JAI MAHMOOD:
When you live a life like mine, you don’t get a lot of ideas about the future. I wasn’t walking out of rehab with a five-year plan in my pocket. Fintan came through there, man. Food and lodging if I worked in the foundation center in Ancoats. I’d been in often enough, always on the wrong side of the counter, but still. I knew the place, the people, and what they were going through. And I wanted to help. I really did want to start giving back instead of taking all the time. I was doing maintenance, making sure people stayed fed and bedded, leading NA meetings—you name it. He said if Rob ever came around, I should keep my head down, but he never did.
There’ve been about five million names, about five million people down through the years, and a lot of them I know I won’t ever see again, so imagine my mug when I saw Vladimir, Vlad the Inhaler, my first connect from back in Owens Park days. He walked in wearing his rucksack and looking for something to eat. He’d shrunk down so much I nearly didn’t know him. He’d been this great big guy before, but everything had taken its toll, everything had sunk. You could have changed his name too, just straight up called him Vlad the Impaler, because he’d clearly graduated from snorting anything in sight to shooting it. When you saw his arms and legs, they were like pincushions, just war-torn with sores and track marks, broken veins all over. I was surprised he was even alive. I could tell he had no interest in getting sober or asking for help. We were just somewhere he could sit indoors and get a bite to eat between binges—and listen, fair fucks, life’s not for everyone.
He walked in midmeeting that night. I couldn’t stop and talk, but I was staring at him, assessing the damage, when I saw something I never thought I’d see again. I can’t even remember the rest of the meeting. I just wanted to get it over with and talk to Vlad. With one thing and another, people coming up and stuff, I couldn’t get to him in time. I might have spooked him, looked a second too long or something, but he left. When I ran down the road a few minutes later, he was gone.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I emailed some of the websites streaming the video that weekend. I tried to get them to take it down, but I don’t think any replied. After what Dad had done, I didn’t feel like talking to him, and when Mum called, I was too embarrassed to answer. So I called the one person who’d gotten in touch and offered me their help. I called Fintan.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I must say, I wasn’t fully prepared for a phone call from Kimberly. Yes, I’d called earlier to put her in the picture about Robert. I felt I owed her that much, the foundation’s full support when it came to the potential blowback from her father’s actions, a small local scandal. But I’m afraid that all changed for me when ten or more journalists left a press conference I was hosting to watch a smut film she’d made with Andrew Flowers. I was dumbstruck.
Perhaps people who’d been around them more at the time were better equipped to deal with it than I was. Other people knew them better, so perhaps they’d picked up on a certain kind of energy that was moving back and forth. But you have to remember that I only knew Zoe back then. Zoe, who spoke so highly of them both. And all the time they’d been having this sordid affair behind her back, taking her for a fool. Look, I’ve always been behind the curve when it comes to sex, I can come across as more conservative than I’d like, but it took my breath away that they didn’t think it might be relevant in her disappearance. She went missing minutes after discovering their affair.
In my mind, their silence was either incredibly thoughtless or deeply suspect. I’m a man with a lot of sympathy, but for some reason, I just couldn’t extend it. It just wouldn’t reach as far as the limb I felt like Kimberly was out on. I was still reeling from the revelations about Robert’s proclivities, I’d almost lost everything I’d worked for, and I discovered the same day that Kimberly had done something at least as unforgivable, in my opinion perhaps more so. Andrew Flowers was a fly-by-night, shallow, vain man without self-awareness, someone who you expect this sort of thing from. Kimberly was Zoe’s sister.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
He told me that I could, quote, “Get fucked,” since that’s clearly what I was so good at.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Yes, well, intellectually, I know you’re right. It’s not fair to compare them. Zoe and Kimberly are different people, vastly different interior lives. But at the back of my mind, a part of me was thinking, How dare you have that face? How dare you have that voice? Those eyes? During the course of that conversation, I came very close to saying, “Perhaps, Kimberly, it’s not a feeling of inadequacy you’ve always struggled with. Perhaps what we’re looking at here is plain inadequacy. Perhaps what we’re staring in the face is the fact that you’re not good enough, the fact that you don’t even come close to Zoe.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I hung up, then looked out my curtains at the hacks still standing in the street. You see people on the news and they’re famous, with a team around them. But for the rest of us, if your life turns into a story, there’s no guide or help or person in your ear telling you what to do or where to go. So I just called into work and said I wouldn’t be there the next day. If they had to fire me, then that was that, but I wasn’t going to have a photographer following me around while I dug up fucking flower beds. Then I packed a bag, went outside past this idiot in his tent and got in my car. Before I could even start up, my phone was ringing. I answered to a man asking for Kimberly Nolan. “This is DI James calling from Greater Manchester Police. I think, in light of current events, we should probably have a talk, don’t you?” He sounded bad, about a hundred years older, which at the time drove home how long it had been. I said, “Okay, what do you want to know?” He said it would have to be in person, Monday afternoon. So that was it, I had a destination. I was going back to Manchester, seven years later.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yes, of course, among all the other horse shit, there was the not unexpected but still amazingly unwelcome phone call from the police. Detective Inspector James sounding like he wanted to reach through the phone and throttle me. “Yes, sure, Monday, fine.”
JAI MAHMOOD:
So Vlad, man, he was as gay as the day is long. Like, flame on. That was why he bought me a drink that first time we met outside the Great Central—he thought I was cute. He always called himself a “large fruit smoothie,” said that’s why he’d had to leave Russia. Y’know, Putin’s not into lads, is he? So after work, I took a walk down to Canal Street, the gay quarter. From the state I’d seen him in, he wouldn’t be cruising any clubs, but I thought he might want to be around his people, y’know?