JAI MAHMOOD:
Fuck that. That picture of the professor kept me up at night, man. Zoe must have been gone for about two months by that point, but Alex’s death properly shook me. I wanted to help. I didn’t want to be too late again. So I was thinking about who might have planted that picture. Someone was helping or someone was fucking with our heads. Either way, I knew I should make it known. I was done talking to the police, so Kim seemed like the right person. I went to the tower and buzzed her flat. I tried, I just got no answer. So I buzzed a few more times until someone let me in.
FINTAN MURPHY:
It was a few weeks after the Christmas break. I was supposed to be meeting Liu at the tower and found her in this heated debate with Jai. The last time I’d seen him had been at the party, when he produced Zoe’s underwear from his pockets and got beat up, so I was understandably apprehensive. I didn’t go over at first, because he and Liu were going at it.
LIU WAI:
I don’t remember what we were talking about.
FINTAN MURPHY:
Jai looked like a haunted man to me, like he’d seen something terrible, or perhaps just taken something terrible. He was talking far too fast, jumbling his words and getting ahead of himself, saying the second halves of his sentences before the first, rattling on about Kimberly, her parents, some kind of danger.
I cut in and gently started explaining that he should speak to the police if he knew something, when the lift doors opened and DC Manning emerged alongside two other officers. They were all stark white and slick with sweat. Manning had an open wound on her arm, she was bleeding, she was angry. I’d never seen her looking angry before. It felt like something huge had happened.
SARAH MANNING:
Given that there’d been a reported intruder, given what we’d just found behind the wall of Zoe’s room, I found it interesting, to say the least, that Jai Mahmood was hanging around the lobby of the tower.
Red-eyed, agitated, forever in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I asked what he was doing there, and he started to back off. One of the constables, Roberts, was the one who’d questioned Mahmood in late September about Zoe’s missing underwear. He’d found candid photos of Zoe in Jai’s possession, and they sounded similar to the ones I’d just seen in the crawl space. Jai made a break for it but crashed into the lobby doors instead. We arrested him on the spot.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I’d left the TV woman and worked my way back to the tower, feeling weird. I was staring daggers into every man I passed, wondering if any of them could be the one who’d just hit me. I knew it wasn’t safe for me to go back there, but I just had to know what they’d found. Then when I arrived, they were dragging Jai out in handcuffs. He saw me and started resisting them, shouting and trying to get to me.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I just wanted to talk.
LIU WAI:
None of us knew where to look, but it seemed so obvious to me. The police had finally put together the fact that Jai was fixated on Zoe, and now that fixation had shifted down a gear to the next best thing, Kim.
SARAH MANNING:
When DI James arrived on the scene and I explained the intrusion—Kim’s assault, then, latterly, what we’d found on fifteenth—he sent in forensics. They managed to get two people inside the crawl space to swab, dust and print everything they could see. In the end, they had to remove a part of the wall to gain full access. I left the scene for medical attention. I had cuts and burns on my arms, but I checked in from the hospital. That was where I was when I found out everything in that space had been wiped down. “Forensically cleaned,” I was told. Mine was the only blood found. No loose hairs, no fibers, no fingerprints. It was immaculate in that sense, just like the rooftop, and I always assumed the same person was responsible. They recovered one or two further items of Zoe’s from behind the wall—some more clothes, some more jewelry, a set of keys belonging to Lois Best. The photographs I’d seen were quickly verified as Jai Mahmood’s work.
The object I’d mistaken for a body was actually a mannequin. It had been messed with. Dressed in Zoe’s underwear, among other things.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I never saw it. I never wanted to.
SALLY NOLAN:
I’d rather not talk about that.
ROBERT NOLAN:
It felt like some vindication for me, personally. Proof positive that a sicko had fixated himself on Zoe. She hadn’t just run off.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
The brown-eyed girl? I only know about it because the police came asking if I’d kept any of Zoe’s used “feminine hygiene products.” I probably blinked at them eleven or twelve times in a row, then said, “That’s an unusual question. May I ask why?” Then they showed me a photograph of this thing they’d found. It was like an old shop-window mannequin, maybe roughly Zoe’s size and build, wearing a blond wig and some of her underwear. Whoever put it there had apparently stolen two of her used tampons. They’d cut off the tips and attached them to the face as eyes. I guess they’d originally have been blood red, but by the time I saw them, they were this terrible stale-brown color.
SARAH MANNING:
The mannequin was grotesque, but no more so than what that space told us. That someone had been watching Zoe closely for a long time, and they’d been able to come and go from that apartment as they liked. There was a maintenance hatch on the stairwell that gave access, but it could only be opened with specialized tools. You’d have to know it was there and you’d have to know exactly what you were doing. It was awkwardly placed, an alcove, but you could just about access it without being seen from the lifts.
The strange thing was that it could only really get you behind the walls of 15C, suggesting to me that the intruder knew about the access panel before the girls moved in. But then, the theft of Zoe’s personal items, especially the soiled feminine hygiene products, spoke to someone who was sexually obsessed with her specifically. We couldn’t work out which order it went in. Did the intruder lie in wait behind those walls for just anyone? Or did he notice Zoe first and happen upon the panel afterward? Wasn’t that too much of a coincidence?