A born fucking liar.
And at the same time, what could I say? I would have been homeless without him. When I finally did leave for good, somewhere in early 2012, I had to go in the night when he was passed out, black-out drunk. As far as Zoe Nolan goes? He was seeing someone, he was moving money around, and his days were largely wide open to do whatever he liked with. I can tell you that from when we first got together. Oh, and that song, “R U Still in 2 It,” that Zoe apparently kept putting on her Facebook page? That’s fairly close to his heart too. I know because it was our song. I played it for him the first day we met. There’s no doubt in my mind that they were having an affair.
JAI MAHMOOD:
They expelled me the day before the reconstruction started filming, not that I’d been invited to the shoot or anything. I had to be out of Owens Park by the end of that week. I’d made it four months into higher education. None of the others were speaking to me by this point, not my family either, so I didn’t have anyone to tell. My last night on campus, I knew I should stay away. Something just took me there, man. It was dusk, the magic hour, this mix of lit windows, some darkness, and some color still in the sky. For the first time in months, I remember wishing I had a camera. I went through the lobby of the tower no problem, straight up the stairs. I wasn’t interested in trying to help or talk to Kim anymore. Fuck all that. I knew everything that had come before was finished and whatever happened to me next would be brand new. Maybe better, maybe worse, but definitely different.
The door to the roof had police tape on it, but that had been ripped off and broken, and clearly, people were still going in and out. Then I opened it and wondered for a second if I was seeing things, like, hallucinating. Because there was Zoe Nolan, standing right at the edge, right where I’d seen her before, dangling her leg out over nothing, weeks and weeks after she’d gone missing. And no, I wasn’t high. I wasn’t dreaming. I knew I wasn’t because something felt different about it, like, totally wrong. I crossed the roof quiet as I could, not wanting to scare her. When I got within reach, I grabbed her arms, proper tight. She struggled, but I just pulled back, and we both landed on the rooftop together.
I stared at her, like, “Everyone’s looking for you. Where the fuck have you been?” She stared back like nothing had happened, said she’d lost track of time. Then she saw something in how I was looking at her and closed her eyes. Started to laugh. She said, “I’m Kim,” and then I saw it. I never normally mixed them up, but she was wearing the clothes, the makeup and the wig they’d gotten in for the reconstruction. It was scary in a way, man, nearly flawless, except for one thing…
When I found Zoe on the roof that first time after all the fire alarms, she was out on the ledge like a dreamer. She was watching everything and absorbing it, in love with life. Kim could look like her sometimes, and especially that night, but the difference was she looked like she might actually jump. I stopped laughing when that occurred to me, when I asked myself why she’d been standing on the roof ledge on her own at night. Kim just carried on cracking up, even when she saw how scared I’d been and how serious I was. My heart was going like a cat in a bag. You know how sometimes your body gets the picture faster than your brain does? It was like that, man. My body sensed danger, but my brain couldn’t work it out. I remember looking down at my hands and they were shining under the moonlight, gleaming with sweat. Kim just kept on laughing.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-02-25 18:19
To: you
on Sun, Feb 24, 2019, Joseph Knox [email protected] wrote:
Hey—well, message received and understood—this is your baby.
I’ve almost reached the end of part two. Now feels like the time to say: I’m really troubled by the whole twin thing. This might sound stupid—but is there any chance at all that Kim and Zoe switched places? i.e.—is the girl we now know as Kim ACTUALLY Zoe? For example, could Zoe have swapped places with Kim on the night that she supposedly disappeared (or perhaps even before that, for unknown reasons)?
Another thing: Rob Nolan wanted to BE someone and his best bet was with Zoe. Once the RNCM thing failed, once even Zoe saw her ticket to fame as null and void, it’s interesting that her disappearance opened the door to a different kind of celebrity for her dad…
Say Rob and Zoe were in it together: He could get rid of Kim, the daughter he “had no time for” and still have Zoe in his life (but now passing as Kim). They’d both get the limelight. Possible?
Jx
# # #
Hey JK—thanks for understanding.
No—Put simply, this is a stupid thing to think. Twins aren’t just two interchangeable versions of the same person. People would have noticed and known, especially given the amount of scrutiny at the time. Full disclosure though: cough, I-thought-exactly-the-same-thing. I edged toward asking a few people in interviews but they openly laughed at me. The silver bullet to the twin-swap theory is that twins (apparently) do NOT have matching fingerprints. Kim was printed on the night Zoe went missing. Sarah Manning said the police absolutely confirmed it was her and ruled out this theory at the time using multiple items that only Kim or Zoe would have touched and comparing the two.
It doesn’t discount Rob Nolan straight up making Zoe disappear for the fame though. And of course, this isn’t to say Kim never pretended to be Zoe, which is something you must be just getting to if you’re at the end of part two. You’re basically at the end of the main investigation. Shit’s about to get weird, Knoxy.
Ex
21.
“Dead End”
With the reconstruction looming and the investigation effectively stalled, Kim takes matters into her own hands with a reckless attempt to find out the truth.
CARYS PARRY:
Well, my day didn’t start with that panicked phone call but only because I’d been up since 4:00 a.m. I wouldn’t necessarily be on set for every shoot, but given that this story had originated with me and I’d made various assurances to the Nolan family, it had become my baby. So I was in the van and on my way to Fallowfield when Rob Nolan called saying that no one could find Kim.
ROBERT NOLAN:
Sal and me had spent the night before in Manchester. Plan was that Kim would meet us in the lobby of the Travelodge, and we’d get breakfast, have a coffee. Course, she never turned up. We couldn’t get her on the phone either.
SALLY NOLAN:
Well, I was worried, so I called Liu Wai, but she hadn’t seen her. She went to knock on the new flat Kim had been moved to, but she wasn’t in her room. Her new flatmates hardly knew her, they weren’t sure she’d even been back the night before.