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.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I went into the communal space to find the police interrogating my flatmates. In a room containing four white boys and one brown one, the constables wore out their powers of deduction deciding which of us was Jai Mahmood. So when they asked who Andrew Flowers was, I thought I’d better raise my hand and close the case for them. Look, I honestly thought it was all a joke. I thought they were male strippers or something. I was checking their IDs, expecting to see Officer Nasty and Sergeant Ticklish. And just when I think they’re about to rip their shirts off and start playing Wham!, they ask the others to leave the room. Then me and Jai are looking at each other, like, What did you do?
You have to remember we’d only just met, we didn’t really know each other. Then they started telling us why they were there and I lost all credulity. They said they’d received a “serious complaint” about our behavior from the night before. Was there anything we wanted to tell them?
JAI MAHMOOD:
So while Flowers, this walking definition of white privilege, is proving how funny he can be, I’m winding my neck all the way in. I can tell these guys don’t like the look of me. And I can hear my mum in my head, saying I’m the first in the family to reach higher education, how she’s killed herself to get me here, so I just go quiet, which is the worst thing you can do. Andrew’s dickheadedness makes him look innocent. Cops understand hostility and being called pigs, but they don’t understand fear, so I just look like I’m hiding something. I just look guilty as sin.
And at the same time, I’m racking my brains trying to work out what we’ve done. Y’know, is this because we were in the tower? Is this because I was on the roof? Is this because that girl thinks I’m a fucking barrister? But it’s clearly something more serious than all that, and then they tell us that “personal items” have been removed from a property we’d visited the night before. That we were trespassing in the tower block and the best thing we can do now is own up to it. I’m sitting there shitting it, staring at the floor memorizing my fucking Converse, when they say, “Look, we know you’ve got priors for theft.” And that’s confusing, man, because no, I haven’t. Course, I look up and realize they’re talking to Flowers.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
A complicated story, a boring one. Not funny and not interesting. I just grew up estranged from the rest of my family. There was a nanny around in Surrey when I was a boy, Mrs. Withers, then when I was of age, I got packed off to boarding school. And you know who my father is? Right, correct, one of those men who owns things. Not just hedge funds and lobbies but whatever he happens to be handling in any given moment, whatever falls within his sightline. People and places and you name it. So it wasn’t theft, whatever the police might like to call it. He took something that belonged to me, so I took something that belonged to him. That’s quid pro fucking quo as far as I’m concerned.
Case No: VT 08/03/11/3462
Reporting Officer: Constable Alice Hardy
Date of Report: March 8, 2011
At 1755 hrs on March 8, 2011, I met with Mr. Richard Flowers at Ashwan House on Christchurch Rd. regarding a vehicle theft. Mr. Flowers said his son, Mr. Andrew Flowers, had stolen one of his cars, a vintage Jaguar, after an emotional argument in the family home at approx. 1600 hrs. Mr. Flowers was concerned his son may have been under the influence of drink and/or drugs when he took the vehicle.
Mr. Flowers described his car as a burgundy colored, 1952, C-Type Jaguar, registered in the UK. The car registration is FLW3RS. He estimated the value of the car at in excess of ￡450,000, adding that it is a “one of a kind” collector’s item and due to be sold at Sotheby’s Auction House in early April. He described no distinguishing marks or items.
Mr. Flowers stressed that he had not given his son permission to take the car and that he was concerned his son would intentionally damage the vehicle as a result of their disagreement. He stated further that his son was given to dishonesty in discussing his father’s business dealings, relationships, morality, and sex-life.2
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Look, the short version is that my maternal grandfather, Charles Barclay, owned a merchant shipping venture which went under, I think literally, and he basically sold off his daughter—my mother—to be married. She’d been around the world, but as with everything else in my grandfather’s possession at the time, she was basically damaged goods. One bad marriage behind her, one burgeoning speed addiction in front. I was always embarrassed by her. Eyeliner that looked like it had been scrawled on with a Sharpie, smile painted a few millimeters away from where her mouth actually was. Always walking out of shops without paying, always crashing cars, always crying in the shower. Mainly I was away at school anyway, and when I went home, I spent most of my time with the daughter from next door, a seventeen-year-old half-Parisian princess called élodie.
Anyway, I got a worrying phone call from Mother one day in term time, which was rare, and then I couldn’t get hold of my dad, which was the norm. I travelled home to find he’d had her hauled off to the nuthouse a fortnight before and not told anyone. And look, it’s not like she shouldn’t have been there—she was mad as a box of ballbags—but the fucker hadn’t even been to see her. In fact, I found him busy making house with my girlfriend, élodie, the half-Parisian princess from next door—forty-three fucking years his junior. So I don’t know. I suppose some days passed, Mum cut her wrists and killed herself, Dad and élodie eloped, yada yada yada, I rolled his vintage half-a-million-pound ponce racer. I didn’t mean to damage the car. I think I just wanted to stop. Stop everything. The fucker pressed charges too.