True Crime Story(52)
SARAH MANNING:
The disarray of that press conference set the tone all wrong. The conclusions we allowed people to draw from it hindered our investigation from the off. It was like a starter’s pistol for every exploitative reporter, every cowboy with a pet theory, every dirty cop with a story to tell. Basically anyone and everyone with a mortgage to pay.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
They say everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame. Mine were merciless. There had been the pictures, the insinuations made about me, but then came the unnamed sources. Someone from the police putting it out there that I had a criminal record for theft, even though I was a “rich kid” and could apparently have anything I wanted. I know for a fact that one of my arresting officers from Surrey sold a story anonymously, one suggesting that I referred to the police as “pot bellies.” I know it had to be him because I’d shouted words to that effect while he was handcuffing me six months before. A man spat at me in the street one day, women refused to serve me in shops. When I tried to walk away, they shouted stuff like, “Where’s Zoe Nolan?”
SARAH MANNING:
Andrew has a particular way of speaking, one that immediately put the back up of every officer working on that case, myself included. I’d like to think I’d never let something like that cloud my judgment, but there was legitimate unease about his answers to some of the questions we put to him. James’s team was dissatisfied with his responses on the so-called sex tape, that was certainly true. They thought he was hiding something. They were concerned about what Alex Wilson had said—about Zoe being scared of him that day—but to see those theories printed in newspapers, attributed to officers who “wished to remain nameless,” was a different thing. It incensed me. Frankly, it pissed me off, but there was a feeling in the team that keeping this kind of pressure on Andrew might yield results. At the same time, the family were reading all this unattributed stuff, some of it true, some of it gut instinct, some of it smoking-hot garbage, then thinking I was holding out on them.
No one who gave quotes to the press ever did it in a measured way. They never said, “This kid’s been through an emotionally demanding situation and acted strangely.” They never left any room for doubt, because doubt doesn’t sell newspapers. The quotes you’d see would say things like, “Everyone in that room knew he was lying about the sex tape. He was the only person who could have leaked it.” Whether that was true or not, the place for those kinds of conversations was the incident room, not the national press.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was surprised that was even allowed, to fabricate things or attribute them to anonymous sources. Stories ran about everyone, but especially about me and about Andrew and Jai. The article would be in the paper one day, then the pensioners would write in from Wigan the next. All these poisonous fucking letters pages, all saying we “looked” guilty or knew something more than we were letting on. They said we were in it together, that we’d done something awful with Zoe’s body. I tried not to let it get to me, but I felt like I had to read it, had to try and steel myself against it somehow. Course I ended up just memorizing it all, replaying it in my own head. They said I was “dark” and “troubled.” I’d cut my hair off and started wearing black because I worshipped the devil, because I hated beauty, because I hated my sister and didn’t want to look anything like her. It was a crash course in how fast people fucking judge you. You start catching looks in the street, hearing whispers while you’re in line at Aldi, but what can you do? You can’t stop passersby and swear your innocence, explain your life story, like, “Wait, it’s not true. I just wanted to try and look like myself,” so people judge you. At a certain point, you see and hear so much shit it becomes like the voice in your head, you start judging yourself for them.
And I was losing my mind as it was.
Walking into rooms not remembering why I was there, leaving things on the stove or in the oven or whatever. Picking up cups of coffee I thought I’d made five minutes before and finding them stone-cold. I got burn marks all over my hands and around my wrists from just not thinking in the kitchen, and then the fucking Sun printed a close-up of my arm when I’d been in a supermarket one day, saying I was self-harming. The worst one was my own fault, though. My favorite band at the time were these Danish punks called Iceage. They’d made this kind of new-wave-noise punk album, all dangerous and teenagers and smoldering and gorgeous. And stupidly, I went to see them about five days after Zoe went missing, right before Christmas.
I just needed to feel something good, hear something other than these horrible voices in my head. I needed to get my hair blasted back by music that I loved and forget who I was. All we’d been doing for days was sitting around watching the phone, watching stale sandwiches curl up at the corners like smirking fucking faces. We were just watching the news, waiting for a knock at the door, and the quiet and the stillness felt like it was actually killing me. You couldn’t put a film or a song on, you couldn’t pick up a book and even get to the end of the first sentence. So I went to see some live music, and it was cathartic for me, life-affirming and life-saving. I threw myself around and I sweated and I screamed and I walked out of there remembering what life felt like, what it could be. I couldn’t hear the pensioners in Wigan over the ringing in my ears. I shouted them all down, and that night, I slept properly for the first time since Zoe went missing. Then Dad came into my room a couple of days later and threw a newspaper at me.