By Sunday, Denise and Mandy Waller were running out of things to say to each other. They just sat there in the television room, with Nichola Bailey. Mandy had found it increasingly difficult to off er words of reassurance. ‘We’re not going to find him, are we?’ Denise would say. ‘Of course we are,’ Mandy would reply, knowing it sounded simplistic. Knowing, against all hope, that he would not be alive.
You could only drink so many cups of tea. It was getting claustrophobic in the room. There was nothing to be said and nothing to be done. They were beginning to get on each other’s nerves.
Ralph was out, driving around, searching with other members of the family. ‘Why don’t we go out?’ Mandy said to Denise and Nichola, thinking the change would do them all some good, and break up the day. She took a radio with her, and told the control room that they were going for a drive.
They didn’t get far, just in and around Bootle. The radio was on, and then it was speaking to Mandy. ‘Can you come straight in.’ It was Noel, the control operator, who was Welsh with a thick accent. Later, Mandy discovered that he then said, ‘and can you turn your radio off.’ She had heard him, but did not understand what he was saying. Fortunately, she automatically turned the radio off, anyway.
Denise had also heard the first half of the message. She wanted to know what was happening. Mandy said she didn’t know, but she thought to herself that a body had been found. They turned back for Marsh Lane.
Albert Kirby, Jim Fitzsimmons and Geoff MacDonald were sitting in Geoff MacDonald’s office, reviewing the inquiry, working out where to go next. An officer knocked and walked in. ‘Sir, we’ve a report of a body, back of Walton Lane.’ As the officer gave them the details, the three men were putting on their coats and making their way to the car park, to drive to the scene.
When Mandy Waller arrived back at Marsh Lane an Inspector was waiting in the car park. They didn’t want Denise to hear the news casually; they wanted to protect her until confirmation had been made. The Inspector walked ahead from the car park to the back entrance of the station, with Denise and Nichola. Mandy was just behind them.
As the group went in, Mandy saw the bosses coming out of the door. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ Denise was panicked by the sight of the three senior officers. ‘It’s all right,’ said Jim Fitzsimmons, ‘Don’t worry.’ What else could he say? They walked past Denise, and Geoff MacDonald broke away to speak to Mandy. ‘They’ve found a body on the railway line. We think it’s James.’
Mandy knew then, but could say nothing. She could see that Denise was putting two and two together. Denise kept asking what was happening, but would not ask directly if they had found James. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ Mandy said.
Geoff MacDonald drove the couple of miles to the railway line. He turned off Cherry Lane into the cul-de-sac by the How. A cordon was already set up, the railing pulled back to give access to the line. Jim Fitzsimmons, hoping it wasn’t James, but knowing it would be, tried to create a convincing scenario in his head. James had wandered up on to the line, and been knocked down by a train. He made his mind up this was what had happened. But he didn’t believe it.
They clambered up the bank, while an officer who had met them described the barest details of the scene. They could see in an instant that it was James, even though his head was hidden by his clothing. The anorak, the scarf, the tracksuit bottoms, all too familiar, by now.
No one spoke for a few moments. There was only silence and stillness. Then Geoff MacDonald said, ‘I’ll do it.’ There was no discussion about this, no weighing up of which of the three senior officers should perform the duty. Jim Fitzsimmons and Albert Kirby would not say, ‘That’s very brave of you, Geoff,’ because that’s not how it works. Though both of them thought it.
Geoff MacDonald turned, to go back to his car, to drive to Marsh Lane and tell Denise that they had found James’s body.
It was a long and difficult half-hour in the television room, Denise wanting to know what was going on, Mandy wondering how long it would be before word came through. Eventually, unable to bear the waiting any longer, Mandy went down the corridor to try and get some news.
As Mandy walked back to the television room, Geoff MacDonald was just ahead of her, going in the door. He had expected to find Mandy inside, and he would have called her out, before they went in together, when Mandy would have told Denise.
As it was, Geoff MacDonald told Denise himself, and Mandy was just behind him, coming into the room, as he spoke. ‘Yes, I’m sorry, we’ve found James.’ Denise screamed. It seemed to Mandy that she collapsed internally. They all cried. Mandy went to fetch some toilet roll, because there were no tissues available.
Ralph was still out, and could not be contacted. The police feared that he would arrive back and hear the news from one of the numerous men and women of the media who were camped outside the station. But they had followed the story to the railway line, and Ralph had heard nothing when he walked into the front entrance of Marsh Lane. He was met and told by Geoff MacDonald. Ralph’s distress manifested itself as anger. He punched and kicked a screen that was standing nearby.
