I Know You Know

by Gilly MacMillan

  “Your dad answered, and he passed the phone to me. Annette asked had we seen Scott or Charlie at all. I said no, not for hours. I asked her why. She said they hadn’t come home yet. She said Jessy was supposed to be looking after the boys, taking them to the lido over at Portishead or something, but she wasn’t answering her phone and there was nobody at her flat. Annette thought you’d been with them, too, but I explained that I kept you in.”

  The Jessy whom my mum is referring to is Jessica Paige, Charlie’s mother. She married later in life and took her husband’s name, so she’s called Jessica Guttridge now, but for the purposes of the podcast we’re going to refer to her as Jessica Paige, to avoid confusion. You’ll hear more about her in Episode 3. Here’s Mum again:

  “Annette told me she convinced herself not to worry at first when they were late, because Jessy was a really bad timekeeper, but she was panicking by then. ‘It’s Sunday night,’ she kept saying. ‘Where could they be this late on Sunday night?’ My heart started going like the clappers when I realized it was over an hour since they were supposed to be home.”

  It had been Annette’s specific understanding that Scott would be back home before it got dark. Scott and Charlie had assured her they would be when they left her house at lunchtime. At that point, there had been a plan for Charlie’s mother to take them for a swim at the lido. I had known about it, too. Jessy’s boyfriend was supposed to be driving us, but the swimming plan went nowhere. To our disappointment it fell through in the early afternoon before I even mentioned it to my mum. It fell through because Jessy and her boyfriend realized they needed to be elsewhere. Nobody told Annette.

  On 18 August 1996, in Bristol, dusk was officially recorded as being at 9:01 P.M., so by the time she phoned Mum, Annette’s anxiety had been mounting for a while. Mum and Annette went out into the estate to look for the boys. Nobody they talked to had seen Scott or Charlie since around eight, when a neighbor said she’d spotted them walking down a path in the estate. The neighbor had assumed they were on their way home. She hadn’t spoken to them. That was the first clue Annette had that the lido plan had gone awry.

  Here’s Mum again:

  “When we realized they probably hadn’t gone to the lido we started to get really worried. We searched in all the places we could think of, and then we went back to Annette’s and phoned everybody we knew—and I mean everybody. We kept phoning Jessy’s flat, but no answer. Your dad went back round Jessy’s flat as well, didn’t you, Ted? He came with us the second time we went.”

  Another partial nod from my dad. He croaks something. I find it hard to understand him nowadays, but Mum can interpret.

  “Nobody was in. That’s right. We were getting proper worried because it was gone eleven by then, but as we got back outside, we saw a taxi pull up. Nobody said anything, but we was all thinking the same thing: this’ll be them and we’re going to feel like silly buggers for running around the place and waking everybody up looking for them. I was all ready to give Jessy Paige an earful for making us worry like that, but when she got out of the taxi, the awful thing was that she was alone. And I tell you, if my heart was going like the clappers before, it felt like it stopped at that moment. Annette gripped me so hard there was a bruise there the next day, and you had to support her, didn’t you, Ted? She collapsed.”

  I can imagine this scene. The estate at night could be a scary place. Nighttime was when you suddenly became aware of the empty properties and the great stretches of darkness between the towers. The brightest communal lights hung above the main entrance to each tower block, but even they didn’t cast much more than a halfhearted glow about the place, as if they were underpowered or exhausted. I can imagine my mum, my dad, and Annette Ashby standing under one of these, the tops of their heads and shoulders glowing, their shadows pooled underfoot. I can imagine them watching the taxi disgorge Jessy Paige in front of her building, the noise of the slamming car door echoing between the buildings and the sound of its tires as it accelerated away swiftly, the way taxis always did after dark.

  “Jessy didn’t see us at first. She was hardly able to stand upright. She vomited. She had sick on her face and hair. Annette ran over to her and went mad. She was shaking Jessy, shouting at her, even though Jessy was all floppy. Annette’s asking ‘Where are the boys? Where’s Scott and Charlie?’ The state of Jessy, though, she was so drunk or drugged we couldn’t tell which. It was awful. Do you remember, Ted? Once we got a few words out of Jessy, it turned out she hadn’t taken the boys anywhere. She thought they were with us or Annette. We called the police then, Annette did, and we pulled people from their beds to help search. By the time it got to midnight, the crowd had grown and loads of people on the estate was searching around the place, walking the paths, checking the stairwells, and calling for Scott and Charlie. It was so hot, everybody who was awake was asking out their windows ‘What’s going on?’ So we told them and word kept spreading. Lots of people came out to search, but there was no sign of Scott and Charlie. It was like they’d disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  I interrupt to ask a question. It has become quite dark in the house now, but none of us has bothered to turn on the lights. The dog is asleep on Mum’s lap. This is a question I have been nervous to ask. There is something I want to know because it has preyed on my mind over all the years since Charlie and Scott were murdered. I’m not nervous because I think Mum might be angry, but because it’s a question she has probably asked herself many times, too. It’s a what-if question, and they often come with regrets.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up and ask me where Charlie and Scott might have been?”

