Valerie is upset. I reach out to her to try to offer some comfort; she takes my hand between both of hers and squeezes my fingers. Her fingers are bony and cold and her face is a mirror of the grieving Virgin Mary in the painting above the altar.
“Cody, you must think hard about what you are doing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think any good will come from this. You should walk away and get on with your life before it gets snatched away from you. Seize life while you can, dear.”
“Don’t you want justice for Sid?”
“I want peace for Sid.”
“What if he was innocent?”
“He was innocent. I know that. I’ve always known it. I don’t need the world to know it anymore. I used to want them to. I used to feel so much rage about it I thought it would eat me from the inside out, but what good would it do now that he’s dead?”
“It could restore his reputation? It could give you closure?”
“I’m his mother. I know he didn’t do it. Sidney didn’t have a vengeful bone in his body. What you boys did upset him, but he never said he wanted to get you back for it. Never. That’s how I know he’s innocent and God knows it, too. That’s good enough for me. I’ll never have him back now, so the best I can hope for is to live my life in peace. It passes in a flash, Cody—you’ll understand that one day. So don’t be chasing dragons when you could be building foundations for a good life. Some people never have that opportunity.”
I tread carefully as I take my leave, anxious to avoid stepping on the worn plaques set into the chapel floor, marking graves. I pause at the chapel door and turn back to face the altar. I watch as Valerie begins to move a mop across the flagstones in smooth, circular motions. When her back is to me, I dip my knee and make the sign of the cross, a memory of how to do so rescued from a decades-long dormancy with surprising ease. Outside, the wind is sharp and strong, shifting mountains of cloud above me and bending the branches on the trees. I shudder and feel foolish for genuflecting to a god I haven’t believed in since I was a child, but I also reflect on why I did it. Any port, as they say, in a storm. Even for the unbeliever.
My interview with Valerie Noyce certainly unnerved me, but not for the reasons I thought it would. I had expected bitterness and rancor, accusations and recriminations, but found a raw yet gentle honesty in its place. Our discussion subverted many assumptions I had held about her. It reminded me to take nothing for granted. But it did not discourage me from continuing with this podcast. Why? Because Valerie Noyce might not want justice for her son, but I do.
I would like to deliver justice, through this podcast, to Sidney Noyce.
Why?
It’s time I told.
I knew Sidney Noyce when I was ten years old. I didn’t like him and we’ve established that my friends and I treated him badly. But—and this is a big but—I never really believed Sid was the person who murdered Charlie and Scott, because, as others have said, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body. He never once lifted a finger against any of us, no matter what we did to him. Did I tell anybody at the time? No. Would they have listened if I had? Probably not. I was ten years old. I was not a nice kid. I was a liar.
But I believed Noyce was innocent then, and I still do, twenty years later. It’s why Owen Weston’s article asserting Noyce’s innocence resonated with me so much.
Detective Inspector John Fletcher disagrees. This is a clip from a phone conversation we had:
“Sid Noyce may have gone out with the intention of buying ketchup, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get a different idea along the way. The prosecution alleged that he walked around the block because he was searching for the boys to take revenge on them, and the jury chose to believe that. People can snap. Even the gentlest, sweetest people can snap if you put them under enough pressure. I’ve seen it many times during my career.”
Fletcher’s feelings about Noyce are crystal clear, and like mine, they have remained the same for the past two decades.
However, if you were listening carefully to that clip, you’ll have heard John Fletcher say something important. Detective Inspector Fletcher says, referring to Sidney Noyce: “He walked around the block because he was searching for the boys to take revenge on them.” But let me put this into context for you. This clip comes from the end of a phone conversation I had with Detective Fletcher. What you’re about to hear is a recording of our whole conversation on this subject. It puts what you heard Fletcher say in the last clip into context. It is my voice you’ll hear first:
“Can you tell us about the sighting of Noyce on Primrose Lane on the night the boys disappeared?”
“Detective Constable Fryer let us know that he’d interviewed a woman called Sonya Matthews as part of our door-to-door inquiries. She lived in Meadowsweet Tower in a flat overlooking Primrose Lane.”
“You have good recall of her name.”
“You don’t forget the details of a case like this. Sonya Matthews told DC Fryer that she saw Noyce walking up and down Primrose Lane after 20:15, calling out the boys’ names.”
“Excuse me, did you say up and down?”
“No. I said up.”
“So the witness saw Sidney Noyce walk up Primrose Lane once?”
“That is correct.”
“And when she saw him on that occasion, he was walking in the direction of the supermarket, in the path of the boys?”
“Yes.”
“And then she saw him walking back the other way?”
“No. That is incorrect.”
“So, just to be clear, when she saw him the second time, he was walking the same way as the first time she saw him?”
“Correct.”
“She didn’t see him backtracking between those two sightings?”
“She did not.”
“So how did he come to be walking the same way down the same alleyway at eight-fifteen P.M. and then again twenty minutes later?”
“We came to the conclusion he had walked around the block.”
“You’re saying he walked in a circle?”
