“The evidence against Noyce all added up nicely, up to a point. A lot of people on the estate attested to the fact that he used to spend time with you boys, and that you three taunted him. A key witness described Noyce following Charlie and Scott down Primrose Lane. That was the final sighting of the boys. She also described how Noyce circled the block and how she heard him calling the boys. That was contested by the defense because they claimed to have discovered that her story had changed since her original statement, but not effectively enough. What else? The bodies were discovered on a patch of land behind the dog track, a place that Sid is likely to have known because he spent time at the track. This location was also near Tesco, where Noyce worked. But even given all that, there was no doubt in my mind that reasonable doubt existed, because the bulk of what the prosecution had against him was circumstantial. Unfortunately, Noyce’s barrister was unbelievably ineffective. I told his parents to make a complaint, but they wouldn’t. They were scared of offending him and that it might damage Sidney’s defense. But a good defense should have been able to cast reasonable doubt on each and every one of those things.”
“What about the blood?”
“Ah. The blood. Yes. That’s what swayed the jury in the end, of course, even though Noyce refused to say how it got there when they questioned him. I believe they judged him first and listened to the evidence afterward. Just like the police.”
“Did you speak to any jury members?”
“It’s illegal in our system. They’re protected. I wish I could have. I would have given anything to be a fly on the wall in the jury room. That verdict got returned so fast, it was as if they’d agreed what they were going to say before they even went in there. I think it was the blood that got Noyce, though. I’d put money on that. It was by far the most damning piece of evidence. Even a good defense would have found it a challenge.”
The tiny droplets of blood found on Sidney Noyce’s trousers were enough to damn him because a forensic expert testified—albeit vaguely, according to Owen Weston—that the droplets appeared to have been transferred at the time an injury occurred. They constituted evidence that Noyce had been with the boys at the time they were attacked, and not afterward, as he claimed. Without access to the photographs of the spatter pattern, we are unable to draw our own conclusion or get them independently examined. The photographs remain archived in the police case files.
I had an important question to ask Owen Weston.
“If you don’t think Noyce murdered Charlie and Scott, then who do you think did?”
“I don’t know. I have theories, but I don’t know for sure. Whoever it was put a lot of effort into stopping me reporting on the case.”
“Can you explain what you mean?”
“Somebody tried to intimidate me. At first it built up slowly. When my first few articles about the case were published, I began to get silent phone calls. Infrequent at first, then daily, then a few times a day. Usually at my office number, but some at home, too. Then the threatening letters started. They went to the office at first, but we received one here, too. It said some horrible things and my wife saw it. I told her the best thing to do would be to ignore it and assured her everything would be okay. But it escalated quickly. I came down one morning to find that somebody had slashed my tires in the drive, and a few days later I was attacked in a lane near the courthouse.”
“Did you consider stopping?”
“Not at first. I’m an investigative journalist. Intimidation is what you expect if you are doing your job properly, and I had my professional pride, but it took its toll on my family. My wife asked me to stop reporting on the case after the physical attack. She gave me an ultimatum. We had small children.”
“How did they attack you?”
“A few punches to the abdomen, he slammed me against a wall. And this.”
Weston pointed to the crooked bridge of his nose: an obvious break.
“Did you see who did it?”
“It was just one man, but I couldn’t identify anything about him afterward except that he wore black boots and a balaclava. He took me by surprise, landed the punches where he needed to, very professional. It happened as the trial was coming to a close, so after the guilty verdict I stopped reporting, reluctantly, because I felt Sid Noyce needed somebody to continue to make a noise on his behalf, but you do these things for your family. The intimidation ceased immediately.”
“Did your recent article trigger anything?”
“No, but it might. And so might the podcast. If you want to get to the bottom of this, look at other possibilities. Noyce was just one of many initial suspects, and once he was arrested, the police didn’t examine the alternatives properly. In fact that is one of the single most notable things about this case: the early focus on Noyce meant that all other avenues of investigation were shut down too early.”
The clips you’ve just heard are from an interview I recorded with Owen Weston before Maya and I received the packet of photographs. As soon as the photos arrived, I realized, based on my conversation with Owen, that they might be the start of a campaign of escalating intimidation. After the police, he was the first person I phoned. Owen had this advice to give me:
“If you plan to continue with the podcast, watch your backs. It’s not a game. Whoever is behind this might be capable of murder.”
Sobering words, and all the more so as another threatening incident has occurred since then and has been reported to the police. This morning, Maya lifted the lid of the laptop and was faced with a gruesome image. Our laptop wallpaper had been replaced with a candid photograph of Maya in the bathroom, the same photograph we were already sent a copy of anonymously. The photograph on our laptop had been doctored with a red line ripping across Maya’s throat. It looked shockingly violent. A word in red capitals scrolled across the bottom of the screen: STOP. Maya slammed the lid of the laptop shut. When we opened it again later on, mustering our courage to face it again, we discovered the laptop had died and we weren’t able to bring it back to life.
Fortunately, we are religious about backing up our work in progress via secure methods, so everything we have been working on is safe. Before this happened, you might have called our obsession with backing up a form of paranoia. Now it feels like a wise thing to have done. We have handed the laptop over to the police for analysis and bought a new machine to continue work on the podcast. To protect it and us, it will not be connected to the internet.
