FINTAN MURPHY:
Liu and I started meeting most days after that. Awful as it sounds, we were energized by Alex’s death, and Liu had this brain wave, one that turned out to be quite brilliant, actually. We’d been briefed, along with the family, about this mystery man, this picture found among Zoe’s things. Of course, by this point, the man had been identified as Professor Michael Anderson, but it seemed as though that had all ended in disappointment. Where we’d thought the police were charging off to arrest him, they’d simply asked if he knew Zoe, and he’d simply said no. Speaking for myself, I remember Zoe and I walking, that first day we met, when she’d stopped cold at the sight of the Royal Northern. At the time, I’d put it down to her being upset about not studying there, but I’d come to the conclusion that it had been more serious than that. She’d barely been able to speak. She’d been traumatized by something, and that place represented it to her. I was convinced that she was traumatized by Michael Anderson himself.
At the time, I think we all felt the same way—useless, sick with worry and uncertainty—so when Liu suggested we try to find some kind of link between Zoe and Anderson, to prove that he might have known her outside that audition, I leapt at the chance to help. What with my time spent assisting Zoe’s parents and my attempts to actually study, that meant pretty much no sleep for a few weeks. As you may have noticed, I’m not so good at putting my own life first. What had been a promising relationship with my flatmate Connor unfortunately started to fall even further by the wayside.
LIU WAI:
I could see how run-down Fintan was. I felt guilty because I knew he was incapable of saying no, but I couldn’t think of who else to ask. Certainly not Kim, Andrew, or Jai. And it was too big a job to do on my own. So much of Zoe’s life was on Facebook. Nowadays, that kind of stuff would probably be a big lead for the police, but outside a cursory glance, I wasn’t sure they’d really taken that much interest in Zoe’s life online? From what we could see, Michael Anderson didn’t have an account, at least not under his own name, but there were literally thousands of pictures on Zoe’s page that we could work our way through.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Everything. Every last thing. Everything Zoe had uploaded and everything that she’d been tagged in, just anything to find some link. It took us forever.
LIU WAI:
If Zoe was tagged even once in an album, we went through every single picture, even ones that had nothing to do with her. It took us days and days, because when we found albums that we couldn’t access, usually because they belonged to other users who’d made them private, we’d message the people who’d uploaded them, explaining our situation, asking for their help. It all took time.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Alongside that work, we were also going through Zoe’s wall uploads as well, making note of any strange comments left by people we didn’t know or any unusual posts made by Zoe herself. Anything mentioning secrets or men of course, but there was precious little like that. Zoe would mainly post links to music videos or quotes of song lyrics. The only thing that really stuck out to us in that regard was when we saw she’d posted one particular song several times. We collated each instance we could find and saw that it was always uploaded at the same time, midnight, on the first day of every month. It surprised us to see that she’d been doing this for years, twenty some posts, with only one brief gap, the first few months following her RNCM audition.
We started scrolling back, looking for the original post, and the earliest we found was from August 2009, roughly two years before she went missing. It was a song by a Scottish band neither of us had heard of called Mogwai, not really Zoe’s thing at all, and it was called “R U Still in 2 It?” This kind of sad, dirty, strangely romantic love song. I can’t go a day without thinking about it now.
LIU WAI:
It gave us a window to focus on. Pictures, albums, uploads from 2009. We wanted to find whatever had sparked off this weird tradition. Zoe would have been fifteen or sixteen that year and had started doing a lot more music-related activities outside school, judging from her Facebook activity. Travelling with busloads of kids to perform concerts in Birmingham or something, then all coming back again the same night. Seemingly everyone on those trips would take pictures and upload their own albums to Facebook, so you’d have the same night from twenty different angles. It was useful for us but, you know, endless.
FINTAN MURPHY:
It was literally the end of the day, a minute or two to midnight, when we found it. We’d been listening to a playlist that Liu and I had compiled of Zoe’s favorite songs, which was about six or seven hours of music. It had run out and stopped playing ages before, which gives you some idea how long we’d been sitting there. This was probably our fifth or sixth day straight. I was standing up, stretching, getting ready to leave, when Liu started hitting my arm, pinching me. She couldn’t even speak.
LIU WAI:
Because we got the fucker. Zoe and Michael Anderson in 2009. Onstage. Together. Two years before her audition at the Royal Northern College of Music. Some choral performance in Manchester. There are, like, twenty-five people on stage, and it’s a rehearsal picture, but there they are. Not standing together, not looking at each other, but in the same place at the same time. It was soon afterward that Zoe started posting the “R U Still in 2 It?” song on her page. I thought, Boom, scumbag.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-02-20 21:53
To: you
on Sun, Feb 17, 2019, Joseph Knox [email protected] wrote:
Evening, E. Some thoughts on Ch.19:
1/ “R U Still in 2 it?” as in, “Are you still into it?” As in, the phone calls Zoe was getting as a kid? Kim said those calls stopped abruptly AFTER Zoe’s failed audition. Is it possible she met Anderson on the road at 15, was coerced into an affair with him, then split when he knocked her back from the RNCM audition?
2/ This fucked up menstrual thing with the mannequin. Sarah says it made her think of sexual obsession, but couldn’t it equally be linked to fertility? Does Anderson have kids? Any history of difficulty conceiving? I know that’s mad but so’s everything.
3/ If what Sarah’s saying about Zoe’s living space is true, i.e., that it was uniquely suited to the kind of surveillance she was under, then it makes me wonder. Sarah said they couldn’t work out if Zoe’s stalker ever really targeted her, or if they just already knew about the crawl space and waited to see who moved in. Did Anderson ever work or study at Manchester University? Could he have found out about the space that way?