KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was glad of the interruption when Sarah got a phone call and we all took a break. She went out for a minute, then came back to tell us there’d been a development, that they’d identified the man in the picture. When she gave us the name, I broke out in goose bumps.
ROBERT NOLAN:
Michael Anderson was head of the panel that failed Zoe in her Royal Northern College of Music audition, despite her being more than qualified to be there. And now we find out this picture she’d hidden was of him. I hit the fucking roof.
SARAH MANNING:
Anderson’s face was about to start going out to the world as part of a press appeal. We had to share his identification with the family immediately so they wouldn’t find out about it from someone else, but of course we were concerned about Robert’s press relations.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Dad was just shouting, “Is he under arrest?” Grabbing his keys and putting his jacket on, trying to get out the door like he could go and get him himself.
SARAH MANNING:
I was trying to explain that we didn’t know what this information meant. It was still just a glossy picture cut out from a magazine. One found inside a tin that we suspect someone else might have tampered with. It was hardly a smoking gun.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
In all the excitement, them shouting, then trying to calm each other down, I just got up and left. We’d been talking to the producers in a coffee shop in Fallowfield, and I started walking, then running back to Owens Park, because I’d finally remembered something. I went straight to the tower, up in the lift and down the hall. I unlocked the door to 15C, just sort of shaking and out of breath, double locked it behind me and went into Zoe’s room. Here’s all this stuff the police had been through, all this stuff we’d been through, over and over again, and there in all her music books, I found the prospectus for the Royal Northern College of Music. I remembered it because she’d left it lying open in our room for weeks when she was applying there. I turned to the page where I knew I’d seen this man’s picture and found it had been ripped out. Someone had taken it.
So…
I realized I was holding something really important, something vital, because whoever put that picture up on the roof had to have taken it from here. I was thinking of DNA, fingerprints, holding it by the edges, when I heard this rumbling sound from somewhere else in the flat, like someone banging, shouting, trapped inside the walls. I went out into the hall as fast as I could but heard this thud from somewhere behind me, then this thing like a scream. I was at the door with my hand on it when I had to stop and turn around, because I could hear someone breathing hard, like, struggling for air in the hallway behind me.
There was a man standing there. I think it was a man. He was wearing Andrew’s Halloween costume, the Scream mask and black cloak, watching me, breathing like he’d just run up fifteen flights of stairs. He held out his hand, but I put the prospectus behind my back, which was pressed against our front door. There was this energy in the air, like this ambient hate coming off him in waves, and I could tell that whoever it was knew me. You can’t look at someone like that unless you know them. Whether he was the one I’d seen buzzing our door that night, the shadow, or someone else, I didn’t know. But he took one step forward and punched me in the stomach so hard I fell down and threw up. He ripped the prospectus out of my hands, then stepped over me, struggled with the door and left.
PROFESSOR MICHAEL ANDERSON, Head of Vocal Studies, RNCM:
My recollection of events is that I was only too happy to cooperate, to help the police in any way I could. Just as I’m only too happy to set the record straight with you today. I had absolutely nothing to hide and, in my mind at least, no connection whatsoever to this unfortunate young woman.
SARAH MANNING:
Michael Anderson lawyered up immediately, refused to answer anything but the most basic questions and threw up every roadblock he could think of. Cooperative is not the word. In that first interview, he didn’t make a single statement that wasn’t delivered through his legal representative.
PROFESSOR MICHAEL ANDERSON:
I believe I was leading a workshop at the time, probably taking one or two students through the very basics of whatever their elective path was, be it composition or improvisation or so forth, when the police arrived. We moved into my office to talk more comfortably, and they asked if the name Zoe Nolan meant anything to me. I had to confess that it didn’t, so they showed me her picture. I took my time looking at it, because so many young women passed through those doors each year, but she didn’t seem familiar. I asked what it was all about, and they told me that she was missing. I said I was sorry to hear it.
SARAH MANNING:
What struck the team as unusual was that, while of course a lot of young women passed through Michael Anderson’s offices, and it made sense that he wouldn’t remember one who hadn’t progressed past the interview stage, we already knew for a fact that wasn’t where his relationship with the Nolan family ended.
ROBERT NOLAN:
I’d found his office number listed online after the Royal Northern rejected Zoe. This must have been about six months before she went missing. I called him the same day and asked respectfully, in that first instance at least, if there was anything we could do. If Zoe could prepare three more songs for another performance, or if he might take a second look at her scores. We spoke for five or ten minutes, and I made him take me through the whole list, pull up the file, every reason he didn’t think she was good enough. We discussed her in detail.
He said I should leave it with him.
SALLY NOLAN:
To Rob’s way of thinking, he’d had so many doors closed on him because of his background, he didn’t want to see the same happen to Zoe. It twisted him up in knots because he thought his accent or his lack of theory or a wrong word here and there had hurt her chances. So he called Anderson and tried to fix it. I was in the room with him for every one of those phone calls and they all got heated. We’re talking five or six conversations over a couple of weeks, the last of them turning into a shouting match. Rob had called him at home, at night, and Anderson said it was getting too much, he’d failed Zoe and that was that. He said the next time Rob called, he’d find himself talking to the police.