The Nothing Man Read online

  In mid-December, we travelled to Dublin Airport to meet Tommy off his flight. We waited at Arrivals as people came streaming out of the sliding doors and into the outstretched arms of waiting loved ones. All around us were squeals of delight, tears and even a few handmade WELCOME HOME signs. I was holding a sign that said the name of a man I’d never met and I was waiting to talk to him about a murderer who’d changed the course of both of our lives. This was typical of what being the victim of a violent crime often felt like to me. I looked fine; I looked normal; I could blend in with everyone else. But I had a secret that set me apart, that made me an Other. The lives of the people around me were so different to mine they may as well have been science-fiction. I would never stand in an Arrivals hall to wait for my family. I had lost all the family I’d had. And if I somehow found a way in the future to make a family of my own – something that, when I thought about all the steps I would need to take to make that happen, seemed utterly impossible – I would never let them go anywhere without me. I’d be too scared to. Because even when you were at home, altogether, you still weren’t safe. I had seen the proof of this first hand.

  Tommy O’Sullivan was thirty-three now and working as an engineer for an aerospace company. His black hair and bushy beard were flecked with grey, and he was dressed casually in jeans with a leather messenger bag slung over one shoulder. He’d flown from Abu Dhabi to London and then from London to here, but his bags had only made the first journey. He wore a wedding ring. His wife, Amanda, had family in England and was spending a few days with them before joining her husband at Nancy’s house in Malahide. Tommy was warm and open, easy to chat to and generous with his time, repeatedly reassuring us that he was in no rush to leave. We found a table at the bar on the mezzanine level and ordered a round of coffees. I asked if I could record the conversation on my phone and he agreed.

  He told us he’d been waiting a long time for this day. Seventeen years, give or take a few weeks.

  The Gardaí had interviewed Tommy at the house, but only for a short time and on the morning after the incident, when Tommy – in his own words – was still half-dazed by the event. Months later, when the Crimecall episode had made him realise the prank call was connected, he’d spoken to them again, but that meeting was brief. He’d always believed he knew more than they’d got out of him. Tommy was convinced what happened wasn’t a random attack, but that his family had been targeted. Chosen was the word he used. Even now, all these years later, he was tormented by why. Why them? Why had this man done what he did? And why had he never been caught?

  Tommy talked us through the events of that night, which for him had really only begun in the early hours of the morning, after the Nothing Man had left. He described his phone ringing and hearing his father’s voice on the other end of the line, despite the early hour and being in the room next door. The locked bedroom door. His father going outside and then calling out for Tommy to ring the Gardaí. A glimpse of his mother’s nightgown through a partially open bathroom door. Not seeing her properly until later that day, when she was discharged from hospital, clean and sterile and bandaged up. The Garda response. The immediate assumption, by them and his own father, that this was a tiger kidnapping gone wrong.

  ‘But gone wrong how?’ Tommy said to us, throwing up his hands, the frustration at that assumption still bubbling just below the surface all these years later. ‘A tiger kidnapping involves a gang and a vehicle. Where were they? There was one guy and no car that we know of. So at what point did it go wrong, exactly? It never went right, because it was never a kidnapping. There was zero evidence of that. The only reason that even came up at all was because my dad was a bank manager and made the mistake of telling them that. And they were like, “Oh, great. Mystery solved. Tiger kidnapping it is. Next!”’ He backtracked to the phone call two weeks before the attack, the one he’d thought was a friend of his playing a New Year’s Eve prank. He described the voice and then did an impression of it. It was raspy, odd and unnatural. A theatrical whisper. Let’s play a game. He described watching Crimecall – which he’d only happened to catch during a bored channel-surf – and feeling a sudden chill when he realised that the call was part of this, that he’d actually spoken to the Nothing Man.

  I asked him if he had ever found anything odd in the house, particularly in the weeks leading up to the attack, and told him about my own discovery of the knife and the rope. But Tommy couldn’t remember any similar incident at the house on Bally’s Lane.

  Ed explained why we’d wanted to meet with Tommy in the first place, why we were hoping to meet with as many survivors as we could. Our priority was finding a connection between the people the Nothing Man had chosen. There had to be something, but it was hard to find it when we didn’t know exactly what it was we were looking for.

  But we had Tommy and me, two eldest children from two Nothing Man targets, who’d lived only miles from each other growing up. Perhaps if we both shared everything we could remember from our families’ lives around the time of the attacks, we might hit on something we had in common. It was like a perverse game of Nothing Man Snap, and it was a long shot. But it was all we had.

