True Crime Story(68)
And wtf is going on with Anderson? Why did he even agree to talk? Does he have any idea how he comes across on the page?
Jx
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Hey, XXXXXXX happy valentines day. XXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX Thank you for your concern…
Can I ask what you mean by “come on board”? Like, as a co-writer? I’m sure that comes from a good place but don’t you think it might undermine what I’m trying to do? Apologies if I’m getting the wrong end of the stick here.
I had NOT considered Rob’s work as a plumber in the context of the piping. I’ll look into it. You’re thinking he could have worked inside the building at some stage???
Like I said, the tower was fully finished in ’66 but only went up to 15 floors. Work started in ’74 to ADD four floors on top of that BUT because it hadn’t been part of the original plan, and because they didn’t pay the original architect to come back, there were some “quirks” of the construction. I haven’t been able to speak to anyone who worked on it directly—best case scenario they’d be in their 60s or 70s now, but I did speak to an architect who’s been involved with adding floors to other tower blocks. He said it could throw up all kinds of strange spaces if the work was sloppy.
Basically, if the girls had been in ANY flat other than 15C, Lois wouldn’t have been disturbed by those sounds (which may well have been someone moving through the crawl space), and the intruder couldn’t have spied on Zoe or gained such easy access to her life.
Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time.
And I know, Anderson’s an eel. When I first approached him he was unbelievably patronizing and flat out refused to talk. Said he was still raw from being “doxxed” at the time (one of his students published his address on Facebook after it emerged he’d been questioned). So I got in touch with some of his colleagues, and from there his ex-wife, and SUDDENLY he was on the phone, very eager to meet and speak. “Don’t want you getting the wrong side of the story, now, do I, darrrrrrling?”
I want EVERY side of the story, treacle.
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Ex
PS—I’m surprised you’re not more interested in Alex Wilson’s suicide? Nothing to suggest it’s connected but still a pretty big deal, right?
19.
“Blood Red”
As a disturbing discovery is made in the fifteenth floor apartment formerly shared by Kim, Zoe, Liu and Alex, Kim finds herself forced into a role that she has tried hard to avoid for her entire life.
LIU WAI:
Frankly, I thought that if I never saw Jai again, it would be too soon. He’d gotten his horrible little druggy claws into two of my friends by this point. I was meeting Fintan for the first time just the two of us, and Jai was skulking around the lobby of the tower, looking absolutely shady as fuck. Then he was all over me.
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.