Mum fed me and Charlie and Scott jam sandwiches and squash. We were jostling one another in the doorway, getting our shoes on, desperate to head out to play again, when she noticed the rip in my T-shirt. I tried to cover up the damage and slip away, but she caught me by the arm, pulled me back into the flat, and made me take the shirt off. She grounded me as a punishment, and for the rest of that night I had to stay in our sweltering flat with her.
Charlie and Scott went out without me, into the evening where the tower blocks were throwing long, deep shadows across the estate and the sun was a sinking ember behind them. That was the last time I saw my friends, because they didn’t come home that night or ever after. A rip in my T-shirt saved my life.
The following morning Charlie and Scott were found brutally bludgeoned beside a pile of rubbish on a bit of unkempt land behind the dog track. Scott was already dead. Charlie survived overnight, and lived for a few minutes after the police arrived—long enough to say just one word—but he died before the ambulance reached them.
The loss of my friends and my guilt that I survived is a darkness I’ve lived with since that night. I’m not the only one. Digging up the past for my research into this case has not been easy for me, or for some of the people I’ve been speaking to.
But—and this is a big but—if the reporter Owen Weston is correct and Sidney Noyce didn’t kill my friends, then somebody needs to ask questions about that. And if Noyce didn’t commit the murders, somebody must know who did. Charlie and Scott’s killer went home bloody that night and had to live with what he or she had done in the days and weeks afterward. That kind of thing surely doesn’t go unnoticed. Maybe now, twenty years on, keeping a secret like that will have burnt enough of a hole in that person’s conscience that he or she will be ready to tell. Or perhaps circumstances have changed, and this person will feel able to speak up now without fear of reprisal. Loyalty is a slippery thing.
If that somebody is you and you are ready to talk, I am ready to listen, because those of us who were close to Charlie and Scott need to know what really happened. We need certainty and we need closure. It wasn’t just the lives of two families who were shattered by these murders, it wasn’t just their friends; it was an entire community, including Sidney Noyce and his family.
So if you’re out there and you know something, please—for the sake of all of us who are still remembering, and still struggling with the darkness—it’s time to tell.
Chapter 2
Jess stops off at the supermarket on her way home from yoga. She heads directly to the bakery aisle and takes a few moments to select candles for Nick’s birthday cake. She opts for one fat one instead of forty-six spindly ones. The packaging promises it will burn and sparkle like a firework. Nick will love it. Beneath his serious, hardworking front beats the heart of a big kid. Not many people know that, but it’s one of the things Jess loves most about her husband. She believes Nick is a good man through and through.
Decision made, she cruises down the wine aisle and grabs a bottle of bubbly. She splurges on a brand Nick likes. At the end of the aisle, she spends a couple of minutes looking at magazines. Jess is a student of lifestyle. She selects her two favorite titles—one fashion, the other interiors—and puts both in her trolley. She will spend hours poring over them later. She and Nick don’t have lots of money, but there’s enough to make them and their home look nice if she budgets carefully.
Jess checks her watch and hums as she makes her way toward the checkout: plenty of time to get home and get everything ready for Nick’s return. She feels relaxed. It’s a good day.
She notices the newspaper headline when she’s waiting in line to pay. She snatches the local rag from the shelf above the conveyor belt and tries to read it, but she doesn’t have her reading glasses with her and the small print is a blur. The headline is not. It’s crystal clear.
LOCAL BOY CODY SWIFT RETURNS TO BRISTOL TO INVESTIGATE DOUBLE MURDER OF BEST FRIENDS
Head shots of the victims are printed below, side by side. They appear slightly out of focus to Jess, just as the small print does, but she doesn’t need her glasses to recall every detail of these faces as if she last saw them yesterday, because the boys in the photographs are her son, Charlie, and his best friend, Scott. They are the same pictures that were plastered across the front pages of the local and national papers in the weeks after their murders and during the trial, twenty years ago. They are bland school photographs and the boys have the flattened, startled expressions of the flash-lit. Both wear red school sweat shirts, and somebody, the school nurse perhaps, must have brushed their hair roughly and forced it into an unfamiliar parting seconds before the pictures were taken.
