True Crime Story(48)

SARAH MANNING:

I heard Andrew repeat this accusation at the time. All I can tell you is that I spoke to the officers involved and can say with some certainty that wasn’t the case. A more disturbing scenario to me is that Zoe’s stalker saw her relationship with Jai and was jealous of it. He took steps to neutralize a threat.

Think about it.

Someone started a campaign to keep Jai off campus. Someone apparently beat him up, apparently broke his camera. If you believe Jai’s version of events, it seems likely he brushed up against the same obsessive mind that Zoe did.

ANDREW FLOWERS:

I said I’d never seen or heard anything violent from Jai myself, so I wasn’t going to speculate. They said, “So you weren’t at Fifth Avenue nightclub on such a date?” I shrugged, told them I didn’t keep a diary but might have been. Then they went into the story of him being dragged out of there, wasted. I said, “So what?” You know, in my mind, we’re all lying in the gutter. It’s just that some of us are facedown in our own sick. But no. Jai had been trying to rape some girl on the dance floor in their version of events. I told them that he wasn’t the type. Then they asked if perhaps his substance abuse might play a role? They asked me if I’d ever seen Jai swallowing pills.

HARRY FOWLES:

Look, everyone knew Jai was selling drugs.

SARAH MANNING:

Upon learning that Jai Mahmood was selling drugs on campus, I made my concerns for Alex Wilson very clear. She seemed vulnerable and had been under the influence the first time that we met. It was easy to imagine someone might be preying on her.

HARRY FOWLES:

I’d seen Jai giving cash to this absolute unit of a guy in the Great Central, over the road from Owens Park, which I told the police. Next thing you know, I’m down the station going through mug shots, trying to pick him out.

ANDREW FLOWERS:

You have to remember I haven’t slept in more than twenty-four hours by this point. Now Zoe and Jai are both missing, apparently shagging, and the police think I’m responsible. They left me alone in there a while, an hour or so, then came back and started belting me with pictures of tough guys, running their records down for me. Telling me this one killed a man, this one raped a girl, all of them dealers, motherfuckers, fatherfuckers, babyfuckers even. All possible known associates of Jai’s. They’re telling me that they suspect he’s dealing drugs to vulnerable young women, that he’s taking advantage of them. My head was like a merry-go-round, my face hurt, I felt sick. I didn’t know him very well, but I’d thought he was a decent guy. It upended me. Finally, I said, “Look, unless I’m under arrest, I want to talk to someone. I want to go home.”

They admitted there was no legal case to hold me, so they sort of shrugged and said I was free to go. I didn’t even know where I was, which station, what part of the sodding city I was in. I hadn’t seen natural light in hours. So I went out into the corridor and called my father. It was the first time we’d spoken in six months. Afterward, I kind of walked out into the street, probably crying and pissing my pants, and saw Rob Nolan, Zoe’s dad, heading straight for me.

SALLY NOLAN:

I was never anything to do with Rob’s plan. When he told me what he was up to, I didn’t know where to look. I thought, Who the hell are you? What the hell are you thinking?

ROBERT NOLAN:

The press conference I’d organized was the next day, the first Monday after Zoe went missing. It was planned as an appeal for information, to get her face out there and make it clear that her family meant business. And I wanted the police to get that message too. They’d been shit from the word go. Pure shit. Slow to take us serious or even get that Zoe wasn’t the kind to just wander off without a word. So I was trying to pressure them as much as anything, and it worked because they finally came up with a name for me and a kind of a strategy.

They asked if they could add an appeal for a young lad to come forward, a Jai Mahmood. There was stuff in the press after about racial profiling, but that was something of nothing. I don’t see it. I don’t care if you’re black or white or green. I just said, “Absolutely, fantastic, we’re finally getting somewhere.” So a part of me did want Andrew—apparently Jai’s best mate—to be up there with us. I thought maybe that’d bring this Jai out of the woodwork faster?

But I knew I had to play every side.

When I saw that lad Andrew’s face, my girl’s scratch marks in his skin, nothing could have convinced me he wasn’t involved. Nothing. I thought other people might feel the same way, so I decided to put him onstage, scratch marks and all. I thought, Let’s let the world decide, then we’ll see if he feels like talking.

SARAH MANNING:

I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t advised Rob and Andrew against going ahead with it. To Rob, I tried to make the case that he’d be turning his appeal into an entertainment, a zoo, but I think that appealed to him. It was his way of taking control of the narrative and showing that he was the man in charge.

With Andrew, I just showed him the picture of his face we’d taken at the station, asked him what he thought people might think when they saw it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. His mind was elsewhere. He was trying to act in the way he thought a normal person might. The problem is, for better or worse, Andrew Flowers is unusual. I don’t say that judgmentally but as a statement of fact. His background’s unimaginable to anyone outside of the 1 percent. Motorbikes for birthdays, ski trips for Christmas. That means when he tries to imitate normal behavior patterns, he massively overshoots or undershoots, because they’re just alien to him. It’s not that he’s speaking a foreign language, he’s doing an impersonation of someone speaking a foreign language. So he eventually said, “Her family’s asked me to help. How can I say no?” And I wanted to shout at him, “You can say no because it’s going to ruin your life.”