KIMBERLY NOLAN:
They started to pour something on me. At first, I thought it was petrol, then I realized it was vodka. One of them held my face up and they just poured the whole bottle over my head. I was coughing and choking, but they kept on going until I was sick inside the bag. They dropped the bottle on to my face, it smashed my fucking front teeth, and I still didn’t move. I still didn’t dare.
Then I heard the zips on their trousers and definitely two of them, maybe all three, pissed on me. It was so cold that the heat from it was scorching, like, searing to the skin. It went all over my hands and arms, all over my body, and all over the bag and in my face and in my eyes and in my mouth. I was just trying to breathe through my fucking ears or something until they finally stopped and I heard footsteps going away. I heard the driver’s door close, then one of them leaned down to cut the cable ties around my wrists.
LIU WAI:
…Well, I heard that she actually did see something inside that van…
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
He leaned into my ear and said, “Tell anyone about this and you’ll get it in every hole, sweetheart.” He picked me up and turned me facing the breeze. I felt the air sticking the wet bag to my face, all the piss and vodka and sick. He draped Zoe’s jacket back over my shoulders and told me to walk two hundred steps straight ahead, said they’d be gone when I got there. If I took the bag off or turned around, they’d have to use me like a village bike and then they’d have to kill me.
So I started walking, shaking, mainly trying not to be sick again. I had my hands out in front of me to stop myself from going into a wall or something. I couldn’t have been ten steps in when I heard a loud bang and dropped to the floor, thinking I’d been shot. Then the van started up and I realized it had been the back door slamming shut. They were driving out and away, so I peeled the bag off my head—I couldn’t breathe—and saw taillights disappearing over my shoulder. Nothing else because my eyes were streaming and burning, hurting so much.
LIU WAI:
…Well, this is all according to Jai, so I suppose you might have to take it with a grain of salt, but apparently she told Andrew what she saw inside the van.
JAI MAHMOOD:
Look, I mean, nah. What would I know? I was out cold.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I just held on to the ground and let my eyes stop stinging, adjust to the dark. When I did look up, I saw I was on a building site, the abandoned one off Canal Street in town. It was meant to be luxury apartments like everything else, but the money had gone wrong, so it was just a hole in the ground with a fence around it. The center was this pit, this twenty-foot drop into exposed foundations, and I was about two steps away from walking into it when I took the bag off my head. They’d wanted me to fall into it blindfolded and drunk, covered in piss and sick.
FINTAN MURPHY:
My questions are just the obvious ones. Why did she take Zoe’s jacket from the club? Why does she say she called Zoe when we can prove that she didn’t? Who was she actually looking for outside? How come she didn’t tell the police about her abduction? I mean, she makes it all sound fairly serious.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’m sure Fintan would have reacted much more rationally. I’m sure Fintan does still have his fucking phone records from seven years ago, but I don’t know. I didn’t recognize their voices, I didn’t think I knew them. And I knew how it looked. It was a running joke between us all at the time when we’d had too much: “Oh, someone must have spiked my drink again last night.” But I think I would have said something. I think I would have found the right time or the words, but then Zoe went missing a month later. Nothing made sense to me after that. When I tried to say it, when I even tried to run it through my head, it just sounded pathetic and attention-seeking. Like I was making it up to compete with my glamorous missing sister.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Competing with her glamorous missing sister. I couldn’t put it better myself. Funny she was brave enough to tell the story for a five-figure sum, seven years on.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I sold it to the Mail to defend myself, which I think Fintan knows.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Mainly, I’d ask what happened to the clothes she was wearing that night. They should have been a veritable gold mine of DNA evidence.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I walked home, I had a shower, I went to bed. I was frozen, I had to try and unthaw. I slept for about twelve hours, and I don’t remember seeing the clothes again. He knows someone was stealing stuff from the tower. Clothes from out of our rooms, Zoe’s as well. That’s all on record.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Yes, someone was stealing things from the tower, Zoe’s too, but what a thief would want with urine-sodden, vomit-encrusted clothes, I don’t know. Look, I say none of this to be cruel. Sometimes I think this story we’re stuck in has messed with our heads. When people go through this kind of trauma, they don’t get closer to each other. Sadly, they just tear apart. The least we can do is try to be decent, and if I’m falling short of that with Kimberly, then I apologize to her here. Of course I do. But Zoe, my best friend in the world, is still missing all these years later, and this is what Kimberly wants to talk about? It’s nothing. It’s a footnote.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Liu says that I know what Kim saw inside the van?
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
No, I [inaudible] Look, I closed my eyes like I said.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
She did say something like that as it happens. She told me she saw a face.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
An illustrated face. Well, a tattoo on the back of one of their hands. This ghoulish laughing clown face, a great big, horrible grin. Look, I never thought I’d say it, but I think I agree with Fintan. I mean, aren’t we here to talk about Zoe?
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-01-14 07:11
To: you
on Fri, Jan 11, 2019, Evie Mitchell [email protected] wrote:
Hey JK, just wondering if you’d had a chance to read the prologue?
Ex
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on Sat, Jan 12, 2019, Evie Mitchell [email protected] wrote:
Nudge
…Ex
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on Sat, Jan 12, 2019, Joseph Knox [email protected] wrote:
Argh, sorry—can’t find the original email w/ attachment. Would you mind re-sending?
J
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on Sat, Jan 12, 2019, Evie Mitchell [email protected] wrote:
Sure. Here. (You’re the worst btw)
E
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