“Any priorities?” Rawlins asks.
“Where she was on Sunday evening, and who she was with.”
Jessica calls out something that neither Fletcher nor Rawlins can make out.
“What was that, love?” Rawlins asks. She and Fletcher move to the doorway. Jessica looks up at them from the sofa, shadows carving holes out of her face.
“Where I was,” she says. She must have overheard them.
“Where were you, darling?” Rawlins asks.
“Paradise. I remember now.” Jessica laughs. It sounds artificial and loud, and Fletcher’s heart sinks. She’s playing games with them. Maybe she’s still high or drunk. The look on Rawlins’s face tells him she’s come to the same conclusion. “There’s no point in both of us hanging around,” she says. “Let me get on with it. I’ll page you if I learn anything useful.”
Fletcher takes his leave. On the way down in the elevator, he realizes Jessica might have been more helpful than she seemed.
Paradise, he remembers, is the name of a casino.
Chapter 8
Jessica is fostering the rescue cat for the time being. She felt sorry for it at the shelter because it looked depressed in its cage. Its fur is cotton wool soft and it is generally a sweet old thing, though Jess has learned to beware when it rolls onto its back. If she tries to stroke its tummy, it strikes lightning fast with claws and teeth.
Two days have passed since Cody Swift ambushed Jess in the car park and she is still rattled, though not rattled enough to contact Felix yet. She has been working hard to push that impulse back into the cage it should never have escaped from.
She was too upset after the incident with Cody to hide what had happened from Nick. After she told him about it, she watched a red flush spread swiftly across his neck and cheeks.
“I’m going to call him again,” Nick said, “and tell him—”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “Honestly, don’t.”
“I’ll find out where he lives and tell him face-to-face.”
“Don’t lower yourself. He’s not worth it. I told him to get lost. He got the message.” She was already regretting letting slip what had happened. She learned years ago how to keep things a secret and to deal with them herself, but her instincts have got soft since she married Nick.
“I want to protect you from this,” Nick said.
I don’t want you to have to, Jess thought. She adores him when he says this kind of thing, but finds it uncomfortable, too, because whatever Nick says or does to prove how much he loves her, she will always believe she is damaged goods and not worth the ground he walks on.
“Darling, I’m fine,” she said. “Please, don’t get worked up. I told Cody he would have to answer to you if he comes near me again. He understood. He understands.”
She leaned in toward Nick. He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head and they stayed that way, still as statues, while Jess let her demons rage secretly inside her.
She kept her emotions carefully in check for Nick’s last two days of leave, praying that Cody would not try to contact them again. She put on her best wife-and-mother game face and went out of her way to make everything as nice as possible for Nick and for Erica. This is something she’s discovered she’s good at: buffing her small family’s domestic experience until it shines.
Now she waves Nick goodbye as a cab takes him to the station. He’s on his way to London for days of preproduction meetings. Erica is out with Olly. As soon as Nick has gone, Jess shuts the front door behind her and bolts it. She lowers the slats on the shutters covering the front windows. The house darkens inside, but she doesn’t care. She stands in the gloom and takes deep breaths. With Nick gone, it is almost a relief to allow herself to taste and feel her fear. Keeping it bottled up has taken a toll on her. She is exhausted, but she feels she has time and space to think now, and her first thought is that if Cody Swift is planning on coming to her house, she’s not going to make it easy for him to snoop. She nips out to the bins by the back door and pulls out the two bags of rubbish that are in there. She puts them in the garage and double-checks that the up and over door is locked. She knows better than to leave anything around that a stranger can get their hands on. After the murders and during the trial Jess was stalked by reporters for weeks.
When Erica gets home she probably won’t notice the extra security measures—she lives too much in her own sweet sixteen bubble—but if she asks about the gloom, Jess will say she has a migraine. Or should I tell her what’s happening? Jess thinks. Should I? Would Erica be safer? She checks herself as soon as she’s had the thought. Erica is not in any real danger, she tells herself. Not yet. Not nearly. Not if I can help it.
In Jess’s wary mind, that train of thought leads inevitably to another. She can’t help thinking how she herself was used and abused by men as a teenager and later, until she met Nick. That at least is a danger her and Nick’s careful parenting has spared Erica from. That safety is something her daughter has that Jess never did.
The thought stirs pride but also a familiar swell of anger in her. She battled her anger so hard after Charlie’s death: anger that he had been murdered, anger at what she had been through herself, anger at what people said about her, anger at herself for not being a better mother. Being safe with Nick let the anger rise. He encouraged her to feel it. “You need to,” he said, “or it’ll eat you up from the inside.” How she raged.
Now that she feels less vulnerable in the house, she goes upstairs to her office and sits in front of the computer. She will resist looking up the podcast, she tells herself. She fears it. Instead, she types two words into the search engine: Felix Abernathy. She clicks on the link to his website. When it loads she flinches. Felix Abernathy Public Relations scrolls across a black screen, and then she is face-to-face with an almost life-size head shot of Felix himself.
