True Crime Story(22)

JAI MAHMOOD:

I’d never be arsed now, but I was really into developing my own prints back then. Just black-and-white eight-by-tens and stuff, but magic to see, like making gold out of nothing. Our place was perfect for it, man, no natural light in the bathroom, nothing to black out, and it had a pretty strong ventilator for all the fumes and stuff. I just swapped the bulb with a red one and wheeled everything else in. There was no room on the counter, so I had this plywood base that sat on the rim of the bath, then I put my enlarger—this old Beseler 23C—on top of that. Drop your developing trays inside the tub and you’re flying. I’d found this roll-around kitchen cart that everything fit into on the first night, so my setup and takedown time was about ten minutes flat. I never forgot I was living with four lads, though. Like, I was up early to make sure I wasn’t in anyone’s way. And I was making prints from the night before. Life always started to feel real for me the next day, when I started developing it, seeing stuff for the second time around.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

I don’t remember what I would have been doing—pruning, watering—but Lois’s voice started getting louder. I kind of called through the wall, “Is everything okay?”

LOIS BEST:

I could hear a man in my room. And I don’t mean through the walls and floorboards like normal stuff. When I was in bed, it sounded like someone was whispering through a traffic cone into my ear. And I knew it was probably just some eighteen-year-old boy from the next floor up, someone with no idea his voice was travelling so much, but I’d been awake half the night. I felt like I was losing it.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

I knocked on but got no answer. We’d been there a couple of days by this point, and Lois had really kept to herself. I think I wondered if she was struggling. Looking back, I was probably quite keen to find someone more socially awkward than I was, take them under my wing like a bonsai tree or something. So I opened the door and found her kind of staring at her wardrobe. I asked what was wrong, and she said she’d woken up thinking there was someone inside it, someone in her room. We looked at each other for a second, and I just started laughing. I didn’t know she was serious—I mean, I didn’t even know her—but she laughed back, and I think I suggested breakfast as a way of getting her out of there. It honestly didn’t occur to me to open the wardrobe or look in it.

LIU WAI:

As someone who’s witnessed their own mother go through shock, like, be completely normal one moment and then break down in the spice aisle of Waitrose the next, I didn’t feel comfortable letting it go? So while I brewed some coffee and sat Zoe down on the sofa, I called the police to report the theft of her clothes. They clearly weren’t interested, so I was in the middle of convincing them that this was serious when Lois and Kim came in.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

Andrew told you some people cast Zoe as a victim after she went missing, but that’s probably because he didn’t know her that well. People had always cast her as a victim. And she knew it too. She could really lean into that too-thin, too-quiet, too-delicate thing when it suited her. So I think wrapped up in Liu Wai’s Zoe worship was this weird need to protect her at all costs.

Basically, I walked in on Liu reporting some missing clothes as a cross between armed robbery and sexual assault, hissing into the phone, demanding they send their “best man” down to take a statement. And all this time, Zoe, in her tiny voice, is saying, “No, no, no, it’s fine. It’s not that big a deal,” just getting talked over. And it’s all news to me, so I’m like, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

We hadn’t talked the night before because she came in so late. I was thinking, fuck, I really can’t let her out of my sight. It hadn’t occurred to me that Liu would be calling the police about the harmless ten-minute gathering in our kitchen the night before. Then she reeled off every name she could remember, including Jai Mahmood and Andrew Flowers, giving me this look like I’d sold my sister’s virginity to them on eBay.

JANINE MORRIS, Ex-student experience officer:

Well, I was contacted by the authorities that morning. Managing student housing, you can imagine the kinds of calls I usually got. [Laughs] I was in my midthirties then, but I’d long since lost my ability to be shocked. I’d long since lost the color in my hair, let’s put it that way.

This one stuck in the memory, though.

The police said they’d had a report of “sexually motivated theft” in the tower block and needed assistance tracing possible culprits. I didn’t want to know what “sexually motivated theft” was, so when they gave me a list of names, I looked them up. They were all students of ours, so it didn’t take long. Next thing you know, the police are on-site, and I’m taking them around to knock on. Two of the boys, Flowers and Mahmood, lived together in Tree Court, so we went there first.

I’ve reported my share of robberies to Greater Manchester Police, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a quicker response. I remember thinking, Next time the house gets broken into, I’m telling them a teenage girl’s knicker drawer got turned over, too.1

JAI MAHMOOD:

I heard the buzzer going, but I was still working on my prints, so I just left it for the others. I didn’t really notice anything until a few minutes later when Harry, one of the guys we lived with, started knocking, saying there was someone there to talk to me. I walked into the hall still holding a dripping photo.