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.
JAI MAHMOOD:
And by this point, the trillionth time of asking, seeing how fucking furrow-browed everyone was, I told them about our system. There was this antique tin hidden on the roof, near the gutters, an old Twinings tea tin, and that’s where Zoe left cash for me and I left Xans for her. We never handed stuff to each other. I’d arrive and she’d usually be leaning out over the ledge, looking down. I’d open the tin, take the cash, leave a pill. If she was there, then we’d talk. The only reason I told them about it was because I’d cleaned it out that day I snuck back into the tower. I’d already swallowed what had been left inside there, so I thought, what’s the harm?
SARAH MANNING:
The tin was our first significant break in the case. When officers accessed the roof with Jai, he led them to it and they arranged for its recovery by forensics. This would have been Christmas Eve. There were no drugs inside, there was no money either. There was just a photograph of a man in his forties.
JAI MAHMOOD:
They had to do prints and stuff, so they didn’t open it there and then. In my mind, it was just some empty tin, same as I’d left it. I only found out later when they dragged me back in for more questioning that something had changed. What spun me, right, what’s still spinning me now, is I’d been back to the tower, like, days after Zoe’s disappearance. Like I say, the cops were nowhere, so I went through that tin and emptied everything inside into my pocket. It was a couple of pills and that was that. So I’m telling you, hand on heart, that when she went missing, there was no picture in that tin. Someone planted it after, and that should shit us all up, even the people who want it to be true.
Because it was like everything else the police were working off, and it was like everything else the papers were printing—it was just another anonymous source. Someone was way ahead of us, man, scattering bread crumbs for people to follow. Only problem was, to my way of thinking, that trail took us right off the edge of a cliff.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-02-09 06:13
To: you
on Fri, Feb 08, 2019, Joseph Knox [email protected] wrote:
Ugh, that’s really disturbing about the phone calls, but if you WILL go around writing your number on the walls of public toilets…