“That was the assumption the prosecution made based on the sightings, yes.”
“People don’t normally walk in circles if they’re on their way to buy ketchup.”
“Sid Noyce may have gone out with the intention of buying ketchup, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get a different idea along the way. The prosecution alleged that he walked around the block because he was searching for the boys to take revenge on them, and the jury chose to believe that. People can snap. Even the gentlest, sweetest people can snap if you put them under enough pressure. I’ve seen it many times during my career.”
“Did you agree with the prosecution?”
“I did, yes. Especially when combined with the other evidence we had.”
What Fletcher says is plausible, but it is his slip of the tongue that intrigues me. The reason I’m intrigued is because what the witness said she saw on that night became a crucial issue in the case against Noyce and is one of what Owen describes as “grains of uncertainty” surrounding his conviction for the murders.
Even Noyce’s defense team—in what was apparently an unusual display of vigor—claimed that the witness had changed her story at some point before the case got to trial, and that she had in fact originally stated she saw Noyce going in the opposite direction the second time he passed down Primrose Lane. That is, away from the boys. That is, toward his home, where he said he went.
Here’s journalist Owen Weston explaining why there was unfortunately no proof of whether Noyce ever made it to Tesco to buy ketchup, as he said he did.
“Sidney Noyce had bad luck. That night Tesco’s air conditioning packed up and flooded the store, so it was closed down. He couldn’t have bought ketchup even if he did go to the store, so there’s no proof of whether he ever made it to Tesco or not. There were CCTV cameras in the Tesco car park that might have caught him arriving there, but by the time his defense team woke up and requested the footage from the store, it
had been taped over.”
Maya and I have tried very hard to gain access to the court records of Sidney Noyce’s trial, but we weren’t able to. They’re not on the public record yet. Most of the information we have about what went on in the courtroom during Noyce’s trial has come from the reporting done by Owen Weston when he covered the trial for the Bristol Echo. Like Valerie Noyce, he attended court every day.
In the next episode of It’s Time to Tell we are going to talk to Weston about some of the other “grains of uncertainty” in Noyce’s conviction and about where he thinks police should have been looking.
Before we leave you today, I have two brief news items. Maya and I are thrilled to report that the number of downloads of It’s Time to Tell has doubled over the past week, taking us into the top ten for our category on Overcast, and what’s more we are now a featured listen on iTunes, too! Thank you to each and every one of our listeners for your support. Please keep listening and keep spreading the word using #TimetoTell. It means the world to us!
Something we are less excited to report is a bit of negative news. We wondered whether to keep this from you, but decided, once again in the interests of transparency, to share it.
Yesterday, we received by post an A5 envelope containing three photographs of Maya and I: one of us leaving our flat, one of us in our car, and, most disturbingly, one of Maya in the bathroom of our flat, taken through a window. At the bottom of this photo, one word was printed in ballpoint: STOP. We have handed the photographs over to the police and are still processing what it might mean for us and for the podcast.
It certainly makes the following clip even more pertinent. Back to Owen Weston, the man whose article got me started on this journey in the first place. This is a clip from my interview with Owen. You’ll hear more from this interview in the next episode of It’s Time to Tell:
“The case the police built against Noyce is a classic example of detectives seeing a suspect who looked good for the crime and making the facts fit the face so they could get a quick and tidy result . . . Remember this, though: If Sidney Noyce was innocent, somebody else is guilty . . . there will be information you might be closing in on that they don’t want uncovered. And that person has murdered before.”
Chapter 11
Jess emerges from Oxford Circus tube station and has to step away from the throng of pedestrians to get her bearings. Retail and advertising signs fight for her attention. Traffic surges through the junction. She hates looking like a tourist as she consults her phone to find her way to Felix’s office, but it does the job, and a few minutes later she finds herself on a narrow street in Soho standing in front of a door beside which five buzzers nestle discreetly on a modest brass plaque.
Felix Abernathy PR is engraved next to one of them. Jess straightens her jacket and stoops to try to check her hair in the shiny plaque before pushing the buzzer. She announces herself and is buzzed in. Inside the building there’s a small elevator, but Jess takes the stairs at a steady pace up all five floors. As she walks up, she is completely focused on the meeting ahead of her.
When she reaches the office, she’s struck by how small it is. Cozy, almost. There seem to be only a couple of rooms, yet his website would have you believe Felix is running an empire. In the reception space, three women sit at desks. They are smartly dressed. A large window offers a partial view over Golden Square. One of the women rises, smiles nicely at Jess, and asks her to take a seat for a few minutes. “Felix is on a call, but he’s expecting you,” she explains.
Jess looks out of the window. It’s lunchtime. Down in the square, young and pretty television types are eating, vaping, flirting, posing in the sun, and looking beautiful before they go back to their jobs running crappy errands for postproduction companies. Jess feels a pang for the things she might have done if she hadn’t had Charlie when she was so young.
