Fletcher shakes the proffered hand. “How are you?”
“Can’t complain. You?”
“Yeah. Fine. It’s good to be out of the office. What’s going on here, then?”
“I’m thinking about using hot air balloons for a client as a bit of a PR stunt, something to anchor an event with, so I’m here for a demo.”
“You going up?”
“Fuck, no! Would you?”
Fletcher squints at the balloon. “I think I’d like the views.”
“You’re a braver man than me,” Felix says.
“I couldn’t do it, though. I get vertigo.” The balloon has been unfolded to its full extent, making an oval-shaped lake of fabric on the grass. A few people have stopped to look. “What can I do for you?” Fletcher asks.
“Cody Swift.” Felix pronounces the name as if it were a disease.
“Ah.”
“I believe you’ve talked to him directly?”
Fletcher nods an affirmative.
“I need you to provide him with a bit of information,” Felix says. “There’s been a turnup for the books, as it happens. A contact of mine has been able to identify the taxi driver who dropped Jessy Paige home at the estate on the night of the murders. I thought it might be useful for the podcast.”
Felix has Fletcher’s complete attention now. The identity of this driver was never known.
“How did this come about?” Fletcher asks, but Felix taps the side of his nose. He hands Fletcher a piece of paper. A name, address, and mobile number are written on it. “Here’s your man. He needs interviewing and Swift needs tipping off. Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” Fletcher asks, but the men are testing the gas burner. A bright column of flame flares noisily in front of them before dying back again. One of the balloon team approaches Felix as another backs the truck off the grass.
“What did you say?” Felix asks, and Fletcher repeats the question.
“Authenticity,” Felix replies. Fletcher doesn’t like the sarcastic edge to his smile. “I think it’s better coming from you than anybody else. It won’t be a problem, will it?”
Fletcher wants to refuse, and would like to question Felix more about his motives, because the timing of this feels very convenient for Jessica after the last episode of the podcast, but the moment when Fletcher had the leverage to turn this man down is long past. “No problem at all,” he says.
Felix raises his hand in greeting to the woman approaching them and begins to walk toward him. He turns briefly back to Fletcher. “You going to stay and watch it go up?”
Fletcher shakes his head. “Things to do,” he shouts. He holds up the bit of paper Felix gave him, even though he was trying to suggest he had things of his own to do.
“Good to see you, John.”
As Fletcher walks away he hears Felix say, “Will the logo be in the same position on our balloon? I want it to be much bigger than that.”
The woman’s reply is indistinct.
“Tell me once again how this came about?” Smail says. He and Fletcher are standing in the middle of the office. Heads have ducked low in the cubicles around them, and phone calls are being conducted in murmurs or hurriedly brought to an end.
Smail hasn’t smiled once since Fletcher informed him of Noyce’s admission and arrest. He hasn’t patted Fletcher on the back, thumped his arm genially, or given him the tight sort of nod that passes for approval from some senior officers. Instead, he’s interrogating Fletcher.
Fletcher feels his temper rising but dutifully begins the tale again. Smail asks, “Why didn’t you arrest Noyce before bringing him in?”
“I had an inkling he might have something of value to tell us, but I wasn’t sure what, and he was distractible at home. I thought a chat at the station might help him focus. I had no idea we were looking at a possible confession.”
“Why did Noyce travel alone with you and Danny? He should have been accompanied.”
“I didn’t realize he had such severe mental limitations. Honestly, I just thought he was a bit thick, boss. I only realized when we were chatting during the drive and he said he went to St. Jude’s special school when he was a kid. I took the appropriate steps to safeguard him as soon as we arrived at the station. His mum acted as appropriate adult, and we arranged for a duty solicitor to be with him in interview.”
Smail’s fingertips tap a slow rhythm of disbelief on his upper lip. “Sometimes,” he says, and his patronizing headmasterly tone offends Fletcher, “we feel euphoria at the prospect of a solve, and that euphoria can interfere with the appropriate reason or, shall I say, caution we might expect a senior officer to exercise during an investigation. It can obscure the fact that gray areas might exist in our process. Are you sure that once the pretty pink smoke of this solve has blown away, we won’t find ourselves staring at a steaming pile of shit that is of your creation?”
