Dedication
For Jules
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 1—Three Deaths and an Article
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 2—Home, but Not Home
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 3—The Other Mothers
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 4—The Detectives
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 5—The Prime Suspect
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 6—The Case Against Sidney Noyce and the Silencing of Owen Weston
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 7—The Many Lives of Jessica Paige
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 8—The Lost Hour: From Paradise to Blackhorse Lane
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 9—Fancy Man
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 10—Ghost
Chapter 24
It’s Time to Tell: Episode 11—Wrong Time, Wrong Place
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Read On
Praise
Also by Gilly Macmillan
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
The weather is raw. Horizontal rain spatters Fletcher’s glasses and slaps his cheeks.
He saw the pit from the motorway. He had a bird’s-eye view from the overpass and another glimpse from a meaner angle as the car came down the exit ramp. The wipers were going like the clappers. He saw the backs of the gathered construction workers. The pit was a muddy gash in the car park in front of them, and the sticky clay soil inside it a dull dirty orange. Fletcher and Danny parked near the entrance to the superstore, at the end of a line of cars in disorderly formation. Danny didn’t open the passenger door until he’d cinched his hood tight around his face like a girl’s bonnet.
Inside the pit the men have discovered a nest of bones. Fletcher stands unflinchingly beside it as the weather assaults him. He takes in the scene. He sees fresh black tarmac, shiny with surface water. Rainwater has collected in every undulation and the puddles are pockmarked and squally. They offer wobbly reflections of the rectangular building and the sky behind it, where a streak of sickly yellow light cowers beneath clouds pregnant with more rain. One of the workers tries to light a cigarette. His lighter sparks and dies repeatedly.
“What are they doing here?” Fletcher asks.
“They’re expanding the store,” Danny says.
“Is it not large enough already?”
The superstore is a behemoth, as big as a city block. The tarmac flows around it like a moat, and from its black edges, streets of Victorian terraced houses radiate away in lines that track the ancient curves of the landscape, rising to colonize a natural bowl in a steep ridge behind. Parkland runs along the top of the ridge, a telecom tower lodged amongst the trees.
On the other side of the superstore, dominating the horizon, Fletcher can see six high-rise towers that form the housing estate called the Glenfrome Estate. He can’t believe it has escaped the dynamite. It’s a relic. Fletcher and Danny have history there, but Fletcher likes to look forward, not back, so he won’t be the one to mention it.
The pit is deep. Seven or eight feet, Fletcher estimates as he stands at the edge of it. He quells a mild lurch of vertigo. He’s perturbed by the sight of the bone—the tip of a femur, he guesses from the size of it—and by the depth of the pit, and the way it resembles a grave. The digger is abandoned beside them, the huge scraping tool quivering above. Danny shakes the hand of the site foreman. Beads of water hang like pearls from the edge of his hood. “We need to get this covered up,” he says. Water is accumulating in the bottom of the pit, a few inches already. It’ll be lapping the bone before long.
To Fletcher, he says, “It’s probably another fucking Julius Caesar.”
“Could be.” Fletcher shudders. It’s because of the weather, not the body. The cold has finally got to him. He can feel it in his bones. This isn’t the first time he and Danny have investigated the discovery of suspected human remains. Once it turned out to be a Roman burial, another time a plague pit. This body is definitely not going to be fresh. So far as Fletcher knows, it has been twenty years or thereabouts since the superstore was built and the land under the deepest layers of tarmac was last dug.
“Could be the missing link,” he says to Danny. It gets a laugh.
There’s nothing much more to do until somebody can get out here to examine the bones and date them. Deciding how much of the car park to cordon off is probably the extent of it. Fletcher feels a wave of heartburn: hot tongues of stomach acid defying gravity just when the rest of his body’s giving up that fight. He extracts a strip of antacid tablets from his trouser pocket. It’s not easy. The wind nearly takes them. He chews three as he and Danny watch the men in high visibility jackets fetch a tarpaulin. The tablets taste unpleasantly of chalk dust with an overtone of spearmint.
“Do you know what?” Danny says. He’s swiveling on his heel, looking around.
“What?” Fletcher replies.
The men struggle to spread the tarpaulin over the pit. Its edges flutter so violently it could have been caught on a line and dragged fresh from the sea, and before they can get it in place, a chunk of clay detaches stickily from the wall of the pit and falls.
“Wasn’t it here that we found the boys?”
“Hold on!” Fletcher shouts. “Stop!”
Where the clay has dropped away, it has cleanly exposed more bone. Fletcher can see the curve of a skull. Eye sockets gape and it looks as though the bone of the forehead has caved in, or been staved in. He can also see what looks like the end of a large metal spanner. He would bet fifty quid it was buried with the bones, and he thinks there might be some sort of material matted on it. It’s definitely not a Roman artifact.
“See that?”
He turns to catch Danny’s reaction,
but Danny’s puking a few feet away, bent double right behind the stand. The tips of long grasses obscure his head and tickle his ears. The heat intensifies the smell of his vomit.
