The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (26 page)

They began driving back to Lower Lane and Jon said he’d like a drink when he got in. He wanted a Lilt. Then he asked, can fingerprints come out on skin?

*

Liverpool had been playing at home, that afternoon, to Ipswich, and Bobby’s car got stuck in the traffic, leaving Walton Lane for the Strand just after half five. It was a small car and, with five people inside on a cold day, the windscreen was quickly covered in mist, which Phil Roberts who was driving struggled to remove.

Bobby was anxious about meeting up with Jon. Where would he be? He
wasn’t going to be on the railway at the same time was he? Bobby wasn’t going if he was. The officers told Bobby they were planning to drive along the route and Bobby wanted to know how you could drive a car on the railway.

Once on Stanley Road they followed the route back to Walton, and Bobby showed them where they had got on to the railway, by the bent fencing in the entry off City Road. Jon got over first then Bobby passed the baby over. Jon grabbed the baby, and then Bobby climbed over, on to the railway.

*

It had been decided that Albert Kirby should tell Denise and Ralph Bulger that two boys, aged ten, were being charged with the abduction and murder of their son James. Earlier that afternoon Albert and Geoff MacDonald had driven up to Kirkby with Mandy Waller and Jim Green, the two officers who had first dealt with Denise and Ralph, just over a week ago.

On the Monday, Albert had appointed Mandy and Jim to be the inquiry’s family liaison officers, and they had spent the week shuttling between Marsh Lane and the home of Denise’s mother in Kirkby, where the Bulger family were based.

It had been Jim Green’s job on the Monday to tell Denise and Ralph that James’s body had been cut in half by the train. He had worried over the words he should use, not wanting them to sound blunt and insensitive. In the end he had asked to see Denise and Ralph privately in the kitchen and said, ‘I have to tell you that James’s body had been severed by a train.’

Denise had stood there with her head bowed, showing no reaction, and Ralph had stared with what Jim Green would come to recognise as angry eyes.
Ralph had simply nodded in response, and neither he nor Denise had asked any questions.

This was the only detail of the injuries that had become public knowledge, and the police had wanted the family to hear it from them first. Albert’s decision to keep the other injuries from them had made it difficult for Jim Green, who more or less knew everything because he had attended the post mortem, but had to keep the knowledge to himself in all his dealings with the Bulgers.

As the week progressed the family had become increasingly inquisitive. There was some anger, particularly at moments when they felt the police were not doing their job, not following the right lines of enquiry, or not keeping them informed. The sudden flare of publicity over Snowdrop Street did not help. Why weren’t we told? Why are we hearing things from the television? Is this the one? Have you got him?

There had been no time to tell the family of the Snowdrop Street arrest beforehand, and the family liaison officers tried to explain that through the course of the inquiry there might be several such arrests. It would be best not to read too much into them.

One of the many Bulger uncles lived in Walton and picked up various rumours about what had happened and who had been responsible. He had been told that the video footage of the abduction clearly showed the two brothers who had found the body. It was obviously them, why hadn’t the police got them? Mandy checked, and reassured the family that they had been eliminated from the inquiry.

On the initial visits, Mandy was served tea in a cup and saucer from the best china. By the end of the week tea was coming in a mug, and they knew without asking that she didn’t take sugar. Becoming close to the family, exposed to and touched by the intense emotions they were feeling, was hard enough in itself. It was good, that Saturday afternoon, to be the bearer of positive news.

Albert Kirby spoke to Ralph first, and told him they expected to charge the two boys later that day. Were they sure these were the ones? Oh yes.

Albert asked to see Denise, and was taken upstairs to a bedroom, where Denise sat on the edge of the bed, with a box in front of her containing some of the thousands of cards and letters of sympathy that had been arriving for her and Ralph.

Denise did not at first realise who Albert was, and it seemed to him, as he explained what was happening, that he was talking to someone who wasn’t really there. Denise asked no questions of Albert but, back downstairs, the family wanted to know about the boys.

The charges meant that the family was a step closer to getting James’s body released for the funeral. The ages of the boys being charged did not make it any easier for the family to focus responsibility for James’s death. It was frustrating and incomprehensible. They wanted to know why, but there was no explanation that Albert could offer.

