The Nothing Man Page 10

  When I ask her what she saw when she entered the bathroom, Patricia looks disappointed in me. I tell her that I want people to understand how bad he is, this man, how dangerous and vile and violent, because I want readers to get angry about his continued freedom. She nods, thinks for a bit. Then she says, ‘I won’t tell you what I saw. That poor woman has suffered enough indignities. But I will tell you this: when I called it in, I said I had a suspicious death. I couldn’t feel a pulse, but it was more because of what she looked like. The colour of her, the injuries to her face … When I saw Linda O’Neill in that bath, I thought she’d be going from there straight into a body bag.’

  Jim woke up with a start, sending his copy of The Nothing Man flying off his lap and on to the floor. He’d been dreaming of the house in Fermoy; of moving through its unfinished rooms; of the woman who’d lived there. Mixed in were his very real memories of standing over her while she tossed and turned in her sleep, breathing on her shower curtain while she stood beneath the stream of hot water on the other side, and listening in the dark to what her husband did to her so that he could do the same, so that she’d know he’d been listening. He was desperate to return, to surrender himself to his dream-memories, but the last wisps of sleep had already darted beyond his reach and—

  Was that birdsong?

  It was no longer silent outside the shed’s walls. The dawn chorus was warming up. What time was it? Jim pulled the blackout blind away from the window and cursed at the bright sunlight that immediately assaulted his eyes.

  His next thought was that his phone was upstairs in the bedroom.

  And he’d set an alarm on it.

  Jim shoved the book under the seat cushion and left the shed, hurrying around to the front of the house and getting to the front door just as he heard the angry beep-beep-beep coming from upstairs.

  His alarm, feet from Noreen’s head. It was set for seven.

  He’d spent the entire night in the shed.

  As Jim closed the front door, the beeping stopped. Then came the sounds of Noreen hoisting herself out of bed.

  Too late.

  He went into the kitchen and took a seat, his seat at the head of the dining table. There was a newspaper lying neatly folded on the nearest chair. An issue of the Echo, which covered Cork. Jim grabbed it and put it in front of him, opening it up but not looking at it at all. He took a few deep breaths. He worked to still himself, to stop feeling flustered and hurried and caught out.

  Upstairs, a toilet flushed.

  He wasn’t panicked so much as annoyed at himself. He didn’t like it when things didn’t go to plan. And there was enough noise in his head right now without adding a barrage of Noreen’s idiotic questions into the mix as well.

  Why was he up already? How long had he been up? Why hadn’t he turned off the alarm?

  It was enough to drive a man insane.

  Everything had been so much easier before, back then. All he had to do was say he was on an operation and that he couldn’t say any more than that. He could disappear from the house for days on end and she wouldn’t raise a single objection, or ask him where he’d been and what he’d been doing there when he got back. She knew what answer she’d get. But these days, things were very different. He had a job that kept him in one location, the Centrepoint Shopping Mall in Douglas, every weekday between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. Centrepoint was only a fifteen-minute drive from their house. Noreen wasn’t the sharpest tool, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She knew if Jim wasn’t at work, he had nowhere else he needed to be.

  Their relatives lived hours away and Jim had no interest in either side of the family; a get-together at Christmastime was all he was willing to suffer through, if even that. He would never meet up with any of his old colleagues because he hated them all intensely, and the last thing he wanted to talk about was his time in the Gardaí. Sometimes he wished he’d put more effort into cultivating friends or hobbies, or even just pretending to, so that he could announce he was off on a golf weekend or going out for a couple of hours to meet someone for coffee. But he hadn’t, and it was too late now. He’d never expected there to be a need for it, not at this hour of his life.

  But he did need to finish the book. Sooner rather than later. He’d have to think of something.

  Heavy steps on the stairs: Noreen on her way down.

  She didn’t drive. There was that, at least. She’d always been too nervous to, and Jim made sure she’d only ever got more so by telling her in detail about every horrific accident scene he’d heard a colleague describe. Bodies crushed beyond recognition. Skulls split open like eggshells. Brain matter splattered on tarmac. She occasionally took the bus into town, but most of her life outside of their house was confined to the consecrated acres on which sat their local church, community centre and cemetery. She was a Minister of the Eucharist, a member of the Legion of Mary and helped out twice a week with Meals on Wheels. Then there were the events in aid of various things throughout the year. She was friendly with a few of the other women who did the same, but rarely saw them under other circumstances. The first thing Noreen did every morning was go for a walk around the estate, out on to the road, up to the church, around its perimeter and back again, and as far as Jim knew after that she came home and stayed there.

  Shuffling slippered feet in the hall.

  Noreen could, theoretically, walk to Centrepoint, but Jim didn’t think she ever had. She was vocal about hating the place. She complained that half the shops in there were closed down and said she preferred to get her groceries from Tesco and Aldi, neither of which were Centrepoint tenants. He’d be very unlucky if she suddenly decided, six months after he’d started working there and possibly years after her last visit, to suddenly go now.

  Noreen arrived into the kitchen.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Jim said, ‘I’m doing longer days for the rest of this week. Someone’s out sick. They need me to stay until five.’