This is it, Jess thinks: game over. Over the past twenty years, she has learned to organize the different stages of her life into distinct strata: the lonely childhood full of foster families she can barely remember; then what she thinks of as the dirty years before and after Charlie was born; after that, the desolate ones following his murder, a time that brimmed with anger and self-destruction until she met endlessly kind and patient Nick, who coaxed her onto a path toward sanity; and now. Now is good and wholesome. It has been like this ever since she learned to trust Nick, and it has only got better since Erica was born. It has been so good, in fact, that it might be perfect if it hadn’t been for Jess’s guilt about what happened all those years ago.
Jess’s hands begin to shake and the paper trembles. Cody Swift has lit a stick of dynamite that could blow everything in her life to smithereens. She knows already that his podcast could be a new and dark dawn in her life.
She ignores the man behind her who is nudging her trolley with his and asking if it belongs to her. She leaves the things she has carefully selected in the bottom of it and hands just the newspaper to the cashier. The cashier talks to Jess, but Jess doesn’t reply. She grabs the paper and her change and hurries back to her car.
When she gets home, Jess goes straight to the computer in the office she shares with Nick, scooping up her glasses on the way. She studies the newspaper article in detail and discovers there’s not much more information to be found online, only a short CV for Cody—it’s impressive, who knew he’d do that well for himself?—and a brief recap of the case. Of course, there’s not a single detail Jess is not already aware of. Her stomach plunges as she reads.
Jess gets up and crosses the hallway to her daughter’s room. Erica’s belongings are scattered on the floor, her bed is a rumpled mess, and there’s not an inch of surface space to be seen on her desk or dressing table. Her bulletin board is a lovingly curated montage of every good time Erica has ever had. Jess sits on Erica’s bed and picks up a pillow. She holds it tightly to her chest and the pressure releases the sweet smell of her daughter. Sunshine peeks through the shutter slats, casting lines of shadow across the room. Erica is my everything, she thinks. She and Nick are my whole world.
Jess doesn’t want Nick to find out about the podcast because he’ll go mad. He considers himself her protector. He knows about Charlie, because he has known Jess almost forever.
Nick and Jess met in the darkest times after Charlie’s murder. He literally picked her up off the street one night, about a year after Charlie’s death. She had fallen off a curb, dead drunk. She had a black eye and a broken wrist. Nick didn’t care. He said he saw something in her, even in that moment, and he took her to the hospital and stayed with her that night and afterward, fighting tooth and nail first to persuade her to trust him enough to let him be part of her life. If it hadn’t been for Nick, she doesn’t know where she would be now. Dead probably. Maybe. Either by her own hand or somebody else’s. She had sunk that low.
There is not just Nick to consider, but Erica, too. She doesn’t know about Charlie. Back in the late 1990s when the murders happened, the internet was too new to be a widely used news source. When the media lashed out at Jess at the time of the murders, and again later, when she was in the public eye, they did it in print. News one day, fish-an
d-chip paper the next. Jess has relied on this to hide her past from her daughter.
Years ago Jess flirted with telling Erica the truth, but when is a good time to tell your beloved daughter that her half brother was murdered and that you were accused of negligence in the aftermath? Never. So Jess has kept her past packed away and clung to Nick’s mantra, which is that loving and raising Erica to a gold standard represents the chance for Jess to put things behind her and create something good.
Jess forces herself to stop remembering. The guilt her memories induce takes many forms, but it is consistently powerful enough to make her feel as if she has a mouthful of ashes. It can cause her to retch. It is complicated and exhausting. She glances at the clock on Erica’s bedside table. Pull yourself together, she thinks. She has two hours until Nick gets home. He’s been working away for a few weeks. His favorite stew has been simmering in the oven since this morning. They’ll have to do without the bottle of fizz she abandoned in the supermarket trolley. Never mind. She’s got some red wine they can share instead.