Later, after Denise had been taken home, Ralph paced up and down, throwing out questions, demanding to know what had happened, how James had died. There were no answers, then, but there was already speculation.
*
Albert Kirby had taken his red, spiral-bound notebook to the scene. He did not start a new notebook for each inquiry, but simply turned to the next clean page. He was about a third of the way through the latest book, and kept the old ones, God knows how many, in his desk at work. He called them his ongoing bible of investigations.
The last page before the Bulger inquiry had been notes for a management structure he was developing. The first page of the Bulger inquiry was his introductory notes, in small, precise handwriting, and on the second page he made his sketch of the scene at the railway line.
He noted the position of the lower half of the body, between the track and the embankment, on the side nearest the police station, and the position of the upper half, seven sleepers further down towards Edge Hill, between the same tracks.
Nothing was moved, everything left as it was. Preserving the scene, keeping it sterile. The pathologist was on his way and, until he arrived, there could be no way of knowing how James had died.
As he studied and thought and made notes, Albert did not allow himself any emotional response to the sight of the body. He dreaded to think how many he had seen over the years. He must have been involved with 35, even 40 murders since his days as a junior detective. He remembered three in one week as a DI, and he had come to realise that they always seemed to go in runs, and always in the winter months, from October through to the early part of the year. Never in the nice weather and long daylight hours of summer when you were out searching scenes.
It was not something he could ever get used to, the scene of a killing. It was always different, by way of the age and gender of the victim and the circumstances of their death, and it was always hard.
He had learned that the emotional impact always came later. It had to be suppressed at the time because it would only interfere with the work. He was duty-bound to be professional. It was his duty to find out how, and why, somebody had died, and who was responsible for that death. There was no room for emotion. He had to put himself on automatic pilot.
This was true for Jim Fitzsimmons, too. There was no conscious process of repressing feelings. It was simply about doing the job. Looking at what evidence could be gathered at the scene, making sure everything was done properly. It was odd, like seeing the scene from a distance, but that was the way it was.
The light would fade fast, and they had to work quickly. Jim was up and down the embankment, between the police station and the scene, clambering over the kennels, briefing people and leading them on to the line. He tore the jacket of his suit on some bushes.
SOCO officers came in to oversee the searches and the recovery of forensic evidence. They photographed and made a video record of the scene. A search log was opened, and OSD teams formed cordons to make line searches along the track. The upper half of the body was covered with a forensic tent, and the fire brigade used salvage sheets, stakes and rope to create a cover for the area around the lower half of the body.
A press photographer got up on to the line and was spotted trying to take pictures of the body before the covers had been erected. He was the target of some anger from the officers.
It appeared that the body had been lying at a right angle across the track nearest to the police station, the upper half inside the track. It appeared to have been covered in bricks, and had probably been dislodged when a train had severed the body at the waist, dragging the lower half, which was naked, some fifteen feet, seven sleepers, down the line.
The clothing which had been removed was scattered around the upper half of the body. Grey tracksuit bottoms, lightly stained with blood and paint, a pair of white training shoes with the left shoelace undone, and the right shoelace still tied, and a pair of white socks with blue stripes and light bloodstaining. A pair of underpants, heavily stained with blood, was found, placed under one of the bricks. There was a heavy strip of steel lying against the bricks. It was a fishplate, which is some two feet long, and is used to attach railway track to sleepers. It weighed over 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and was stained with blood.
The white scarf, also bloodstained, was lying on the side furthest from the police station, between the track and embankment. One bobble had been separated from the scarf, and this was found in the middle of the other track, back towards the bridge.
Three Tandy Evergreen AA-sized 1.5v batteries were scattered near the scarf, two of them stained with blood, and a fourth was still in the cellophane packet which was also lying there. The sleepers and the ballast around the scarf were bloodstained, and there was blood spattering on the neighbouring wall of the old station platform. A trail of blood led across the tracks to the upper half of the body. There were two bricks stained with blood near the scarf, and others around the body. There was an S-shaped Pandrol securing clip with blood staining, and some blond hairs adhering to it. The clip would normally be used with the fishplate in the construction of track. British Rail kept emergency supplies of fishplates and clips at intervals along its railways.