*

At 6.15 on Saturday evening, 20 February 1993, Detective Inspector Jim Fitzsimmons charged Jon Venables with the abduction and murder of James Patrick Bulger, and the attempted abduction of Mrs Power’s son.

Jon sat on a stool against the bridewell counter at Lower Lane Police Station. He was drawing on paper as he waited for the charges to be read. His mother and father were behind him, upset and comforting each other. Susan began crying briefly, and Jon began crying too. Then she stopped, and he stopped. When the charges had been read, and Jim Fitzsimmons had
explained them to him in simple language, Jon carried on drawing.

Jim then drove down the East Lancs Road to Walton Lane, to repeat the procedure with Bobby.

*

Bobby had been playing
Spot
Pairs
in the detention room with Brian Whitby, the local police youth liaison officer. PC Whitby had been working at Anfield that afternoon during the Ipswich game, and had been asked to sit with Bobby for a while on his return.

Whitby had been in the station last Friday, 12 February, and had worked out that he had been standing in the kitchen area of the canteen, with its large window directly overlooking the railway barely 50 yards away, at about the time James Bulger was killed. He had been having difficulty coming to terms with this, and was having difficulty coming to terms with the idea that Bobby had been responsible. Whitby had known the Thompsons for years, through his work. Bobby had not been high on his private list of suspects.

They chatted idly as they turned the cards, and Bobby said, ‘Can I go home soon, PC Brian? I don’t want to be here any more.’

The bridewell was suddenly crowded, for the first time in days, as the interviewing team, the senior officers, the lawyers and the social workers gathered ahead of the charges. The officers chatted and there was some laughter, an air of relief among them. Normally, this moment in an inquiry would be the prelude to a celebratory party back at the station bar. There would be no party tonight at Marsh Lane. Just a few speeches of thanks from the bosses, and some cathartic consumption of alcohol.

Bobby came out of the detention room, and stood briefly, a small figure lost among the grown-ups. It was as if he could have slipped away without anyone noticing.

Then some of the adults left the bridewell, and Jim Fitzsimmons and Bobby took their places opposite each other across the counter. There was no chair for Bobby, who stood with his head slightly raised, peering up at Jim Fitzsimmons. It reminded Phil Roberts of
Oliver
Twist
.

When Bobby was charged he said, ‘It was Jon that done that.’

Afterwards, his mother, who had been in no state to attend the charges, had to be helped away from the police station. She was in the advanced stages of shock, staggering like a drunk, her whole body shaking uncontrollably, though she was completely sober.

Bobby went back to the detention room and later he fell asleep, while a couple of social workers and a police officer sat there talking. A train went down the railway line, and Bobby sat up. He said, was that a train going past? Yes. Bobby lay down again. I know all the times of them trains.

23

On Shrove Tuesdays in the nineteenth century it was a popular local sport to set a cock loose in a ring with a mob of small boys whose hands had been tied behind their backs. The boys would fight to capture the cock, and the winner would be the boy emerging with the cock held in his teeth.

There was conventional cock-fighting, dog-fighting and bull-baiting, in which a bull was tied to a stake and attacked by dogs, which were set upon it one at a time, one after the other.

The adult game of Lifting was reserved for Easter Mondays and Tuesdays. On the Monday women were free to carry off men, apparently in the hope of finding men with money in their pockets to spend in the ale houses. On Tuesday the men lifted the women and, as one G. H. Wilkinson noted when writing his personal history of Walton in 1913, ‘acts of the grossest indecency were committed’. Wilkinson added that the better education of the working classes and the exertions of religious teachers to inculcate more respect had gradually put an end to such disgraceful practices.

Walton was then little more than a small village, still flanked by farmland, nurseries and the estates of the local manor house. It was only at the end of the last century that the village was finally overrun by the creeping city sprawl of Liverpool which, in itself, was a reversal of history.

The sandstone church of St Mary The Virgin in the parish of Walton on the hill was once the Lord’s house of all it surveyed. The church has a proud vantage point on the brow of the rise from the River Mersey. It has a 118-foot bell tower, from the top of which, it is said, Blackpool Tower is visible on a good day, some 30 miles away.

