LIU WAI:
Personally, I never felt safe from that moment on. Once I knew someone had been in and stolen Zoe’s stuff, I felt like we were under some kind of surveillance. Someone actually set up a Facebook page posing as an appeal for information on the location of her underwear, invited half the student population to join, like, hundreds of people. At the time, it seemed juvenile. Now, like everything else, it just looks sinister. We never found out who it was, but let’s just say I was looking a little bit more closely at the people surrounding me at the time.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I’d guess that Zoe and I had only met two or three more times by this stage. There’d been a couple of choir practices at St. Chrysostom’s Church, and we’d taken a long stroll, walking and talking, after each one. I’m afraid she didn’t tell me about the theft, no. My relationship with her was quite humorously chaste, almost old-fashioned. No off-color jokes, both kind of focusing on music, positivity.
I suppose we both must have needed it.
I’d grown up in the old country, in an old family, and I think I was quite old-fashioned myself in some senses. I did unfortunately find out about it all without Zoe’s consent. I was invited to join a Facebook group called “Knickers with Attitude,” which had been established to resemble an appeal for information on Zoe’s missing underwear. I declined the request and blocked the page. To me, it felt intensely childish. I can’t imagine how it must have felt for her.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
People nudged each other, they looked her way. Word definitely got around. It could have been really distressing, but I think she sort of enjoyed it. She was recognizable for a few days—who wouldn’t want to be the center of attention at eighteen? It’s what Dad had been priming her for her whole life. Suddenly, she was getting smiles in the lobby, boys were buying her drinks…
That’s actually how we found out Jai was the main suspect.
Two boys bought us a bottle of wine at the Friendship Inn, and one of them said he’d heard that “raghead” took Zoe’s underwear from her room. I didn’t know Jai outside the night I’d seen him in our flat, and as far as I knew, Zoe hadn’t met him at all, but I guessed he was the person they were talking about. We left without finishing our drinks.
LIU WAI:
So, whoever set up the page had taken pictures from Zoe’s real Facebook. Like, personal information and stuff from her wall. We realized it must have been someone who was actually friends with her on there or someone who had access to her account, which I think made it even more disturbing? Zoe loved Facebook. She was always talking to ten people at once, putting up pictures, making comments, so to suddenly realize someone was monitoring her was dark.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I think what disturbed me more than the page itself—which was just stupid—was that none of us were talking about the theft outside our group. Me, Zoe, Liu, Alex and Lois all knew about the robbery. Well, I didn’t tell anyone. Zoe said she didn’t either. I think Fintan backs that up because she never said anything to him. Then you’ve got Liu Wai, who was scarily loyal, Alex, who was busy with her own life, and Lois, who left immediately afterward. I just couldn’t see it coming from anyone in that group. So to me, the most likely person to have started that page was whoever had actually stolen her underwear or maybe whoever the police had spoken to about it. No one else should have even known.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I personally never saw the Facebook page, but you could tell something was in the air. Who knows if one thing was connected to the other, but what I remember were posters appearing around Owens Park, warning of a predatory photographer. As I recall, they specifically urged girls to “Beware.” I mean, it could only have been directed at Jai, which was ridiculous, but he started getting shit for it pretty much immediately.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I wasn’t even into pictures of people, man. The odd thing came along, but only when they weren’t facing the camera. Maybe massive groups like the fire alarm evacuations, stuff at a distance, but faces didn’t really float my boat. Owens Park was ugly as shit, though, and that did. You’d see me around with my camera a lot at the time. I was always trying to get on roofs and in hallways and to hang out windows, always trying to find new angles, man. And I started getting hassle. Shouted at and called a sex pest and stuff. Yeah, I remember the posters.
HARRY FOWLES, Andrew and Jai’s flatmate:
I think we were only a few weeks in by then, but there was already a rift between us. Like, Andrew and Jai one side and the rest of us—me, Chris and Lee—on the other. For one thing, Andrew would always refer to the rest of us as One Direction, like, really scornfully. More seriously, none of us had ever dealt with the police before, so it felt pretty real when they turned up questioning the two of them about something in our first week. You’ve got Andrew kind of shouting at them and Jai refusing to cooperate, being accused of this awful stuff.
It just felt like a lot.
What really made ears prick up and kind of stay that way was this mention of theft, things going missing. Because that had started at ours too, gently at first, then sort of snowballing out of control. You couldn’t leave anything in the fridge without it going missing. Y’know, if you left your wallet lying around for the day and then picked it up later, you’d find yourself saying, “What happened to that twenty?” My house keys, the fob and my room key and everything, went walkabout in the first week with no explanation.
It was only much, much later I put it all together.
After Zoe Nolan went missing and it was all over the news, I realized that the police had been talking to Andrew and Jai about things vanishing from her place. I suppose it always struck me as a kind of clue. Like, stuff was going missing from our building, and stuff was going missing from theirs. And who went between both buildings? Andrew and Jai. We put our foot down about Jai doing his science lab shit in the bathroom too. Someone was going around taking pictures of girls against their will or something, so it seemed weird for him to be developing stuff in secret all the time.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I checked the Facebook page once or twice, just looking for clues of who might be running it. I stopped going on there when people started posting mad stuff—that wall was like a public toilet. People saying a perv was on the prowl, he needed reining in, attaching pictures of some posters that had been put up around Owens Park, all warning about a photographer who was stalking women.