A tin of Humbrol Azure Blue paint was found on the track, on the other side of the bridge, and there were stains of blue paint in the area by the tin. A box of Quality Street was found further down the line, together with some sweets.
The doctor, arriving in advance of the pathologist to complete the formality of certifying death, could not touch the body and, not seeing the head inside the clothing, thought the head was missing from the body.
With the arrival of the Home Office pathologist, Alan Williams, at five o’clock, the clothing could be moved, and it became evident that the body had sustained multiple head injuries. There was a great deal of blood, and blue paint had stained the left side of James’s face, ear and neck, and his anorak.
Later, in the evening, two men from the Co-op Funeral Service came in a van to collect James’s body and deliver it to the mortuary for identification and the post mortem. They drove into the car park at Cherry Lane and reversed the van up to the fence at the bottom of the embankment. They picked up the child’s body bag, which Alan Williams had placed by the fence, and lifted it into the back of the van.
They took the body to the mortuary at Broadgreen Hospital, where it was identified by Ralph’s brother, Ray Bulger, at nine o’clock. Geoff MacDonald and Jim Green both attended the post mortem, which Alan Williams began at 10.45 and completed at 1.30 the following morning. It was the first post mortem Jim Green had ever attended as a police officer.
There was a lull now, for the senior officers, awaiting the pm report in the morning. The search for James, for a body, was over, and they would now be looking for the perpetrators of a violent death, surely a murder. All efforts would now be focused on those two teenagers in the video.
Back at Marsh Lane the atmosphere was as solemn and as quiet as it had been up there on the railway line. Everyone had hoped James would be found alive, but expected to find a body. No one had expected such violence. Details were still scarce, but word was getting round.
Jim Fitzsimmons answered the phone to Geoff MacDonald’s wife. She hadn’t spoken to him, but she’d heard the body had been found. She had been going to go to bed, but thought now she would stay up, because she knew her husband got upset. Jim Fitzsimmons said it would be better if she waited up for him. He’d had a difficult task to perform. Officers did not tend to go around asking each other how they felt, but Jim knew how Geoff MacDonald would be feeling.
So did Albert Kirkby. First there had been the breaking of the news to the family, and then the post mortem. Albert could think of no one who found post mortems easy. It was the smell as much as anything, the antiseptic, the chemicals, the stink that seeped into your suit and clung to you afterwards. Albert always tried to keep a discreet distance, hanging back, talking to the pathologist.
This time he had been spared the post mortem, but he would go home now and be unlikely to sleep soundly. It was always the same in the difficult stages of an investigation. You worked late, your mind running at full pitch, then you’d go home, unable to switch off. Albert would lie in bed in the dark, knowing at least that he was resting, trying to steer his thoughts in sweeter directions, like hitting a golf ball squarely down a fairway.
He would not talk to his wife about the day’s events. He rarely did. If he had to bring his troubles home, he would try hard not to shed them there. Susan, his wife, had told him off for this over the years, but it made no difference. When Susan sensed he was preoccupied and quiet she would tactfully suggest he went for a run, though it was a little late to go running tonight.
For Jim Fitzsimmons Sunday night was the welcome opportunity of an early finish. Or relatively early, it already being eleven o’clock. He left the office and went down to his Cavalier in the car park. Sitting in the car, alone suddenly, and no longer busy, he felt upset. It just came over him and he began crying. He drove home, distressed and puzzled, unable to understand his reaction. What’s it to do with me?
He had been fine at the railway, not bothered at all by what he had seen there. Yet, over the last couple of days, it was as if he had come to know James, and feel for him. Now, on the first and last night of the inquiry when he was home before midnight, he walked in getting more and more upset. His wife, Fran, had waited up, and Jim sat and talked to her while he downed a can or two of beer. He sat up until gone two in the end, but it seemed to help. In the morning he felt better.
*
A reporter from ITN took Osty, Pitts and Stee to the park, to film an interview with them, about their discovery of the body. Osty and Pitts were wearing big weatherproofed jackets, one green, the other purple, with hoods and high collars that almost covered their mouths. Stee, who was taller and wearing a black bomber jacket, stood between them.
As the tape rolled, Pitts said, we’ll be TV stars. They called to the other children gathering around them. Go away.
Reporter. OK, so do you want to tell me how you came to find the body?
Stee. ’Cos we were walking along the railway and, erm …
Pitts. (smiling) We was having a ciggie on the railway.
Reporter. You was having what?
Pitts. We was having a ciggie on the railway.
