LIU WAI:
I’ve personally never understood those songs where rappers are upset about people talking to the police. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of? So I was happy to tell them exactly what I’d seen and heard. And frankly, Kim was long-suffering around Zoe. Anyone would have said the same. She didn’t like Zoe’s clothes or her music or her friends, and yet she was always hanging around us for some reason.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I had to start justifying myself to them, which always makes you sound guilty, especially when you feel guilty, and especially when you’ve just been arrested. I said they could think what they wanted, but I never fucked with Zoe’s text. If I’d wanted to avoid suspicion, I would have just deleted the entire message. I feel like it was left that way to raise as many questions as it could. Then, I guess there were a few hours between Zoe going missing from the tower and my arrest at the building site. They were obsessed with that window of time, but I just couldn’t say where I was or what I was doing. It was a blur. The other thing the police could never get their heads around was me and Zoe—twins—being two separate people. Some detective actually asked me which one of us was the evil one, and I knew he was joking, but Jesus.
I had to explain that we were both individuals, tell them about Zoe’s music, her suicide attempt, the reasons we were living together in the first place. I had to explain why I felt like I couldn’t let her out of my sight and, yes, why that might have made things difficult between us. Then I saw the way they were looking at me and started to clarify, like, “Wait, she didn’t do this to herself. What happened before was a cry for help.” Then the lead officer, James, just looked at me and said, “Okay, fair enough, so what was she crying about? What’s wrong at home?”
SALLY NOLAN:
I think I’d been talking to them for all of five minutes before I stopped and said, “Wait a minute. Why are you asking me where Rob was?”
ROBERT NOLAN:
I’d been performing at a pub in Stockport, a Christmas party, about a fifteen-minute drive from Fallowfield, about a forty-five-minute drive from home. I got back around one, one thirty in the morning, which apparently would have given me time to get to Fallowfield and back the night she went missing. I’m not sure what I was supposed to have done with her or why. It was offensive, and I’m talking to them bleary-eyed and with half a haircut, losing my rag. It makes me angry even now. They’re wasting their time talking to me while my daughter’s twelve hours gone? I said, “Where’s the prick with her scratch marks on his face? Why aren’t we talking to him?”
LIU WAI:
Andrew has one of those great big upper-class English noses, like, you’d think he could smell around corners or something. And he was always looking down it at Zoe. Nothing was good enough. He’d correct her, mock her taste, all this. Sometimes you’d think he didn’t even like her. So why was he always hanging around us? I was like, “He’s in the stupid sex tape. He’d be more likely to leak it than me, probably more likely to leak it than anyone. Zoe was probably texting him, asking how he could have done that to her.”
SARAH MANNING:
We were made aware of the so-called sex tape that afternoon. Alex Wilson told me about it, but she was clearly under the influence of something, and I found it difficult to follow exactly what she was trying to say. When I spoke to Liu Wai, she confirmed the broad strokes of the story. I actually saw the tape myself when I caught two students in the tower lobby sniggering, watching it on their phones. It was short, just a clip, but no doubt devastating for Zoe to see leak out into the wider world. One of the kids was doing an impression of Andrew, saying “Oh, Zoe, Zoe,” over and over again.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Which I suppose is how I ended up in this fetid fucking police station, free to leave at any time, just with three or four shitkickers between me and the door, explaining my sex life on a hangover and no sleep. More to the point, how I ended up hearing every word I’d ever spoken in Liu Wai’s presence recited back to me verbatim but now helpfully context free. So I’m racist, I’m sexist, I fucking hate Zoe, blah, blah. It was no surprise to me that Liu Wai memorized every word I ever said around her, because her issues with Zoe were as profound as anyone else’s. She had no life of her own whatsoever, no social skills whatsoever, and her only pleasures were attained vicariously. She was then and is now a leech, and that’s far more destructive in my book than a boyfriend who’s only after one thing. Most importantly, returning to the matter at hand, when Zoe attacked me, she never said anything about the damned tape, and there’s a room full of people to back that up.
LIU WAI:
I’d say Zoe’s reaction to the tape was pretty clear.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
The truth was, not only had I never seen the fucking thing, but I didn’t even have a copy of it. I didn’t have a file. I didn’t have anything. Not on my phone, not on my laptop, not anywhere.
LIU WAI:
Let’s meet Andrew halfway and say, hypothetically, that he didn’t leak the tape. Let’s say someone else did. Dozens of people saw Zoe more or less rip his face off seconds after seeing it. Does he expect us to believe that those two things are unrelated? She wasn’t thick, however much it might suit Andrew Flowers to keep suggesting she was.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I’ve never once suggested that Zoe was any less intelligent than me, and certainly not thick. I resent those words being put into my mouth. Am I glib? Yes. Cynical? Sign me up. But don’t call me a fucking snob just because I reject this somber procession of grief that we’re all supposed to lockstep into out of some misplaced notion of etiquette. We react—we think and we feel—in different ways. I wouldn’t think to delegitimize however Liu Wai wants to grieve, fucking incense and lanterns, Hello Kitty coffins, whatever, fine by me. But while her grotesque Saint Zoe shit might make her feel morally superior, it’s been scientifically proven not to bring people back from the dead.
Oh, where was I?
Yes, well, I suppose the police considered the text important because they perceived some causality between the sex tape and it. They thought whoever leaked the tape was the intended recipient of Zoe’s text. Once I agreed to hand over my phone, my laptop, my university log-in for forensics—all of which came back clean I might add—I thought they eased up on the idea of it being me. But of course their next questions were, “Well, who do you think leaked the tape, then? Who do you think the text might have been intended for?”