The Nothing Man Read online

  Thus Detective Sergeant Edward Healy took four hitherto unconnected, unsolved cases – Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan, Linda O’Neill and the double murder of Marie Meara and Martin Connolly – and linked them, advancing Operation Optic more than any other single member of the force. He was the one to identify that a serial attacker was at work in Cork city and county. He stopped thinking about resigning, or moving to another city, or going back to college to study something else. He could only think about catching this man.

  Detective Sergeant Edward Healy felt alive again. My mother, father and sister only had a week left to live.

  Back in that awful room in the hospital on the night of my family’s attack, the man with the reddish hair and freckles on his nose was crouched down in front of me, talking.

  I looked into his face and willed myself to pay attention. I could still hear that odd rushing noise in my ears. I wanted my mother. I wanted to hear a knock on the door and look up and see her poking her head in, saying, ‘Is Eve in— Oh, there you are. Come on!’ But instead the door stayed closed and the man kept talking.

  Gradually, a few words began to get through.

  Remember … Telephone … Anna.

  ‘Where is she?’ I said, surfacing suddenly. ‘Is she okay?’

  Freckled Man looked relieved and moved to sit beside me. When he spoke again it was very quietly, as if he was telling me a secret. He called me Evelyn. He said Anna was very, very sick but she was in hospital and the doctors and nurses were looking after her. It was an explanation for someone much younger than me and I bristled with anger. I was twelve. I wasn’t a child. I wanted to shout that at him.

  He said that after I had some sleep, we’d need to talk about what had happened back at the house. I stayed perfectly still, working to keep my face blank, my whole body tense with terror. Because I couldn’t talk about it. It was taking all I had to keep it locked away inside my head. Every so often an image would break free – Anna’s limp hand hanging off the side of her bed; a spray of red on the wallpaper in my parents’ room; the angle of my father’s head as he lay at the bottom of the stairs – and I’d physically jolt, whipping my head to the side as if it wasn’t a memory but something real right in front of me, and I had the option of shutting my eyes and turning my head away.

  Freckled Man said there were two questions he had to ask me now because they were so very important. Just two questions and then Nannie and I could leave and get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow I’d even be able to visit Anna.

  ‘What about my parents?’ I asked.

  He smiled with his mouth closed. Later, I would look back on this and catch the pity on his face.

  ‘Them too,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’

  I felt a stab of jealousy. ‘Are they with Anna?’

  ‘Just two questions, Evelyn.’ Freckled Man lightly tapped my knee. ‘All right?’

  I nodded.

  The first question was if I knew anything about prank phone calls, if I could remember anything strange like someone ringing our house lately but then hanging up without saying anything, or maybe I’d heard my parents talking about something like that …? What I knew about prank calls came from kids’ movies. They were funny. They were harmless. They were jokes. In my head, there was no path that could connect such a thing to what had happened in our house. Why was he asking me about that? I thought Freckled Man must be mad. I told him no.

  The next question was the most important one, he said. The man who’d been in our house tonight, the stranger who’d hurt my parents and Anna – he wanted to catch him, to stop him hurting anyone else. But he needed my help. Had I seen this stranger? Could I say how tall he was, or what he was wearing? Or perhaps I’d heard his voice? I told him no, I hadn’t seen anyone. He asked me if I was sure and I said I was. I could tell he was disappointed, but trying to pretend not to be. He thanked me for answering his questions and said we could go now.

  Nannie took my hand and led me out of the room.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I’d be sleeping in my own bed, but I was surprised when we didn’t go to Nannie’s house. Instead, she and I were brought to a big, dark hotel. The schoolteacher woman came with us, but not into the room where we’d sleep. I think she said something to Nannie about being right outside.

  There were two beds but we both got into the same one. She left the bedside lamps on. I asked what we were going to do in the morning, without clean clothes or my toothbrush, but Nannie didn’t answer. She was silent but I knew she was awake because I could feel her body shaking. I slept in fits and starts, and at some point woke up to see that Nannie had turned over, rolled away from me. I touched a hand to the stretch of pillow she’d vacated. It was cold and damp.