  She paused in the doorway and blinked at him.

  ‘Well.’ She pulled her grubby robe around her, the one that made her look even fatter than her clothes did, and went to the kettle. ‘Good morning to you, too.’

  She was behind him now but he could tell what she doing by the sounds.

  Taking down two cups. Getting teabags from the tin on the counter. Milk from the fridge.

  ‘You were up early,’ she said after a while. ‘Why?’

  The water in the kettle started to bubble.

  ‘Because I was awake’. Jim turned a page of the newspaper. ‘So I said I might as well get up. No point lying there just staring at the ceiling.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘A while ago.’

  Jim turned another page. He hadn’t been registering anything in front of him except for the shape of the headlines and the size of the photographs, but now the words NOTHING MAN suddenly jumped into focus.

  For a second he forgot where he was, who he was, that Noreen was there. He leaned over the paper and traced the headline with his finger.

  NOTHING MAN CASE REOPENED IN NEW BOOK.

  The headline was above a picture of the family in Bally’s Lane, one of the front of the house in Fermoy and that goddamn pencil sketch again – and a thumbnail-sized cover of the book itself. Speedily, he scanned the text. The case that terrorised Corkonians nearly twenty years ago is the focus of a new book … sole survivor of the Nothing Man’s worst attack, Eve Black, who was just twelve years old at the time … Detective Inspector Edward Healy welcomed the book and said he hopes it will reignite interest in the case … ‘He’s still out there, yes, but we’re still looking.’

  A cup of tea was hovering in the air in front of him.

  ‘Finally,’ he said, taking the cup from Noreen so quickly that some of the liquid spilled out and on to the newspaper. He turned another page and leaned over to look with feigned interest at a story about fishing quotas off the Irish coast.

  He was waiting for her to move off, to get
her tea and go back upstairs with it like she did most mornings.

  But she lingered, stayed standing behind him.

  ‘I think that’s a couple of days old, that paper,’ she said. ‘Katie brought it with her last night.’

  The shopping centre was busier than it had been the day before, but that still didn’t make it busy. Aside from a car that had been abandoned by the loading dock and a handbag that had been reported lost but was quickly found in the Ladies’ dressing rooms, Jim had nothing much to do except count down the minutes until his shift was over and he could resume reading The Nothing Man.

  While Noreen was in the shower, he’d moved the book from the shed to his car, where it was now once again locked in the glove compartment. His plan was to drive somewhere after work, maybe down to the Marina, where he could park up and read for a few hours without drawing attention or being disturbed. He could do it because as far as Noreen was concerned, he’d be at the centre until five at least.

  In the meantime, he was doomed to be excruciatingly bored. This morning’s minutes seemed to be passing by at the speed of sludge.

  Until he saw the woman in the trench coat.

  Her hair was pulled back today and she was wearing a skirt instead of trousers, but it was the same coat and she was carrying the same bag. He was sure it was her. She must live locally or work nearby or both. She was walking through the fresh produce section of Grocery, holding a wire basket. All that was in it so far was a bag of apples.

  The last time he’d seen her, twenty-four hours ago, she’d been heading for the tills with a copy of The Nothing Man. Had she actually bought it? Had she started reading it yet? How much did she know about what he’d done?

  How would she feel if she knew the Nothing Man was standing just a few feet away from her right now, watching her, studying her?

  When she set off in the direction of the frozen food, Jim – on impulse – went too. He kept his distance and made sure to make it look like he was just patrolling the store, but his eyes never left her.

  Today the coat was buttoned up, its belt wrapped tightly around her waist, revealing the lines of her body. He watched as she filled her basket with a bottle of wine, two microwavable meals and a four-pack of toilet roll.

  Did those choices indicate that she lived alone? Did she ever come in here on her way home after work? If she did, could he follow her there? What would he do to her in the dark?

  What would he like to do?

  And would he still be physically able to do it?

  ‘Just the man I was looking for.’

  Steve O’Reilly had stepped in front of Jim, blocking his view of the woman. His hair was looking even more thick with sticky gel than usual and standing as he was, with his hands on his hips, exposed the fact that he was wearing cufflinks.

  He was the manager in a low-cost department store and he was coming to work with cufflinks on. How unbearably pathetic.

  Jim almost couldn’t stand to look at the man.

  ‘What happened to you yesterday?’ Steve asked.

  Jim put his hands on his own hips, mirroring Steve’s stance.

  ‘Migraine,’ he said.

  ‘Migraine,’ Steve repeated.

  The two men stared at each other hard.

  ‘And what did you do about that?’

  Jim feigned confusion. ‘Do about it?’

  ‘Do you have a doctor’s note or …?’

  ‘I just went to bed. In a dark room.’

  ‘You just went to bed? In a dark room?’

  Repeating everything back but phrased as a question: An Amateur’s Interrogation Technique, chapter 1. Jim refused to respond to it.

  ‘No painkillers?’ Steve raised his eyebrows. ‘For a migraine?’

