Albert went out with his briefcase first thing on Sunday morning, down to Marsh Lane, ready now to assume the mantle of Senior Investigating Officer. He spent the morning catching up with what had happened so far and, with other officers, began planning the next steps in the inquiry. They wanted to further enhance the video footage, maximising public awareness of James’s disappearance and jogging memories of seeing the boys, perhaps even prompting an identification. The media would be used, posters distributed, and special attention given to the Strand, where a vacant shop site had been made available as a temporary police station.
The search for James, in all likelihood the search for a body, was expanding, spreading across Walton without forgetting Boode. There were no certainties, only an unwieldy set of possibilities.
By lunchtime, Albert felt that he was up to date. He would have a mid-afternoon briefing with Geoff MacDonald and Jim Fitzsimmons. In the lull, Jim slipped out and drove over to Walton Hospital where his mother, an inveterate and incurable smoker, was being treated after a mild heart attack. She was a warhorse, Jim’s mother, the survivor of a brain operation for a tumour a few years earlier, and determinedly smoking through a continuing heart problem. He was worried for her but felt instinctively that she would survive her current illness.
At the hospital, he sat with his mum for a few minutes, his mind not quite letting go of James. ‘I’ve got to be off now.’ He said goodbye to her and walked out of the hospital. On the spur of the moment, he decided to carry out his own search of the barren land behind the hospital buildings. He rummaged around for 20 minutes, finding nothing, and drove back to Marsh Lane for the briefing with Geoff MacDonald and Albert Kirby.
15
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 drivers 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 drivers 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.
■
On Sunday afternoon Becketts 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 Georgies 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 bade.
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 t
he 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.
16
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 offer 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.
The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case Page 8