  The thick curtains were drawn, but there was enough light to see that Nannie was sitting on the chair by the desk, perfectly still, her hand resting on the telephone. I waited, thinking she was about to make a call, but the seconds ticked on and she didn’t move.

  In actual fact, she had just taken one. It was someone at the hospital ringing to tell her that Anna had died.

  It was strange, Jim thought as he made his way home through rush-hour traffic, how Ed Healy was being portrayed in the book. He wondered if Eve Black had really written The Nothing Man or if she’d had one of those … What do you call them? Ghostwriters? Because claiming that Healy had done more for Operation Optic than any other member of the force was laying it on a bit thick.

  That certainly wasn’t how Jim thought of the man. He credited Healy with letting this all happen. That day he was called out to Westpark and the dick in a high-vis vest brought him to the so-called ‘lair’, Jim was there too. Already there, standing only feet away, hidden among the trees. Watching and listening. If Healy had seen him, it would’ve all been over before it had even begun.

  There’d have been no attacks. No murders. No fun.

  But Healy hadn’t bothered to look.

  It was odd too how Eve seemed utterly unable to extrapolate the obvious from the evidence. The Gardaí had had the same problem at the time – especially with Westpark. It was simple. Jim had entered the house while both occupants were sleeping in their beds and proceeded to do what he normally did: wake, threaten, secure. But while he was with the woman, the man managed to escape his binds. He ran downstairs and outside. Jim followed. When he reached him, he saw that the man had grabbed a mobile phone and was trying to use it. Things got physical, which Jim didn’t like because that kind of thing left marks – cuts, bruises, swollen knuckles – and he needed to be able to go home to Noreen and into work the next day as normal. So when the man had been reduced to crawling on his stomach in a hopeless attempt to reach the phone that had been kicked well beyond his reach, Jim noticed the incline of the driveway and the car sitting in it and had a better idea. He pulled on the driver’s side door: open. He reached into the car, released the handbrake and that was that. He hadn’t planned to leave behind a scene so … operatic, but that’s how things had worked out. He remembered his colleagues discussing it at the station the next day. What kind of sick fucker are we dealing with here? they’d asked one another, while Jim sat among them. As one of them.

  It was already dark when he got home. No lights on in the front of the house signalled that Noreen was at the back of it, in the kitchen. Probably watching TV, so she wouldn’t have heard the car pull in. Jim took his copy of The Nothing Man from the glove box and the Pet World bag from the passenger seat and slipped around the side of the house.

  Never having had a dog, he’d been overwhelmed by the choice of food on sale. He’d walked past the pet store in Centrepoint countless times but had never appreciated the sheer size of it, seen just how far back it stretched, until today. It was as large as a supermarket. This hadn’t helped Jim, who had no idea what he was actually looking for. In the end, he’d gone purely by the picture on the box.

  He opened the box of dog biscuits and upended its contents on to the floor of the shed. Size-wise, t
hey were perfect. Narrow cylinders, two to three inches in length. Hard on the outside, so they should survive for a while in the soil. But the marrowbone filling wasn’t the jelly-like substance Jim had been expecting. It didn’t yield as easily as he’d thought it would. In fact, the only way to get the rat poison pellets in there was to force a screwdriver through first and then push the pellet into the hole the screwdriver had left behind.

  He made a prototype, a pellet at both ends, and paused to admire his handiwork. The pellets were small and thin and hard, and almost the same colour as the marrowbone.

  Perfect.

  He made five more.

  Later tonight, he’d come back and bury them at the base of the hedge that separated his rear garden from Karen and Derek’s.