She takes herself downstairs and lays the table. She concentrates on the task to block Cody Swift and the article out of her mind. She has learned over the years how to anesthetize her emotions with practical activity, especially with creating a home. She gets out the good silverware, linen napkins, napkin holders, best candlesticks, and wine bottle holder. There is a vase of fresh flowers on the mantelpiece. She arranged them this morning. She loves flowers. Except for poppies. Never poppies. Not even red or white ones. In the days after Charlie’s murder, she visited the spot where his body was found. She saw the bank of orange poppies that marked the spot where he died and knew the brightness and vigor of their wafer-thin petals would haunt her forever.
In the kitchen, she takes a chocolate mousse cake out of the fridge and decants it from the box it came in onto a glass plate with a gold rim. She remembers she also left the spectacular candle in the trolley at the supermarket and feels disappointed. Luckily, the pâtisserie she ordered the cake from has done some lovely writing on the top. It reads Happy birthday, Nick, with all sorts of curlicues and fancy italics. It’ll have to do.
She puts the cake back in the fridge and thinks it’s a shame Erica isn’t able to be with them on Nick’s birthday, but the plan is to celebrate again on the night she returns from her school trip. They’ll have a special meal out. Even though it’s Nick’s birthday celebration, he let Erica choose the restaurant, so it’s going to be nachos and mocktails all the way—the more straws, umbrellas, and colors in the drinks, the better.
Upstairs, Jess dithers over her outfit. She wants to look right. Like her guilt, this impulse to please has traveled with her for the past twenty years. She lays out a simple, pretty shift dress and a pair of silver ballet flats. She showers and expertly puts together her hair and makeup at her dressing table. A fresh look is what she’s after.
Brand-new underwear goes on: matching and silky. If Erica’s not home, Nick sometimes wants to get cozy almost as soon as he’s stepped in the door. Jess doesn’t mind because it probably means he’s kept it in his pants while he’s been on set; she understands the temptations of that world better than most. She also doesn’t mind because she has missed him sorely while he’s been away. In Jess’s world, you can be both a pragmatist and a romantic.
She jumps when she hears the double hoot of Nick’s car horn. He’s early. Her shoes clatter as she trots down the stairs. She opens the front door and stands framed in the doorway, offering him a side view of the slender curves she works hard to maintain. She places one foot in front of the other and hikes her chin up. “Hello, darling,” she says.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes.” He always says that; bless him.
He gets his duffel off the back seat of the car. He looks tired. He’s been away all week: fourteen-hour days minimum. It’s the way it is on set. He’s a first assistant director. They work like beasts. He hugs her and plants a kiss on her lips, but no wandering hands this time.
“I filled up on the M32,” he says. It’s a petrol station that’s only a couple of miles away, and she thinks, Oh, crap, because she suspects she knows where this is going.
“Have you seen this?” He gets the local newspaper off the passenger seat and holds it up to show her the article about Cody, the podcast, and the murders.
“I’m not going to talk to Cody Swift. He’s not getting a single word out of me.” She says it tough as old leather, like she would if she was playing a mob wife, and Nick nods, but a sob escapes her. “Charlie,” she says. Spoken aloud, there’s no other word that can make her feel as raw as this one. She loses herself in Nick’s chest and arms. She feels heat, a heartbeat, and takes comfort from the firm pressure of his embrace.
Later, she pulls herself together and he tells her more than once how much he loves his birthday meal. She holds his hand across the table and keeps her real feelings behind her smile as she proposes a toast: “Happy birthday, darling. Here’s to being another year younger!”
Chapter 3
The sign on the door says WET LAB.
Fletcher didn’t have to come here in person, but he likes to see things for himself. Back in the day, it was a tactic that helped fast-track him up the ranks.