We would not advise any of our listeners to continue with a project in the face of intimidation, but I do not want to stop, because I am on a personal mission. Unlike Owen, I do not have small children or a wife who need me to stop. Maya and I are in this together and we have agreed we will keep going, because if somebody is going to such lengths to bully us, it is all the more likely that there is something to discover. In the next episode of It’s Time to Tell, we’ll be talking about who else could have been responsible for the murders. We’re going to look into avenues of investigation the police apparently ignored and ask some more questions about why that happened.
Here are two clips related to what we’ll be focusing on in next week’s episode. The first voice belongs to ex–Detective Superintendent Howard Smail, the second voice to crime reporter Owen Weston.
“I was cradling Ms. Paige as I tried to help her sit down safely. It was the biggest mistake of my career, though of course I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Jessica Paige was unaccounted for between 22:13 and 23:25 on the night the boys disappeared. That’s seventy-two minutes. So far as I could ascertain, this was never properly investigated. It was an unforgivable lapse on the part of the police and Noyce’s defense team.”
Chapter 13
Felix invites Jess to lunch and she doesn’t feel she can refuse. In the taxi on the way to the restaurant, Felix works on his phone while Jess watches London pass by. A notification pings.
“New episode of the podcast just dropped,” he says. “Want to listen
?” His thumb hovers over the play button.
“No!”
“Joking. Keep your hair on, darling. I think it’s best if you don’t, actually.” He reads out the podcast title: “‘The Case Against Sidney Noyce and the Silencing of Owen Weston.’ Cody Swift likes his fancy titles, doesn’t he? Makes him sound like Sherlock Holmes.” He laughs, but Jess doesn’t see the funny side. She’s relieved when Felix slips the phone back into his jacket pocket.
The restaurant Felix has chosen is small and the other clientele are as groomed as he is. Jess feels a little underdressed by comparison, but she knows how to fake confidence and she holds her head high. The hostess greets Felix warmly and shows them to a private booth toward the back of the restaurant. Felix orders for them both without looking at the menu and Jess doesn’t object.
There is a moment of awkwardness once champagne has been poured and the waiter has left. Felix wordlessly proposes a toast and their glasses chink. Jess thinks she can detect affection in his eyes. She sips. The chatter in the restaurant is a pleasant hum around them. Warmth, the taste of champagne and the smell of food encourage her to relax.
“I could get used to this,” she says.
“Not too shabby, is it?” he replies. His gaze seems to fall on her in a different way from when they were in the office. Here the light is dimmer and kinder and they are close enough to each other that if they adjusted their positions, their knees could touch under the table. It is intimate in a way Jess finds familiar but unsettling.
What does he see when he looks at me? she wonders. She holds the fragile stem of her glass lightly. Sunshine pouring through the window hazes her view of the front of the restaurant. A used woman? A has-been? Is it just me who feels the old spark we had, or is he sensing it, too? She thinks there might still be a spark. She is certain there was one, back in the day. Felix had so many girls over the years, but Jess was the only one he visited at her flat, she’s sure of that. They weren’t like a normal boyfriend and girlfriend. He would often arrive very late at night and they would listen to music and fall asleep together on the sofa, his arm over her shoulder, just like she imagined a husband and wife would. Felix would drop his guard around her at those times. In the morning, he would tease a grumpy Charlie until he smiled. Charlie never liked to find Felix there when he woke up.
“You married?” Jess asks.
“Between wives.”
“Kids?”
He shakes his head. She’s not surprised. Food arrives, hidden underneath small silver domes. The waiter removes the domes from their plates simultaneously, and clouds of dry ice spill from the rims of pewter bowls and across the tabletop. The smoke dissipates quickly, revealing a tiny mountain of chopped flesh in each bowl, laced with dill and chunks of salt and pepper.
“Something wrong?” Felix asks once the waiter has gone.
“Pretentious, isn’t it?” She can’t be arsed to pretend.
“Pretentious as fuck.”
She bursts out laughing. It’s not what she was expecting him to say. This is a glimpse of the old Felix.
“Would you rather get a McDonald’s?” he adds.
“Probably.”
Now it’s his turn to snort with laughter. Other diners turn to look. “That’s my girl.”
They tuck in, reminiscing about some of their old haunts and other safe topics, careful not to mention any unmentionables. Jess carefully monitors how much she is drinking, not easy to do, as the waiters seem ever present, topping up her glass with champagne. The portions of food are so small and delicate it doesn’t take long to get through their first two courses. She’s about to ask Felix if he’s seeing anybody, given he’s not married. She wants to know if he’s bagged a celebrity girlfriend, but he speaks first.
“Can you get away for a bit?”
“Away?”
“From Bristol. Ideally for a few weeks. I think Cody Swift’s podcast has a naturally short shelf life, and his interest in you has a shorter one. If you’re not in Bristol, he can’t get to you, and with a bit of luck the whole thing will have run out of steam by the time you get back home.”
“Nick’s on a shoot in Morocco,” she says.
