True Crime Story(27)
JAI MAHMOOD:
I wasn’t even into pictures of people, man. The odd thing came along, but only when they weren’t facing the camera. Maybe massive groups like the fire alarm evacuations, stuff at a distance, but faces didn’t really float my boat. Owens Park was ugly as shit, though, and that did. You’d see me around with my camera a lot at the time. I was always trying to get on roofs and in hallways and to hang out windows, always trying to find new angles, man. And I started getting hassle. Shouted at and called a sex pest and stuff. Yeah, I remember the posters.
HARRY FOWLES, Andrew and Jai’s flatmate:
I think we were only a few weeks in by then, but there was already a rift between us. Like, Andrew and Jai one side and the rest of us—me, Chris and Lee—on the other. For one thing, Andrew would always refer to the rest of us as One Direction, like, really scornfully. More seriously, none of us had ever dealt with the police before, so it felt pretty real when they turned up questioning the two of them about something in our first week. You’ve got Andrew kind of shouting at them and Jai refusing to cooperate, being accused of this awful stuff.
It just felt like a lot.
What really made ears prick up and kind of stay that way was this mention of theft, things going missing. Because that had started at ours too, gently at first, then sort of snowballing out of control. You couldn’t leave anything in the fridge without it going missing. Y’know, if you left your wallet lying around for the day and then picked it up later, you’d find yourself saying, “What happened to that twenty?” My house keys, the fob and my room key and everything, went walkabout in the first week with no explanation.
It was only much, much later I put it all together.
After Zoe Nolan went missing and it was all over the news, I realized that the police had been talking to Andrew and Jai about things vanishing from her place. I suppose it always struck me as a kind of clue. Like, stuff was going missing from our building, and stuff was going missing from theirs. And who went between both buildings? Andrew and Jai. We put our foot down about Jai doing his science lab shit in the bathroom too. Someone was going around taking pictures of girls against their will or something, so it seemed weird for him to be developing stuff in secret all the time.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I checked the Facebook page once or twice, just looking for clues of who might be running it. I stopped going on there when people started posting mad stuff—that wall was like a public toilet. People saying a perv was on the prowl, he needed reining in, attaching pictures of some posters that had been put up around Owens Park, all warning about a photographer who was stalking women.
LIU WAI:
And maybe it came from the Facebook thing, but someone kept pranking our door relentlessly. Like, they’d buzz up from the ground-floor entrance and then when you answered, no one would say anything. Occasionally, people would play knock-a-door-run and stuff. It’s hard to tell what was sinister and what was the result of being surrounded by teenage boys. My main problem was more inside the flat, like a feeling of not knowing who was coming and going? It sounds like hindsight talking, but I’m telling you I could feel it. I have quite bad allergies, certain things really set me off. Every time I stuck my head inside Zoe’s room, I’d come away sneezing.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I didn’t live with Liu Wai for very long, but even just across those three months, she was quite sensitive to her surroundings, always noticing drafts or dust, quite often coughing or sick.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
If someone sneezed in Australia, Liu Wai caught a cold in Manchester.
LIU WAI:
I think it was because I grew up with just me and Mum, but men’s aftershave has always really stood out to me? It’s always just made my nose itch, and that was what I was getting from Zoe’s room. And as far as I knew, she hadn’t had any boys around at that time. When I mentioned it to her, she’d say she couldn’t smell it, but it was definitely, definitely there. Now, I want to go back and scream at her, at myself, like, “Get out!” I wondered if whoever had taken her underwear was returning to the scene of the crime or something.
Another thing that meant nothing to me then was how I’d always come into the flat after a day of no one being there and sort of find myself saying, “Wait, why is Lois’s door wide open?” Like, that room was supposed to be empty.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I never made it out on the night Andrew met Zoe. If I had, I might have realized what was going on before he did and changed the course of history.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Look, if I’m down on all fours in the confessional booth, then no, I cannot fully recall the night I met Zoe. If I’d known then that I’d end up having to discuss it for the rest of my life, I probably would have drunk some water or something. I can give you my movements, though, the vague sequence of events.
JAI MAHMOOD:
I was meant to meet him back at ours before he went out, but I never made it. At the time, I was working on this project where I’d document the multistory car parks of Manchester, all in black and white, then develop the pictures myself. I was starting with the ones nearest to us, yeah, Oxford Road, Salford, satellite towns, then thinking I’d work my way out, maybe even right to the airport. It came out of a story I’d read about the city’s population growing so massively. The census said it was up something like 20 percent in ten years, and I was buzzed off how that works. Where does everyone go? Where are their houses and rooms and cars? I wanted albums full of multistory car parks and apartment blocks and sublets and things. The idea was to build this kind of bible about the margins and where we cram all the stuff we don’t want seen. It probably would have ended with illegal squats and homeless shelters. That’s ironic now I think about it, because I never finished the project, but I did end up living in those places.