The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (13 page)

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 track suit 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.