“Operation Crusader?”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve got a client on it.”
She wants to ask who but knows better. Felix can make you feel special—he can make you feel like the center of his world—but no matter how special you feel, you never get to hear about the other people in his life, so you don’t ask.
“You should go, if you can. Take the kid. I’ll deal with our little problem here.” He smiles.
It’s an incredibly tempting idea, but Jess is skeptical. Wouldn’t it be just too easy to disappear and leave everything with him? But on the other hand, God knows she’d give her right arm for an easy solution, and hasn’t she been through enough tough stuff to deserve an easy ride in life sometimes?
A wave of tiredness flattens the adrenaline that’s kept Jess going all day. She’s not sure if she’s feeling her age or the champagne. Both, probably. She glances at Felix. “I want to know what you’re thinking of doing,” she says.
“Do you ask Nick to tell you every detail of what he does when he’s on a shoot? Do you ask Erica to describe how she studies for all those exams she’s doing at school, or learns her lines for those plays she’s in?”
Jess freezes. Felix’s tone is friendly, but these are details about her daughter that Jess hasn’t shared with him. She shakes her head.
“Then let me do my job.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
“I heard you the first time. There’s no need to be paranoid, darling.”
“Felix—”
“Relax. What makes the world go round?”
She hesitates, then offers, “Money?”
“And what does Cody Swift need to keep his podcast going while he’s not taking on paid jobs?”
“Money.”
“Exactly. He’s doing very well, as a matter of fact, but that doesn’t mean he has enough of the green stuff. I happen to know somebody who is contributing some funds to the podcast, who may be persuaded to withdraw those funds over, maybe—what shall we say?—some editorial differences, perhaps?”
Jess is relieved. Money. Of course! She’s fine with that. What was she thinking? Felix is respectable now, he’s got a public profile. The things they did were so long ago. Water under the bridge for them both. Nobody needs to get hurt in the present day for them to get what they want. She tells herself to relax, that she doesn’t need to be hypervigilant.
“Sorry,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Book yourself and the kid a flight to Morocco. Have a holiday. Spend some time with the other half. Treat yourselves. Don’t worry about a thing.”
She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “Thank you.” She means it because she wants to believe in the possibility that the different parts of your life can remain distinct, that old selves and new cannot bleed into one another.
Felix turns her hand over and draws a circle in the middle of her palm with the tip of his finger before letting go again. “You’re welcome.”
She pulls her hand back. She takes the starched napkin from her lap and twists it with both hands. “Can I get a coffee?” she asks.
“Anything you like.” He orders two espressos. She thinks he seems detached now, as if she’s overstayed her welcome, but there’s one more thing she wants to achieve in this conversation.
“Are you worried about the podcast?” she asks.
“Not in the slightest.”
“But what if I . . .”
“What if you talk about what happened that night? Is that what you’re going to say? After a nice lunch like this and a generous offer of help from me?”
“And what if I do?” She wants him to feel a tiny edge of threat from her, to know that he is not a hundred percent in control.
“You won’t.” He leans on one elbow. It’s a relaxed pose, but
threat laces the atmosphere and feels as familiar from the past as the tug inside Jess telling her she wants to be with him. “You’re not that stupid.”
“Aren’t I?” she says. “Are you sure? A frightened woman can do some very silly things.” It’s the sort of thing he used to say to the girls who worked for him. He stares.
“I remember when Charlie died,” he says. “Do you?”
She nods. Braces herself for the inevitable retaliation.
“What was that word you used when you talked about it afterward? Do you remember what it was? No? Shall I remind you?” he asks.
She shakes her head. It’s a tight movement.
Felix licks his lips. “Relief, you said. It was a relief when Charlie died.”
She raises her head and watches him watching her, sees the curl of his lip, the set of his jaw, and the hardness in his eyes.
“It’s time I went home,” she says. “Thank you for lunch and for helping me. I appreciate it.” She has to force herself to say it. His words have cut her to the quick, but she won’t let him see that. He wouldn’t have said them unless she’d rattled him, so she got what she wanted.
“Good girl,” he says. “You’re welcome.”
He doesn’t stand up. She feels his eyes on her back as she walks through the restaurant, toward the door. On the street she turns around to look back inside—hoping for something, though she’s not sure what—but all she can see is her own reflection. She walks briskly toward the tube station.
It’s true, what Felix said, though nobody else knows apart from them. Jess did feel relief after Charlie died—only at first, when she still didn’t know which way was up—because it had been so difficult to look after him. Her memory of that feeling is the hardest thing she has had to live with.
Chapter 14
Fletcher is on the phone talking to a member of the fraud team who originally investigated Dale when a call from his elder son starts to buzz on his mobile. He picks it up but can only watch uselessly as the call goes to voice mail. He’s been waiting for a call back from Andrew for what feels like weeks. Andrew is a Royal Marine. Earlier in the year he was on a winter training exercise in Norway, but Fletcher doesn’t know where he’s been since then. The radio silence has been especially tough for Fletcher because he knows Andrew is in regular communication with his mother. Andrew doesn’t leave a message.
I Know You Know Page 16