Free The Irish Scissor Sisters by Mick McCaffrey Page B

her at this stage, Kathleen had told Lulu that Farah had left her for a former partner and hung-up the phone.
    Farah’s family would later make numerous attempts to contact Kathleen. She eventually told them that Farah had left her for good and was living with another woman. Then one day in July Kathleen rang Lulu Swaleh. The mother of six was in a very distressed state about Farah. She was in tears, ranting and making no sense. She eventually hung up the phone and never spoke to Noor’s family again.
    Kathleen also had a second story that Noor had suddenly left her and she’d heard nothing from him. In early April, Kathleen rang Ali Suleiman Abdulaziz asking if he had heard from Farah. Abdulaziz and Farah were quite close but he had not seen the Somalian and asked Kathleen whether the pair of them were still going out. Kathleen became upset and wouldn’t answer and hung up on him. He tried ringing Noor’s mobile over the next few days but kept getting a message that the number was not in service. Ali had spent the previous Christmas Eve drinking with Farah, Kathleen and Charlotte at Richmond Cottages and was genuinely worried about his friend. He could not get the missing man out of his mind. Three or four days later he rang Kathleen to see if Farah had changed his phone number and she sobbed, ‘Ali, I’m finished with Farah.’
    She also met and chatted with Karen Tobin, the landlord’s wife, and told her she ‘did not know what it is like to give somebody three years of your life and for that person to then walk out on you’. Mulhall told Karen that gardaí knew that Farah had ‘gone off’ and was ‘not legal’ and was using an assumed name. Karen Tobin later stated that she felt that Kathleen was trying to give the impression that she had been in a committed relationship with Noor and was devastated that he had left her.
    In the second week of May, Kathleen ran into a man she knew from drinking in the Parnell Mooney pub on Parnell Street. She had not seen him since Farah Noor had attacked him during an incident in the pub. It later emerged that she said he would not see the man who had tried to beat him up again because the police had deported him.
    On 23 May 2005 Kathleen Mulhall made one of her regular visits to the community welfare office at 77 Upper Gardiner Street. She spoke to Community Welfare Officer Dermot Farrelly who, in later investigations, made the following statement to gardaí: ‘Last month Kathleen Mulhall came into the office and I spoke to her at the counter. She was by herself. She was worried about Farah Swaleh Noor. She didn’t know about his whereabouts. She was asking me to tell her from the records on file if we knew where Farah was, if we had any address for him. She wanted to know if we knew if he was all right. I told her that we weren’t in a position to give out the information to her. She then said that Farah might be using his real name. She said she didn’t know how to spell the name but it was Sheila Swaleh Shagu. That’s how she pronounced the name. She wasn’t very clear on the exact pronunciation. I have put variations of the name into the system but there is no match that is similar to the name at all on our computer files. I know from the information on Farah on our computer, his mother’s name is Sumeha Shigoo.’
    Kathleen was going to great lengths to inform as many people as possible that she was looking for Farah. Some time after going to see Dermot Farrelly and enquiring about Noor, Kathleen ran into the community welfare officer in the Gala shop on Summerhill Parade. Farah’s body had still not been identified at this stage so Kathleen spoke to him again. Mr Farrelly was on his lunch break and didn’t really want to talk to her outside work but he didn’t want to be rude either. They exchanged small talk before going their separate ways.
    As well as sorting out her cover story in the weeks and months following the murder, Kathleen was still obsessed