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.
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.