  Since they’d got the dog, they’d reinforced the shared hedge border with metre-high wire fencing on their side, but Derek had installed it himself and done a piss-poor job. The fencing hung loose between the posts, enabling the dog to lift it with his nose, burrow through the base of the hedge and make his way into Jim’s garden. That’s when the problems with the dog had first begun. His bowels and his leaving home to evacuate them was only the latest and most annoying instalment in the saga.

  And Jim had had enough.

  He was at the end of the hall, already reaching for the handle of the kitchen door, when he heard the voices. Katie and Noreen. It sounded like they were sitting just on the other side, at the kitchen table. They mustn’t have heard him come in. He was about to join them when some instinct, some primal alarm, told him to stop and wait.

  Noreen’s voice: ‘… time does it finish?’

  Katie’s: ‘I’d be lucky … ten o’clock. Please?’

  Jim pressed his ear against the door where it met the frame so as to hear better.

  ‘I don’t know, love,’ Noreen was saying. ‘You know I don’t like getting the bus home after dark. Can’t one of your friends do it?’

  ‘They’re either at work or at training with me. Get Dad to drive you.’

  ‘You know your father has absolutely no interest in any of that stuff.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to go in, he can just wait outside. And wasn’t that stuff his job?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Was he on that case?’

  A beat passed.

  ‘No,’ Noreen said. ‘Your father was never—’

  Jim pushed open the door.

  The two women jumped. They were sitting at the table, just as he’d thought. It was laid for dinner but they weren’t eating yet. Both of them looked up at him in surprise – at first. Then Noreen’s expression settled into something more inscrutable.

  Katie got up to give him a hug. She was dressed in running gear, her face scrubbed clean and cheeks red. Her hair was damp and smelled like something soapy and floral.

  ‘I just came from the gym,’ she said when she saw him looking. ‘Cycled here afterwards.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  ‘I have the gear, Dad. Don’t worry.’

  Noreen stood up and moved behind him, to the stove.

  ‘I came to ask Mum a favour,’ Katie said as she and Jim sat down, ‘and she made me stay for dinner. You know she’s convinced I’m starving myself. She’s probably over there melting a stick of butter into that stew as we speak.’

  ‘I can hear you,’ Noreen said. ‘And it’ll be two sticks now.’

  Jim said to Katie, ‘What favour?’

  ‘Oh, well … Yeah.’ Katie lifted the jug of water on the table and started filling her glass from it. ‘You see, there’s this book signing in town tomorrow night. I wanted to go but I just found out Friday night’s training’s been brought forward to Thursday because there’s a game on Friday, and none of the girls are free, so I asked Mum if she’d go in and get a book signed for me but she doesn’t want to go on her own. The bus, after dark, etc., etc.’ Katie rolled her eyes. ‘So I was thinking … Maybe you could go with her? Drive her there, I mean. She can just run into the shop, get the book signed and come back out. Five, ten minutes, max.’ She smiled hopefully. ‘Please, Dad?’

  A book signing. Tomorrow night. In town.

  Jim’s tongue felt swollen, too big for his mouth. His throat was itchy and dry. He wasn’t sure words were going to come out but he opened his mouth anyway and said, ‘What’s the book?’ They sounded strangled, like he was speaking and choking at the same time.

  ‘The Nothing Man.’

  It wasn’t Katie who’d answered him but Noreen. She was approaching the table with two steaming plates of food. She set them down just as Katie reached behind her, into the backpack that was hanging off her chair, and pulled out a hardcover book.

  Yellow letters on a glossy black background.

  ‘I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known she was about to do a signing in Cork,’ Katie said, ‘but I presume I can just bring in this one and she’ll sign it for me? I mean, I’ve never actually gone to a book signing but it seems …’

  Jim didn’t hear the end of the sentence. The rest of the world was falling away, disappearing into the dark, as if his vision was being reduced to a single pinprick of light like a dying television set.

  It left only one thing illuminated in front of him.

  Something was stuck inside the book, about a third of the way in. Something blue. It could’ve been a postcard or a folded letter or a piece torn from a cereal box, but it didn’t matter what it was. All that mattered was the purpose it was serving.