  Mum strokes the dog for a moment or two before responding. Then she sighs.

  “Love, I wish we had. I don’t know why we didn’t. I suppose we got caught up in the search, and all the panic. How I wish we had, though—I do wish that. Every time I think about it.”

  If they had asked me, at least one of my friends might have survived, because I would have told them to search by the track. It was one of the places we hung out, even though we weren’t supposed to. Instead, my parents left me sleeping and got a neighbor’s daughter to babysit while they went out searching.

  Mum picks up the story again.

  “We searched all night. It was about eleven the next morning when they found Scott and Charlie. All that searching, but nobody thought to go around the back of the dog track until then. Them two detectives found them. They tried to save Charlie, but Scott was already dead. That was when all hell broke loose.”

  She makes a minute adjustment to a coaster that’s on the polished table beside her. She turns on a reading lamp, and the bulb is reflected in the film of tears on each of her eyes. As I prepare to leave, Mum says she has a question for me.

  “Have you thought about what you’re doing, digging up the past? People might not like it. They might have learned to live with their feelings by now, but the feelings haven’t gone away. They never will. Be careful what you stir up.”

  I’ve thought a lot about this, about the pros and cons of revisiting something so painful after all these years. But the conclusion I came to is this: isn’t it better, always, to have answers? Mum and I are going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

  As I’m leaving, Mum hands me something.

  “It’s the last photograph I’ve got of the three of you together. Your dad took it the week before the murders. I never gave this to the press, even when they came banging on the door asking for photos and stories, offering money. It felt wrong. I wanted you to have it when you were ready, but I forgot about it over the years, until now.”

  The photograph shows me, Charlie, and Scott sitting on one of the concrete cylinders that I was forbidden to play inside. Behind us, you can see the back end of an ice cream van. We are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and each of us is holding a 99 Flake ice cream. Charlie is holding up his cone, pretending it’s the Olympic torch, and the chocolate flake is hanging out of the edge of his ear-
to-ear grin. It’s typical Charlie. He looks like a mob boss who just heard some good news.

  I find the photograph very moving. We were the best of friends. It reminds me in the strongest possible way why I should pack away any moments of doubt about pursuing this investigation because Charlie and Scott deserve the truth.

  The photograph reminds me of something else, too. It reminds me of the title of this episode. After the violence of my best friends’ murders, my home never felt the same again. Not the estate, not our community, not the families we knew, not the flat, not anything. The violence of the crime ripped everything apart. It was home, but not home.

  Thanks so much for listening to It’s Time to Tell. In the next episode, we’re going to meet two very important people, both of whom lost a son on the night of 18 August 1996. Here’s Annette Ashby, Scott’s mother, who’ll be talking more next week:

  “We let you boys run around the estate that summer and all the summers before it because life felt more innocent back then. We believed we knew our community and you boys were brought up to be streetwise. More fool us. The next time I saw Scott was at the morgue.”

  Chapter 4

  On the evening Erica is due back from her school English trip to London, Jess and Nick go to collect her. Nick has a new job lined up, but shooting doesn’t start for a few days. He and Jess have been trying to relax after the shock of the news about Cody Swift and his podcast. They have gone about their normal routines and tried to enjoy Nick’s downtime. They have been out to breakfast together and shopping. Jess has cooked something nice for them every night. The house feels empty without Erica.

  So far Cody Swift hasn’t tried to contact Jess. She and Nick have decided not to listen to the podcast and not to mention it to Erica. They’re hoping it’ll stay under her radar. Nick has looked the podcast up on iTunes and seen that it has fewer than fifty subscribers. It feels like less of a threat than it did at first, but since she became aware of it, Jess’s nights have involved bad dreams interspersed with violent awakenings in which she finds herself gasping for air, as if she were being throttled.

  When they arrive at the school to collect Erica, Jess and Nick join a group of parents waiting at the gates. Erica looks to be in fine form when she emerges from the coach. She drags her bag and assorted items she’s failed to fit into it. Once she’s navigated her way through the throng of kids, she drops everything and throws herself into Nick’s arms first. That’s my girl, Jess thinks, and her heart fills.

  Erica is a bundle of energy; she wears every emotion on her sleeve. She is Jess’s greatest achievement. She is also a daily reminder of the child Jess failed to keep alive, which means that on a bad day Jess feels unworthy of having her. Who, she thinks as she watches Nick and Erica embrace, deserves the daughter they always wanted when they couldn’t do enough to keep their son alive? The thought nags distractingly and the familiar taste of ashes fills her mouth, but she is practiced at keeping her composure and manages to hold the smile on her face.

  It’s Jess’s turn for a hug next. Erica smells strongly of a new perfume and Jess wonders how much shopping her daughter has managed to fit in between “cultural experiences” in London. Quite a lot, judging by the amount of stuff she has.

  “What the bloody hell have you got in here?” Nick asks when he picks it up. “How much spending money did you take?” Jess smiles. Nick was the one who pressed a wad of twenty-pound notes into Erica’s hand before she left.