Off camera, children are gathering around, laughing. Osty says, pack it in, laughing, all youse go away.
Stee. He dropped his money, him, at the, erm, bridge, right, didn’t you, and like he couldn’t find it, like that, and then we all went back ’cos we were in front of him. He says, I’ve lost me money, so we all walked and had a look for his money and, erm, what happened then? And then, like, I found it, didn’t I.
Pitts. (laughing) He says, I find everything, me.
Reporter. Yeah, when, er, what, er, when did you first see the body?
Stee. About, like, and then we ’eard dogs barking away the com pounds …
Pitts. In the police station.
Stee … so we went down, and we walked past it and never noticed it in the beginning, right, then we went down to have a look at the dogs, came back up, like that, and I jus’ seen it there, just in a like a coat, like an ’orse, with the organs all coming out.
Osty. All the organs coming out, like big fat worms.
Stee. So like and then I said, ’ere, look at that, doesn’t that look like a baby.
They all laugh, except the reporter, and Stee falls away, cracking up.
Stee. Can we start it again?
Reporter. Yeah, we’ll start it again. Just tell me how you came to discover the body.
Stee. Right, we were walking along the railway and, er, like, we, erm (laughing), and he dropped something, and he said, oiyo, come back ’ere, I’ve lost me money. This was by the bridge, so we walked back, I said, and he was throwing all the bricks and all of that off the railway, like that, and someone went, you’re never gonna find this, and I went, here are, there it is, like that, and then, er …
Pitts. He says, I find everything, me, and then he walked up and then he found the baby.
Stee. Like we had a look at the dogs and then found the baby.
Pitts. Yeah, we walked past him, right past him we walked. They were a bout there, and we walked round past him.
Reporter. So you walked past the child at first?
Pitts. Yeah, we would’ve walked past it, only he says come and have a look at the dogs in the compound, there might be big dogs and that.
Reporter. What did the body look like?
Stee. Terrible. We couldn’t see the face. We couldn’t see the face.
Pitts. Wrapped up in a little, like a coat.
Reporter. OK, start again, tell me what the body was like when you found it.
Pitts. Wrapped up in a coat, with all housebricks all round it and bars on it.
Stee. And all organs hanging out from the waist.
Pitts. Like just there, not pouring out, just all in a big, big like hill.
Stee. And then he turned round, no, and then he went, it’s a cat. It’s a cat wrapped up. Then we seen its legs.
Pitts. No, we said, no, it was you that said, well I said, it’s a dead cat, and you went no it’s not it’s sausages.
Reporter. Tell me, sensibly now, tell me what did you think it was when you first saw it.
Stee. A baby. I did. Honestly. Didn’t I say …
Osty. Socks and shoes.
Stee. Shoes, yeah. ’Cos I said, it’s a baby, ’cos I seen the legs.
Pitts. Then you see doll’s legs, and they all ran, and I said no, it’s not, and I walked back over and it had no pants on or nuttin’, and all dirt round its feet, so then I jus’ went, it’s a baby.
Stee. And then we all ran towards the bridge, got down and went to Walton Lane.
Reporter. What did you do once you’d found it? Who did you tell?
Stee. The police. The police. Walton Lane, ’cos it was only the back.
Osty. Next to it.
Reporter. So tell me sensibly, were you surprised that you found something like this on the railway line?
Stee. Yeah, very, like, ’cos you don’t really find dead bodies on the railway, do you. When we seen it we jus’ ran to the police station.
The reporter pauses for a moment or two. Children begin to gather round, encircling the boys, in front of the camera. They creep into the view of the camera in twos and threes. Eventually there are nearly 20 of them, all gathered around Osty, Pitts and Stee, jostling, pushing and laughing. One girl, in a red sweatshirt, has her headphones on, attached to a Walkman. In the fields beyond, a man is walking a dog.
Reporter. So what did, er, what did you think when you found it? (Pitts looks around him.)
Reporter. Don’t worry about the people behind you. Be sensible. It’s not funny.
Stee. He thought it was a dead cat wrapped up.
Pitts. Doll’s legs.
Reporter. Tell me, this one on the right here, tell me, what did you think when you first saw the body?
Osty. Don’t know. All of us jus’ seen it and ran away.
Reporter. Were you surprised that you found it? Osty. No.
Reporter. So tell me, just once again, and as sensibly as you can, for getting everyone around you, tell right from the beginning what happened, tell me really from the beginning what happened.
