True Crime Story(59)

ANDREW FLOWERS:

I’m sure Liu Wai can make herself believe in anything that benefits her. Look, to some extent, I was the same, but at least I can come out and say it. I didn’t have so many questions about money back in those days because it was a fact of my life. I wish like fuck it still was. At the time, I’d always had it, and so had everyone around me. I never thought to ask.

FINTAN MURPHY:

As I’ve said before, I’m not certain my friendship with Zoe was necessarily representative of the friendships she shared with others. When we were together, we walked, perhaps we got a coffee when we felt extravagant. I didn’t have two cents to rub together, so I’m sure Zoe would have felt it incongruous to flash the cash in front of me.

SARAH MANNING:

We knew the date that the money started to arrive in Zoe’s bank. The first payment was a small amount, a couple of hundred pounds, likely a test, before the second payment of ￡15,000 reached her account on October 1, so just a couple of weeks after she moved to Manchester. Certainly not singing money saved from down through the years.

ROBERT NOLAN:

Zoe had been picking up paid singing work since she was sixteen years old. We’re talking cash in hand, though, fifty here, a hundred there. The biggest shows she did were with choirs and orchestras, concerts where she’d travel with a group of other musicians, usually by bus, but it was rare she stayed away—and that was really just for the experience more than the money. It wasn’t about that for her.

SARAH MANNING:

We could also see where some of the money had gone. The largest purchase was an Apple Mac laptop, but there were plenty more. Frédéric Malle perfume, Moschino dresses, Chanel makeup. And then there were the more social expenses. Meals, cinema seats, gig tickets. Liu Wai and Zoe were due to go and see Bruno Mars, the cast of Glee and Beyoncé in the New Year, all paid for on Zoe’s card.

Frustratingly, none of the social expenditures went any way toward explaining the unaccounted-for times in Zoe’s days. This is all a very long way of saying that we had to get right down into the nitty-gritty of her financial life, times, dates and places, because the source of the cash—what should have been the single biggest lead in the case—was untraceable. The analysts hit a brick wall.

MARTIN BLACKMORE, Independent financial forensics analyst:

In the normal course of things, each time you make a payment, your transaction will be recorded alongside your personal data. So tracing the cash in a person’s account is usually a matter of speaking to their bank manager for five minutes, supposing you can get authorization to do so. Of course, some payers are cleverer. As more cash and information gets exchanged digitally, so too the desire for anonymity increases. We’re talking about behavior that’s widely discouraged by the authorities, but then so’s smoking and drinking. So’s not paying your taxes.

As long as there’s a demand for anonymity, someone out there will provide it. And where even one such service in the world exists, there’s no real way to stop people from using it. As things stand, you’ve got various methods at your disposal, all of them providing greater or lesser degrees of security. You could set up a trust, for example, or a shell corporation and send money from there. There’s the mythical but still somewhat effective Swiss bank account, estate transfers, on and on. Cryptocurrency is thought of as a fairly recent example, but it was established in 2009, two years before Miss Nolan went missing, so it’s certainly possible. Crypto brands itself as a decentralized digital currency with no central bank or administrator, something attached to no one nation or government. A cash transfer system so anonymous that no one even knows who really established it. I could set up a bitcoin account and be sending anonymous payments to anyone I pleased before you could clear security and leave this building. All I’d need to give them is an email address. And that’s just one kind of cryptocurrency.

So that’s the how of it, but what about the why? Why do people want to go to the trouble of sending payments anonymously? Well, let’s look at the examples that might have been related to your case. The three Es: espionage, extortion, or extracurricular activities, by which I mean paying someone to do something illegal. You don’t want to use your Lloyds online account to hire a contract killer, for example.

Espionage feels unlikely, the idea of the digital dead drop. From what you’ve told me, Zoe wasn’t moving in any particularly grand circles, not traveling internationally as part of her work, and the sums are far too great for the spooks I’ve met. There are the unaccounted for times and dates in her life when I suppose you could imagine her crawling through the air vents in a nuclear power plant with a camera attached to her head or something, but I think it’s a stretch.

Then you’ve got extortion, which feels like a more comfortable fit. By extortion in this instance, I think we’d be talking about straight blackmail. Zoe acting as middleman for someone who could expose an individual or institutional vulnerability. Or perhaps she even initiated it, personally blackmailing a man who’d behaved inappropriately, for example. Seventy-seven grand seems a bit steep, price-wise, but there you go.

For me, the most intriguing E is probably extracurricular. I shouldn’t think she’s a hit woman or a bank robber, but the people I encounter in my line of work who pay young people like this with no discernible reason usually turn out to be criminals. Gun against my head, I’d say the most likely scenario is that Zoe was a money mule, a smurfer, for a criminal enterprise. Perhaps she didn’t even know it. She was approached or seduced into the operation, promised a fee to allow this money to rest in her account for a while. She’s someone who no authority on earth would suspect of hiding vast sums, so she’d be a good fit for a criminal to try and launder it through.