True Crime Story(77)

There was just nothing left to say.

ROBERT NOLAN:

Your daughter going missing, people can just about grasp that, the phantom-limb idea. You’re disfigured, and saving a miracle, you won’t ever be whole again. But to feel the case going limp, to watch it curl up and die in my arms…

It was the one thing in life keeping me going.

Not forever, but just day to day. It didn’t thrill me or make me jump out of bed in the morning, but it was like a life-support machine or something. Just enough to get through the twenty-four hours that happened to be in front of me. When the tip line went dry, when there was no news—not even bad news—when the phone just stopped ringing, that was my lowest point. I’d been using any distraction I could to stay at one remove from reality, one step ahead of it, but that felt like a nearly lethal dose of the stuff. I couldn’t take it, I freely admit.

The future I’d imagined was gone, and, well, I’ve always been a fixer, a self-made man, so I set about building a new one. I turned everything to kick-starting the Nolan Foundation. I’d been on leave until then, but I handed in my notice at work and said to myself, this is my life from now on.

SALLY NOLAN:

We spent less and less time together after the reconstruction. It was the end of so many things. The investigation, my marriage, my family. Rob came to bed hours after I did, got up again before I was even awake. Sometimes he didn’t come to bed at all. I was angry, and he knew it, but he’d gone too far down that road to turn back. I couldn’t help but think, you know, we lost Zoe against our will, but now it’s like we’re choosing to lose each other, to lose Kim.

We knew she’d left Manchester, and she texted us every week or so to say she was safe, but that was it. She wouldn’t say where she was and I knew why. She thought Rob would pass on her whereabouts to the press, anything to keep the wheels spinning, and she was probably right—there was nothing he wouldn’t have done.

LIU WAI:

I tried to help in any way I could. Obviously I’d never say this in front of the Nolans, but I found myself almost hoping for the worst? Like, give me bad news, give me anything. Just give me something definite that can pull us all out of this spiral and end the story one way or another. I tried to help with the start-up of the foundation—making and fielding phone calls, applying for grants and funding—but it was too much. Mr. Nolan was very particular in his vision of the charity. Things had to be done in this certain order, a certain way, and if you stepped outside that, he could get livid and take it as a personal insult. I never held that against him, given the circumstances, but alongside my studies, it was just too much? I had to remember that there was a reason I’d gone to Manchester in the first place, there were still things I wanted. Some days, I saw Fintan literally out on his feet. Like, however much he had to give, Rob Nolan always took it.

FINTAN MURPHY:

Well, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I was drawn to the idea of an active parent, even one who could be as domineering as Robert. In a strange way, I think we each fulfilled a need that the other had. He became a father figure for me, and I suppose I became a kind of surrogate child for him. We kept each other going. It was trying, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, but at the end of the day, at least we were doing some good. The division of labor made itself apparent quite quickly. I was working behind the scenes, and Robert was out front as the spokesperson. That’s not to say we didn’t have our disagreements.

He was always more drawn to immediate rewards than the rigors of running what amounted to something like a small business. So where I might want to pool our resources and pour them into our originally stated goal of establishing a scholarship in Zoe’s name, assisting young women from working-class backgrounds in getting an education, Robert wanted to release a charity single of his own composition, “Zoe’s Song,” to put her image, rather than her spirit, at the forefront of our operations. Where I wanted to spearhead Zoe’s Law, to make it illegal for teachers to engage in relationships with students, Robert was more drawn toward lobbying celebrities to join the appeal. You said that Sally told you Robert believed everything he read? I’m not sure that’s quite fair, but I can see where she’s coming from. The way I’d characterize him is to say that he realized a lot of other people believed everything they read.

Perhaps even the vast majority of them.

And so he was always gearing his message toward the largest populace he could. I’ll admit now that I had some fear about his motives buried at the back of my mind. That probably helped me stick around through hard times when I might otherwise have walked away. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I’d just gone through my first real breakup. Us weirdos from fucked-up homes are always so desperate to start families, to right the wrongs that have been done to us, and I guess I’d imagined adopting with Connor, or at least with someone, somewhere down the line. I knew if I stuck around the foundation that I’d be giving up that kind of future, at least for a time. The thing is, I worried that, unchecked, Robert might turn it into something garish. At first, we each recognized that the other’s response to the situation was valid. At first, our two approaches complemented each other. But I suppose time isn’t particularly kind to any type of relationship.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

When I thought about what I loved, it came down to my greatest achievement, Chihiro, my bonsai tree, and the hikes I used to take in the back fields behind our house when we were kids. So when I left Manchester, I tried to move toward those things. I got a job in Ambleside, in the Lake District, somewhere we’d gone a lot when we were kids. It’s a beautiful gray town filled with English spaniels where it almost literally never stops raining. My job was with the National Trust. Conservation, a lot of outdoor work, gardening and learning simple repairs. How to be a handyman basically. I didn’t have any money, and I lived in a tiny room above a pub at first. No one knew who I was, and when I went down to the bar on Sundays for my weekly pint, I’d be so tired I could go whole minutes without thinking about things.