Fletcher flinches. He was expecting a handshake and he gets this? This is not how Smail should be treating a man who has just handed him a solve. His anger swells, and beneath it, he feels as if humiliation has soaked every cell in his body. He is sodden with it. A public dressing down will be hard to come back from. He says nothing in response, because he can’t trust himself to keep his cool. Smail isn’t finished yet.
“I think you may get away with bringing Noyce in alone, I think you will, though it won’t just be me asking for an explanation. But what you will not get away with is not informing me immediately that you were intending to bring Noyce into the station, and not informing me immediately he arrived here. John, what the fuck were you thinking? You are working on my investigation and you undermined me. This investigation should have been concluded with due care and attention to every detail.”
Fletcher has detached himself emotionally. It’s the only way to get through this. He notes the way Smail’s acne scars have flared redder than usual, and how his pupils look as hard and shiny as wet pebbles.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Smail says. “I will take over the Noyce interviews from this point onward and for the time being—until we are absolutely certain that the case against Noyce is watertight—you will pursue our other ongoing lines of inquiry. You can start by looking through the CCTV tapes you picked up from the casino. I look forward to a report on my desk in the morning.”
Fletcher burns with anger and frustration as he leaves the office with the box of CCTV tapes in his arms. He should be in the pub, raising a pint with the rest of the team. It should be the finest night of his career. On any normal investigation, it would be. This outcome is a car crash for him personally, and so far as he’s concerned, that’s down to Smail. He—Fletcher—needs to fix it.
He slings the tapes into his car and gets into the driver’s seat. Rain is pissing down. The back of his neck feels damp and slimy where it’s got beneath his collar. He can’t face going home to the wife and baby. It would do his head in. There would be a row within minutes. A sharp knock on the car window makes his head snap around. It’s Danny. He gets in.
“You all right?” Danny asks. He’s out of breath.
“I’ve been better.”
“I’ve been told not to talk to you.” They both smirk. That’s never going to happen. “There’s something you should know. The duty sergeant told me they spotted blood on Noyce’s trouser legs. Not a smear, droplets, as if from a fresh wound. Sergeant said they’ve gone off for testing.” Danny raises his eyebrows at Fletcher. “Good news, don’t you think? You’re right about Noyce. This is going to prove it. Don’t let Howard Smail get to you.” He claps a hand on Fletcher’s shoulder and squeezes it briefly before getting out of the car.
Fletcher watches Danny jog back across the parking area and disappear back into the building. He feels buoyed by the news of the blood. It’s not anything until it’s tested, but he feels optimistic it will back up his case against Noyce. He doesn’t want to leave anything to chance, though. Even if the blood is N
oyce’s and Fletcher is proved right, he suspects Smail might still try to keep him down and take the credit for Noyce’s arrest. Fletcher needs to own this, or Smail could bury him so deep he might never resurface.
He considers his options, and one of them seems more attractive than the others. In fact, as he considers it, it doesn’t just seem more attractive, it seems positively sensible. Fletcher puts the key in the car’s ignition, slings his arms over the back of the passenger seat, and before he’s backed out of his parking spot, his beautifully simple plan is almost completely formed.
One hour later Fletcher pushes open the door of the Coach and Horses pub near the arches on Cheltenham Road. Felix Abernathy is already seated at a table with a pint and a pizza that looks as if it may have spent time in a microwave.
“Felix.”
“John.” Felix doesn’t get up. Fletcher orders a drink at the bar and takes a seat. “All right?” he asks.
“Been better.” Felix cuts a triangle of pizza, picks it up, and concertinas it into his mouth.
Fletcher lowers his voice. “I’m hoping to come to an arrangement.”
“Oh, yeah? I thought you might be wanting to tell me the tapes had been destroyed.”
“They will be, but things have developed. I think we may both have a problem.”
“Go on.” Felix pushes his plate away and scratches his cheekbone with the back of his fingernails. “I’m listening.”
