Free The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case by David James Smith

because he had made a diversionary career move. Four years ago, at the age of 32, Jim Fitzsimmons had entered Liverpool University as an undergraduate – still salaried as a police officer, still carrying his warrant card, but now just another student, albeit a mature one, on campus.
    Normally, officers returning to study would have resumed policing duties during the long summer breaks. Jim had chosen to add a Spanish option to his combined Management and Policy Studies degree. It had meant spending his summers in Spain, for the good of the course, naturally.
    He had worked hard at the Spanish, but struggled with the grammar. This had brought him a 2:1 BA Honours degree. He had finished on 3 July last year and resumed his career as a Detective Sergeant the day after, working out of headquarters at Canning Place. He had passed for promotion in September, been notified of his new posting in January, and started on Monday.
    Going back to work had not been difficult, although he had been so long away from the job. He had not stopped thinking of himself as a police officer, because he didn’t think of himself in those terms to begin with. He thought the experience of the degree had changed him in some way he couldn’t quite articulate. Something to do with broadening his view of life, probably.
    Jim’s father had been a docker, and Jim had been the eldest of six children. A large and extended Catholic family from Bootle was no rare thing. A close community, overflowing with children. Jim was the dreamy, dizzy kid with a passion for football and Anfield, and not much talent for playing himself.
    His dad bought him a season ticket when he passed his eleven plus. Or rather, Jim was given his dad’s own ticket for the stand, and his dad bought a ground ticket for himself, because he couldn’t afford two for the stand. Jim went to matches on the back of his dad’s Honda.
    After a couple of years at a Catholic grammar school, the Salesian College, Jim had begun to develop quickly, finding skill as a sportsman, especially football, and signing schoolboy forms with Liverpool before being taken on as an apprentice professional at sixteen.
    His father, who had always smoked heavily, contracted lung cancer, when Jim was thirteen. Jim’s father, who was 40, never acknowledged that his illness was terminal. He simply made his eldest son promise that he would never smoke. Jim was in the boys’ pen on The Kop when his father died, because he wasn’t wanted at the hospital. Jim remembered the loss, but not the grieving. He thought of his father as a strong man.
    As the family wage-earner, his apprenticeship to Liverpool was a godsend. Twenty pounds a week plus twenty pounds keep, which he gave to his mum. He had been signed on by Bill Shankly, and imbued with the great man’s philosophy of the game, and of life. He learned to play football the Liverpool way: simple, play it simple, push it and move. That was the word of Shankly. Every successful thing in life is done simply.
    At the end of his apprenticeship, Jim was released by Liverpool. He had never made the first team, and accepted that he was not destined for glory as a footballer. He was gutted – but he needed a job.
    The father of his then girlfriend – now his wife, Fran – was a police officer. Jim liked his future father-in-law and, on the basis that he couldn’t face the thought of going indoors to work, he applied for the police and the fire services. He was accepted by the police, and sent for training in November 1975. His first posting was to Anfield.
    He worked at Walton Lane after that, and went into the CID, before being promoted back into uniform as a sergeant. Before long he was back in the CID again, first on special duties at headquarters, which was a euphemism for the Special Branch, then working around the country, even going into Europe for occasional enquiries, with the Regional Crime Squad.
    Jim was 36 now, married for some fourteen years, with two boys,