True Crime Story(76)
I thought the question of who’d planted Anderson’s picture, if anyone even had, wasn’t really mine to answer. It was just another mystery. For a second, I thought about telling the police, eliminating him as a suspect or whatever, but then I thought, Nah, let the fucker twist. Mainly, I thought about what Jai had said. The way Zoe had been thinking about me all those years, not as a failure but as something good. So I decided I should go out and actually earn her respect. I should find the thing that Kimberly Nolan might want to do with her life and then do it. I dropped out that day, packed a bag and left Manchester for good.
CHLOE MATTHEWS:
One thing I never said at the time, even though I probably should have. Mr. Nolan—he said to call him Rob—he came over and complimented me on looking so much like Zoe, like I said, and even played me a recording of her singing.
The way he put his arm around me, though…
It made me feel uncomfortable. I knew he was suffering, so I didn’t say anything then, but when he really started to grip me about the waist, I think I laughed awkwardly and looked at him, like, Please get the message. He took it the wrong way, though, brushed the hair back from my face and kissed me full on the lips. And I don’t mean in a fatherly way, although I was dressed up as his daughter. I mean his tongue pushed past my teeth. It was moving around inside my mouth before I could shake him off.
* * *
8 All interviews with Chloe Matthews were conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-03-05 21:45
To: you
on Fri, Mar 01, 2019, Joseph Knox [email protected] wrote:
Hey E—I’ve tried calling a few times—wagwan? I just finished part two so I’m fully up to date. Kim confronting Anderson like that is insane. Don’t get any ideas. He’s got some balls even talking to you. Not to go back into it now, but whether she ruled him out or not, please be careful around the guy. He sounds like slime.
Jx
# # #
Sorry, Joe, it’s all been mad here and I’ve gone off the rails a bit.
I’ve been pulling all-nighters for months now. I’m broke and working flat-out, hanging on by the fucking rings around my eyes. So I was really hoping that’s why I’ve felt so rough lately. I decided to try and take it easy for a week or so but I think I might actually feel worse. I really don’t want to think about getting sick again rn. I can’t.
And yes, yes, I’ll see a doctor. I would have gone already but someone broke into my car last week and pissed all over the driver seat. Just another day…
That plus the phone calls and personal ads have me convinced that someone doesn’t want me to be doing this. So thank you for not getting into your reservations again. When I lash out it’s only because I agree. All I have are reservations. I certainly don’t have anyone red-handed, no dead body or smoking gun. I know the appeal for this story’s limited without any kind of answer on Zoe’s whereabouts or her potential attacker. Believe me, I heard that loud and clear from Annalise at Curtis Brown when she let me go as a client last week. (Yep.) So now I don’t have an agent either.
I was talking to Kim just yesterday, saying how run down I was and how hard it felt to keep facing all this rejection. She told me what she did next, all to do with the van stuff, a TRUE exclusive. It’s in rough form—there are still people I need to find and talk to, but I’m sending it so I know there’s a safe copy out there somewhere.
Onward and downward. XXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX
Exxx
Part Three
Zoe Nolan Was Never Here
22.
“Super Dark”
As months go by with no new leads, the main players in Zoe’s life begin to disperse and the stalled investigation draws to an effective standstill.
SARAH MANNING:
The case went cold. Our reconstruction was well timed and well produced, and it aired to millions of people on prime-time television. It also allowed us the chance to blitz newspapers and magazines with renewed appeals for information. Rob Nolan did the rounds everywhere that would have him—photo ops, phone-ins, on-air interviews, usually with either Fintan or Liu somewhere in tow. And all this in tandem with a ￡10,000 reward for anyone with information that led to Zoe’s whereabouts.
Calls were coming in at first, believe me.
Crackpot theories, sightings, tips, none of them leading anywhere. There was burgeoning resentment in the team for Rob Nolan and the press relations he’d employed, namely selling stories to the tabloids to try and keep pictures of Zoe in circulation. Roughly a third of the calls coming in to the tip line felt like a result of that. A lot of people just wanted to tell us that they thought Kim, Andrew or Jai Mahmood were responsible for Zoe’s disappearance somehow. By this point, hundreds of man-hours had gone into the case. The entire local area had been canvassed, a three-mile radius, thousands of homes. Every Owens Park resident had been interviewed, some of them several times. Anderson was under surveillance, but with an alibi for the night of Zoe’s disappearance, with no hard evidence against him, with really nothing but the picture to go on, even that was curtailed.
To put it simply, there was no way forward. The sad fact is you can’t have all those highly trained people sitting around spinning their wheels. The case was downgraded. It remained officially open, but DI James was reassigned and his team was disbanded. I was given other duties alongside my work with the Nolans, but quite honestly, they took up less and less of my time.