SALLY NOLAN:
When they brought Kim back to Owens Park that morning, I didn’t recognize her. Stick thin and screwed up and black-and-white, this soaking wet wraith getting out of a police car. She was all makeup-streaked and dead-eyed. I thought she looked like a murder victim.
LIU WAI:
In all this, I hadn’t realized that Mr. and Mrs. Nolan were yet to see Kim’s new look, and I didn’t properly prepare them for it. Her dad, who I think is kind of a bit old school, looked at her and said, “What the fuck have you done to yourself?” I couldn’t tell if he meant the way that she looked or the fact that she’d been arrested. It kind of covered both.
SARAH MANNING:
I reported for duty at nine o’clock that morning, and I’d been assigned by ten. They told me the parents were already on the scene and understandably distressed, so I arrived at Owens Park roughly the same time that Kimberly did, around noon. Honestly, I thought she looked like she was in shock. Maybe people thought it was the makeup making her look so pale. But her pupils were huge, her breathing was irregular, her lips were blue. I couldn’t believe the arresting officers had booked her at the station, then brought her to the scene. She should have been in the hospital. She was barefoot, bleeding, out of breath, shivering. We’re talking about December in Manchester, cold as ice.
I remember thinking something else was wrong, though.
A family member going missing has to be the height of trauma, and I’d say especially so when it’s your twin sister. But I felt like Kim was carrying more than that on her shoulders—and that’s certainly the opinion I expressed to Detective Inspector James, who was on-site that day and went on to take the lead in the investigation. There was no body, no ransom note, no threat. No reason to suspect foul play so few hours after her disappearance. So why was Kim so agitated? Why was she so aggrieved? It felt like she wasn’t telling us everything.
The other thing wrong was the scene itself. I can’t point fingers, because there were only a handful of officers on-site at that time. No one could have known how things would develop, but the tower was bad for us. We had eyewitnesses saying Zoe had never left the building, but it still hadn’t been locked down twelve hours later. There were something like a thousand students all being collected by parents that day for the Christmas break, all leaving the building at the same time, all carrying large suitcases, holdalls, backpacks. It was a disaster.
Detective Inspector Gregory James declined to be interviewed for this book, reiterating Greater Manchester Police’s statement that to do so could prejudice the ongoing investigation into Zoe’s disappearance.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Kimberly arrived looking freezing cold. I think she had one of the police officers’ UV jackets draped over her shoulders. DC Manning, Sarah, the liaison officer, the person we dealt with most, said that the police had spoken to security at the site where she was found, that given the circumstances, everyone had decided to let Kimberly’s trespassing misadventure go. Somehow, that had the strange effect of driving home the seriousness of Zoe’s disappearance for me. Round my way, kids aren’t just taxied about by the cops and let off with a warning.
SARAH MANNING:
I offered to help Kim, to get her inside, maybe find her a hot drink and a shower. I’d only just introduced myself to her parents, so that might be why they resisted the idea. They were still being briefed and after all, they’d lost one daughter already that day. On the other hand, I thought they seemed worried by the prospect of Kim speaking to the police. I remember Sally pulling the high-vis jacket off her immediately, putting her own jacket around Kim’s shoulders instead. It’s not that I thought Kim had something to do with her sister’s disappearance. It’s more that her parents seemed to think it.
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.