Dr. Mary Hayward, senior forensic pathologist, is waiting for Fletcher in the lab. Her red hair is on the turn to gray, but her clear green eyes pack a punch that Fletcher feels somewhere in his stomach, just like he did the first day he met her. She wears pearl earrings and red lipstick, and her eyes are rimmed lightly in black. She appears to have grown even more groomed, glossy, and successful over the years, while Fletcher feels as if he has been incrementally fraying at the seams.
“Mary,” he says.
“John.” They shake hands and her cheeks dimple as she smiles.
“Amazingly, we’ve got a full set of bones,” she says. “Shall we?”
She pulls on a pair of plastic gloves and they move to a table where the bones found in the car park have been laid out on a thin foam sheet. The bones have been cleaned and reassembled into a two-dimensional skeleton. At the head of the table the skull rests upright, supported by a white ring that reminds Fletcher of a vicar’s dog collar. Mary picks the skull up carefully. Fletcher’s always liked that about her: the way she has respect for the dead.
“There’s obvious trauma to the skull,” she says.
This confirms what Fletcher thought he noticed in the car park. She swivels the skull so he can get a close view. The front looks to have been caved in with a single deep blow. The bone surrounding the fissure is riddled with hairline cracks as if it were no more robust than wall plaster.
“Somebody took a good swing at him,” Fletcher says.
“It’s consistent with a blow from the spanner that was found with him.”
“Anything else?” To Fletcher, most of the bones on the table look like old brown sticks, but he knows Mary will have found clues to the identity and lifestyle of this person in every piece.
She talks him through it. “He’s male. Approximately forty to fifty years old at time of death and approximately six feet tall. Large frame. Caucasian. Historical fracture to his tibia and collarbone, probably sustained in childhood.”
“Do you know when he died?”
“We’re working on it.”
“It’ll be before 1997,” Fletcher says. “The car park he was found under was dug up and relaid then.”
“So I gather. We also have some scraps of clothing and footwear remnants. They’ll help.”
“At a guess?”
“You know I don’t guess.”
He nods. He knows. Mary places the skull back onto its foam ring. “There is one thing you might like,” she says. She hands him a small object in an evidence bag. Fletcher holds it up to the window. The object glints dully through the plastic.
“A signet ring,” he says. “What’s engraved on it?”
“Initials,” she says. “And a four-leaf clover.”
&n
bsp; “A four-leaf clover?”
“Looks like it.”
They both allow themselves to smirk. They share a love of gallows humor.
“Not so lucky, then,” Fletcher says. One of them had to.
“The initials are PD,” Mary says. “Obviously, we’ll run his DNA, but they might help you get you an ID sooner.”
Fletcher feels hopeful. He’ll input details of the ring into the missing persons database when he gets back to the office and see if it throws up a link to anybody.
Mary strips off her gloves and bins them. “I heard about Jane,” Mary says. “I’m sorry.”
The comment takes Fletcher by surprise because he likes to keep his private life private, and it pains him to think that the recent breakdown of his marriage might have become the subject of gossip. He manages a response. “Happens to the best of us.”
His reply acknowledges that he knows Mary’s marriage has also ended. Fletcher could say more, and knows he probably should, but he’s reached his limit on personal talk, so he changes the subject.
“Do you remember the boys who were murdered by the dog track?”
Mary nods. “Difficult to forget that one.”
“We found this guy a hop and a skip from there.”
She raises an eyebrow. They both know better than to read anything into the coincidence, yet also realize that it should be kept in mind.
“And weirdly, something else happened related to that case . . .”
Lately, Fletcher has developed a habit of giving up on what he’s saying in the middle of a sentence. It’s usually because something has occurred to him. Mary prompts him. “Enlighten me.”
“I had a phone call at the end of last week from a man who said he was called Cody Swift.”
The name is a challenge to her powers of recollection, but Fletcher knows Mary has a superb memory for detail, and sure enough, it takes her only a moment to place the name.
I Know You Know Page 2