The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (10 page)

PC Oughton tried to explain that an assault charge was unlikely. Ann said she had no complaint to make. She only wanted Mrs Venables seen and spoken to. Ann and Bobby then left the police station.

Later, one of Bobby’s friends went into the video shop, to collect Bobby’s pound for him, from Joanne.

12

The number of alleged sightings of James multiplied as news reports of his disappearance continued. Some were local to Bootle, others were further afield. A woman phoned the police in Cambridge to report seeing a child in a car on the M11. Another thought she had seen James on the platform at Leeds railway station. A builder had seen a suspicious-looking man with a child in a Ford Orion on a building site in Widnes. The man had said he was looking for some twigs, to make a bow and arrow for the boy.

All the reported sightings were logged. Each had to be assessed for its feasibility, and given a place in the hierarchy of priority.

A patrolling officer in Bootle was stopped by a young lad who said he’d heard about the missing child, and thought his neighbour might have seen something. His neighbour was the woman who had been crossing the bridge over the canal that afternoon, and seen James crying on the tow-path below. When the officer called in, she told him her story, distressed now at the implications of what she had seen. She had thought he was with the group of children nearby. She hadn’t thought there was any reason to interfere.

Jim Fitzsimmons had been joined at Marsh Lane by two senior Superintendents from CID command. It was cold, it was late, and a two-year-old was alone and in jeopardy. They were sure the child the woman had seen was James. It was the first sighting of him. There was no indication of how he had arrived at the canal. He might just have wandered there on his own. Deep down, Jim began to think it probable that James had drowned in the canal.

No option could be dismissed, but there was no reason to suppose that James’s disappearance was even a criminal matter. With the elimination of the pony-tail man, and the sighting of James by himself at the canal, it was now less likely to involve an abduction than had seemed to be the case earlier in the evening.

There was no chance at this hour, in the dark, of searching the canal itself. Jim requested an underwater team for first thing in the morning. He thought they would find a body.

Denise and Ralph did not know of these developments. Denise was being
interviewed, in detail, by a Detective Sergeant, Jim Green, from Southport and his female colleague, DC Janet Jones. The officers are feeling their way through the interview, establishing once and for all that there is nothing amiss with the family, that James’s disappearance has no domestic connection.

Denise is quiet and withdrawn, her head bowed. She is looking for reassurance. ‘You will find him, won’t you? Will he be okay?’ It had all happened so quickly. She couldn’t understand where James could be.

After the interview Jim Green drove Denise and Ralph round to the Strand so that Denise could show exactly where she’d been when James went missing. Seeing them together for the first time, DS Green wondered if there would be any friction between them; if Ralph would blame Denise in any way for what had happened. But Ralph put his arm around Denise in the back of the car, clearly offering comfort.

The search of the Strand was still going on as they walked through to Tym’s the butchers. It was getting on for midnight now, but the police activity continued unabated.

Two more reports came through of alleged sightings of James. One of the women who had been walking their dogs on Breeze Hill reservoir had called Walton Lane police station. She told them that the boy she had seen fitted the description given on the Granada news programme. He had been with two slightly older lads. The boy looked as if he had fallen and grazed his head.

The other caller had been at work in a garage on Berry Street in Bootle when a scruffy, nervous teenager with close-cropped hair came in asking for a light. He had been with another youth and a small child. The child had been carried on one of the boys’ shoulders as they walked away. The caller had felt that the child didn’t belong with them. Berry Street was behind Stanley Road, towards the docks – the opposite direction from Walton.

The two sightings conflicted with each other. There was no guarantee that either of them was actually of James. They certainly couldn’t both be of James. On balance, the latter had to be favourite. The garage was nearer the Strand, and the boys were bigger. How could James have got all that way to the reservoir, and with two boys who were only slightly older than him?

Perhaps, but only perhaps, he was not in the canal, after all?

