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

Daniel, twelve, and Joe, ten, and a six-year-old daughter, Louise. A family Pools win, a few years ago, had made life more comfortable. The eldest boy was at the Merchant Taylors’ school in Crosby; their home a little nicer than it might otherwise have been.
    He was a stocky, solidly built man, still playing football for the police and coaching a team of youngsters. Warm and easy-going, he favoured a laid-back style of management in the force. He was known universally to colleagues as Jim or Jimmy Fitz.
    In that Shankly way of seeing football as some kind of metaphor for life, Jim saw himself at half-time, and was looking for a good second half. Hence the return to academic study. He continued to believe in simplicity as a policy, and he liked honest players, true people.
    As he made Marsh Lane in his Cavalier, Jim had time to reflect on his own wanderlust as a child. He had once disappeared out of the old Woolworths on Stanley Road, while shopping with his mother, and been found 20 minutes later, on the way to Liverpool city centre. There was the time he had hopped on a bus and been found in Allerton. And when the Hornet had printed a picture of the Liverpool team, he had walked off and called at every newsagent from Bootle to the south end of the city, trying to buy a copy of the comic. The police had spent two and a half hours looking for him. Hopefully this, or something like it, would be the story with James Bulger.
    When he arrived at Marsh Lane Jim was brought up to date by theuniform bosses. Nothing seemed to have been overlooked in the response to James’s disappearance, but now, with increasing concern for the vulnerability of such a small child, it would become a CID matter.
    Jim phoned round the stations in the division and called in all the available detectives, leaving just one for cover at each location. He began running a manual control, which would be the prelude to a computerised HOLMES major incident enquiry, should that be necessary.
    A final and thorough search of the Strand was planned, and the keyholders of every shop were called from their homes to re-open their premises.
    Ralph Bulger had also arrived at Marsh Lane by now. He had only heard of James’s disappearance when he called at his mother-in-law’s home, expecting to meet Denise and James, back from the shops. He went straight round to see Ray, his brother-in-law, because Ray had a car, and could give Ralph a lift into Bootle.
    Mandy Waller and another officer were asked to take Ralph up to Kirkby, to search the Bulgers’ home. Ralph could not understand the necessity for this – James was hardly likely to have made his own way back – but accepted Mandy’s explanation that it was a standard procedure when children went missing.
    Ralph had some recent photographs of James on a roll of 110 film, which they brought back to Marsh Lane. Other members of the family were also coming into the station, offering support and help with the search.
    The pony-tail man finally turned up, at the front desk of the police station, having found out that the police were looking for him. He had been at the Strand that day, but it became apparent that he had not been involved in James’s disappearance. He was then the first TIE of the enquiry – he had been traced, interviewed and eliminated.

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    Afterwards, Jon and Bobby came down from the railway on Walton Lane, just the other side of the bridge from the police station. They clambered down the embankment, following the slope of the supporting wall of the bridge. At the top of the wall they reached out for the lamp-post, and slithered down it to the ground. A drop of some ten feet.
    They crossed into the village then and hung around, roaming through the entries. They decided to knock for Gummy Gee, but there was no answer, so they sat on the steps near Gummy’s house for a while, until another boy they knew came along and told them Gummy was in. No, they said, we don’t think so. But they knocked for