SARAH MANNING:
Andrew has a particular way of speaking, one that immediately put the back up of every officer working on that case, myself included. I’d like to think I’d never let something like that cloud my judgment, but there was legitimate unease about his answers to some of the questions we put to him. James’s team was dissatisfied with his responses on the so-called sex tape, that was certainly true. They thought he was hiding something. They were concerned about what Alex Wilson had said—about Zoe being scared of him that day—but to see those theories printed in newspapers, attributed to officers who “wished to remain nameless,” was a different thing. It incensed me. Frankly, it pissed me off, but there was a feeling in the team that keeping this kind of pressure on Andrew might yield results. At the same time, the family were reading all this unattributed stuff, some of it true, some of it gut instinct, some of it smoking-hot garbage, then thinking I was holding out on them.
No one who gave quotes to the press ever did it in a measured way. They never said, “This kid’s been through an emotionally demanding situation and acted strangely.” They never left any room for doubt, because doubt doesn’t sell newspapers. The quotes you’d see would say things like, “Everyone in that room knew he was lying about the sex tape. He was the only person who could have leaked it.” Whether that was true or not, the place for those kinds of conversations was the incident room, not the national press.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was surprised that was even allowed, to fabricate things or attribute them to anonymous sources. Stories ran about everyone, but especially about me and about Andrew and Jai. The article would be in the paper one day, then the pensioners would write in from Wigan the next. All these poisonous fucking letters pages, all saying we “looked” guilty or knew something more than we were letting on. They said we were in it together, that we’d done something awful with Zoe’s body. I tried not to let it get to me, but I felt like I had to read it, had to try and steel myself against it somehow. Course I ended up just memorizing it all, replaying it in my own head. They said I was “dark” and “troubled.” I’d cut my hair off and started wearing black because I worshipped the devil, because I hated beauty, because I hated my sister and didn’t want to look anything like her. It was a crash course in how fast people fucking judge you. You start catching looks in the street, hearing whispers while you’re in line at Aldi, but what can you do? You can’t stop passersby and swear your innocence, explain your life story, like, “Wait, it’s not true. I just wanted to try and look like myself,” so people judge you. At a certain point, you see and hear so much shit it becomes like the voice in your head, you start judging yourself for them.
And I was losing my mind as it was.
Walking into rooms not remembering why I was there, leaving things on the stove or in the oven or whatever. Picking up cups of coffee I thought I’d made five minutes before and finding them stone-cold. I got burn marks all over my hands and around my wrists from just not thinking in the kitchen, and then the fucking Sun printed a close-up of my arm when I’d been in a supermarket one day, saying I was self-harming. The worst one was my own fault, though. My favorite band at the time were these Danish punks called Iceage. They’d made this kind of new-wave-noise punk album, all dangerous and teenagers and smoldering and gorgeous. And stupidly, I went to see them about five days after Zoe went missing, right before Christmas.
I just needed to feel something good, hear something other than these horrible voices in my head. I needed to get my hair blasted back by music that I loved and forget who I was. All we’d been doing for days was sitting around watching the phone, watching stale sandwiches curl up at the corners like smirking fucking faces. We were just watching the news, waiting for a knock at the door, and the quiet and the stillness felt like it was actually killing me. You couldn’t put a film or a song on, you couldn’t pick up a book and even get to the end of the first sentence. So I went to see some live music, and it was cathartic for me, life-affirming and life-saving. I threw myself around and I sweated and I screamed and I walked out of there remembering what life felt like, what it could be. I couldn’t hear the pensioners in Wigan over the ringing in my ears. I shouted them all down, and that night, I slept properly for the first time since Zoe went missing. Then Dad came into my room a couple of days later and threw a newspaper at me.
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT
Kimberly Nolan made a boozy exit from a Manchester nightclub after partying alone on Wednesday night.
Kim, 19, the twin sister of tragic missing Zoe, let what’s left of her hair down at a rock concert held in the city’s Soup Kitchen nightclub.
The punk rock student looked unrecognizable from her sister in a thigh-skimming black miniskirt, fishnet tights, and Dr. Martens.
Sporting a shaved head and emo-style makeup, Kim rocked out with confrontational and controversial Danish punks Iceage before staggering outside for air.
Iceage, who released their debut album this year, have been plagued by accusations of xenophobia, with reports of fans giving the “Sieg heil” salute at their concerts.
Kim appeared to be refused reentry into the nightclub following her breather and decided to call it a night.
Kim and Zoe’s parents, who led an emotional appeal earlier this week, have urged anyone with information on their daughter’s whereabouts to come forward.
Sun, Friday, December 23, 2011
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Needless to say, the stuff about them being Nazis was bullshit.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Oh man, my mum called saying she’d seen my picture on the news, that the cops wanted to talk to me. I’d never heard her like that, crying so much she couldn’t breathe. She said they thought I was jungled up with this girl who’d gone missing. That was the first time I realized what was going on, man. I was still keeping my head down at Tariq’s, worrying about owing Vlad a grand. I got online and read the official story, which was bad, then I got on Facebook and read the real one, which was worse, all about the sex tape, the fight, the crazy appeal and stuff. That got me out of the house for the first time in days.
It actually scared me into going back to the tower.
So here’s me thinking I’m walking into roadblocks and helicopters, dragnets and manhunts and shit. I’m thinking I’ll be surrounded straightaway, I’ll tell them who I am and we’ll be sorted. But Owens Park was a ghost town, everyone gone for Christmas. I know GMP came out years later, swearing up and down they did their best, but I’m telling you, yeah? Their number one suspect walked right into their crime scene without passing a single high-vis jacket. And I guess it just downgraded it all in my mind. It sounds stupid now that so much of Zoe’s stuff is out in the open, but at the time, when I saw even the police weren’t taking it seriously, I thought it must be innocent. She must be doing what I was.