  Nick and Jess wait in the car while Erica says goodbye to her brand-new boyfriend. They learnt about this relationship via a series of excitable text messages from Erica while she was away. They know the boyfriend is called Olly and he’s in the Upper Sixth, but not much else. Jess assesses him through the car window: tall and skinny, with floppy brown hair. Shades of a young Hugh Grant. Nick’s also watching him like a hawk, though Jess doesn’t think he has much to worry about. From the look of Olly, she doubts he’s got it in him to do a single thing that Erica doesn’t want him to. Her daughter is nothing if not strong-willed.

  Jess winds down the window as Erica approaches, dragging Olly by the hand.

  “Can we go straight to Pete’s Cantina?” Erica says.

  “Now?”

  “I’m so hungry.”

  “Don’t you want to go home and take a shower first? And change your clothes, maybe?”

  Erica’s wearing sweat pants and a hoodie. Her long blond hair looks as if she used it as a nest to sleep in on the coach. Jess would like Erica to give it a brush at least. Her daughter has other ideas: “I really want to go straight there. Then Olly can come, too. Please?”

  Jess and Nick exchange glances and she shrugs, because what Erica wants, Erica usually gets. It’s not the way Jess brought Charlie up, but that’s the point. It must be different with her daughter. Everything must be different.

  “The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned,” Nick says. “Jump in, both of you.”

  At Pete’s Cantina they are seated in a corner booth. Erica and Olly slide into the banquette and Jess and Nick take chairs opposite. The teenagers are full of giggles and sit pressed up against each other.

  “What did you like best in London, then?” Jess asks.

  “Literally everything!” Erica says.

  “Hamlet at the Barbican was a highlight,” Olly says. He’s got a surprisingly deep voice.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” The waitress rattles through the list of specials. She’s just audible above the pumping mariachi soundtrack. Erica and Olly order elaborate mocktails, Nick asks for a bottled beer, and Jess treats herself to a pink cocktail with a sugared rim. As Jess listens to the kids choosing their food, she notes how this whole experience seems as normal as tying a pair of shoelaces for them.

  Not that Jess really knows what “normal” is. She relies on Nick to tell her or show her, because nothing she experienced when she was growing up gave her a “normal” road map.

  The closest Jess ever got to eating out in a restaurant when she was a teenager was eggs, beans, chips, and a tea at a Little Chef restaurant in a service area just off the A361. She was on her way to a caravan park in Devon with her last-but-one foster family. It was 1986. She turned sixteen on that holiday, and she’d just found out she was pregnant.

  Jess remembers how her foster dad’s upper lip shone with grease as he ate his strips of bacon and how he moved his foot underneath the table until the tip of his shoe made contact with Jess’s skinny, razor-nicked calf.

  She already knew she was carrying his baby. She’d spent her holiday cash on a pregnancy test and done it in the loo while they waited for the food.

  She kicked her foster dad’s shin as hard as she could and watched him try to suppress his reaction to the pain in front of his family. He would be grateful to her very soon, Jess knew, because she would never admit he was the father of her child.

  She wanted to keep the baby for herself, because she had nobody else. Her mum was a drug addict who overdosed and died when Jess was four years old. Her dad disappeared before she was born. She never learned his name. There were no siblings. For as long as she could remember, Jess had lived with a gnawing sense of rejection and separateness.

  As she shoveled her food into her mouth that morning, her mind grew full with rich, unrealistic thoughts of the baby—how she and it would become a family of their own. Her heart swelled with hope. She could belong to the baby, and the baby could belong to her. It would, she felt sure, be a girl.

  “So, Mrs. Guttridge . . .”—Olly interrupts her thoughts—“Erica told me you used to have a role on Dart Street? Like, the girlfriend of a gangster or something? Regular cast?” he asks.

  Jess feels the smile freeze on her face. She hates talking about the past, even the good bits. She feels as if she’s already spent too much time thinking about it and they haven’t even got their main courses yet.

  Nick got her the role on Dart Street. He was working on the production in its earliest days. It was a
brand-new soap set on a street in Bristol, about the lives of the families who lived there. They were struggling to cast the role of Amber Rowe, a feisty newcomer to the street and the love interest for one of the main characters. Production had already rejected dozens of actresses when Nick suggested they take a look at Jess, and they auditioned her in spite of her lack of experience. She was a perfect fit: right look, right voice, and right attitude. She saw the opportunity for what it was—a once-in-a-lifetime chance—and threw herself into the role. It helped bring her back to life after Charlie’s death.

  “I might have done,” she says.

  “What was that like?”

  “Well, it was a job. I loved it, but the schedule was relentless. It’s why I quit after I had Erica, because I wanted to spend time with my baby.” Jess pats the back of Erica’s hand and gets a smile in return.

  Neither Nick nor Erica know this is a half-truth. Jess did want to spend time raising Erica herself, but she might have stayed on Dart Street for longer if the media hadn’t taken an interest in her past once the show became successful. She got the story quashed, but it frightened her into quitting.

  “See! That is why I would want to work in film!” Olly says. “Because otherwise it must be really difficult to develop as an actor.”

  Bloody hell, Jess thinks. The sense of entitlement and possibility some of these kids possess astounds her.