JAI MAHMOOD:
Zoe was depressed, man. That’s what she told me, that’s what was apparently so controversial. She was like a fucking submarine or something, pressure from all angles, mad stresses from her family and friends to try and be perfect. They had this dream that she was about to be famous or something, and she’d lived under that for so long she’d started believing it herself. She’d been trained to believe she was this one-time talent, yeah, then realized in the last year that it was all bullshit. She said she used to watch The X Factor and Pop Idol, all this reality TV, and just feel sorry for everyone involved, all these poor, deluded people. But by the time I was talking to her, she saw herself as one of them.
I didn’t think she was deluded or not special, which is what I tried to say, like, “We don’t all need to be famous to be someone.” But they’d spent so long polishing her surface she was scared there was nothing underneath.
It started with her seeing me out on my rounds in Owens Park one day, asking me what I was doing. I said, “Nothing much,” and she laughed and said that wasn’t what she’d heard. I was surprised when she tried to buy, but I was hardly the person to say, “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” So I just tried to respect her privacy. I tried to make it as easy on her and as safe as possible. For handovers, I couldn’t go to her place, because they knew me there. She couldn’t come to mine because of Andrew, so I thought about that first time I’d seen her up on the roof and suggested we meet there when she wanted something. When she did, we’d talk, and I’d get the inside track on why she was using in the first place.
One thing she did say, yeah. She thought someone was stalking her.
When I asked why she thought that, she said she’d nearly caught him once or twice, that she had this sense of a shadow, always ducking away, moving out of her sightline at the last second. And look, she was buying tiny amounts of stuff too. Sometimes I thought she was paying for the talk as much as for the pills. She said she’d had an “episode” sometime in the last year and was scared to have anything too serious lying around. I assumed “episode” meant overdose or suicide attempt, so I never tried to upsell to her. It meant more visits than I’d usually make—people usually bought in bulk—but I didn’t mind. I liked the tower and I liked Zoe. We’d meet on the roof, I’d sell and we’d talk, and that’s all there ever was to us, whatever anyone else says.
SARAH MANNING:
It certainly illuminated some aspects of the case—Zoe’s increasingly abrasive behavior before her disappearance, for example—and it explained why she’d felt this sudden urge to visit the rooftop after her blowup with Andrew. I have to say, I felt like we weren’t getting the whole picture of Jai’s drug use or his distribution. I was worried about how much Alex Wilson had been slurring her words on the day Zoe went missing for example. When I asked Liu, who was the most talkative of the group, she intimated that a guy Alex was seeing sometimes gave her drugs. I’d met Sam Limmond, and I was surprised by that, but Liu said no, Alex was seeing someone else as well. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure who this second guy was. For obvious reasons, I wish we’d tried harder to pursue that.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I never sold drugs to Alex. Ever. She asked me and I turned her down flat. I knew she could be quite manic, and I didn’t want to fuck with her head. That’s never what I was about.
SARAH MANNING:
Look, Jai’s statement tallied with what we already knew—Zoe’s disappointment, her suicide attempt—so in some ways, it was welcome. But it was just like Kim’s arrest and it was just like Andrew’s sex-tape denials. The explanations we got were the bare minimum. They left a lot to be desired.
JAI MAHMOOD:
They were asking me stuff I didn’t know, so yeah, I was struggling. They wanted to know what Zoe and me did all day, and I’d say, “We didn’t spend that kind of time with each other.” We’d meet on the roof some evenings for five, ten, twenty minutes, max, but they kept on hammering, “Where does she go during the day?” I was like, “I don’t know. I guess she goes to class?” They didn’t believe I didn’t know, but what could I tell them? I’m not psychic. Then came all the money stuff, and my head just spun off my body.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
The police search of Zoe’s room in the tower was pathetic. I guess it might be different if they thought she’d been murdered, but they didn’t even take stuff away, just told us not to touch it. One day while we were sitting around going stir-crazy, and probably because we were missing her as much as anything, we decided to go through her things anyway, just Mum and me. At a glance, it all seemed normal, what you might expect from a teenage girl’s room, then I found this brand-new laptop under her bed. I knew by then that she’d given her old one to Liu Wai, but I’d thought that was more to do with how she felt about the message that had been left on there—you know, it was soiled. We’d both arrived with the same model, secondhand Toshibas, but her replacement was top of the line, still in its box. I couldn’t have afforded it with everything I had, and she hadn’t even bothered to unpack it. And then there was more stacked up in the wardrobe. Bags from Harvey Nichols and perfume from Jo Malone. Dresses, coats, clothes—all stuffed away, most of it unopened, still labelled, untouched. We went through them and found receipts in the bags showing she’d paid for everything herself, on her own card. We just weren’t that kind of family. We’d never had that sort of money. While I’d been looking for bar work in the weeks before Zoe went missing, she’d been spending thousands of pounds.
SARAH MANNING:
It’s standard procedure to examine bank accounts for unusual activity. Up until this point in the investigation, that meant checking to see if Zoe’s cards were being used to withdraw cash or make purchases after her disappearance, which they weren’t. When Kim and Sally came to me with evidence of extravagant spending, I passed it on to the team and they began a more detailed process of financial forensics. From experience, I thought we were probably dealing with credit card fraud or maybe some kind of ridiculous overdraft situation. Neither one uncommon for students, especially those coming from lower income households. The banks throw so many cards, loans and overdrafts at them it’s easy to amass some substantial debt. People in that situation cut and run all the time, then usually come home safe once they’ve calmed down. If anything, I thought it might be a positive thing, a simple solution. Instead, we found funds in excess of ￡77,000 in Zoe’s current account.