  His radio beeped. He lifted it off his belt and said into it, ‘Steve here, go ahead.’ After a squawk of static, a tinny voice said something about a problem with the computer at the customer service desk. ‘I’ll be right there.’ He looked Jim right in the eye and added, deadpan, ‘Over.’

  The next sound to come from the radio was the sound of a short, sharp laugh and three words that were, in contrast to what had come before, mercilessly distinct.

  ‘Copy that, Jim.’

  Even tinny from the speaker on the radio, the sarcasm was easily detected.

  Steve grinned triumphantly.

  Jim felt his cheeks beginning to burn.

  True, no one else said that on the radio around here. But Jim did it because a habit formed over twenty years was difficult to break, and because he was right to. It was an established protocol for ensuring clear radio communication. They could make fun of him all they wanted, but who would have the last laugh here: the intelligent man who’d already had an illustrious career as a member of An Garda Síochána or the idiots stuck working in this dump for minimum wage for the rest of their lives?

  Steve was holstering the radio, the smirk having spread into an expression of smug satisfaction.

  Jim lurched at the younger man, grabbed Steve’s throat with one hand and pushed a closed fist into his sneering mouth with the other, forcing open the artificially whitened teeth until his fingers felt Steve’s soft palate, and then Jim opened his fingers, flexing and stretching, until he heard the crack of a jawbone, the crunch of a tooth, the scream of someone being made to bear unbearable pain. Just at the point where Steve had taken almost as much pain as a human could, when he felt his skull was breaking open from the inside out, Jim yanked out his fist and used it to smash Steve face-first into the nearest glass door of a freezer cabinet, through it, repeatedly, until his face was pierced all over with shards of broken glass. Then he pulled him back out by his greasy hair and pushed him down the aisle, door to door, rubbing what was left of his face against them, leaving a long smear of Steve’s blood—

  ‘Well, let’s hope there’s no migraines today, eh?’ Steve winked at Jim. ‘Or for the rest of this week.’

  Back in reality, Jim just glared at Steve’s back while he walked away.

  Jim turned and faced his reflection in the nearest freezer cabinet, then pressed his forehead to the cool glass.

  He felt shaky and light-headed. He needed to calm down. He was letting himself get too worked up.

  And the likes of Steve were decidedly unworthy of it.

  He started back towards the entrance to the department store. He often positioned himself there for fifteen-, thirty-minute blocks throughout his shift, as that was the most effective place for security personnel to be seen. Standing there made him a deterrent, but also put him within feet of the security sensors. As an added bonus it was a great place to look like he was working when he wasn’t at all.

  But Jim didn’t make it that far.

  At the start of Grocery, just after the flowers and magazines but before the fruit and veg, there was a concession selling hot drinks. It had three high-top tables where people could perch, drink their coffee and crane their necks to stare up at a TV screen hung from the wall. It was permanently muted but sometimes showed subtitles.

  This morning, the TV was tuned to one of those shows where a couple sat on a couch and interviewed people Jim never recognised sitting on another couch alongside. The interviewee was a blonde woman, late twenties or early thirties, pretty despite her attempts not to be. She had whiteblonde hair shorn very short, cut with jagged edges, and she had draped her thin frame in some kind of voluminous black thing. She was missing the heavy TV make-up that made everyone’s faces look like they belonged on wax dolls but in truth, she could’ve done with it, because there were purple shadows under her eyes and she was so pale she looked ill. This was all compounded by the fact that she or someone else had swept a bright red colour across her lips but not very neatly, and on a 42-inch high-definition flat-screen TV, you could see it had become smudged and was bleeding past the borders of her lips.

  It was Eve Black.

  Jim knew this not because he recognised her – he hadn’t seen her since she was twelve years old, a
nd only then for a few moments – but because of the words at the bottom of the screen. THE NOTHING MAN MURDERED MY FAMILY: AUTHOR EVE BLACK ON HER NEW TRUE-CRIME MEMOIR.

  He watched as it disappeared, then Eve did too.

  She was replaced by a floating family photograph, grainy and slightly out of focus: mother, father and two blonde girls holding hands.

  Then they were gone, replaced by a travelling shot of Eve and another woman walking towards a house, their backs to the cameras. Eve stopped and pointing to something in the middle distance.

  The subtitles were off. Jim had no idea what they were saying.

  Back to the studio.

  A shot of the presenters, their faces pinched with seriousness.

  On to Eve.

  She nodded and then started talking, moving her hands.

  The longer Jim looked at her, the more he could see the face of that little girl in her features.

  He should’ve seen this coming. He’d been so focused on the book, on his reading it, that he’d failed to think about the bigger picture – the far worse, much more pressing problem at hand: other people reading it. The story in the newspaper was one thing. It was a Cork newspaper, and anyway who read those any more? This was a TV show. It was national.

  Now the female presenter was holding up a copy of the book. Jim could guess what she was saying because a graphic had appeared on screen with times and dates.

  Tonight, Eve Black was going to be signing copies of her book at a store in Dublin city centre. Tomorrow, she was going to be doing the same at a store here, in Cork.