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.
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.