True Crime Story(69)

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?

FINTAN MURPHY:

Liu and I started meeting most days after that. Awful as it sounds, we were energized by Alex’s death, and Liu had this brain wave, one that turned out to be quite brilliant, actually. We’d been briefed, along with the family, about this mystery man, this picture found among Zoe’s things. Of course, by this point, the man had been identified as Professor Michael Anderson, but it seemed as though that had all ended in disappointment. Where we’d thought the police were charging off to arrest him, they’d simply asked if he knew Zoe, and he’d simply said no. Speaking for myself, I remember Zoe and I walking, that first day we met, when she’d stopped cold at the sight of the Royal Northern. At the time, I’d put it down to her being upset about not studying there, but I’d come to the conclusion that it had been more serious than that. She’d barely been able to speak. She’d been traumatized by something, and that place represented it to her. I was convinced that she was traumatized by Michael Anderson himself.

At the time, I think we all felt the same way—useless, sick with worry and uncertainty—so when Liu suggested we try to find some kind of link between Zoe and Anderson, to prove that he might have known her outside that audition, I leapt at the chance to help. What with my time spent assisting Zoe’s parents and my attempts to actually study, that meant pretty much no sleep for a few weeks. As you may have noticed, I’m not so good at putting my own life first. What had been a promising relationship with my flatmate Connor unfortunately started to fall even further by the wayside.

LIU WAI:

I could see how run-down Fintan was. I felt guilty because I knew he was incapable of saying no, but I couldn’t think of who else to ask. Certainly not Kim, Andrew, or Jai. And it was too big a job to do on my own. So much of Zoe’s life was on Facebook. Nowadays, that kind of stuff would probably be a big lead for the police, but outside a cursory glance, I wasn’t sure they’d really taken that much interest in Zoe’s life online? From what we could see, Michael Anderson didn’t have an account, at least not under his own name, but there were literally thousands of pictures on Zoe’s page that we could work our way through.