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.
Unfortunately, there are strong arguments against all three. Her disappearance certainly fits espionage, but nothing else we know of her life suggests it. The cash suits extortion, but then why wasn’t the money claimed after her disappearance? Why didn’t anyone even try? And the same goes for being a mule. In fact, in that instance, you’d expect to see test payments in and out before they transferred any whopping great sums to her, and the payments out never happened, not even small ones. It seems unlikely that they’d keep pumping cash in without even attempting to move it on.
Given her background, her social standing, her youth, what I don’t really see is any way your Zoe acquired this kind of money in anything other than illegal circumstances. I’d suggest that whatever the poor girl got wrapped up in, it was as serious as a heart attack.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-02-13 22:17
To: you
Hey, Foxy Knoxy—are you not talking to me now?
Here’s an icebreaker, then. Today I opened the door to a nervous guy asking if I was Evelyn. I said, “Yeah, do I know you?” He said he was my five o’clock. I was like, “My five o’clock what?” He was sweating by this point and it SUDDENLY dawned on me what he was there for. I said, “Sorry bud, I think someone’s playing a prank on us, can I ask where you got my address?”
He was nice enough, bit out of breath, but he did show me the site. It was ANOTHER personal ad, saying roughly the same thing as before, and that I’d undercut any other girl in the area. He’d messaged them to arrange a date and someone actually replied, setting one up, sending him to MY FLAT.
This guy got into the building because someone was leaving when he walked in, but my door’s been buzzed THREE TIMES SINCE. I’ve contacted the site and had it taken down but wanted to say sorry for blowing up at you before. I know you were just worried.
I guess it’s just hard to hear those kinds of doubts from one of the only people I feel like I can trust.
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