A photograph can’t hurt me, she has to tell herself, though her heart has begun to pound and goose bumps are rising on her arms. She can hear her own breathing. Calm down, she thinks. The cat has begun to move in silky figures of eight between her feet; she reaches down and scoops him up onto her lap. She clicks further into the website. “Face your fears,” Felix told her once, with a crooked smile that was part encouragement, part threat. She can hear his voice as she sits in her study today, even though he spoke those words to her more than twenty years ago. She shudders as she remembers how his fingertips were poised on the handle of a hotel room door when he said it, and how his other hand was in the small of her back, exerting pressure, ushering her into a room where a man was waiting. She has to shake her head to rid herself of the memory. The cat gazes up at her levelly as she does. “Waifs and strays, the pair of us,” Jess tells it.
She takes a deep breath and explores the website further, but it contains minimal personal information about Felix. She didn’t really expect to find any, but she can’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment because while this is stressful, she can’t deny she’s also curious about what Felix is like now, perhaps morbidly so. Just the thought of him creates a pull in her gut even after all these years. She hates that it does. It feels like a dirty part of her, but it also keeps her finger on the mouse and her eyes on the screen as she clicks through each page on the website and examines every photograph of him.
In most of the pictures Felix has his arm slung around a client. The majority of his clients are instantly recognizable to Jess as celebrities. There will be others, Jess thinks, who are not keen to be on display and for whom Felix’s discretion will be his greatest asset. He has always done favors for people who need those favors to remain a secret. It was how he rose so high and so fast, back in the day. He became very useful to some very influential people in Bristol. He facilitated their illegal habits and made sure those habits were kept out of the public eye and beyond the law.
The clients in the pictures are a type Jess also recognizes, because she was like that once. In the main, they are young women or reality TV stars
. They are the most hungry and vulnerable, Jess thinks, the ones who’ll use and abuse their bodies in every way imaginable, just to get their picture in the paper. They want fame and take any route to get it. Just like Jess did. How ironic that it was Nick who finally got her work in the industry, after all the promises Felix made.
She strokes the cat as her eyes rove over the images on-screen. Its purr sounds like an idling engine. There’s no denying Felix has aged well. He looks good. Well groomed and well dressed in a way that only money can buy. He has a bright white smile and there’s no sign of the gap between his front teeth she used to find attractive. “Your dream came true, then,” she says aloud. She’s not sure what it is, maybe the sight of all those desperate young women hooked on Felix’s arm or the contrast between Felix’s lifestyle and her own quiet domestic life, but suddenly she’s had enough of snooping on him. She clicks the small red circle on the top corner of her browsing window and Felix disappears. She rests her eyes on the computer wallpaper: a professional photograph of herself with Nick and Erica. This is what she should be concentrating on. She stands up abruptly and the cat falls to the carpet, hissing its disapproval. “Tough luck,” she says to it. “We can’t always get what we want.”
She will go for a run, she thinks. It will help her get rid of the tension she’s been carrying around for days. She’ll push herself and go for one of her longer routes. Ten minutes later she’s changed and stepping out, earbuds in, house key zipped safely into a pocket, determination to maintain control of her life launching her run at a challenging pace.
The woman opens the door of her car as Jess is about to jog past. She’s only a few yards from her driveway and getting into her stride. The door takes up most of the pavement and forces Jess to stop abruptly. “I’m so sorry,” the woman says, and Jess grimaces, jogging on the spot and waiting for her to shut the door when the woman asks, “Are you Jessica Paige?”
Jess isn’t sure she’s heard correctly at first. Her music’s on quite loudly. She turns. She’ll run around the car if this stupid cow won’t shut her door like a normal person, but the woman repeats, loudly enough that Jess hears it crystal clear this time, “Jessica Paige?”
Jess’s heart skips a beat. She stops.
“I’m from the Bristol Echo. Have you got a minute?”
The small smile curling the edge of the woman’s lip has a callous shape that Jess dislikes. This has got to be about the podcast. Jess pretends she didn’t hear. She flashes the woman her best bland smile and runs as fast as she can, cutting down random roads and into narrow alleyways. She doesn’t stop until she reaches her local park, and by the time she gets there, she’s so out of breath she sinks onto a bench.
“Fuck!” she says. There’s nobody close enough to hear her. At first she can do nothing more than wait for her breathing to slow and the pounding of her heart to subside. As they do, she becomes aware of the ache in her legs. She doesn’t normally sprint that hard.
She tries to get her thoughts together. She needs to figure out how to get home without running into that woman again. She needs to know whether this was simply a random journalist trying it on in response to the podcast because there’s no other news today, or if there’s a bigger problem. She tries not to think about Felix. He must be a last resort. Two days, she thinks, for two days it felt as if there was a chance things could go back to normal again, and now this.
She turns off her music so she can try to think straight, but the noises of the park intrude immediately: dogs barking, the squeak of another runner’s shoes, and worst of all, children’s voices from somewhere nearby. It’s a reel of playtime sound effects: shrieks, yells, the scuffs and shoe slaps of running and dodging, and laughter. It triggers a physical reaction in Jess. Her breathing quickens as if she’s still running, and her chest tightens. She knows what’s happening because it has happened before, though not for a very long time. It’s a panic attack. Her vision blurs and she screws her eyes shut. She wraps her arms around her stomach and leans forward. It’s as if the whole of her life is concentrated in this one moment and she can never move beyond it; it feels both painful and hollow. She moans. It’s a feral sound, long and low and empty of hope. It expresses only a fraction of the guilt Jess has felt for the past twenty years. She’ll never stop blaming herself for Charlie’s death. Never.
