True Crime Story(13)

ROBERT NOLAN:

Artists aren’t like the rest of us. They’re sensitive people. Their antennae are finely tuned from years of training, they’ll pick up on the slightest emotional signals from people around them. That was Zoe. She was learning how to take everything in, and in time, she’d have learned how to use it all too. But negative forces are like viruses for that kind of mind. You see it time and time again, these great artists overwhelmed by their own talent, by the burden of all the bad energies around them. They pick up on these negative wavelengths and they get infected. I can speak with some personal experience on that.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

Negative forces? I think that’s Dad’s polite way of referring to me. The negative forces I saw in Zoe’s life were all men. That was what he really trained her for without even knowing it. To be a doormat to some older man and to isolate herself from anyone who saw things differently. Without all that in her head, without where it eventually led her, would we even be sitting here?

He’d always use one of us as a stick to beat the other. That’s what made me and Zoe keep secrets from each other, and that was a slippery slope. She’d always attracted a certain kind of male attention, even as a kid. Not always flirtation at first, but fascination, and that turned into flirtation as we got older. And I mean, it was almost always one-sided, most of the time she didn’t even notice. Grown men standing too close to her, teachers leaning in over her shoulder and stuff. When we had pay-as-you-go phones, we used to top them up at a corner shop near school. You’d put, like, a fiver on and get a receipt out of the till, only the guy serving Zoe started keeping her receipts, and back then it printed your phone number on there.

He started sending her dirty messages—we’re like thirteen, fourteen at the time—and Zoe would politely ask him to stop because she had no equipment to push back and say, “Hey, dickhead, fuck off.” Which was what I did as soon as she told me. It got so bad I had to tell Mum, she had to call the police. What I’m saying is Zoe and me used to talk about this kind of stuff. She’d tell me things, I’d tell her things. She helped me with my anxiety and I helped her work out what she actually wanted, instead of just doing what she was told. We were the yin and yang, we needed each other to fully function. But because Dad saw that as him losing his grip, losing his dream, he just pushed her harder and harder, and that ended up pushing us apart. So getting older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she stopped talking to me that way. She turned secretive.

And I remember it because there were things in her life I really was jealous of. She had this whole other world through her music stuff, a way out of that house. Sometimes she’d be travelling, performing with ensembles or choirs, private functions on weekends, whole groups of people in her life I had no idea about. At home, she’d get calls, and I’d go, “Who shall I say’s calling?” Then get a name back I’d never heard before. Or you’d hear her whispering on her mobile in the bathroom with the tap running, trying to cover up whatever she was saying. Or her phone would go off while we were eating, and she’d disappear for twenty minutes. This was all stuff she would have shared with me once, but that impulse had been beaten out of her. If it hadn’t been, she might not have been such a mystery to us when she went missing.

One thing that really sticks out in my mind now, for obvious reasons, is when we were getting ready for college one day and she left her phone on the dresser. It went off, and when I looked at the screen, it was a withheld number. I don’t know why I did it, maybe a joke, maybe just to feel like someone exciting for a second, but I picked up and said, “Zoe speaking.” Silence. Then breathing, then a man’s voice, not a boy, not someone our age.

He said, “Are you still into it?”

SALLY NOLAN:

Yes, I think we were all tense before Zoe’s audition, all out of sorts.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

The phone went clammy in my hand because I knew this was out of my league, way too adult. I heard someone coming, so I just said, “Yes,” hung up and put her phone back on the dresser.

ROBERT NOLAN:

Now, I can say with some certainty I should have gotten her out of there, out of that house. Got her away from that bloody environment, all that negativity. I’ll always blame myself that I didn’t. I got to see Zoe in her prime, but the world never did. The world never will.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

One way that call fucked me up was that sometimes after, I’d hear Zoe’s phone go off, then she’d answer, listen for a second and say, “Yes.” I’d ask who it was, but she’d already backed too far away from me by then. She’d always just say, “Oh, no one.” And all I could think was, Are you still into it? Like, are you still into what?

LIU WAI:

I only ever met her after the fact, but from what I remember, she said her audition had gone well? She just preferred the idea of University of Manchester.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

So, with all Dad’s dreams in her head, she applied to the School of Vocal Studies and Opera at the Royal Northern College of Music. You know, this isn’t belting out golden oldies to your parents’ friends after dinner. It’s not small-town, amateur-dramatic stuff. These kids have been raised for it. They show up singing arias out of their arses, references from private schools, known names, the lot. They speak three languages and still have nannies at seventeen years old. It wasn’t fair forcing Zoe to compete against them.