You have to remember I haven’t slept in more than twenty-four hours by this point. Now Zoe and Jai are both missing, apparently shagging, and the police think I’m responsible. They left me alone in there a while, an hour or so, then came back and started belting me with pictures of tough guys, running their records down for me. Telling me this one killed a man, this one raped a girl, all of them dealers, motherfuckers, fatherfuckers, babyfuckers even. All possible known associates of Jai’s. They’re telling me that they suspect he’s dealing drugs to vulnerable young women, that he’s taking advantage of them. My head was like a merry-go-round, my face hurt, I felt sick. I didn’t know him very well, but I’d thought he was a decent guy. It upended me. Finally, I said, “Look, unless I’m under arrest, I want to talk to someone. I want to go home.”
They admitted there was no legal case to hold me, so they sort of shrugged and said I was free to go. I didn’t even know where I was, which station, what part of the sodding city I was in. I hadn’t seen natural light in hours. So I went out into the corridor and called my father. It was the first time we’d spoken in six months. Afterward, I kind of walked out into the street, probably crying and pissing my pants, and saw Rob Nolan, Zoe’s dad, heading straight for me.
SALLY NOLAN:
I was never anything to do with Rob’s plan. When he told me what he was up to, I didn’t know where to look. I thought, Who the hell are you? What the hell are you thinking?
ROBERT NOLAN:
The press conference I’d organized was the next day, the first Monday after Zoe went missing. It was planned as an appeal for information, to get her face out there and make it clear that her family meant business. And I wanted the police to get that message too. They’d been shit from the word go. Pure shit. Slow to take us serious or even get that Zoe wasn’t the kind to just wander off without a word. So I was trying to pressure them as much as anything, and it worked because they finally came up with a name for me and a kind of a strategy.
They asked if they could add an appeal for a young lad to come forward, a Jai Mahmood. There was stuff in the press after about racial profiling, but that was something of nothing. I don’t see it. I don’t care if you’re black or white or green. I just said, “Absolutely, fantastic, we’re finally getting somewhere.” So a part of me did want Andrew—apparently Jai’s best mate—to be up there with us. I thought maybe that’d bring this Jai out of the woodwork faster?
But I knew I had to play every side.
When I saw that lad Andrew’s face, my girl’s scratch marks in his skin, nothing could have convinced me he wasn’t involved. Nothing. I thought other people might feel the same way, so I decided to put him onstage, scratch marks and all. I thought, Let’s let the world decide, then we’ll see if he feels like talking.
SARAH MANNING:
I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t advised Rob and Andrew against going ahead with it. To Rob, I tried to make the case that he’d be turning his appeal into an entertainment, a zoo, but I think that appealed to him. It was his way of taking control of the narrative and showing that he was the man in charge.
With Andrew, I just showed him the picture of his face we’d taken at the station, asked him what he thought people might think when they saw it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. His mind was elsewhere. He was trying to act in the way he thought a normal person might. The problem is, for better or worse, Andrew Flowers is unusual. I don’t say that judgmentally but as a statement of fact. His background’s unimaginable to anyone outside of the 1 percent. Motorbikes for birthdays, ski trips for Christmas. That means when he tries to imitate normal behavior patterns, he massively overshoots or undershoots, because they’re just alien to him. It’s not that he’s speaking a foreign language, he’s doing an impersonation of someone speaking a foreign language. So he eventually said, “Her family’s asked me to help. How can I say no?” And I wanted to shout at him, “You can say no because it’s going to ruin your life.”
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I’d called my father, but he didn’t have time to talk. He just put me on to Lipson, the family lawyer. So when I left that station and walked into Rob Nolan, I suppose I was quite emotional, I suppose I was quite stupid. I just saw a dad taking charge, doing everything he could for his child. When he put his hand out for me to shake, I took it. Looking back, I should have told him to stick it up his arse.
* * *
6 All interviews with Dr. Hannah Docherty were conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
13.
“Under Pressure”
On the third day of the investigation into Zoe’s disappearance, the press conference organized by her father forces almost everyone into the spotlight, with disastrous results.
ROBERT NOLAN:
You want to go in and start shouting. That’s your first instinct. Fight the universe. Then you think you should talk to whoever it is that’s done it, make a deal and reason with them. Say you don’t have to involve the police at all, that you can settle it quietly. They just need to let your kid go and all’s right with the world.
SARAH MANNING:
We briefed the Nolan family not to make an emotional or aggressive appeal. Everything we know about these situations tells us not to point the finger, not to make any inflammatory or accusatory statements. We asked them to make it clear how much they loved their daughter, how painful it was to be apart from Zoe, perhaps even articulate the emotional weight of not knowing. The aim of the game is to humanize the missing person and humanize your family. We know that an individual who might take a young woman is likely someone who’s become temporarily or permanently empathically disengaged, someone who’s lost all sympathy. We’re trying to communicate directly with them, to say, “This is a person. Be careful.” That’s a complex enough message without playing games.
ROBERT NOLAN:
It goes against what you’re thinking and feeling in the moment, because you know someone’s done something. You know your kid hasn’t just wandered off. All parents do in that situation. They can tell when something’s wrong, and my heart goes out to them. It’s the worst club in the world you can be a member of. So I got through it by telling myself it was a performance. I just learned my lines and recited them, but I made damn sure I was playing all sides.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
On the morning of the appeal and with some sleep in me, I happened to look at the picture the police had taken of my face. Constable Manning had left me a copy, and I started to see what she was saying. I tried to broach the subject with Rob Nolan, to suggest it might be a distraction having me up there, looking like something the cat had been at.
ROBERT NOLAN:
I said, “You’ve got to be up there. If Zoe’s watching and she’s upset about this fight, it’s important she sees you want her back, that she isn’t in trouble.”
ANDREW FLOWERS:
When I sort of started to say I didn’t think she’d feel particularly bad about the fight Rob just interrupted, got loud, hammered me with questions he already knew the answers to. If all else failed he’d lean on his age, his supposed life experience. A few times he even shouted me down. He reminded me of my own father in that respect. He expected to be listened to, his instructions followed. He told me it wasn’t too much to ask. And besides, he said the police were requesting that I go up there now, he said they wanted me to appeal for Jai to come forward.
SARAH MANNING:
No one ever told Rob Nolan that Andrew’s presence was required for Jai to come forward. Quite the opposite.