After a few minutes, Felix flings open a frosted glass door at the back of the room. He doesn’t say a word, but smiles and opens his arms to her and Jess understands he wants her to come to him the way she used to. He always did like to make an entrance and control a room. She stands up and puts on a smile. She knows how to make her cheeks dimple. She walks steadily toward Felix and hugs him, and they kiss each other chastely on either cheek.
“You look a million dollars,” he says. She endures the feeling of his eyes traveling down her body. “Come on in.” Before he shuts the door behind them, he addresses the women at the desks: “I hope you’ve been looking after my Jessy. She’s a very old friend of mine. Bring us some tea, would you, Sarah?”
My Jessy, Jess notes as the door closes.
“Take a seat. Get off your feet. Don’t stand about on ceremony.” Felix settles into his desk chair in front of the window and gestures to the seat opposite. Jess sits. He leans back and crosses his arms loosely. It is such a benign gesture and he’s wearing an expression so affable—as if she’s a pet he’s very fond of—that out of the blue a sense of farce overcomes her and she feels as if he’s her bank manager. The thought brings a smile to her face. Of all the things she didn’t think they’d ever come to—after the terrible, filthy acts they were involved in together and inflicted on each other—it was this.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” But she can’t help a smile. It’s because he’s presenting such a sanitized, successful version of himself. She knew he was capable of success—everybody knew it back in the day—but sitting here with him like this, she suddenly can’t believe he’s done so well. It’s hard to take in the reality of it. She gestures to their surroundings, encompassing the office, the view outside. “All of this.”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” He tilts back in his chair. He looks smug, but he’s watching her carefully.
“You’ve done well,” she says. He always liked flattery.
“Thank you. And you have, too, by the sound of it.”
“I’ve done okay.” She feels her sense of unreality ebbing as quickly as it arrived. He’s faking it as much as you are, she thinks. Be careful.
“We came from nothing, you and me,” he says. “We should be proud of what we’ve achieved. Everything we’ve got, we built with our own hands.”
She nods, though she doesn’t exactly agree. Me, not so much, she thinks, but it’s true that Felix clawed his way up to this all by himself. When she first met him, he was so proud to be driving for his boss, a local businessman with his hand in the TV business amongst other things. Felix remained proud when he moved on to doing more than just drive for the man. He started fixing things, and not the plumbing: parties, discreet rendezvous, drugs. Felix made contacts of his own as soon as he could, with powerful people, people in authority, and he stopped working for somebody else. He had his hand in so many things. She remembers how Felix used Charlie and his friends to run drug deliveries for him on the estate. That was wrong. She can’t believe she let Charlie do that. She smiles at Felix cautiously—she doesn’t want her discomfort to show—and he says without any more preamble: “Cody Swift.”
“I need him stopped.” She didn’t mean it to come out like that. She meant to say, “I need the podcast stopped.”
There’s a knock on the door. “Come in,” Felix calls, and the secretary carries in a tray with a steaming teapot and two cups and saucers on it. Felix remains poker-faced, staring at Jess. “Would you care to clarify what you mean?” he says once the woman leaves the room, shutting the door behind her. Neither of them have acknowledged her, let alone thanked her. “Just so I’m sure I understand.”
“I want Cody Swift to leave me and my family alone.”
Felix pours tea. He moves to put a cube of sugar in her cup, but she covers it with her hand.
“All grown up now, are we?” he says. “I remember when you took three. Or are we just watching our figure?”
She doesn’t rise to it. “I can’t lose another family,” she says.
“Because of Charlie,” he says.
Their eyes
meet, but she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t feel any need to explain. He’s seen her rawest emotions before; to display them again now would increase her vulnerability.
“Do you have any thoughts about how to achieve this?” he asks.
“Don’t hurt Cody.”
“Isn’t that what your husband threatened to do?”
“How do you know that?”
“Darling, you phoned me twenty-four hours ago. Don’t you think I’ve done a little bit of due diligence since then?”
“Did you talk to Cody?”
“No. We don’t want to make him nervous. I talked to somebody I trust. He got me some information. Sounds like your husband gave Cody Swift a real scare. Not.”
Felix shouldn’t criticize Nick, Jess thinks. It’s out of order. She puts her cup down on the saucer and it chinks sharply. Felix tilts his chair back again, eyes on her, as ever.
“We need to discuss money,” he says. “Some of my private clients prefer to make arrangements for a monthly retainer.”
She can’t believe he’s got the brass neck to try this on. She leans forward. “We both know I’m not paying you a penny,” she says. She takes a pointed look around his office so he can see her taking in the view of central London, the framed photographs and articles, the fancy clients and fancy china. “If Cody Swift digs as deep as he says he’s going to, you might have as much to lose as I do, don’t you think?”
Felix blinks, but otherwise doesn’t move a muscle. The cogs are turning, Jess thinks. Hold your nerve.
Chapter 12
Fletcher and Danny listen to the latest episode of the podcast in the car on the way to the prison. Fletcher winces when he hears the sound of his own voice. Both snigger when Swift quotes Owen Weston’s grains of uncertainty.
“Thinks he’s a poet,” Danny says.
I Know You Know Page 13