True Crime Story(72)

Because most of all, I didn’t want anything further to do with the police or the press. They’d been doing me from both ends for weeks by this point—odd stories, endless shit, occasional working-class heroes out on the street, all these fucking Kevs and Bevs banging into my shoulder, shouting at me as I walked by.

So when Lipson, my father’s lawyer, turned up at my door, I thought it was the turning of the tide, some cessation of hostilities with my own family at least. Lipson was essentially approaching me on the police’s behalf. He’d spoken to them and worked out a deal where I’d sign a statement disputing Jai’s version of events re a photograph the police had taken from him. He explained that I needed the points, with my father as much as the police, and with the press perhaps more than anyone. I just had to fuck over my friend to earn them. So I let him hold my hand through it, essentially saying, “Jai was lying. The officer never took that picture from him.” It’s just that when it came to the crunch, I couldn’t sign it. I let Jai down the night Zoe went missing, and it ate at me. I couldn’t do it again. So I said I was sorry and ripped up the statement and probably my life and future along with it.

SARAH MANNING:

It turned out that a police officer had broken the chain of evidence by removing a similar picture from Jai’s possession during the investigation into Zoe’s missing underwear. We had to let Jai go because we could no longer say with certainty that he’d placed the picture in the crawl space. Incidentally, that officer did find the picture he’d taken some weeks later, while cleaning out his desk. It’s slightly different from the reprints we found in the crawl space, so its presence in the outside world never truly exonerated Jai.

My mind kept going back to that hole in the wall, this obsessive life we’d uncovered as a result. I’d been inside that space. I knew what it took to move through it. We were looking for someone who was prepared to edge their way through total darkness just to get a glimpse of Zoe. Of course we wondered who that could be. The problem was that our list of suspects were all friends and family, all people already in her life. Why would any of them be so desperate to see her? They could just knock on her door at any time. I thought it had to be someone outside her social circle. That was the only way that clandestine kind of close observation made sense.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL ANDERSON:

I had questions being put to me about times and dates I couldn’t possibly account for—mine is simply not that kind of job—and about enormous sums of money, and, well, it was laughable. Teaching—I should say lecturing—doesn’t leave a lot left over to siphon away into the bank accounts of young women. Would that it did.

SARAH MANNING:

At the time, it was impossible to definitively tie Anderson to the cash, and of course he was less than forthcoming about it himself. His salary was somewhere between ￡80,000 and ￡95,000 a year. Good money if you can get it, but clearly not enough to be moving sums like the ￡77,000 found in Zoe’s account. If it came from him, it certainly wasn’t from his salary.

ALICE ELLIS (formerly Alice Anderson):

I’ll be very interested to hear what Michael’s said, but you bet I can clear some things up. All that cash is simplest. Michael inherited a large pile of money from his grandfather in 2009 and another fat wodge from his mother in 2010. His grandfather was Sir Christopher Michael Anderson, a property magnate, richer than God. It was never explained to me exactly what kind of sums we were talking about, which I assume made them substantial. We had no mortgage on either of the houses, though, no monthly budget, put it that way. Oh, and I met Michael when I was one of his students at the Royal Northern College of Music.

Just by the by.

There was a roughly twenty-year age gap between us, so when it came to our finances, I was more like his child than his partner. And by 2011, we weren’t talking finances at all, because I’d asked Michael for a divorce. Why? Why not? I could always smell women on him, by which I mean girls. I could always see lies in his stupid red face. I could always feel my life passing me by. When I suggested we separate, he became cold, distant, holding me at arm’s length while he got his affairs in order, so to speak. I suspected at the time that he was moving his family money around so he wouldn’t have to cut it in half when we got divorced. The ￡77,000 could easily have come from that.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL ANDERSON:

Alice? Well, as with all things Alice, the twenty-year age gap is a slight exaggeration in her favor. I think she’s perhaps seventeen years my junior, but let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of a good sound bite. And our relationship, such as it was, didn’t begin until long after she’d been a student of mine. Outside Louisa, our daughter, we don’t have any kind of relationship today. That’s probably why Alice has an ax to grind now. At the time, though, I’d agree with her self-assessment. She was a very sad person. When it comes to motherhood, some women rise to the challenge and some simply shrink away from it. Alice, I’m sad to say, was the latter. She acted like she had postpartum depression before she got pregnant, so you can imagine what she was like after. I just couldn’t believe how disappointed she seemed to have this tiny miracle, Louisa, in our lives all of a sudden. That’s why I initiated the divorce.

ALICE ELLIS:

A consummate dick right down to the end. I just wish I could say he was a big one. I wasn’t ever sad or disappointed with Louisa. She was my only reason to keep on living, in the face of everything else. Michael would literally sit there and say black was white to your face. So nights he told me he’d be home late from the college, he might not come home at all. “I told you.” No, you fucking didn’t, darling. When I was raising Louisa, I’d never been more on my own, so I noticed when he came in seven or eight hours late. After we separated, I learned that he’d isolated me from my family and my friends by design. He hung up on them when they called me, he deleted emails, he didn’t pass on messages. He told my mother, who was struggling with a weight problem at the time, that she disgusted me. We didn’t speak for seven months. I know he’d deny all this if it was ever put to him, but that’s Michael. The ultimate vocal coach, the ultimate performer. A master of mimicking voices and styles, without any real style of his own.