He didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
Not only was Zoe missing, but we were all on the spot for it. We’d all been unaccounted for at the crucial time. His speech was slurred—it sounded like he’d taken something—and I had what the police had said to me blasting through both ears. Namely that Jai’s a junkie and he can’t be trusted. I delicately broached the subject with him and he admitted he might need a day or so for stuff to pass through his system. I said that was fine and I could meet him the next day. I felt like a pretty solid friend until he said he’d rather not meet me alone, he wanted someone else to be there. Oh, and that he needed a fucking grand first.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
When I saw Andrew was calling me, I nearly didn’t pick up. I probably shouldn’t have. He asked how I’d been, but I could tell there was something else and at some point, he blurted out that he knew where Jai was, he just needed my help in making him come forward. This was it, my one attempt to try and play the game. It was after the story had come out about me “partying” in the wake of Zoe’s disappearance. I let Andrew convince me that we could clean up our images and come out looking like the good guys, which, obviously, we didn’t.
We went into town and met Jai in the Temple, this tiny underground toilet of a pub on Great Bridgewater Street. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures, but he looked awful, like he really was guilty of something. Like I say, I tried not to, but I’d read every headline, every story, every radioactive comment section. I was at the point where I believed the bad things they said about me, so of course I could believe the worst of him as well. There were too many coincidences for them not to show in my face. The theft stuff, this suggestion that he and Zoe had been seeing each other on the sly, the fact that he’d been unaccounted for when she went missing and had turned up afterward wanting money.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I think to some extent both Kim and I felt like a stranger was walking through that door. He even looked different, although I could hardly mount my high horse on that front. My face was still fairly distinctive to say the least. I was wearing Kim’s concealer over the scratches, essentially looking like a Bond villain on his day off. But I did hope that in coming and taking my money, Jai was letting me off the hook for how I’d acted. Instead, his first question was, “Did you find your watch, then?” Like, really satirizing the importance I’d placed on it. I said, “No, no one cares about the watch any more, mate.” He shrugged and said, “Some of us never did.”
It didn’t seem like there was much more to say, so I gave him the cash—taken from my current account, I might add—then we went with him while he handed it to this sketchy guy, paying off his hangover. And we’re talking ten minutes at the most. He met him in the McDonald’s at the top of Oxford Road. It was Christmas week, so shit weather and last-minute shoppers everywhere, low visibility. We didn’t realize we were being photographed the entire time. When we met Jai, when we handed him the money, when he met his Russian, the lot. We were fucking clueless. Afterward, we did manage to take him to the police. Afterward, he did cooperate—but of course no fucker printed that.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I was with Robert and Sally when they read that story, about Kimberly and Andrew’s dirty meeting with Jai, them handing thousands of pounds to this known drug dealer, this violent man. I never told Kim this, but Sally had a fall that morning. At the time, I thought she’d had a heart attack or a stroke or something. It was one of the worst moments of my life. Rob stormed out afterward, and I had to spend the whole rest of the day caring for her in this poxy student flat. I thought, What the hell have I got myself into? I had my own mother on the phone, herself reading these terrible stories, begging me to come home. I kept saying I would, I’d be on the next flight out, but then I’d see a picture of Zoe and think, Christ, what kind of friend am I?
JAI MAHMOOD:
I didn’t see the pictures at the time, but I knew they were bad. I felt like shit for Kim, whatever was going on, because I knew she was getting hurt, I had the same thing with my own family. They were seeing and hearing these bad things about me, thinking I’d changed. I couldn’t pick up the phone and talk to them for a year after. That day, though, I was just in with the police. There was tinsel up in the interview room, man, I thought I was still high. I just got hammered with questions, started to feel like public enemy number fucking one.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Not to get competitive, but I’d say we were in joint first place on that score.
JAI MAHMOOD:
They were asking me things I didn’t know, about thongs and this threat on her computer, and then worse, about stuff I didn’t think they knew. They wanted to know why Zoe and me had been texting each other, why we’d been meeting up. I think I said we were friends and tried to leave it at that, but they had all these statements from the others saying we weren’t, that I never spoke to Zoe and she never mentioned me, that we must have been carrying on in secret.
In the end, it all had to come out.
LIU WAI:
To this day, I refuse to believe that Zoe was using drugs. First of all, I lived in the next room, I would have known. Second, Zoe told me things, personal things. We were close. I thought at the time, and I still think now, that the so-called revelations about her personal life were generated, leapt on and perpetuated by the police because they didn’t know what they were doing or where to look. They just saw an attractive young woman and filled her with every kind of salaciousness they could dream up. But drugs? I’ll accept that she was speaking to Jai, maybe he was preying on her, but I just can’t believe the worst about people I love. In my opinion, he threw her under the bus to save his own skin.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
My parents, Fintan and Liu, they all came down on Jai as a fantasist and a liar because it was too painful to consider that they didn’t know Zoe, that none of us really had. Everyone seemed to agree that she’d been acting out of character, abrasively, going quite quickly up and down, but no one wanted to look at why that might have been. It made sense to me, though. I could see it. And I could see how she might feel more comfortable confiding in a stranger than in me. It hurt, but we’d been driven apart. I could definitely see it.