The Nothing Man Read online

  ‘I’ll park somewhere. Don’t worry.’ He looked to Noreen. ‘We’ll both go in.’

  He would have a legitimate reason to be there. Noreen would be by his side, helping to make him look like any other customer. Katie wouldn’t be able to pick up her copy until Friday at least, so he could come home afterwards and read it openly. And he liked the idea of it, of all three of them being in the same room less than twenty-four hours from now.

  Him.

  Noreen.

  Eve.

  It was poetic really. He was about to walk up to the woman who’d made it her mission to find him and failed at it. Instead, he was coming to her. But she’d have no clue who she was looking at and Noreen would be utterly oblivious to it all.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Katie said, beaming.

  Noreen looked down at her food and said nothing at all.

  – II –

  AMONG THE SHADOWS

  – 6 –

  Aftermath

  I’m obsessed with descriptions of grief. I collect them, literally. I copy them down into a notebook. My motto: no poem, personal essay or misery memoir left behind. ‘As if you have been dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body.’ That’s from Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life. ‘It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes.’ Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.’ The poet Edna St Vincent Millay, from Letters. ‘Grief is like wandering through a minefield … however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere.’ Owen Jones, quoting his mother in the Guardian. ‘That five stages of grief thing is total bullshit because that was ACTUALLY a study into the reaction of people who are given terminal diagnoses, NOT people who’ve lost loved ones. Grief doesn’t follow any pattern. In reality it’s MESSY and CONFUSING.’ An anonymous commenter on a website happily named TellUsYourGrief.com.

  I collect them and try them on, but so far not one of them has fit. Not completely. What does it feel like to lose both your parents and your younger sister to a violent crime when you were just twelve years old and the first person to come upon the bodies? Who has written about that? Who can give me the words? Because in all these years I’ve never quite been able to find them. If pushed, I’d say I’d felt numb. Empty. Alone and lost. I’d drag out all the usual suspects, the standard metaphors, which, I’ve noticed, are all weirdly meteorological: an earthquake, a fog, rolling waves. I could talk about how, when Nannie and I were hiding out in Spanish Point, my grief felt like the effort required to live your entire life with your back pressed against bulging closet doors because if you move from them and they open, everything will come spilling out.

  Jim yawned.

  He had only just come out to the shed. Noreen had gone to bed early and had been sleeping so soundly when he went upstairs at eleven that he’d chanced coming straight back down. But he was already yawning. Maybe Noreen was right. Maybe he needed to ditch the reading for the evening and get a full night’s sleep instead.

  Or maybe it was just the reading material that was the problem.

  Jim scanned the rest of the page, then the two pages overleaf. More grief and loss and feeling sad. Her grandmother feeling sad but pretending not to. Having to lie and say her parents were in a car crash when she started school. Feeling sad about that – and guilty.

  He yawned again.

  Tonight he’d had the foresight to make a flask of tea before coming outside and he set down the book now so he could swallow a few mouthfuls of it.

  Jim was just over halfway through The Nothing Man. That wasn’t quite far enough to feel confident about what exactly it was he was walking into tomorrow night. He needed to stay awake, to read as much as he could. He needed to get to the part where Eve wrote about what had happened in her family home that night, with Jim. He needed to know what she remembered, or claimed she did.

  He picked the book back up, found the page where he’d left off and then flicked ahead.

  Enough with the grief already. It didn’t interest him and it wasn’t important. He could skip it.

  Jim found the first page of the next chapter and started to read on.

  – 7 –

  Blind Witness

  In early July 2015, Professor Eglin arranged for me to meet a friend of his named Bernadette O’Brien. She was an editor at Iveagh Press, a publishing house. Since the ‘The Girl Who’ article had gone viral, I’d been fielding offers for all sorts – books, a primetime television interview, a podcast, something terrifying called life rights – but I was at sea in a strange world and had asked Eglin for his help. He’d suggested I meet with Bernadette.