“He’s still alive!” Fletcher shouts. He tries to drag the heavy roll of carpet, wanting to move it, but not wanting to hurt the boy any more than he already is.
“Help me! For fuck’s sake, Danny.”
Danny comes, stumbling, wiping his mouth, still retching, and together they get the carpet off the lad who still has some rise and fall in his chest. Fletcher is sweating buckets into his brand-new suit. His wife brushed nonexistent dust off the lapels before he left this morning and admired the expensive cut of it, but the suit doesn’t cross his mind as he kneels on the bloody dirt. Nothing does apart from this kid. It’s too late for the other one. His body’s motionless, without breath. His face is pulpy. That’s what set Danny off.
Yards away, the stand at the dog track is deserted. It’s Monday morning and there are only enough people in the stadium to fill a few tables at the bar terrace opposite. Three bookies
have turned out, though, and set up in the morning sunshine, their black bags already full of notes. A sign says the minimum wager is two quid.
While they wait for the ambulance, a tractor skirts the track twice, smoothing the sand. Fletcher cradles the lad’s head in his lap and carefully wipes his hair back from his forehead, avoiding the wounds. He takes one of the boy’s small, soft hands in his own and tells him over and over again that he’s all right now, that they’ve found him, that he’s going to be okay, that he needs to hang in there, that help is on its way and it won’t be long.
A leaning corrugated metal fence separates Fletcher and the boy from the back of the uncovered bleachers. The fence has gaps in it a slight man might be able to squeeze through. People have dumped rubbish here: building site rubble, bits of metal, furniture carcasses, cracked old tires with no tread, a mattress, and the carpet roll, all marooned in the corner of half an acre of unmade ground that otherwise resembles a moonscape. Here and there, Fletcher sees remnants of an old coating of asphalt: peeled-up pieces and sticky black clods oozing in the heat.
From the dog track a public address system plays a startlingly loud trumpet fanfare. Through a gap in the fence and the bleachers, Fletcher has a view of blue-coated handlers leading the dogs onto the track. Some of the men wear flat caps in spite of the heat, or maybe because of it. Fletcher wipes his brow. A gobbet of blood appears at the edge of the boy’s mouth and drips down the side of his cheek. Fletcher wipes it away.
“No you don’t,” he says. “No, no. Hang in there, son.”
There is such a struggle in the child’s eyes. He retches and more blood appears. Fletcher gently pulls the kid further onto his lap and wraps his arms across him, willing some of his own vitality into the child, yet trying not to squeeze him too tightly. The track PA announces the names of the dogs that are ready to race. The words boom into the intense blue sky above Fletcher, and when they fade, he hears the whine of ambulance sirens from the overpass. Finally. Five minutes left to place your bets, the voice on the PA warns. The boy’s eyelids flutter. Flying insects buzz and whine at an unbearable pitch.
“Come on, son!” Fletcher says. “Hang in there. Do it for me.”
Danny has run back to their car. He sits in the passenger seat, door open, one leg out, foot on the ground. He’s talking on the radio. His mouth is making the shapes of urgent words, but Fletcher can’t hear them. He squints. Behind Danny the ambulance is circling down the exit ramp, lights flashing.
“Ambulance is here!” Fletcher roars at Danny. “Meet them at the gate. Bring them over here!” He and the boy are screened by a drift of California poppies growing amongst the rubbish. They’re so fucking orange. A fly lands on the boy’s nose and Fletcher waves it away. The boy blinks, too slowly. He attempts to speak, but his throat catches and his eyes fill with tears. He tries again and this time he rasps something.
“What did you say?” Fletcher asks.
With lips as parched as the boiled air, the boy’s mouth forms a word, but a gargle from inside his throat distorts it.
“Ghost?” Fletcher asks. “Did you say ghost?”
From the track comes the sound of the gates crashing open and the dogs running. The commentary’s a drone. In response to Fletcher’s question there is only fear in the boy’s eyes. He dies seven seconds later, as the dogs fly past on the other side of the stand. The speed of them: silky coats flashing by and clumps of sand kicked up behind.
The paramedics are only halfway across the asphalt when the boy dies. Running. Too late. The air shimmers behind them. It takes them a few minutes to persuade Fletcher to let go of the boy so they can ascertain for certain that their services aren’t required.
Danny calls the coroner’s office while Fletcher pukes.
It’s Time to Tell
Episode 1—Three Deaths and an Article
“You are listening to It’s Time to Tell, a Dishlicker Podcast Production. This podcast contains material that might not be suitable for younger listeners. Your discretion is advised.
“Twenty years ago, two boys were brutally murdered, their bodies abandoned on wasteland. What happened to them remains a mystery to this day.
“Award-winning filmmaker Cody Swift, haunted by the murder of his two best friends, now returns to the Bristol estate he grew up on to find out if, for the people involved, it’s time to tell.”
