ANDREW FLOWERS:
I didn’t like that idea, and I said so. I just wanted to leave the past where it was. It hadn’t done us any favors when it was the present, so why go over it again? I didn’t want the fucking watch back.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I didn’t have time for whatever was going on with Andrew. I walked past him, back into Fintan and Jai in the office and said, “How soon can we get it?”
JAI MAHMOOD:
I said if she got the cash, I’d get Vlad, but, you know, “The guy’s not exactly a safe deposit box. I need to go looking for him.” Andrew was standing in the door, staring daggers into me so hard I thought they might break the fucking skin.
I thought again how weird it was that he didn’t want the watch back. Then Kim went back out and I heard them fight about it outside. He was saying she shouldn’t spend the money, she should keep it. She was saying, “Don’t you want to know who took your watch?” At this point, I break in, like, “Hey, guys, look, I’m not sure the information’s for sale.” Kim said, “I’ve got ten grand, Jai. If I want his fucking fingerprints, I’m getting them.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was charged up. It had been an intense few days, but I felt like something had finally cracked. I got this sense that the truth was out there for the taking, I just couldn’t lose my nerve. Andrew was being off-the-wall weird. Saying it was a bad idea, that we weren’t allowed to do it if he didn’t want us to, that he wouldn’t be involved, all this. I sort of shrugged and said, “Fine. Don’t be involved.”
FINTAN MURPHY:
Andrew stormed off. Jai left to find his friend, and for the first time, Kimberly and I actually talked. Just five or ten minutes, but with some much-needed candor. I told her that the process of being interviewed for your book had made me reconsider my position on certain things. That I hadn’t always felt good about what was coming out of my mouth. I don’t know if she felt exactly the same way, but she said she’d been rethinking things too.
It was a nice moment, but before I could let her leave, there was something I had to know. I asked if she’d spent much time with Andrew in the intervening years. She said no, they hadn’t spoken since all that. And then, with great difficulty, because I’m not good at these things, I asked if she was sure that she could trust him? She started to nod, but I said, “Think about it. The video, all these years, why did you keep it a secret?”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I said, “It wasn’t like you think. It was messy. We both just decided in the moment it was for the best.”
FINTAN MURPHY:
Well, that was my point entirely. I said, “No, it wasn’t for the best. Not for Andrew. For you, yes, had the tape come out, it would have made things difficult with your parents. For Andrew, though, it would have explained why his girlfriend ripped his face off. It would have exonerated him from the text message, from scaring her, from so many things. Why wouldn’t he have just told the truth?”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
So I just said what Andrew had told me at the time, about wanting to protect me. Somehow it didn’t sound quite as romantic in the here and now.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I said that was laudable if true, but it didn’t really sound like him. I just wondered out loud if there was an alternative explanation? Kim said, “Like what?” I said, “Maybe he wanted to stay in the frame for some reason? Maybe he wanted to stay close to the case? Maybe he liked having this secret over you?” You know, why wouldn’t he want us to find out who stole his watch, who was behind all this? We said good night, agreed to meet the next morning, but of course we were both woken up by the bombshell instead.
JAI MAHMOOD:
So the first place I tried when I was looking for Vlad was Canal Street, where I’d seen him before, but he wasn’t around, so I went into town, trying to remember old haunts. When I went back by Canal Street in the a.m., the whole thing was cordoned off. If you don’t know, it’s nightlife central, and cordoning off doesn’t just happen there. So I was asking around, trying to find out what was going on, getting a bad vibe, when I saw them turn the floodlights on to the canal. There was a body in there. It wasn’t until the next day that we found out it was Vladimir. They said he’d been stabbed through the back and pushed in the water. No one ever found Andrew’s watch.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-03-25 05:45
To: you
Hey, hey, HEY! Brace yourself for some insanely exciting news. I know I cant call you and it’s too early for any sane person to be awake, but Den’s wife from Fairfield Property Management came through with those time cards. I’ve been on the phone with them all night, he was reading them out to me as she was finding them, telling me what he remembered about each member of his crew that year. The full list of everyone on site’s huge, some of them had been with him forever, most were at their Christmas do on the night Zoe went missing, but they hired five casual hands to help out in summer 2011.
Here are the names—anyone look familiar???
Coulter, Stuart
Johansen, Andrew
Smith, Martin
Sullivan, Connor
Todd, Edward
Connor fucking Sullivan. A certain someones alibi. I’m shaking writing this, going over there now. Next time we talk I’ll have a tape so hot it might burn the house down.
I THINK I might finally have my ending.
And that isn’t even my big news. Dr Lloyd called back about my tests. Guess who isn’t sick again after all? Guess who’s 7 weeks PREGNANT? XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXX
Exxx
In the early hours of March 25, 2019, Evelyn Mitchell was found unresponsive behind the wheel of her car on a residential street in Hulme, three miles outside Manchester city center. She was pronounced dead at the scene, with a postmortem report later determining the cause of death to be blunt force trauma to the head. The coroner noted that her skull had been broken with such ferocity that brain tissue was visible to the naked eye. That she walked the twenty-seven feet from the home of her attacker to the relative safety of her vehicle is hardly surprising. Evelyn’s strength could be incredible, at times almost unrealistic, and it endured, dynamically, until the very end. Had it not, perhaps her story would close like that of so many others, like the Zoe Nolans of the world. Young women filled with promise who vanish from the face of the earth through no fault of their own. Evelyn’s bloody-minded determination meant that she left a trail leading from her car to the front door of her attacker.