“My superior officer has got a wrong idea about me. I’ve handed him this case tied up in a bow, but he’s not satisfied. He doubts me.” It hurts Fletcher to say that, but he needs Felix to feel as much threat as he does. “He’s asking me to look into Jessy Paige’s movements on Sunday night, since she has no alibi. He’s not going to let it go and he is very interested to know who is with her on the CCTV tapes. He’s pushing me for an identification, which is not what I want, and I don’t think it’s what you want either.”
“You found who killed the boys?”
“Found him, arrested him, charged him.”
“Who?”
“Just between us? Bloke called Sidney Noyce from the estate. He’s backward. Mental age of a kid. He used to try and hang around with the boys, but they taunted him. He’s confessed.”
Felix takes his time lighting a cigarette before asking, “What’s the officer’s name?” He has the best poker face in the business, Fletcher thinks.
“Howard Smail. Detective Superintendent Howard Smail.”
Felix’s eyebrows rise fractionally. “Tell me about him.”
Fletcher explains what Smail is like, how he works, how he has recently moved from a job at the Met in London and is living in a police-owned flat at the Blaise Castle complex while he waits for his family to relocate.
“I can work with the accommodation,” Felix says. “There’s a young woman I’m acquainted with who knows her way around that place. I’ll need to talk to Jess. Off-camera.”
“She’s in a bad way.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Can we rely on her?”
“I said, don’t worry about it.” Felix stubs his cigarette out on his pizza plate and stands.
“You going?” Fletcher feels a moment of panic, and just as they did when he was on the phone to Felix, his emotions surge unexpectedly. He is overwhelmed by the need for somebody else to feel what he’s feeling. “Charlie Paige died in my arms,” he says. He can’t meet Felix’s eye. He takes a long sip of his pint to cover up an unexpected wash of tears.
“John.” It sounds like a warning, but Fletcher can’t stop.
“He was still breathing when I found him. My god! Oh, shit!” His spittle flecks the table, and he snatches up a napkin to blow his nose.
“It’s a fucking shame, John, but you need to hold it together. Deal with the tapes, get me access to Jessy, and I’ll take care of my end.”
Fletcher sits at the table for a few minutes after Felix has left and picks damp bits of napkin off his fingers. He’s embarrassed; he doesn’t know where that outburst came from. He exhales heavily. It’s over now, and he has work to do. He is as certain as he can be that Felix will fulfill his side of the bargain, and as his emotions subside, a feeling of confidence straightens his back as he steps out of the pub.
Fletcher drives home via Feeder Canal. He pulls over in a deserted spot, takes a roll of duct tape from the boot, and carries it and the box of videotapes onto a small pedestrian bridge. The only spectators are the pigeons residing in the window openings of an abandoned warehouse beside him. He finds some stones and places them in the box with the videocassettes and tapes it up. He heaves the lot over the side of the bridge and watches it disappear under the murky water. He knows it’s deep here. He’s seen a car brought up at this site, the driver a bloated mess.
Back at his car, he removes a screwdriver from the glove compartment and closes the passenger door. Standing outside the car, he inserts the driver between the top of the closed door and the roof of the car and levers it until he creates a crack in the door and visible damage on the door’s metal frame. Once he is satisfied it looks like there has been a forced entry, he replaces the screwdriver and drives home.
He arrives half an hour later. He takes a minute to compose himself before going in. His wife is pacing the sitting room with the baby on her shoulder. The TV is keeping them company.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. He pecks her on the cheek. She smells of baby sick. “I just need to make a quick call. Then I’ll take him, I promise.”
Smail picks up quickly. Fletcher keeps it brief and Smail repeats his words back to him, barely containing his anger. “You stopped at Feeder Canal?”
“Yes.”
“To investigate something?”
“I saw a man by the canal who seemed in distress.”
“And while you were helping him, your car got broken into and the videocassettes were stolen?”
“And my wallet.”
“Really?”
“I’m as gutted as you are, boss.”
“Why would anybody steal a box of videotapes?”
“People will steal anything, boss.”
“Did you make a note of the license plate we need to trace, at least?”
“I’m sorry, boss.”
Smail sighs as if Fletcher couldn’t possibly disappoint him any more. “We’ll speak about this in the morning.”
Not if I can help it, Fletcher thinks. He says, “Of course, boss. Sorry, boss,” but the line has already gone dead. Fletcher returns to the front room and sinks onto the sofa beside his wife. He yawns so heavily his jaw clicks.
