James lived with his parents Denise and Ralph in the Merseyside town of Kirkby, about eight miles northeast of the Liverpool waterfront. The Sacred Heart Primary School in Kirkby - where he would have started his education had he lived - now holds a memorial garden in his name. A Red Balloon Learner Centre was established in Merseyside in his memory in 2008, launched by his mother together with the broadcaster Esther Rantzen. His parents both remarried in the years that followed. Denise married Stuart Fergus and had two more sons; Ralph remarried and had three daughters. The grief did not lift, but the family kept reaching for life. They have spent more than three decades doing so.

It was an ordinary Friday at the shopping centre. Denise had stopped at A. R. Tym's butcher's shop on the lower floor to pay for her purchases. She let go of James's hand for a moment. When she looked back, he was gone. Two ten-year-old boys, who had skipped school that day and spent it shoplifting and watching other children, had taken him by the hand and led him out of the building. The CCTV camera captured the image at 15:42 - a grainy frame that would later be reproduced in newspapers around the world. Denise ran through the centre calling for him. She did not, that afternoon, know what had already begun.

James's body was found two days later, on 14 February, on a railway line in Walton, Liverpool. Forensic examination established that he had died from injuries inflicted by the boys before the passing of any train. The pathologist Alan Williams documented 42 separate injuries. The case is sometimes called - by those who have actually had to examine its details - one of unimaginable cruelty. We are not going to detail it here, because to do so would dishonour him. What matters is that he was two years old, and that he was hurt, and that two children, then almost children themselves, did the hurting. Around 38 people are believed to have seen James being walked across Liverpool that afternoon. Most did not intervene. When questioned, the older boys said he was a brother, or a lost child being taken to a police station.

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were charged on 20 February 1993. Their trial, which began that autumn at Preston Crown Court, was held in an adult courtroom open to the public - a procedure the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1999 had denied them a fair trial, because no eleven-year-old, the court said, could be expected to participate meaningfully in such a 'severely intimidating' setting. On 24 November 1993 they were found guilty, becoming the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. Mr Justice Morland called their conduct 'cunning and very wicked.' They were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty's Pleasure. The case prompted intense national debate about the responsibility of children, the role of media regulation - tabloids claimed the boys had been influenced by the horror film Child's Play 3, although police investigation found no evidence either boy had watched it - and the proper handling of young offenders. That debate has never really stopped.

Denise Fergus has spent decades campaigning - against the early release of her son's killers, against the dramatisation of his murder in plays, films, and a 2019 Oscar-nominated short, and against the streams of online trolling and false identification that have surrounded the case. She has been stalked, impersonated, and trolled by people posing as her son's ghost; the perpetrators have been prosecuted. Several people have been jailed for publishing images they claimed showed the killers, in breach of a worldwide anonymity injunction. Jon Venables has been recalled to prison twice, in 2010 and 2017, for offences relating to indecent images of children. None of this returns James. The Bulger case is, in the end, a story about a family who lost a small boy and a country that is still trying to live up to the duty of care it owes its children. James Patrick Bulger was loved. He is remembered.

The events of February 1993 took place across north Liverpool and Bootle, broadly in the area around 53.443 degrees north, 2.960 degrees west. The New Strand Shopping Centre is in Bootle, and Walton, where James was found, is approximately two miles south. Liverpool John Lennon Airport (EGGP) is approximately 7 nautical miles south-southwest. This is a residential and industrial part of the Liverpool urban area; visiting it requires respect for the families who live with this memory. There is a memorial garden at Sacred Heart Primary School in Kirkby, where James would have started his education, and the Red Balloon Learner Centre carries his memory in Merseyside.