Stee. We were walking along the railway … from the beginning? The reporter nods.
Stee. We were walking along the railway from our mates, then he dropped his money, and I found it. Then I said, erm, come on, let’s have a look for it, ’cos he was on the floor already, throwing the bricks and that up, and I said there it is, like that, picked it up, and I says, I find everything. Walked a bit further on and we ’eard dogs barking, didn’t we?
Osty. So we went in and had a look.
Stee. Went in and had a look at the dogs and that.
Pitts. Just as we came out, as we went in we must have run through the middle of the body and the legs and everything, ’cos we all ran in to see the dogs, and as we came out, walkin,’ you could jus’ see it there on the floor, right there as you looked. (To the children around him) Go away.
Reporter. Sensibly as you can, when did you first see the body?
Stee. When I jus’ came out from the dogs. Looking at the dogs, that, I just seen it then.
Pitts. Like, you jus’, as you’re walking like that, there’s a drop off a little wall. We looked down it, and jus’ there.
Reporter. OK, thanks very much lads. Cheers. Can we just get a shot of you looking at your friend there? Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh, it’s serious. Look as if he’s talking. Don’t laugh. Fine. Good lads. And the same with you looking up at your mate there. Good lad.
The interview lasted for eight minutes, but only a couple of lines were broadcast.
*
Monday morning, eight o’clock, and all the officers who are taking a senior role in the Bulger inquiry are gathered in the officers’ dining room, upstairs at Marsh Lane, for a management briefing. The room has several tables pushed together to create a square, central table, around which the bosses are seated. It is not unlike a military Mess.
There will be two such briefings every day from now on, the second at eight o’clock each evening, followed by briefings for the whole inquiry team, at nine o’clock in the bar along the corridor.
Albert Kirby is now formally installed as the senior investigating officer, with Geoff MacDonald as his deputy. Albert will take sole responsibility for everything that happens. He carries the formatted Management Policy Book, in which he documents every, decision that is made, maintaining a complete record of the inquiry.
Geoff MacDonald has talked Albert Kirby and Jim Fitzsimmons through the post mortem, and Albert has decided to withhold the description of the injuries that James Bulger suffered from the Bulger family, from the press, the public, and the entire inquiry team, including most of the managers. The only detail that is officially released is that the body had been severed by a train.
Albert knows the family will have to be told eventually, but to do it now, he reasons, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them. Also, public feeling is already inflamed, and the disclosure of such horrendous information will only further incite emotion. The inquiry team has enough to handle already.
But the decision cannot prevent, and perhaps encourages, the rapid spread of rumour, which extrapolates from the known facts into lurid fantasy. The stories are always different, but none of them are true. Denise Bulger was out shoplifting when James was taken, and had to delay reporting James missing because she was getting rid of goods she had stolen. James was kept in a house and tortured before being left at the railway. He was abducted by boys for a paedophile ring. He was tied to a tree and beaten. He was strangled and set on fire. The genitals, the fingers, the head had been removed.
These tales will often begin, ‘Someone who knows a police officer told me …’
The post mortem had shown that James had died from severe head injuries. There were multiple fractures of the skull, caused by a series of blows with heavy blunt objects. Death had occurred some time after the injuries were inflicted, but before the train had severed the body.
There were wounds all over the face and head; more than 20 separate bruises, scratches, abrasions and lacerations. A patterned bruise on the right cheek suggested a blow from a shoe. The lower lip had been partly pulled away from the jaw, perhaps by a blow or a kick.
There were bruises, and some cuts, around the body, on the shoulders, chest, arms and legs. There was no conclusive evidence of any sexual assault, but there was a small area of haemorrhaging in the pelvis, near the rectum, and the foreskin appeared ‘abnormal’; it seemed to have been partly pulled back. There were linear abrasions across the buttocks, but these might have been caused by the body being dragged.
Brick dust and fragments were found on the body and in the clothing. There were no other injuries.
The managers in the dining room concentrated on the means which would lead to the identification of the two boys, and the gathering and examination of forensic evidence at the scene which would support a prosecution. There would be house to house inquiries, posters, the collection of last Friday’s truancy lists from local secondary schools, and a continual round of press conferences, fronted by Albert, to feed the media and maintain public interest. Someone, somewhere must recognise those boys.