  It was a bookmark.

  Katie was reading Eve Black’s book.

  His own daughter. Reading about the other him.

  Jim looked for Katie’s face. He found it looking back at him with an odd expression. Expectant, moving towards concerned. Had she asked him something? Her lips were moving. Was she saying something to him right now? He couldn’t hear the words. He couldn’t hear anything—

  A sharp pinch on his shoulder brought him back.

  ‘Here.’ Noreen was beside him, leaning over to set a glass of something fizzy beside his plate. She said to Katie, ‘Let your father eat his dinner. He’s after doing a full day today.’ Noreen went to the opposite side of the table to take her own seat. ‘Getting up at all hours and then doing extra hours … You need to get a proper night’s sleep tonight, Jim. You’re not forty any more. Sometimes I think you forget that.’

  ‘Well?’ Katie said to him. ‘Will you bring her?’

  He took a sip of his drink to buy time. Its fizziness made his eyes water.

  ‘Why are you reading that?’ he asked Katie. ‘That book. Why would you want to?’

  ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ Noreen muttered. ‘The food will be stone cold.’

  ‘I heard about it on the radio and I …’ Katie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s interesting. Isn’t it? Like, who is this guy? Why did he do these things? How come he was never caught? Is he still alive? It’s fascinating. And the book’s got good reviews. And she’s from here. And it all happened here, while you were— Did you work on it, Dad? That case?’

  ‘Katie,’ Noreen said warningly. ‘This isn’t dinner-table talk.’

  ‘I didn’t work the case,’ Jim said, ‘but I was there when it was going on. It wasn’t entertainment to us, Katie. People died. And so I have to say, I’m a bit concerned that this is your choice of reading material. Concerned and disappointed.’

  ‘But everyone’s reading it.’

  ‘Katie,’ Noreen warned again.

  ‘But—’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Jim said.

  He looked down at the gloopy mess of stew and mashed potatoes in front of him with determination. When he put a forkful of the food in his mouth, he found he couldn’t taste it.

  There was a prolonged silence, interrupted only by the scrape of cutlery against ceramic. Then Noreen said something to Katie about exams coming up and Katie started talking about a presentation she had to make and Jim retreated, tuning out just enough to let the voices blend into one humm
ing sound but not so much that he wouldn’t notice if they stopped.

  Jim wanted to go to the book signing. He had planned to. It was part of his preparation for the next steps. But now so too did his daughter. This was shocking to him, but only because it was Katie. Logically, her wanting to go was unsurprising. He thought back to the first time he’d seen the book, at work, and then later in the bookshop in town. Numerous copies. Big displays. An entire window of the big bookshop in town devoted to it. And since then it’d been in the paper, and Eve Black had been interviewed on TV, and had Katie said something about hearing her on the radio too? The book was everywhere. And it was true crime. Better yet, local true crime. Of course people were interested in it. It was unfortunate that one of them happened to be his own daughter, but why should she be immune?

  The problem was her wanting to go to this signing, and not being able to go, and asking her mother to go in her stead. So now Noreen knew what was happening at that time tomorrow evening. That in itself was more of an annoyance than a problem, but what if Jim went and then, at the last minute, Katie’s schedule changed and she arrived at the shop? Or what if Noreen decided to go? What if they both walked in there together and saw him?

  ‘We’ll go,’ he said.

  Both women looked at him.

  Noreen said, ‘Go where?’

  ‘To the bookshop.’

  Katie brightened. ‘Really?’

  ‘I can just call them in the morning,’ Noreen said. ‘They can hold a signed copy for her. They do that. I’ll go in and collect it Friday morning—’

  ‘But I want my copy signed,’ Katie said. ‘This one.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll go.’

  ‘It’s Patrick Street, Dad. It starts at seven. You should just be able to pull up outside. There’s a loading bay, I think, and at that time—’