  Iveagh Press was a series of small rooms over a café on Dawson Street called Bestseller, a play on its previous incarnation as the headquarters of the National Bible Society of Ireland. I arrived early and was directed to wait in a room with a large bay window that I recognised from outside, a huge conference table and walls lined with books. The air smelled faintly of coffee even before some underling brought me a cup of it. As I sipped, I started to have second thoughts.

  Was I really doing this? Seriously considering writing a book? How did I expect to be able to do that when writing two thousand words of an article had been such an ordeal? I tried to imagine a world in which my story and his were bound together between glossy covers and stacked deep on shelves with price-tags on. I couldn’t. I looked through the open door. The reception desk was deserted. I could just get up and leave. I put down my coffee, pushed back my chair. I should leave. But then Bernadette came in, eyes bright and arms outstretched, and I decided the polite thing to do was to stay and hear her out.

  She had just celebrated her sixtieth birthday but looked five or even ten years younger than that, with a razor-cut bob of jet black hair and thin, delicate gold things dripping from her wrists and ears. That day she was wearing black leggings and a huge knitted jumper that must have been several sizes too big but looked, on her, somehow trendy and fashionable. I was surprised to see that she was walking around the itchy grey office carpet in her bare feet, showing off a shiny gloss of red on her toes that distracted me. Even though she knew exactly who I was and what I’d been through, she didn’t tread on eggshells. She talked to me like I was a normal person. I liked her instantly.

  If I were to write a book, she explained, it wouldn’t be the first about the Nothing Man. There was already a book out there about him, with a title as imaginative as this one: The Case of the Nothing Man. It had been written by a journalist named Stephen Ardle and published back in October 2002. I’d never read it but Bernadette had, and she said it offered little in the way of new information. Ardle had been a crime reporter, primarily for the Irish Examiner, and the book was essentially a collection of the articles he’d written about the case in real time. (Ardle passed away in 2012.) Since then the genre had moved on. So now, I had the opportunity to write the definitive book on the case woven through with my own story.

  My facial expression must have been screaming my misgivings.

  ‘Think of it this way,’ Bernadette said. ‘Yes, you’ll have to open a vein and let whatever comes out dry on the page. You’ll have to relive all this. But just once. Then it’s done. And writing can be very therapeutic. It may help you. And while you must tell the truth, you don’t need to tell us all of it. You can hold back as much or as little as you like, so long as what you do put on the page feels like the whole story to the reader. But here’s the kicker: people don’t just read true-crime books now, they study them. They go looking for more. They listen to podcasts and meet up at conventions and trade theories’ – Bernadette mimed typing on a computer keyboard – ‘online until all
hours of the night. Armies of armchair sleuths. Someone has to know who this man is. People change. Relationships end. Consciences grow. A book about the case will renew interest. Jog a few memories. A book about this case by you will get everyone’s attention. It might move things forward. We might very well end up finding out who he is – and where he is. This could be what gets the creep arrested. Because at this point, my dear, it’s not going to be the Gardaí.’

  I don’t doubt that our mutual friend had prepped her to say this. Eglin knew that the idea of catching the Nothing Man was what had persuaded me to publish the original essay and now Bernadette was dangling the same hypothetical carrot in order to get me to agree to write a book. But that didn’t make what she was saying untrue.

  On that day, my parents and Anna had been dead for fourteen years and no one had ever been punished for it. Whenever I thought about that I felt a white-hot rage bubbling up inside of me, and I had to clench my fists and bite down on my lip to stop it from spilling out in tears or words or something worse, and wait for it to pass. But what if I used that rage instead? Channelled it into the courage I’d need to turn and face the past head-on, examine it closely, write this book? And what if I could make it go away entirely? What if I didn’t need to feel it any more, because he’d finally been caught, and instead I could think about how he was going to spend the rest of his days locked in a tiny dark cell somewhere where he had nothing to do except think about what he’d done and rot away and die?

