I’d already exited Greater Manchester Police when the tape leaked in full, so anything I say about how it might have affected the investigation is speculative. I can say that with Zoe still missing, her file definitely remains open, even if inactive, and I’d think that a development of this kind would be enough to encourage detectives to take a second look.
Unfortunately for Andrew and Kim, an affair gives them the strongest motive we’ve seen yet to want Zoe out of the picture. We saw how she reacted when she found out, how seriously she took the news. And you could argue that they both benefitted from her disappearance, because seemingly, no one else discovered what they’d done, not until all this.
LIU WAI:
And even more worryingly than that, I started to see for the first time why Andrew and Kim might have wanted to hurt Zoe, how they’d always actually hated her. Andrew with his snobbish downward-looking boredom and Kim with her disapproval of everything her sister represented. I was shocked literally to my core. I remember that I started reading the story on my phone at work, then suddenly I was lying on the office floor, breathing into the brown paper bag I’d brought my Tesco Finest smoked-salmon sandwich in.
Because I started to see how much Andrew and Kim must have hated me too, how personal it had always been. They let the whole world believe I might have had something to do with that tape leaking, when they knew all along that it was never on the laptop Zoe gave me, because she didn’t film it. She wasn’t even in it. She found out about it at exactly the same time I did.
SARAH MANNING:
That said, while I do think it might raise new questions for the investigation and certainly point toward a possible motive, my first concern would be the provenance of that video. This is something that’s lain dormant somewhere for seven years, which suggests someone’s been holding on to it all that time. Our main suspect, our shadow man, was someone so obsessed with Zoe that he stole clothes and other objects belonging to her. He had access to that flat. I’d suggest that makes him the most likely culprit for this leak. So the question is, why now? Who does it benefit?
SALLY NOLAN:
Well, I’d listened to the first message on the machine, which was from Rob, telling me I might hear bad things about him, telling me not to believe them until he’d had a chance to explain. He didn’t say much more than that, but I could tell by his voice it was serious, and of course the next message was from Fintan, who was more informative, more distraught.
Fintan had never had a strong father figure in his life, or a mother figure either, for that matter. He’d looked up to Rob in a lot of ways, and to me too. I could always expect a call from him every few weeks. This wasn’t that, of course. This was him calling to tell me that my ex-husband had been taking advantage of those poor girls from the charity. And obviously we were separated, but it still hurt. And I could tell how scared Fintan was, so I was calling him back when I heard a car outside. I hung up and went out to see Rob parking up. We didn’t have plans, we hadn’t properly spoken in years. He got out of the car looking like an old man and started shouting, “There’s something you need to know,” just like that, not even a hello. I told him I’d already heard, but he shook his head and said, “No, this is important. About Zoe, a break in the case.” I told him to go home and sleep it off, but he went on, some stupid story about that stupid tape. How it supposedly changed everything and now I had to do something for him. I started to walk back inside, but he grabbed me—he’d never grabbed me before, he looked insane, I could smell drink—and he said if I couldn’t do it for him, then I could do it for Zoe. He said no one would listen to him or take his calls because of the allegations. He said he’d been smeared, but I could still go to the press, to the police, and get the case moving. I said, “Stop,” but he kept on, so I said it again and again and again, until I was screaming in his face.
I said, “You did this to us, Rob, all of it. You filled Zoe’s head with your dreams. You made her hate herself for what she wasn’t. You set her on the path to that pig Anderson. You turned her and her sister against each other and forced me to choose between them. If Zoe’s got a killer, it’s you.” He let go and I walked back inside and called Kim. I didn’t look back, and I never have since. I heard the car start a few minutes later and I’ve never seen Rob again. I’m afraid I don’t expect to.
SARAH MANNING:
Rob Nolan called me repeatedly, pressing me to use my contacts, to get the police to arrest Kim and Andrew. I told him I wasn’t working for the police anymore, and anyway, it wasn’t that simple, but he wasn’t listening. Once I got off the phone, I thought about what I said to you before, about who benefits from all this. An affair gives Andrew and Kim a powerful motive to push Zoe aside, no doubt, but with the allegations against him in the press, it was Rob Nolan who really stood to gain from that video’s release. I mean, put it this way. His bad behavior wasn’t the big story that day, was it?
CHLOE MATTHEWS:
When I saw the story about the girls from the Nolan Foundation, it reminded me of that day on set of the reconstruction. Somehow, all the girls who came forward really resembled Zoe, and that day when Rob kissed me, I’d been fully dressed up as her. Yeah. Unnerving. I felt like no one was really paying attention to that, though. It all got overshadowed by the video, Andrew and Kim.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Well, nothing I say about this is going to sound particularly impressive. I don’t want to change minds or justify what I did. It wasn’t good, I don’t like myself for doing it, and I don’t forgive myself either. All I can do is tell you the truth that, yes, I slept with Andrew while he was seeing Zoe. Yes, I wore my sister’s clothes, and yes, I asked him to call me by her name. And people should know that I was the one instigating, not him. I’d fallen for Andrew when we first met. I’d imagined a future, but I’d managed to put all that away and forget about it before what happened to me inside the van. After it, though, I was a mess. We recorded the video, like, a week or so later. You can tell because I’ve still got blond hair in it, I never have since. Zoe wasn’t speaking to me. Now I know that’s probably because Andrew said my name while they were together and probably because she was busy spending another man’s money, but at the time, I didn’t.