In the early hours of Saturday, December 17, 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old University of Manchester student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.

She was never seen again.

On the surface, Zoe had everything in the world going for her. In September of that year, she’d traveled from Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester, realizing a long-held ambition to live in the city. She moved into a high-rise student apartment with her twin sister, Kimberly, and two other girls who quickly became her closest friends. Singing had always been the great passion of Zoe’s life, and she’d moved to Manchester to more seriously study music, finding herself unexpectedly popular with course mates and around campus. Her contemporaries found her talent and dedication impressive, and she soon met the young man who would become her first serious boyfriend. She passed three seemingly happy months in this state, right up until December 17, the day her parents arrived to take her home for the Christmas holidays, only to find that she had vanished without a trace.

I’d never heard of Zoe Nolan, or if I had, I’d forgotten all about her. In 2011, the year she went missing, I would have been twenty-five-years old and myself living in Manchester. If you could really call it living. I certainly wasn’t making my dreams come true, I was making minimum wage plus tips in a basement dive bar and putting every penny I earned back into the business. Manchester had made me, for better or worse. It was the first place I’d ever had my heart broken, the first place I’d ever had my nose broken, and somehow that encapsulated so much of what I loved about the city. There was a kind of toughness on one hand and a kind of romance on the other. It was like a man with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed onto his knuckles—you never knew which one he might hit you with next. I was always more like a lover than a fighter, always more like a punching bag than a slugger, so I just tried to keep my guard up and weather the blows when they came. The city always struck me as a lot of different things, some of them good and some of them bad, but make no mistake about it, the city always struck me. As a result, so much of it’s a blur now. There are whole years I don’t really remember, whole jobs, whole people, whole places, much less news broadcasts, much less front-page headlines.

Much less police appeals for information.

So when I looked Zoe Nolan up some six years after her disappearance at the insistence of a new friend, I found that all I really remembered was her image, the picture that had been briefly ubiquitous in the city for a few days half a dozen years before, the face I’d never quite put a name to. Zoe was an almost iconic missing-person blond—almost iconic but not quite. I skimmed the story, muttered something to myself like, “Oh yeah,” then got on with my day, because from what I read, not much had happened since she walked out of that party. She’d never been found, and I couldn’t see why my new friend was so interested in her, why she was suddenly so obsessed. And anyway, I was a busy man. By 2017, my own life had finally started, and I didn’t have time for people who’d been careless enough to lose theirs. I was a published author now, an important person—going places, if only in my own mind. I had no idea what lay behind Zoe’s frozen smile and no idea what lay behind her disappearance. I had no idea that she’d go on to keep me up at night over the next few years and no idea that she’d go on to put a good friend of mine in mortal danger.

Her story was sad, certainly, but hardly sensational.

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.

When a stunning new development threw much of the established narrative of the Zoe Nolan case into question some six months later, I got back in touch with Evelyn, suggesting that perhaps she’d been right all along. She responded quickly, telling me not to read her original file yet, telling me that this new information had shaken loose an important and previously obscured element of her story—that she had finally found the perfect opening for her book…

As I requested and then read this new opening, as I greedily started to work my way through Evelyn’s original chapters, I began to see what she had. That even those closest to Zoe Nolan hadn’t known her empirical truth or, perhaps, that they had each known only their own part of it. I began to understand how Zoe had been forced to keep secrets from those she loved and, perhaps, how she could ultimately even disappear into thin air. Some of the interviewees tended old grudges like garden plots, some of them saw events in a harsh new light. Evelyn argued that the full story, the real truth about Zoe Nolan, could only be assembled from these disparate threads. That in all the ink spilled during the coverage of the case, so much of that truth had been written between the lines, so much of it had been lost entirely. Evelyn argued for a book that would lay everything bare using the unvarnished words of those involved, contradictions and all, the full story unfolding for readers as it had unfolded for her, one revelation on top of another. She believed in a better world, one where a missing girl might actually mean something, but as I read on, I realized that I didn’t.

I saw that in spite of the corkscrew twists and revelations in Evelyn’s story, there was still no conclusion in sight, and it fell to me to tell her the truth. That all the inconsistencies, all the affairs, all the sex tapes, secrets, and lies would mean nothing without an ending. As long as Zoe Nolan was unaccounted for, there was no book. In publishing, as in the world, we’re drowning in dead girls, and I’m afraid that missing ones just don’t cut it. Evelyn had been right that first time we met. Our interests revolve around killers, not victims. “What are you going to do,” I asked her. “Change human nature?” It was my opinion that with a mere missing person, without a dead body, without even a verifiable crime, there was no story. I didn’t want to see Evelyn waste what might be precious years of her life researching a doomed, unresolvable narrative, so I said as much. As a result, by mid-February of 2019, our exchanges had grown terse, with Evelyn’s in particular becoming paranoid, cynical, and at times even disturbing.

So sadly, I didn’t believe her when she told me she was getting close to something, and I didn’t believe her when her own shadow man came knocking at the door. When Evelyn finally found her proof, when she finally went to confront the person she believed to be responsible for Zoe’s disappearance—when she told me that she no longer felt physically well—I was preoccupied, slow to act. Cynically, I’d warned her that this story needed a dead body at the end if it was ever to be told. By the close of March 25, 2019, there were two of them.

My thanks to the Mitchell family, who forwarded the notes, tapes, and documents that Evelyn had collected, and who kindly trusted me with their editing and publication. Some chapters were already in finished form, just as she would have liked them to be read. Others I had to pore through and assemble myself from her rough outlines. I sought out additional testimony where necessary, in some cases from experts, in some cases from people who Evelyn had never gotten around to interviewing, adding them to the established flow of her story.

As I worked, I saw that what had at first seemed like a digressive route through the secret lives of others was actually a menacing road map leading directly to the destruction of something good, a destruction that neither Evelyn nor I saw coming. Perhaps you can read these interviews differently, though. Perhaps you’ll see the danger sooner than we did. Perhaps you’re the person who could have done what I didn’t and prevented another useless death.

This book is dedicated to Evelyn Mitchell, to Zoe Nolan, and to everyone else who never came home.