They acted like they didn’t really know her.
That is, they seemed more comfortable with Zoe’s friends, Fintan and Liu, these people they’d never met before. That feeling lingered for as long as I was around them. The family dynamic—Zoe and Kim’s relationship especially—was anything but simple.
FINTAN MURPHY:
DC Manning took us all aside—this would be myself, Liu Wai, Sally and Robert—and asked if we had any idea what Kimberly might have been doing there, out on this building site in town. We were all at a loss and, quite honestly, still preoccupied with Zoe. Then I saw Kimberly smiling at something. She was sort of wavering off at the side while we talked, just a ghost of herself all in black, makeup streaming down her face. It’s this terrible day, and she’s standing there like that, smiling. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, her feet looked ripped to shreds, so I suggested I take her up to the flat before she face-planted on the lawn.
Mainly, I think I wanted to get her alone.
While we were walking toward the tower, I said, “So what’s so funny?” She scowled at me, then nodded over her shoulder at Robert, said, “My dad’s hair.” He had this half-finished haircut at the time. I couldn’t imagine laughing in that moment, but I thought she was distressed. I wondered if, without the police and her parents and the weirdness of this situation all in her face, she might talk to me. Clearly, she knew something. Clearly, something was going on. In the lift on the way up, she didn’t even look at me. She was just texting someone, like, furiously, furiously texting someone.
The whole fifteenth floor was trashed, like a bomb had gone off at a Christmas market. Once we got to Kimberly’s room and I’d asked if there was anything she needed, I sort of put it to her, you know, “How did you end up at this building site? What’s going on?” She looked at me then all right, and for a long time. I think she wanted me to walk out, but I wasn’t going anywhere. So she started to undress in front of me. I kind of turned away, but I still waited. In the end, she said, “I met a guy. We just needed somewhere to go and fuck.” So I nodded at the wall and walked out.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Whatever I did or didn’t say in the moment, obviously that isn’t what happened. If I couldn’t tell my sister about the van, and if I couldn’t tell my friends, then how could I tell this boy I’d just met the night before? I thought Fintan was probably gay, so I started undressing to try and make him feel awkward. I thought he’d leave or at least turn away so I wouldn’t have to lie to his face. And I think I said I met someone. I might have said we got to talking or something, but I never would have said I was “fucking” some guy.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Look, I come from a background of quite brutal honesty—emphasis on the word brutal there. So I suppose when I arrived in England, in Manchester, I was quite na?ve in that sense. I thought grown-ups told the unvarnished truth—that’s just what they did. No one had ever lied to me so brazenly, not about something so serious. In that sense, I’ve always thought of Kimberly, perhaps unfairly, as this master, this originator, of dishonesty.
LIU WAI:
Andrew Flowers came crawling back while Fintan was with Kim. We were all outside. The police were organizing a second search of Owens Park—they hadn’t found anything the first time. We were all standing vaguely at the main entrance when he kind of staggered in, still wearing a Santa Claus hat. His clothes were dirty, shirt all ripped, and his face was just livid with scratch marks. I’d mentioned to the Nolans, to the police as well, that there’d been an argument. I mean, everyone from the party had seen it. There was no secret.
Even so…
To see his face was something else. You couldn’t look at him without thinking, He killed her. He fucking killed her. I mean, Zoe’s parents hadn’t even met him at this point, didn’t know him from Adam, but I could see they thought the same thing. Mrs. Nolan let out this gasp and just kind of fell on her husband.
SARAH MANNING:
Myself and two officers were forced to restrain Rob Nolan when Andrew Flowers arrived back at Owens Park. Rob was swinging his arms, shouting, “Where’s my daughter?” I was still getting up to speed and had to be told that Andrew was Zoe’s boyfriend. His appearance was certainly distressing, concerning even. We asked if we could speak to him somewhere more private, and he just shrugged. He said, “Am I under arrest too?” I thought that was a strange thing to say, but it only occurred to me afterward that it didn’t make any sense. The word too implied that he knew Kim had been arrested earlier, yet they both denied having spoken to anyone.
SALLY NOLAN:
The second I saw that boy, my heart ripped in half. I knew something evil had happened. I remember feeling it, somewhere down in my bones. I thought, We’ll never see Zoe again.
LIU WAI:
Fintan had been so strong up until this point. We were just meeting for the first time that morning, but he clearly had a good head on his shoulders. He seemed upset and shaken by something when he came back down from the tower, though. I was kind of belatedly worried about Kim—everything had been so hectic before—so I asked how she was. I remember what Fintan said, because at the time, it didn’t make much sense to me. He was looking out at the grass, like, at nothing and went, “That girl should get royalties every time someone lies.”
* * *
5 This interview was conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
11.
“Scratch Marks”
SARAH MANNING:
The operation, which began as a simple missing person search, developed rapidly during the course of that day. There were the strange circumstances surrounding Zoe’s disappearance as well as Kim’s arrest and Andrew’s physical injuries, the unusual behavior displayed by them both. There was the fact that several of Zoe’s friends couldn’t account for their movements that night or, as in the case of Jai Mahmood, were literally uncontactable. There was the fact that the fingertip search of Zoe’s room had turned up no evidence to suggest she’d been planning this—she’d left without her purse, without a change of clothes—and that nothing had been found on the roof or in the building or even in the wider Owens Park area. Nothing except for her phone, this unsent message that had clearly been meant for someone who’d hurt her.