It said, How could you do this to me?
I was present when DI James spoke to the parents. He asked if they had any idea who that message could have been meant for, if there was anything like this in Zoe’s past. Mr. Nolan told us absolutely not, kept emphasizing that Zoe was “straight down the line normal,” and that someone had to have taken her.
SALLY NOLAN:
I let Rob fill them in on the details. I was struggling to talk or think. But when they asked if Zoe had been acting strange lately, if she’d been under any pressure, when he shook his head, I had to put in. You know, “Well, hang on. She hurt herself six months ago. She was living with this disappointment.” Rob looked at me like I’d spat on her name.
LIU WAI:
When the police interviewed me, they kept coming back to the text from Zoe’s phone. How could you do this to me? I’d told them broadly what had happened at the party, how there’d been a set-to and Zoe had asked me to meet her on the roof. I immediately regretted that, because they jumped on it, like, “So the text message must have been meant for you.”
SAM LIMMOND:
I spoke to Alex that day on the phone. It sounded like there was a full-scale search underway by morning. She said she’d talked to the police and told them her worries about Zoe’s old laptop. She thought it was the device used to film the sex tape, emphasized how Liu Wai had recently come into ownership of it.
I wanted to see it Al’s way, course I did, but she was so manic at the time, maybe even on something. I was worried how seriously the police would take her. Al was prescribed Paxil for depression, but sometimes when I wasn’t around, she’d mix it with other things.
LIU WAI:
I never bore any ill will toward Alex, because she was clearly going through something, clearly not of her right mind. When it came to the police, I just said, “Putting the sex tape itself to one side for a moment, why would Zoe write a text message to me if she thought I was on my way up the stairs to talk to her? Zoe was quiet, but she wasn’t a mime. She didn’t have to walk round with a blackboard. She didn’t have to spell out what she wanted to say like a Victorian mute.”
So I told them what I thought.
You text people who aren’t with you at the time. Your sister, for example. Maybe the same one who’d left the building seconds before an incriminating video of you was leaked into the world. I mean, who writes unaddressed texts? Clearly, someone deleted the recipient.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’d had a shower and maybe an hour’s sleep when the police asked to see me again. They wanted to know about the text I’d found on Zoe’s phone, if it could have been meant for me? They wanted to know if we’d been fighting, if we had problems. I asked why they’d think that, and they said outright that “several people” had approached them about tensions between us. They wouldn’t say who, but that was the day she went missing. That was how long it took for us to start tearing each other down.
LIU WAI:
I’ve personally never understood those songs where rappers are upset about people talking to the police. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of? So I was happy to tell them exactly what I’d seen and heard. And frankly, Kim was long-suffering around Zoe. Anyone would have said the same. She didn’t like Zoe’s clothes or her music or her friends, and yet she was always hanging around us for some reason.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I had to start justifying myself to them, which always makes you sound guilty, especially when you feel guilty, and especially when you’ve just been arrested. I said they could think what they wanted, but I never fucked with Zoe’s text. If I’d wanted to avoid suspicion, I would have just deleted the entire message. I feel like it was left that way to raise as many questions as it could. Then, I guess there were a few hours between Zoe going missing from the tower and my arrest at the building site. They were obsessed with that window of time, but I just couldn’t say where I was or what I was doing. It was a blur. The other thing the police could never get their heads around was me and Zoe—twins—being two separate people. Some detective actually asked me which one of us was the evil one, and I knew he was joking, but Jesus.
I had to explain that we were both individuals, tell them about Zoe’s music, her suicide attempt, the reasons we were living together in the first place. I had to explain why I felt like I couldn’t let her out of my sight and, yes, why that might have made things difficult between us. Then I saw the way they were looking at me and started to clarify, like, “Wait, she didn’t do this to herself. What happened before was a cry for help.” Then the lead officer, James, just looked at me and said, “Okay, fair enough, so what was she crying about? What’s wrong at home?”
SALLY NOLAN:
I think I’d been talking to them for all of five minutes before I stopped and said, “Wait a minute. Why are you asking me where Rob was?”
ROBERT NOLAN:
I’d been performing at a pub in Stockport, a Christmas party, about a fifteen-minute drive from Fallowfield, about a forty-five-minute drive from home. I got back around one, one thirty in the morning, which apparently would have given me time to get to Fallowfield and back the night she went missing. I’m not sure what I was supposed to have done with her or why. It was offensive, and I’m talking to them bleary-eyed and with half a haircut, losing my rag. It makes me angry even now. They’re wasting their time talking to me while my daughter’s twelve hours gone? I said, “Where’s the prick with her scratch marks on his face? Why aren’t we talking to him?”
LIU WAI:
Andrew has one of those great big upper-class English noses, like, you’d think he could smell around corners or something. And he was always looking down it at Zoe. Nothing was good enough. He’d correct her, mock her taste, all this. Sometimes you’d think he didn’t even like her. So why was he always hanging around us? I was like, “He’s in the stupid sex tape. He’d be more likely to leak it than me, probably more likely to leak it than anyone. Zoe was probably texting him, asking how he could have done that to her.”
SARAH MANNING:
We were made aware of the so-called sex tape that afternoon. Alex Wilson told me about it, but she was clearly under the influence of something, and I found it difficult to follow exactly what she was trying to say. When I spoke to Liu Wai, she confirmed the broad strokes of the story. I actually saw the tape myself when I caught two students in the tower lobby sniggering, watching it on their phones. It was short, just a clip, but no doubt devastating for Zoe to see leak out into the wider world. One of the kids was doing an impression of Andrew, saying “Oh, Zoe, Zoe,” over and over again.