  ‘There’s a problem, though,’ I told Bernadette. ‘With the details.’ I explained that, all my life, I’d done what I could to avoid them, not just when it came to my own family’s attack but the other ones, too. So I knew only the broadest of strokes. What had elbowed its way in, despite my best efforts. What I had found out by accident. And as for the night itself, I’d been locked in a bathroom. I’d heard sounds and I witnessed the aftermath, but beyond that …

  I was saying I wasn’t sure I could handle knowing exactly what had happened that night and the four other nights the Nothing Man had struck, but Bernadette misunderstood me. She thought I was asking her how I would go about finding out. She’d reached for the phone on her desk.

  ‘One of our crime writers uses a retired Garda inspector as a consultant,’ she said to me, while on the other end of the line, someone’s phone rang once, twice, three times. ‘She’s a friend of mine. She’ll ask him who we need to speak to, and we’ll get ourselves a meeting with them ASAP.’

  All I knew about Edward Healy in advance of our first meeting was that he was a detective and the man I was supposed to talk to if I wanted to know more about the Nothing Man. We arranged to meet in Lafayette’s, the café off the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Cork, early one Tuesday morning. The night before, I googled images of him. The first picture that came up showed him posing proudly with a medal at the end of some race. He had reddish hair and a spray of freckles across his nose. I recognised him instantly: Edward Healy was Freckled Man. This wouldn’t be our first meeting. Fourteen years after that, we were having our second.

  Ed – that’s what I call him now and it feels weird to refer to him as anything else – looks like the kind of airline pilot who comes out from the cockpit to say goodbye to his passengers as they deplane: friendly and approachable, but also confident and authoritative. He is boyishly handsome. Colleagues joke that it’s younger he’s getting and based on the pictures I’ve seen, I’d tend to agree. A health scare around his fortieth birthday six years ago forced him to give up drinking, smoking and – in his words – eating things that tasted good. Now he spends his free time hiking, cooking dishes from vegetarian cookbooks and, when he can, sea-swimming in Fountainstown. He does not look like he has danced with darkness. He does not look like the leading authority on the Nothing Man. But he has and he is. And he is more than that. He is the Nothing Man’s nemesis.

  This wasn’t just another case for Ed. It was the case, his obsession. The one ‘unsolved’ all conscientious detectives have that haunt them, that keep them awake at night. Ed had even stopped his ascent through the ranks because to go any further than sergeant would’ve taken him away from this case. He had paid for his obsession with his personal life. After sacrificing so much, Ed made a vow to himself that he wouldn’t stop until he found the Nothing Man, and he hadn’t. But for nearly fifteen years there hadn’t been as much as a crumb to add to the case files. Ed had only another ten to go until he’d be forced to retire. Time was running out.

  I didn’t know all this that morning in the café, but I do remember Ed’s eagerness for meeting me being a little off-putting. He remembered asking me questions at the hospital and made polite enquiries as to how I’d been since, how my life had been. He’d read my essay and commended me on it. He welcomed the idea of me writing a book and assured me he would help in any way he could. But our conversation was underpinned by an anxiousness, a palpable impatience on his part. He was desperate to talk to me about back then, about that night. The hope I might have something for him was coming off him in waves. As soon as I could, I ripped off the Band-Aid: I told him I was here to get information from him, that I didn’t have any I could give.

  ‘I don’t remember it,’ I explained. ‘What I mean is, I don’t have anything to remember. I was in the bathroom. I mostly just heard sounds. And what I saw afterwards … I know very little. That’s why I wanted to talk to you: I want to know what happened. In my house and the others. Or at least, I think I do.’

  It was mid-morning and only a few tables in the café were occupied. Ed suggested we continue our conversation at Anglesea Street, the Garda district HQ, which was only a few minutes’ walk away across the river. He had a small office there, he said, commandeered for his unofficial one-man cold-case unit that only ever looked at the one cold case.