My name is Cody Swift. I’m a filmmaker and your host of It’s Time to Tell, a Dishlicker Podcast Production.
Two months ago, on 7 February 2017, a man called Sidney Noyce died in prison. The coroner ruled that Noyce took his own life. He made use of his bedsheets to form a noose. He tied one end to a bedpost and asphyxiated himself with the other.
On the day of his death, Sidney Noyce had been incarcerated for just over twenty years since his conviction for the brutal murder of my two best friends—eleven-year-old Scott Ashby and ten-year-old Charlie Paige—back in 1996.
Not everybody believed Sidney Noyce was guilty. Here’s Owen Weston, a reporter who covered the original murder trial:
“Sidney Noyce was a bird in the hand for the police. Or a sitting duck. Take your pick. He had confessed to hurting the boys, but I for one questioned his guilt from the moment I saw him in court. Noyce had substandard intelligence. He didn’t seem to know what was going on. For me, that was the first red flag, but there were others.”
The police took a different view. This is Chief Constable David Tremain (who was a detective chief superintendent at the time) issuing a statement to the press on the day of Noyce’s sentencing:
“This has been one of the most deeply harrowing and disturbing cases myself and my colleagues have worked on in all our years of service. Sidney Noyce’s actions on the night of 18 August imposed a life sentence on the families of Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby, when he ended the boys’ lives in cold blood. It is my sincere hope that Noyce’s sentencing today will help the community to feel safeguarded and reassured going forward, though it can never bring the boys back and our thoughts remain with their families.”
When the judge in the trial sentenced Noyce to life imprisonment, he said the following:
“The crime you committed was brutal and pointless. I am in no doubt that your mental difficulties have held you back in life, but I believe you well understand the difference between right and wrong. On 18 August Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby were out playing on a beautiful summer evening. They may have been on their way home to their families when they encountered you. You subjected both boys to a brutal beating, an ordeal that must have terrified them. Scott Ashby died that evening, but Charlie Paige remained alive overnight. His suffering must have been dreadful. The word monstrous seems inadequate when describing what you did.”
Who to believe? Was Noyce a monster or did he have clean hands? During the twenty years Sidney Noyce spent in prison, he never stopped proclaiming his innocence. After Noyce died, Owen Weston published an article expressing his sadness and frustration and describing once again his long-held concerns about Noyce’s conviction.
I came across the article by chance. I opened the newspaper one Sunday morning and there it was, illustrated with head shots of Scott and Charlie. Seeing their faces after all these years was like getting a punch in the gut. Reading the article gave me a similar feeling because twenty years ago my family and I were not aware that there was any possibility that Noyce could have been innocent. We were delighted by his arrest and his conviction. On the estate where we lived, the predominant feeling amongst the other families was relief that he had been taken off the streets. Kids began to be allowed to come out and play again after months of being kept in by nervous parents.
The thought that Noyce could be innocent overturned everything for me. I wondered how my family and neighbors and friends from back in the day would feel about it. I wondered if they would even want to know. It kept me up at night. Having avoided any mention of the case for all these years, I began to look into it. I contacted Owen Weston
and spoke to other individuals involved in the original investigation, and a story emerged. It pulled me in.
As I got deeper into the research, I shared my findings with my girlfriend, Maya, a producer. “If you really can’t get this out of your system,” she said, “why don’t you do something with it?” She mentioned a true crime podcast she’d been listening to. “It would be the perfect format for a story like this,” she said. “And,” she added, “isn’t it possible that after all these years, if somebody who knew something about the murders that they didn’t want to share at the time, perhaps because they were afraid, or overlooked, or because they didn’t know it was useful, might they not feel that now could be the time to tell?”
So here we are. It’s Time to Tell is my personal investigation into the murders of my best friends and this is how the story began for me.
It was the summer holidays of 1996. August 18 was a Sunday. I spent the afternoon getting up to mischief with my friends Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby on and around the estate where we lived. Charlie, like me, was ten. Scott had just turned eleven. In the late afternoon, we were hanging around the estate’s play area. It was constructed from unwanted building materials that a local firm had donated and concreted into place. I remember a rusting climbing frame, a honeycomb arrangement of huge tires laid on their sides, and rough-edged concrete tubes in different sizes that you could crawl through if the urge took you. None of it would pass a modern health and safety inspection.
I had gone out earlier that day in a brand-new Atlanta Olympics T-shirt my uncle had sent me from the United States. It was my pride and joy. We didn’t have much money, so most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from cousins or neighbors’ kids, and a new item of clothing was something to show off. Mum told me that if I was going to wear it, I mustn’t play in the concrete tubes. But I rarely did what my mother told me to do, so I did play in the tubes—it was the best place to smoke the cigarette butts I used to nick from my dad’s ashtray. I remember how mesmerizing the smoke looked as it curled around the rough inside of the cylinder. By the time Mum called us in for tea at five, my T-shirt was ripped and filthy.
I Know You Know Page 1