Because in my experience—both fictional and factual—girls went missing all the time. As a crime writer, missing girls were more or less my stock-in-trade. Morbidly, I suppose I still expected Zoe to turn up somewhere, even all those years on, not alive necessarily but at least as a dead body. Perhaps there’d be an almost-iconic death to match her almost-iconic missing-person picture. She’d be discovered in a shallow woodland grave, I thought, or a discarded roadside suitcase, or submerged, sunken, somewhere along Manchester’s thirty-six-mile shipping canal. I expected the mysteries of her life and disappearance to be untangled and normalized, if not today then at least tomorrow. I expected her to be rendered mundane by the great villain of our age—a man—a man who had watched her too closely, a man who had taken things too far, a man who had transformed his dark fantasies into a sad and disturbing reality.
If I hadn’t met Evelyn Mitchell, I wouldn’t have given the story any more thought than that. Hers was the first hand in the air at the Manchester Q and A for my debut novel, Sirens. She asked me about the provenance of serial killers in crime fiction and the genre’s tendency to focus more on its murderers than its victims. At the time, I didn’t know I was being tested, and I answered honestly, that I agreed with her to some extent. There were no serial killers in Sirens, and I said I didn’t think there’d be any serial killers in my future novels either, simply because their motives so often seemed superfluous to me. I worried that these increasingly grotesque supervillains FedExing body parts back and forth across the country minimized victims and occasionally just read as ridiculous. We talked a little more when I signed her book later and exchanged email addresses after she told me that she was a writer as well. Evelyn Mitchell, it turned out, was the author of Exitlessness, a scathing first novel about male excess that had been well-reviewed but arrived too soon, selling so little that her publisher stopped returning her calls. A few years had passed and she was no longer the bright young thing who’d been touted for success by the likes of the Observer and the London Review of Books. Now she was standing in line waiting for me, just as in a few years, I’d be standing in line waiting for someone else.
What Evelyn didn’t tell me at the time, what she would, perhaps, have never told the world, was that her career had been waylaid by an unexpected and cruelly unfair breast cancer diagnosis in her late twenties. She had undergone a double mastectomy and suffered countless rounds of chemotherapy, losing crucial writing years and irreplaceable self-confidence. These losses had left her haunted somewhat by the idea, the statistical likelihood, of her own early demise, and she was hungry to make up for lost time on a larger project, one that might leave her mark on the world. Fiction held no more interest for her, she said, real life was terrifying enough. Her new worldview came with a kind of life-affirming fatalism and a surfeit of gallows humor. When she finally told me about her medical history, she smiled across the table and said, “So how does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” I asked.
“How does it feel to be the only tit left in my life?”
In the spring of 2017, when the buzz for my first book died down, I started to meet Evelyn for coffee, sometimes for drinks, and inevitably talk would turn toward what we were both working on. For me, that meant The Smiling Man, my second novel, with which I was determined to improve upon the first. For Evelyn, it meant something else entirely. She had struggled, she said, to find the right project for her second book, struggled with what she saw as her own slow fade into obscurity, until one day, she’d found herself thinking idly, Well, what happens to those girls who go missing? What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world? I encouraged her because I could sense her desperation, because I wanted to be kind, but as my focus shifted to my own work, I increasingly found cause to break our dates, excuses not to meet up for coffee or for drinks. When I was writing intensively, I could comfortably go whole weeks without speaking to friends and family, whole months without opening my emails. I routinely lost track of time and people, but perhaps that’s letting myself off the hook too easily. In Evelyn’s one-room squat, in her frayed clothes and stalled projects, I felt like I could see the dim outline of my own future. A future with no more successes and no more highs, just unanswered calls and rejection letters, just limitless, endless lows. Writers can get superstitious about failure, they think it’s contagious. Our conversation cooled and the basis for our friendship devolved into emails where we’d occasionally say hi and not much else. These emails went from weekly occurrences to monthly ones, from quarterly to almost nothing at all. Then, on June 25, 2018, an email arrived in my inbox with an intriguing subject.
True Crime Story.
Evelyn had, she said, taken the extraordinary step of contacting Zoe Nolan’s immediate family, speaking to them first as a human being and later as a writer. With their consent, she’d spent almost twelve months talking with a wider range of Zoe’s friends and acquaintances, interviewing everyone she could find, anyone who’d speak to her on the record. And as she did, a complex, contradictory picture began to emerge. Where some versions of events overlapped, aligning perfectly with one another, others stood in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies. There were the bitter disappointments that had led Zoe to the degree course where she was, in fact, struggling. There was the criminal boyfriend who refused to leave Zoe alone but admittedly never loved her. There was the unrelenting pressure from Zoe’s parents and the strained, destructive relationship she shared with her twin sister. And then there was the so-called Shadow Man, who stalked Zoe through the city, tracking her every move…
What there clearly was not was any kind of conclusion.
Dwelling on Evelyn’s physical and mental well-being, I felt guilty for having encouraged her down this path in the first place, encouraging her to invest precious time in some unfulfilling and unanswerable mystery. So, to my shame, the email marked True Crime Story went unanswered, and the attachment that Evelyn hoped to use as the first third of this book went unread.