  It was a grey, cloudy day and the sky felt heavy with threat. I was warming to Ed but there was a current of doubt running through me that kept me from feeling wholly at ease. Was this a mistake? Was I going to find out something I didn’t want to know, that I wouldn’t be able to forget? Was I wasting Ed’s time? Perhaps sensing my unease, he asked me what my aim was for the book. I could state that clearly: I wanted to catch him with it. I repeated what Bernadette had said about armchair sleuths and he nodded in agreement. Someone must know something, I said. If they read the book and took in the extent of what he had done, the hurt he’d caused, how dangerous he is … Well, maybe their conscience would make them pick up the phone and call the Gardaí.

  Ed winced at this and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. He put a hand out to stop me and we paused by a bench on the quay that looked across the greenish tinge of the River Lee to the grandeur of the City Hall on the opposite bank.

  ‘I will tell you now,’ he said gently, ‘even if we identify him, and find him, and bring him in, without a confession it will be impossible to charge him.’ The Nothing Man had committed five awful acts and taken lives during two of them, but he had done it all without leaving any trace of himself behind. There was no physical evidence to pin anyone to the crimes. ‘TV makes people think that if we have fingerprints we can just run them through some supercomputer and match them to the owner, but that’s fiction. We need to have collected the match, too. In this case, we don’t even have a set to test. And that’s true of all kinds of evidence in this case. DNA. Fibres. Witness statements. Vehicle movements, even. Licence plates, tyre tracks, that sort of thing. Even if someone calls us with a name and we can drive straight to the guy’s house and pick him up, how will we prove that we have the right guy? What can we check him against? If it wasn’t for the phone calls, we wouldn’t even know the same guy had done all five crimes.’

  ‘You’re telling me I shouldn’t bother,’ I said, defeated.

  ‘I’m telling you that if your goal is to find out who this man is, that may well be achievable. But you might have to make do with that. The chances of being able to get him convicted and punished for what he did are about on a p
ar with winning the Lottery. So if it has to be that, if that’s all that would be enough …’ Ed sighed. ‘I want you to do this but I must tell you if that’s what you need, you almost certainly won’t get it. Not unless he confesses, which, after all these years and no physical evidence, he’d be very unlikely to do. And that’s if we find him.’

  I told him I understood, but my insides were churning. I’d always assumed the problem was that the Gardaí hadn’t found him, that finding him would automatically mean he’d get put away. Losing that as the compass point I was striding towards left me rudderless and lost, but I told Ed I wanted to keep moving forward. I didn’t know what else to do for now.

  I had never been inside the station at Anglesea Street before that day and was surprised by its interior. From the outside, the building looked like a nondescript, squared-off office block. But it was hiding a light-filled atrium and the bare stone on its floor granted it the respectful hush of a grand cathedral. Ed’s ‘office’ was not like that. It was clearly a storage room for obsolete computer equipment into which a desk had been shoved. There were spreading stains on the ceiling tiles and a dusty, dried-out water dispenser in one corner. The chairs were plastic and mismatched and uncomfortable. Ed got us more coffee but it was, at best, a distant cousin of the substance we’d drunk back in the café.

  He reached into a drawer and plonked a thick manila file down on the desk between us. There was a grubby OP OPTIC label stuck on its front. The room felt charged by it, as if the file was emitting some kind of pulse. In my naivety I thought it was the file, the whole thing. In fact, it was just a short summary of the five attacks that Ed kept to hand for easy reference.

  Later I would work my way through all the Operation Optic files, boxes and boxes of them, reading through the documents with Ed by my side to explain and contextualise. I would spend endless days in the reference section of the Cork Central Library on the Grand Parade, poring over every published article I could find about the case. I would meet with survivors and listen to them recount their personal horrors in excruciating detail. I would even, eventually, look at some crime-scene photos. But this was the beginning, the first day, and all I could manage was to hold myself together while Ed talked me slowly through sanitised overviews of each of the Nothing Man’s five crimes.