“Long day?” she says. She looks weary, too.
Never explain. “Yeah. Busy.” He reaches for the baby.
She hands the child over and stretches. “Tea?”
“Thanks, love.”
“Sandwich?”
“No. I got something in the canteen.”
Baby Andrew nuzzles his head into the side of Fletcher’s neck and falls asleep almost instantly. Fletcher relaxes under the warm weight of his child, feeling the little breaths the infant is taking. He’ll wait to phone Felix and let him know the tapes are gone, he thinks. It’ll give Felix a bit of time and extra incentive to put things in motion. He relaxes a little. If Felix keeps his end of the deal, he thinks, I’m made.
It’s Time to Tell
Episode 8—The Lost Hour: From Paradise to Blackhorse Lane
“You’d be surprised what you can do in seventy-two minutes.”
My name is Cody Swift. I’m a filmmaker and your host of It’s Time to Tell, a Dishlicker Podcast Production. That was the voice of ex–Detective Superintendent Howard Smail, referring to the seventy-two minutes when Jessica Paige, mother of Charlie Paige, was unaccounted for on the night of Charlie and Scott’s murders.
Here’s a question for you: What do you think you can do in seventy-two minutes? I did a bit of unscientific research on the subject—by which I mean to say that I looked it up on th
e internet—and discovered that seventy-two minutes is almost how long it takes for the International Space Station to circumnavigate planet Earth. You could also brush your teeth for the recommended period thirty-six times, smoke twelve cigarettes in a row, and have an extremely long soak in the bathtub. These are based on average activity times guessed by me, but you get the picture. You can do quite a lot in seventy-two minutes. You could end a relationship. You could murder.
At the end of our last episode you heard a clip from forensic psychologist Professor Christopher Fellowes, who gave us a hypothesis about Jessica Paige’s state of mind. We were going to let you hear more of that interview, but some dramatic events have overtaken us this week. I’ll explain more later in this episode.
Professor Fellowes is not the only academic we’ve had contact with. The criminology department at the University of the West of England, based here in Bristol, got in touch with us offering to help in any way they could. I asked them to assist us in trying to re-create possible scenarios for how Jessica Paige might have spent her “lost hour.”
Simon McKay, a third-year student, tells us how they went about it:
“Firstly, we had to rule out unpredictable behavior, that outlying scenario where Jessica Paige went for a random drive with somebody, got out somewhere unexpected, and randomly got in a taxi home. Not many people do that sort of thing even if they are drunk. We started with an assumption that Jessica Paige was engaged in what I would call ‘normal’ behavior. Basically, something that is predictable or might have an innocent explanation. We mapped out the various routes you could take if you traveled by car from the Paradise Casino to the Glenfrome Estate. We consulted a map of the city from 1996 to make sure we did this accurately. In teams, we drove each route, sticking to the speed limit. The fastest took us nine minutes. The slowest route took nineteen minutes. We drove the routes on a Sunday night after ten P.M., to mimic the traffic conditions as precisely as possible. We thought about differences between our drives and the one Jessica Paige might have taken. At that time on 18 August 1996, there might have been a tiny bit of daylight lingering, but not much, and it probably wouldn’t have been visible on any of the routes you could take. Jessica Paige’s journey would likely have been made in more or less complete darkness. It was hot, so there could have been a few people out on the streets. We narrowed down our routes to the two we thought they would have been most likely to take, based on them being fastest and most convenient. Along every route, we looked out for places where Jessica and her first driver might have stopped, places she might have been likely to arrive in one vehicle and leave in another. One was a dual carriageway, with very little opportunity for stopping, so unless she traded cars in a lay-by—hard to do in the time before mobiles unless she flagged the taxi down—we felt it was the more unlikely of the two routes. The other route was along a road called Blackhorse Lane. We consulted a colleague who specializes in Bristol history, and he told us that Blackhorse Lane was partly residential, but in 1996 there were shops and cafés along there, too, and in fact there was a popular pub called the Blue Door. It had a beer garden and it was open on a Sunday night. Above a shop opposite it was a taxi firm.”
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