When Denise and Ralph returned from the Strand, Jim Green and Jim Fitzsimmons tried to persuade them to go home for some rest. It was nearly nine hours since James had disappeared, and the couple were despondent. ‘We’ve lost him. He’s gone, hasn’t he?’ No, don’t think that way. There’s still time. We can still find him. The officers barely knew what to say.

And Denise and Ralph didn’t want to go home. They wanted to stay and wait for news. They were tense and quiet. Denise spoke abruptly to the officers, but gave in to their measured persuasion. Denise and Ralph went home.

The search was losing momentum as the early hours of the morning approached. The Operational Support Division teams had checked 73 of the Strand’s 114 premises. Officers were again going over the banks of the canal and the neighbouring streets.

One of the senior OSD officers called in to Marsh Lane from the Strand. He’d got men there doing nothing – what else could they do? It was suggested that they start looking at some of the Strand’s security video footage. Try the camera overlooking the exit nearest to the canal.

It was after one o’clock, and Jim Fitzsimmons was on his own, upstairs at Marsh Lane. Everyone else had either gone home or was out on inquiries. He was just waiting for statements to come back with two officers he’d sent up to Kirkby.

The phone rang, an OSD sergeant calling in from the Strand. An edge of excitement in his voice. ‘I think we’ve got him. He’s on the video, leaving the Strand. Do you want to come and have a look?’

Jim put on his coat, an inexpensive Barbour, and walked downstairs and out of the station. He walked along by the wall of the police car park, past the public car park and across the bus terminal to the Strand’s rear entrance, by the cab rank on Washington Parade. It was the bleak backside of Bootle, quiet at the best of times, now deserted and desolate. Acres of empty tarmac, spare lighting, the concrete mass of the multi-storey car park beyond, and the ungainly skyline of the buildings on Stanley Road. It was freezing, and a sharp Atlantic wind was blowing up from the Mersey across the open spaces.

Jim thought of the missing boy, who was not yet much more than a name. He thought the boy would be found tomorrow morning, in the canal.

There was a small huddle of people outside the Strand. Some were relatives of James, but mostly they were local women, Bootle people, poorly dressed against the cold and shivering as they stood, waiting. They were upset, they wanted to help. Anything. Anywhere they could look. God knows how long they had been there.

Moved by their presence, Jim made his way through them and into the Strand. He was shown into the office, and there on a screen, barely identifiable by the blurred, twitching movement of the time-lapse recording, was James, being led away by two boys. It was just possible to see him stumble as he went out through the doors of the Strand.

Jim was upset by these images of James, made real now and no longer just a name, his fate probably determined in these few moments.

Cases involving children were always affecting. He remembered, as a young uniformed bobby, being called to a house just off City Road, and finding a woman there, hysterical and crying. ‘Oh, my baby’s dead. My baby’s dead.’ She was upstairs in the bedroom, holding the child in her arms. Jim had taken the baby from her. It was a sudden death. A cot death. He had
taken the baby from its mother, and it haunted him still.

Rewind. Forward play. Rewind. Forward play. The officers watched the short sequence for a while, before continuing the process of searching, backtracking through the recording for other sightings of James.

The images needed enhancing. It was almost impossible to discern any distinguishing features about the two boys with James. They looked like young adolescents. Maybe thirteen or fourteen years old.

Jim called the man from the garage on Berry Street, hoping he might recognise James, or the older boys, from the video. It was after two in the morning, and the man was in bed, but he got up and came down to the Strand, and looked at the recording. He watched, and thought. He didn’t know, he said. It might be the same boys, and it might not.

Civilian support staff, Alan Williams and Colin Smith from the police photographic unit, were also summoned from their beds to the Strand. The unit had just taken possession of a new image-enhancing computer. They would work through the night to improve the quality of the footage, and produce usable stills that might identify James’s apparent abductors.

Everything had changed. It was no longer simply a missing from home. Jim Fitzsimmons remained sure that James was dead, but if he had been abducted, even if he had been left at the canal before he drowned, it was a serious criminal offence.