Sometimes she wins the fight against the guilt—as the years have gone by, she’s won more often than not, though even if she does, it still feels close—but sometimes she loses, badly. There have been weeks on end when she has felt as if the simplest things—getting dressed, taking a shower, making a cup of tea—require Herculean amounts of effort. During those weeks, she feels disengaged from Nick and from Erica. When she is at her lowest, all she knows for certain is that she’s no better than a dirty, filthy thing, an unfit mother, a whore. She fully inhabits the names that people called her all those years ago, and she does not attempt to check the self-hatred she feels because she believes it is what she deserves.
In the park, when the first wave of panic begins to subside, she opens her eyes and sees a pair of neon trainers. Somebody is standing in front of her and speaking to her.
“Are you all right? Excuse me, are you okay?”
It’s a young man. He has a hand stretched out toward her as if he wants to touch her, but knows that’s not okay. She has a sudden urge to lash out and say something vicious to him, but she doesn’t. She has spent twenty years training herself out of the aggression she sometimes had to use to protect or defend herself and Charlie on the estate.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very sure. Sorry. Thank you.”
Jess gets up to demonstrate that she’s fine, and he says, “Okay,” though he doesn’t look sure until she fixes on a smile and attempts a stretch. As soon as he’s gone, she sits back down and stays there for a long time before she makes her way home at a careful jog. On the way, she thinks, If that woman is still outside my house, I’ll call Felix; if she’s not, I won’t. It feels decisive. It gives her the illusion of control. It allows her to put one foot in front of the other.
It’s Time to Tell
Episode 4—The Detectives
“This case turned around and bit me on the ass. Fatally. Even if you’ve dedicated your life to justice and to the law, you can’t survive something like that. I was set up.”
My name is Cody Swift. I’m a filmmaker and your host of It’s Time to Tell, a Dishlicker Podcast Production. Those are the words of ex–Detective Superintendent Howard Smail, the man in charge of the investigation into Charlie’s and Scott’s murders. I didn’t meet him personally twenty years ago, but his name was on everybody’s lips. Here’s what his deputy on the case, John Fletcher, had to say about him:
“I looked up to Howard Smail. I wanted to learn from him and I was eager to work with him, but he behaved unacceptably and he paid the price for that when he lost his job. It was hugely disappointing, not just for me as his deputy, but for the team and for the families of Scott and Charlie. Thank God we were able to solve the case regardless. You say Howard Smail is living abroad now? I wonder if he remembers us. There are a lot of people here in Bristol waiting for an apology for what he did.”
I was familiar with the police from a young age. It was not unusual to see a squad car pull into one of the Glenfrome Estate car parks, though unusual enough to attract interest. My mother would twitch back a curtain to better see where the officers might be headed. My dad would glance, then shrug and get on with what he was doing. In other households, the occupants might step carefully back from the window and think about alternative exit routes from the building. Depending on what they had done, neighbors might help cover their tracks. There was a code of silence on the estate: you protected your own. That code shattered if the crime involved children, though. People who hurt children were considered no better than scum.
So when Detective Inspector John Fletcher and D
etective Constable Danny Fryer came to call on our family after Charlie and Scott’s bodies were found, they weren’t the first police officers I’d seen or spoken to, but they were the first detectives. The title had a sort of glamour to it. Perhaps that’s why their visit is the only thing I can remember from that time.
Detective Fryer wore a business suit with creases in the trousers. He had brown eyes and a silky handkerchief in the pocket of his jacket. He looked sharp, but he was kind. I suppose Detective Fletcher was wearing a suit and tie, too, but I can’t recall. All I remember about him is that he stood in the doorway of our living room and watched us. I felt as if I was on display, as if he could see right through me.
Fletcher and Fryer worked the investigation, but it was led, as I’ve mentioned, by Detective Superintendent Howard Smail. He was the senior investigating officer on the case, and his was the voice you heard at the start of this episode. Smail worked on the case for just one week before being forced to step down. Since then he has been a recluse. He won’t give interviews. Any reporters who have managed to track him down have had doors slammed in their faces and threats of legal action against them.
I contacted one of those journalists. This is what she had to say in an email:
“I can give you an address for Smail, but I have two bits of advice. One: Pack your thermals. Two: He does not speak to anybody, even if you offer very good money. Don’t think there’s anything different about you.”
I thought there was something different about me, though. Who else was as intimately connected to the case as I was? Which explains how Maya and I find ourselves in a hired car driving along a coastal highway that links an archipelago of islands off the coast of northern Norway. We have taken two flights to get here so far, and set out on a long highway, which stretches over a hundred miles. At the end of it we hope to meet and interview ex–Detective Superintendent Howard Smail.
I Know You Know Page 9