FINTAN MURPHY:
Look, I come from a background of quite brutal honesty—emphasis on the word brutal there. So I suppose when I arrived in England, in Manchester, I was quite na?ve in that sense. I thought grown-ups told the unvarnished truth—that’s just what they did. No one had ever lied to me so brazenly, not about something so serious. In that sense, I’ve always thought of Kimberly, perhaps unfairly, as this master, this originator, of dishonesty.
LIU WAI:
Andrew Flowers came crawling back while Fintan was with Kim. We were all outside. The police were organizing a second search of Owens Park—they hadn’t found anything the first time. We were all standing vaguely at the main entrance when he kind of staggered in, still wearing a Santa Claus hat. His clothes were dirty, shirt all ripped, and his face was just livid with scratch marks. I’d mentioned to the Nolans, to the police as well, that there’d been an argument. I mean, everyone from the party had seen it. There was no secret.
Even so…
To see his face was something else. You couldn’t look at him without thinking, He killed her. He fucking killed her. I mean, Zoe’s parents hadn’t even met him at this point, didn’t know him from Adam, but I could see they thought the same thing. Mrs. Nolan let out this gasp and just kind of fell on her husband.
SARAH MANNING:
Myself and two officers were forced to restrain Rob Nolan when Andrew Flowers arrived back at Owens Park. Rob was swinging his arms, shouting, “Where’s my daughter?” I was still getting up to speed and had to be told that Andrew was Zoe’s boyfriend. His appearance was certainly distressing, concerning even. We asked if we could speak to him somewhere more private, and he just shrugged. He said, “Am I under arrest too?” I thought that was a strange thing to say, but it only occurred to me afterward that it didn’t make any sense. The word too implied that he knew Kim had been arrested earlier, yet they both denied having spoken to anyone.
SALLY NOLAN:
The second I saw that boy, my heart ripped in half. I knew something evil had happened. I remember feeling it, somewhere down in my bones. I thought, We’ll never see Zoe again.
LIU WAI:
Fintan had been so strong up until this point. We were just meeting for the first time that morning, but he clearly had a good head on his shoulders. He seemed upset and shaken by something when he came back down from the tower, though. I was kind of belatedly worried about Kim—everything had been so hectic before—so I asked how she was. I remember what Fintan said, because at the time, it didn’t make much sense to me. He was looking out at the grass, like, at nothing and went, “That girl should get royalties every time someone lies.”
* * *
5 This interview was conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
11.
“Scratch Marks”
SARAH MANNING:
The operation, which began as a simple missing person search, developed rapidly during the course of that day. There were the strange circumstances surrounding Zoe’s disappearance as well as Kim’s arrest and Andrew’s physical injuries, the unusual behavior displayed by them both. There was the fact that several of Zoe’s friends couldn’t account for their movements that night or, as in the case of Jai Mahmood, were literally uncontactable. There was the fact that the fingertip search of Zoe’s room had turned up no evidence to suggest she’d been planning this—she’d left without her purse, without a change of clothes—and that nothing had been found on the roof or in the building or even in the wider Owens Park area. Nothing except for her phone, this unsent message that had clearly been meant for someone who’d hurt her.
It said, How could you do this to me?
I was present when DI James spoke to the parents. He asked if they had any idea who that message could have been meant for, if there was anything like this in Zoe’s past. Mr. Nolan told us absolutely not, kept emphasizing that Zoe was “straight down the line normal,” and that someone had to have taken her.
SALLY NOLAN:
I let Rob fill them in on the details. I was struggling to talk or think. But when they asked if Zoe had been acting strange lately, if she’d been under any pressure, when he shook his head, I had to put in. You know, “Well, hang on. She hurt herself six months ago. She was living with this disappointment.” Rob looked at me like I’d spat on her name.
LIU WAI:
When the police interviewed me, they kept coming back to the text from Zoe’s phone. How could you do this to me? I’d told them broadly what had happened at the party, how there’d been a set-to and Zoe had asked me to meet her on the roof. I immediately regretted that, because they jumped on it, like, “So the text message must have been meant for you.”
SAM LIMMOND:
I spoke to Alex that day on the phone. It sounded like there was a full-scale search underway by morning. She said she’d talked to the police and told them her worries about Zoe’s old laptop. She thought it was the device used to film the sex tape, emphasized how Liu Wai had recently come into ownership of it.
I wanted to see it Al’s way, course I did, but she was so manic at the time, maybe even on something. I was worried how seriously the police would take her. Al was prescribed Paxil for depression, but sometimes when I wasn’t around, she’d mix it with other things.
LIU WAI:
I never bore any ill will toward Alex, because she was clearly going through something, clearly not of her right mind. When it came to the police, I just said, “Putting the sex tape itself to one side for a moment, why would Zoe write a text message to me if she thought I was on my way up the stairs to talk to her? Zoe was quiet, but she wasn’t a mime. She didn’t have to walk round with a blackboard. She didn’t have to spell out what she wanted to say like a Victorian mute.”
So I told them what I thought.
You text people who aren’t with you at the time. Your sister, for example. Maybe the same one who’d left the building seconds before an incriminating video of you was leaked into the world. I mean, who writes unaddressed texts? Clearly, someone deleted the recipient.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’d had a shower and maybe an hour’s sleep when the police asked to see me again. They wanted to know about the text I’d found on Zoe’s phone, if it could have been meant for me? They wanted to know if we’d been fighting, if we had problems. I asked why they’d think that, and they said outright that “several people” had approached them about tensions between us. They wouldn’t say who, but that was the day she went missing. That was how long it took for us to start tearing each other down.