The church site, with its ancient circular graveyard, predates Blackpool Tower by at least a thousand years, and for several centuries the parish of Walton extended over 40 square miles, embracing the little fishing community of Liverpool.

The village that developed around the church was a travellers’ rest, and policemen with cutlasses sometimes patrolled the outskirts of Walton to discourage the local
banditti
and footpads from highway robbery. The old churchwardens were responsible for dealing with crime, and iron stocks
stood in the graveyard for the summary punishment of drunks, debtors and assorted petty offenders.

When Liverpool began developing as a trading port, it no longer wanted to be an outpost of Walton and in 1699, after an argument which had lasted some 50 years, an Act of Parliament finally granted Liverpool its independence as a parish. The Liverpool Corporation’s case was set out in a memorial: ‘And there being but one Chapel, which doth not contain one half of our Inhabitants, in the Summer (upon pretence of going to the Parish-Church, which is Two long Miles, and there being a village in the way) they Drink in the said village; by which and otherwise many Youth and sundry Families are ruined: Therefore it is hoped the Bill may pass, being to promote the Service of God.’

The said village was Kirkdale, but the legacy of this potential for ruination still persists along Scotland – Scottie – Road which leads out of Liverpool, into Kirkdale Road and on to Walton. There is a press of pubs along the last stretch of Scottie Road. Within a couple of hundred yards, on one side of the road, stand The Foot, The Widows, Dolly Hickey’s Pub and Wine Bar, The Parrot, The Corner House and The Clifford Arms; and, on the other side of the road, The Eagle Vaults, One Flew Over The Throstle’s Nest, The Newsham House, McGinty’s Bar and The Europa.

It was around Scottie Road that the Victorian era delivered some of the worst excesses of poverty and deprivation. The dark, insanitary and thickly populated courts and cellars of Liverpool existed long before Queen Victoria, and the last were not cleared until the 1960s. Yet they achieved a peak of squalor in the mid-nineteenth century, when epidemics of cholera and other diseases were commonplace, and 32 was a ripe old age.

Children, in the language of the day, were ragged street urchins who begged, hustled, robbed and died in sufficient numbers to maintain a high rate of child mortality. They were mythologised in
Her
Benny,
a mawkish Victorian novel by Silas B. Hocking in which Her dies, but Benny finds God and is saved from poverty, bachelorhood and death.

This was Liverpool’s great moment as an industrial and commercial centre. Unemployment was high, work was often casual, especially at the docks, and wages were low. The Welfare State had yet to be invented and poverty was largely unrelieved.

When the city began clearing its courts and cellars it often replaced them with tenement blocks, known as landings, which became slums in their own right, and were in turn replaced with walk-up flats which in turn came to be classified as slums. The cycle of clearances continued into the 1980s, long after Liverpool’s moment had passed, and higher standards of poverty had been attained.

By contrast with Liverpool, Walton was, in the words of an old report, ‘free from those atmospheric impurities which injuriously affect animal and
vegetable life’. It had the clean air of the Atlantic blowing up from Liverpool Bay, along the route of the so-named Breeze Hill, and it had St Mary’s, which it could, and always did, claim as the Mother Church of Liverpool.

Walton developed around the village and the church, predominantly as an area of red-brick terraces; an archetypal Northern landscape of narrow, cobbled streets and flat-fronted houses whose doors opened directly onto the pavement, or bay-windowed properties with front yards barely wide enough to stand in. Back alleys, better known as entries, jiggers or jowlers, threaded between the cramped roads.

It was dense housing, but not so dense as the courts and cellars, and with the exception of the Throstle’s Nest estate off Rice Lane, which has long since been razed, Walton’s population was spared the greatest indignities endured by the people of Liverpool.

St Mary’s was all but destroyed by German bombs in 1941, and was rebuilt in the late Forties. The iron stocks have gone, and the last thatched cottage, behind the church, was demolished in the 1960s, along with several other neighbouring houses and buildings, to make way for the Breeze Hill flyover.