having a sandwich for lunch, and Osty wanted to try and get some money off his mum.
Beckett waited outside, by the Rileys’ garden wall, until Osty and his brother Pitts came out. They were always together, Osty and Pitts, like a stamp stuck on an envelope, as another boy said of them. They all decided to call for Georgie, who lives by the Sportie on Walton Hall Avenue.
As they walked along they met Stee, who had been doing weights at the Sportie. He said he’d just knocked for Georgie, and there was no answer, but he walked with them anyway, and when they called at Georgie’s there was still no one in.
They went looking for Kelly and Emma, who always hang around by the newsagents, and found them there with three lads. Osty went in and bought a packet of ten Embassy filters, so that they could sit off on the rocks in the cemetery later and have a ciggie.
When Kelly and Emma and the other three lads went off they sat on the ledge by the newsagents for a bit, and then Osty and Pitts said let’s go and get our hats back from the police station. The hats had been in the police station for ages, since a kid had got his bike robbed. The kid said the lads who’d done it were wearing hats, and the police had taken the two hats for identification: Osty’s leather hat with the flaps and the fur lining, and Pitts’s Puma baseball cap.
They walked round to the police station on Walton Lane, and the man at the desk told them to come back on Monday. So they went back down Walton Lane to Queen’s Drive, where they met Stee’s brother Lee, and he joined them for a while.
The five of them knocked at Chris’s house by the Ebenezer Chapel and, when there was no answer there, they carried on to Leon’s in the Village, and sat on his front for a while, talking to Leon.
Lee left them then, and they called back at Georgie’s house again, and he wasn’t in. As they were walking away, Joanne came out of her house nearby. Osty and Pitts had been round at Joanne’s with Mick the night before. Now she said a watch had gone missing and she wanted it back.
Osty had been saying he wanted to go to his nan’s because he might be given some money, but they thought Mick might know something about the watch, so they walked over towards Chepstow Road, talking to Natalie and Jenny for a while as they crossed over the broo. Mick’s sister came to the door and said he was out. They thought Mick might be at his girlfriend Amanda’s house.
When they got to Amanda’s she told them Mick wasn’t there, and she didn’t know where he was. They stood talking with Amanda on her front, until Amanda’s mum came out and told them to move.
They went back to Mick’s, and left a message that they were going to the park. Then they walked down towards the new Kwikkie on County Road, near where their nan lived. Sack me nan’s, said Osty, so they went down the entry by the pizza parlour, and down another entry, to the railings by the ralla.
Pitts said that footballs sometimes got kicked from the school on the other side of the ralla onto the line, so they climbed over and dropped down on to the embankment. A train went past, carrying big white stones in open carriages.
A woman came out of her house and told them to get down off the railway. They ignored her and carried on until Pitts found a football. It was only a plastic flyaway thing but they kicked it along the line for a while, and as they got by Church Road, just before the bridge near the police station, they saw a lad with his mum and dad on the road below, so Osty picked the ball up and kicked it to the boy so that he could have the ball. They thought about making a den on the ralla, in the bushes along the embankment.
As they crossed the bridge they heard dogs barking in the kennels at the back of the police station. They went down the pathway, to try and see the dogs. Sometimes they had Pit Bulls and that in there, but today there was only a couple of little mutts. They came back up the path onto the ralla, by the old platforms and Beckett said, eeh, look at that, a dead cat or something. They all looked. It was like a bundle wrapped up in a coat. There were halfies piled around it. Beckett touched it lightly with his foot, but there was no movement. Then he looked back across the track and shouted, look, there’s its legs.
Pitts said it looked like doll’s legs. Beckett was frightened and wanted to run away. Pitts went close to the legs. He said they weren’t doll’s. There was a little pair of trainers nearby. Someone said it was like a baby. Stee said, I think it is a baby, and he ran, shouting and panic-stricken, up the line, towards the police station. They were all frightened now, and ran after Stee. They dropped down from the embankment at the back of the police station, and ran round to the front desk.
Beckett was ahead as they went into the police station, shouting and screaming, and ringing the bell at the inquiry desk. PC Osbourne came through from the office behind the one-way glass and asked what was wrong. The boys looked very excited and agitated. There’s a baby on the railway line cut in half, they shouted, just round the back on the railway. Stay there, said PC Osbourne and went back into the inquiry office to collect his radio. He called to two other officers, there’s a baby on the line, and ran round to the front of the police station, followed by his colleagues. The boys called, it’s round the back of the police station.
The officers ran through the yard, to climb up on the kennels, on to the embankment. They told the boys to stay behind, but the boys followed them up anyway. They watched PC Osbourne recoil as he saw the body. At 15.13 he radioed an urgent message to C Division control. He asked that supervision and CID be informed, and he asked for British Rail to be told to close the line.