That’s when Kim and Zoe drifted a bit. Parents of twins, you know, they do the matching hair and toys and clothes. We never went in for all that, but I suppose you do expect girls to be close. It just didn’t happen with ours, they were always their own people. Then around there, thirteen or fourteen, after Kim got knocked down, Zoe started going out more. She was already singing and getting paid and being hired for shows, it just got more. It’s probably a chicken-and-egg thing, but the hit-and-run made them more different. After it, Zoe was always going out further and further into the world, and Kim was always going back, further inside herself.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Everything stopped. I mean, the van was still going, but everything else stopped. And this man’s still gripping me by my knee, not moving, making it clear that something’s wrong with my leg. It doesn’t reach his fucking leg standards or whatever. So when he asked me about the scar from the accident, my brain went into overdrive trying to work out what to say, how to let him down gently.
I told him there was a flaw in my knee, like a birth defect.
From the way they’d been feeling me, and I know this sounds gross, but I thought they might want to breed me or something. It was late 2011, so the Rochdale grooming scandal was going on in the background, this child sex ring that had gone under the radar for years, and there were all these insane stories about sex trafficking round Manchester.
So I was trying to suggest I wasn’t the right candidate if that was what they had in mind. I was trying to suggest there was stuff wrong with my body, that I was more trouble than I was worth. They made a big deal about my knee, they asked about it, so I started telling them how useless it was. I said I’d been forced to have surgery, I’d been forced to have steel pins implanted and stuff. I said I had to do an hour’s physio a day just so I could walk on it, I said I’d probably lose my leg at some point in the future. I said anything I could think of to make me sound defective, just laying it on as thick as I thought it could go.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I must say, I personally find it difficult to stomach this story of hardened sex traffickers releasing a young woman because she had a bad knee. I think men of that stripe are usually preoccupied with other parts of the anatomy.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
The whole atmosphere changed. The engine was still going and there were still bumps in the road, but it was like these men, who I knew for a fact were inches away from me, had disappeared.
Like something I said had ruined the party.
One of them banged on the partition to the driver, the van pulled up and they all got out. I wondered if it was stolen. I thought they might leave me there, even torch it with me inside or something, but then I heard them talking, like, arguing. I couldn’t make it out because I was too scared to take the bag off my head. I just stood there holding my breath, I didn’t move a muscle.
ROBERT NOLAN:
If I’ve got one regret in my life, and I mean obviously I’ve got more than that now, but if I could fix one thing, I’d go back and pick Kim up on her lying. I know how that sounds, said of your own daughter, but I really would.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
When they got back into the van, they were all cheering. Laughing, joking, asking if I was okay. The talker said they were sorry, it had been a university dare or something. I remember thinking he sounded too old to be a student. One of them helped me sit down and said they’d drop me near to where they’d picked me up. I tried to laugh along, like, “Oh, yeah, just drop me anywhere,” trying not to be sick through gritted teeth.
LIU WAI:
Well, I heard something supposedly happened inside that van…
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Someone was drawing the bag back down fully over my face, then the driver started up and we jolted forward. The bag got ripped off my head and there was a second, like a split second where I could see, where I half saw this blur around me, these two shapes, then I screwed my eyes shut. I put my hands up in front of my face, looked at the floor, the wall. Tried to show them that I hadn’t seen anything, I was still good for a laugh and they could still let me go.
LIU WAI:
I probably shouldn’t say what it was, though. I mean, Kim never came out and said it in her Mail on Sunday interview.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
One of them pushed my face into the wall. He put the bag back on my head, pulled the cord so tight around my neck I could hardly breathe, then everything went quiet. And I knew then the prank stuff was bullshit. I mean, I always did, but even the pretense of it was gone. We were just driving in this dead silence. I could hear them breathing heavier, feel the driver driving differently, more abrupt, speeding up and stopping at the last second, making us fall around in the back. I knew they’d seen me with my eyes open, they thought I’d seen their faces.
When we stopped a few minutes later, someone got out of the back and—it sounded like—opened a gate. We reversed into something—it felt like wet ground, soft under the tires—and when the engine stopped, I couldn’t hear any traffic or city or street sounds. One of them picked me up, opened the doors and threw me out on the ground, and I was just saying, “No, please.” It was muddy, and I was trying to talk and get up, but my wrists were still tied together, the bag was still on my head, I couldn’t see or breathe.
LIU WAI:
No, I shouldn’t say. I was, like, sworn to secrecy.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
They started to pour something on me. At first, I thought it was petrol, then I realized it was vodka. One of them held my face up and they just poured the whole bottle over my head. I was coughing and choking, but they kept on going until I was sick inside the bag. They dropped the bottle on to my face, it smashed my fucking front teeth, and I still didn’t move. I still didn’t dare.
Then I heard the zips on their trousers and definitely two of them, maybe all three, pissed on me. It was so cold that the heat from it was scorching, like, searing to the skin. It went all over my hands and arms, all over my body, and all over the bag and in my face and in my eyes and in my mouth. I was just trying to breathe through my fucking ears or something until they finally stopped and I heard footsteps going away. I heard the driver’s door close, then one of them leaned down to cut the cable ties around my wrists.