To support the forensic efforts Albert decided that every suspect would be asked to give intimate samples. Blood, fingerprints, hair, nail-clipping and a photograph. Every suspect would be entered on HOLMES as a PDF. Personal Description File: surname, forenames, birthplace, birth date, age, sex, school, height, build, hair colour, hair type, eyes, complexion, facial hair, glasses, jewellery, accent, scars and marks.
This process of trawling, the painstaking method, was the reality of detective work. It always amused Jim Fitzsimmons watching that fella on the television, the one they’d been doing the wind-up on in the ads. John Thaw, yeah, Inspector Morse. He always sat there on his own and worked everything out. If only it was that easy. You couldn’t do it alone. You needed a system and the interaction of a team. And, these days, you needed a computer.
HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, had evolved out of the inquest into the large, major disasters of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation more than a decade ago. Human error and the inadequacies of old-fashioned policing had allowed Peter Sutcliffe to extend his series of killings long after he should have been identified as the Yorkshire Ripper.
A Home Office research unit had developed the HOLMES system as a programme which would allow all the information coming in to the incident room on a major inquiry to be stored and indexed on computers, with a complete facility for cross-referencing. In theory, no detail could be lost, ignored or its potential significance overlooked, as had happened with Sutcliffe.
The HOLMES procedure was that all information would go to receivers for assessment, before being passed on to the indexers to be entered into the computer. If an action had been generated it would go to the allocators who assigned officers to the inquiry. The officers brought the result of the inquiry back to the receiver.
To Albert Kirby, after 26 years in the CID, there was nothing to beat HOLMES. As a management tool it was absolutely first class. Priceless. What it had saved in time and efficiency was tremendous. As the SIO he could never be expected to know everything that was happening at any one time. With the safeguards of HOLMES he could at least know that nothing would be missed.
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 overzealous 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 bypassed. Jim was sitting there reviewing a couple of TIEs rejected earlier in the week; he was brooding a little on the Snowdrop Street saga.
He went down to the HOLMES room, and found a couple of DIs from the Serious Crime Squad there. They tossed the information back and forth for a while. Jim was wary of a repeat of Snowdrop Street. On the face of it, though, the information looked good. In the end he decided to go for it.
Against the woman’s wishes, someone was sent out to take a statement from her. Jim asked for local intelligence records to be checked to see if they had anything on the two names. He went through to the bar to see what detectives were still around to take on the arrests, first thing in the morning.
Among others, Phil Roberts, the detective sergeant, was there having a couple of pints. Roberts had interviewed the Snowdrop Street lad, which had left him in need of a drink.
‘Listen,’ said Jim Fitzsimmons, ‘will you deal with this job tomorrow morning?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Good. Just hold it there, while we make some more arrangements.’ Jim asked all the detectives in the bar to wait.
Another arrest. Another boy. Phil Roberts wondered if Jimmy Fitz had it in for him. He had been off the fags for a couple of weeks. It was costing him a fortune in nicotine patches. How much longer could he hold out?
There were no local intelligence records for the two boys, but Thompson had an elder brother with some minor offences. There was a photograph of the brother, and it was possible to see a likeness with the video image of the boy in the dark clothing.
When the statement from the woman came back she had given the name of Bedford Road School. The headmistress was called at home, and added one or two details, confirming that the two boys were ten years old. Venables had two addresses, his mother’s in Norris Green, and his father’s in Walton. Jim found the duty night detective and asked him to get some search warrants sworn out. There would be plenty of time tomorrow for more extensive background inquiries.
Shortly before one o’clock, Jim called the detectives from the bar and, having gathered all the available officers together, led the way into the canteen, which had shut down for the night. They turned the lights on and sat around one of the canteen’s circular tables, about a dozen men, all somewhat jaded at this late hour. There was no excitement. It was no big break. Just two more boys to be pulled in.
Two teams were appointed, and two team leaders: Phil Roberts for the Thompson arrest, and Mark Dale for Venables. Dale was a detective constable, but he’d been acting up to sergeant and was about to be promoted. With the memory of Snowdrop Street all too vivid, and the anxiety that it was about to be repeated, Jim thought it would be wiser if the officers came on in the morning at stations away from Marsh Lane – the Thompson team at Walton Lane and the Venables team at Lower Lane. The boys would be held and interviewed at those stations. That and the early start, he hoped, would keep the arrests secret from the press.
Jim decided not to go out on the arrests himself. He would need to brief the management team in the morning. He wanted to hear immediately afterwards, though, how the arrests had gone, and whether or not the officers thought Thompson and Venables were likely candidates.