He walked back from the Strand to Marsh Lane and left a request for the full HOLMES team to be brought out the following morning. And then, some time after three, he drove home.

13

On Saturday morning Jack from next door popped his
Sun
through Neil’s letterbox. Susan got up at about quarter past ten, and gave Jon the newspaper to read. She told him there would be reports on television about the missing boy.

Normally Jon just glanced at the paper, the TV pages and the sport. This morning, Susan could see, he seemed very intent as he read the report of the missing boy.

Sure enough, there were the news items about the abduction on television throughout the day. Jon watched them all, including the one that showed the video of the child being taken away.

Jon asked his mum, ‘Have they got them boys yet?’ He kept saying, ‘If I seen them lads, I’d kick their heads in.’

All day, Jon was on his best behaviour. He made his mum a cup of tea, which was a rare event, and told her he was going to start being good for her, because he didn’t like to see her being upset. Susan believed she had finally got through to him.

When Neil asked Jon about the paint on his clothes he again said that Robert had thrown it over him, after stealing the paint from a DIY shop. He told his mum that the shop was Taskers, and she guessed he meant the Fads on County Road. He said Robert had stolen some rolls of wallpaper border as well. The paint had been thrown in an entry by Olney Street, round the back of County Road.

In the afternoon Jon’s grandmother came round to pick them up, and they all went shopping on Prescott Road. They went back to his grandmother’s for tea, and afterwards they sat watching cable television until it was time to go home, at about seven thirty. They all stayed in for the evening, and Jon went up to bed after ten.

On Sunday Neil went out for the
News
Of
The
World.
Jon said, ‘Let’s have a look at this. Is there any more news on little James? If I seen them lads, I’d kick their heads in.’

Jon cycled down to the village, to St Mary’s, where he saw some boys from school who had just finished choir, and were playing football in the church yard.

Jon was cycling over the graves and one of the boys, who was nicknamed Frog because of his big eyes, told him to get off. Shut it Froggy, said Jon, and he threw some small stones at them and cycled away.

In the afternoon he played outside on his bike for a while, with his brother Mark. When Jon went in his mum told him that the missing boy had been found dead, down by the railway where he and Bobby had been. Susan saw that Jon was gobsmacked. ‘His poor mum,’ he said. He kept on watching the news after that, to see if the boys had been caught.

Normally, they would have gone back to Susan’s house in the evening, ready for the new week at school. But because it was half-term they stayed over, returning on Monday, when Susan took Jon’s clothes home in a bag and washed them in the machine.

Early in the week Neil made a couple more visits to the friends he had seen on Friday. They spoke about the murder, and his friend’s daughter mentioned that Jon had been sagging that day. Neil said he had been on County Road and, anyway, the lad in the video was taller than their Jon. By Tuesday the discovery of paint at the murder scene had been reported, and Neil spoke of the coincidence, that Jon should have returned home with shiny blue paint on the sleeve of his coat. More washing for Jon’s mum.

*

Bobby, Ryan and another lad from across the road were in the video shop almost as soon as it opened on Saturday afternoon. They were chatting, and Joanne asked them to come behind the counter and watch a film. In the end they stayed there until it closed, watching some Bugs Bunny cartoons,
1001
Tales
and
Fievel
Goes
West.
They stopped for a while and Joanne helped Ryan with his homework, doing his sums. Then they started watching
Beauty
and
the
Beast
on ITV, but had to miss the end because the shop was closing at eight. Bobby started getting cheeky, messing around with the shutters as Joanne was closing, until she managed to get rid of him.

Though Bobby did not say much about the abduction of James, he did tell Ryan he had seen the child in the Strand being taken by two boys. His mum noticed he paid particular attention to the reports about the disappearance on television and in the newspapers. She also noticed that one of the boys on the video looked something like her son. That doesn’t half look like you, she said, and asked Bobby where he’d been on Friday. He said he had been at the Strand, before going to the library. He told her he’d been with Jon Venables.