True Crime Story(6)

FINTAN MURPHY:

A selfless act from Andrew Flowers? Another first. After recent events, I’d say we all know for certain what kind of guy he is…

LIU WAI:

I want to be fair, but honestly? I don’t know what Zoe ever saw in him. I consider Andrew Flowers to be one of the most unpleasant human beings I’ve ever encountered.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

Well, Liu lives to judge people. I’m not saying she’s wrong on Andrew, but being cynical about everything doesn’t make you Nostradamus.

JAI MAHMOOD:

If Andrew really did take me home, it’s probably because it suited whatever was happening in Flowers-land.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

We all scattered, and when I got back to the booth where I’d left them, the only thing I could find of Zoe’s was her bright-red jacket. I was feeling so weird, I couldn’t tell how long I’d been gone, so I think I assumed they’d all left without me. They were probably just on the dance floor or something. Fifth’s this typical Manchester nightclub, a sweatbox that never drops below boiling point.

I was shivering, though.

My teeth were chattering and I was breaking out in goose bumps, so I grabbed Zoe’s jacket and put it on. The room’s this wide-open mezzanine-type space, like the Roman Colosseum or something—you can see the top floor from the bottom and everything just surrounds you. There was a song playing, “Flux” by Bloc Party, the part where the singer starts screaming “We need to talk” over and over again. And I knew then, from the way I was frozen stiff and the room was looming down on me, from the way everyone had vanished and this song kept insisting, “We need to talk, we need to talk,” I knew something bad was happening to us.

FINTAN MURPHY:

Jai’s absolutely correct, I wasn’t out that night, and I’ve never claimed otherwise. I don’t drink for a start. I’m sure Zoe invited me, but I suppose I was busy or not in the mood. The reason I can discuss those events with some certainty is that I went there the following day looking for Zoe’s missing jacket. She’d emailed me mentioning how upset she was to have misplaced it, so I thought I’d see if it was in the lost property to surprise her.

In the event, it was me who ended up being surprised.

The club was closed during the day, but I badgered my way in and pleaded my case. The jacket hadn’t been handed over, but Zoe had mentioned where she’d been sitting, so I asked if they’d let me watch the CCTV covering that booth. I came up with some spiel on data protection law, saying people have the right to request footage they’ve appeared in, and I was doing so on Zoe’s behalf. Either I’m a gifted liar or they just got bored of me, because on the twentieth time of asking, the manager marched us back to the office and handed me over to a security guy. He got things running and we watched the booth on fast-forward until Zoe, Kim, Liu, Andrew and Jai all arrived. We sped through their various comings and goings, then slowed down when we saw the booth had been left vacant. Then Kim staggered back looking absolutely trashed, and I suppose an alarm bell started going off for me then. She checked there was no one around, then put Zoe’s jacket on and walked away.

We were able to follow her on camera after that, we saw her leaving the club in her sister’s red jacket, as she said in her recent Mail interview. Then there were a couple of other things she never quite got around to mentioning. She was certainly confused, certainly disoriented. In fact, in this apparent search for her sister, she stopped in the doorway to check out a guy, even made a grab and shouted something after him. He kept on going. Perhaps her disorientation was also the reason why, when she began persistently calling someone outside, waiting for the phone to be answered, she never once dialed her sister’s number, despite telling the Mail that’s why she left the club in the first place. I have Zoe’s phone records from her parents. No incoming calls on that night or the next morning. Of course, I’d be interested to see Kimberly’s records…

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

Could you find a phone bill from seven fucking years ago?

FINTAN MURPHY:

Look, what I saw on that tape was a young woman undergoing some kind of internal crisis, one exacerbated by drugs or alcohol. She was walking with hunched shoulders, crossed arms, constantly picking at her nails and moving strands of hair, clearly in some kind of emotional distress, but also clearly on the pull. Whatever Kimberly’s problem was, she walked into that building with it.

But once she exited the club and tried to make a couple of calls, it all seemed to fall away. I remember she was looking quite closely at the people gathered in the street outside, she even approached one or two of them. What’s interesting is that everyone she looked at or approached was a man. I remember thinking, Who’s she looking for? The impression I got was that she was searching for someone in particular, and she was confused not to find him out there.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

There was a hand on my back and I was being pushed into this filthy white rust bucket van. Someone had used their finger to write clean me on the door in grime, and I was half laughing at that when everything went black.

FINTAN MURPHY:

Now, because Kimberly never mentioned anything about this assault to anyone, not in the wake of her sister’s disappearance, not for seven years afterward, there was no cause for authorities to check cameras in the surrounding area at the time. Conveniently for Kimberly’s story, there’s no way for us to confirm the existence of this white van now, but I can tell you for damn sure I never saw it on the club’s camera. I mean, not to state things too bluntly, but my dealings with Kimberly Nolan have all been characterized by tall tales.