  We started with the basics: schools and teachers, friends, relatives, clubs and other activities. Then we spread out from there. We talked about the restaurants we went to, cinemas we frequented, shopping centres we returned to again and again. Where our mothers did the weekly Big Shop. Where we went on holiday. Where we went if the day was sunny. Where we went if it was not. Bus routes, hairdressers, hospitals. Things that got delivered to the house. Tommy’s memory was markedly better than mine, but then he’d been older. He could remember which library his family went to, the name of the piano teacher two of his younger siblings had and where his mother’s favourite garden centre was. He could even remember what he liked to order from the café there when she took him along. But we found nothing that connected us.

  Tommy had been four years older than me when the Nothing Man came to his house. He had had the beginnings of a life outside his family. He was spending a lot of time with friends. It had widened his world. His family did a lot of things together like go for drives on a Sunday afternoon, go on holiday, go to the beach in good weather to swim in the sea, whereas what counted as activities in my family was going to Nannie’s house for lunch or playing outside for a while. If our mother had things to do, she normally dropped us off at our grandmother’s on the way there and collected us on her way back. It suited all parties better. I would visit friends’ houses on weekends but didn’t do much in the way of activities outside of school, and Anna was too young to. Tommy had a large extended family, while both my parents were only children and of our grandparents we only had Nannie left. Thus our universes at the turn of the millennium were two parts of a Venn diagram where his circle was several sizes larger than mine and there was nothing to put in the place where they overlapped.

  We clutched at straws until the conversation petered out. Tommy was clearly exhausted, although still reassuring us that he could stay longer. He seemed determined to find the link. We ordered more coffee.

  On this section of my recording of the conversation, there’s a lot of silence punctuated with the tinkling of teaspoons against the inside of ceramic cups.

  Eventually Ed, who had mostly been quiet all this time, spoke up.

  ‘Maybe he came to you,’ he said. ‘Maybe this wasn’t someone you encountered outside the home. Can you remember any callers to the house around that time? Strangers or perhaps new friends of your parents who you didn’t see afterwards? Any sales people, charity collectors, workmen – things like that?’

  I was searching my memory for something, anything, that might fit that bill when Tommy said, very quietly, ‘There was a guard.’

  Ed was instantly alert. ‘A guard? Before the attack?’

  Tommy nodded. ‘Yeah. A few months before.’ This is what he could remember:

  One evening, when it was not yet dark but getting there, the
doorbell went. Tommy was watching TV in the living room while his mother ironed school shirts. They were new shirts, coming out of their plastic packing; she was ironing the creases out. This, according to Tommy, sets the event firmly at the start of the school year, so September 1999.

  From his perch on the couch, Tommy had a line of sight through the open living-room door, across the hall, to the last six inches or so of the entranceway. When his mother opened the front door, he could see the right arm and shoulder of what was unmistakably a Garda uniform. Curious, Tommy muted the TV so he could eavesdrop. He heard a man’s voice say something about a burglary in the area. Gardaí were going door-to-door to make residents aware of this, to encourage them to step up their own home security if need be. At some point, Tommy’s father went to the door too.

  ‘And that’s why I remember it,’ Tommy said. ‘Because my mother turned to him and said something like, “I told you: we need to get that conservatory door fixed.” In front of the guard. She was always on about that bloody door and my dad was always saying he’d get someone out to have a look at it, but it never happened … And then, just a few months later, the Nothing Man got in through that door and I cursed the fact that they hadn’t done anything about it, even after the visit from the guard, even after there being a burglary nearby. But now I’m thinking …’ Tommy paused. ‘Maybe the man wasn’t really a guard.’

  ‘Did you see a car?’ Ed asked.

  Tommy said he didn’t remember seeing or hearing one.

  ‘Do you remember who it was who was burgled?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you describe what the man looked like? Did you see his face?’

  ‘Sorry, no. I’d guess he was about the same height as my dad, but that’s it.’

  A beat passed, pregnant with disappointment.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘I think a guard may have come to our house, too,’ I said. ‘I think.’

  The two men turned to look at me with such intensity that I immediately regretted saying those words aloud – because what I remembered was more of a possibility than an actual event.

  The doorbell going after dark, sounding strange and intrusive at that hour. Me leaving my homework to go stand at the top of the stairs to see what I could see, drawn by this unusual event but knowing better than to rush down and pull open the door myself. The light coming on in the hall. A stretched shadow in it. A man’s voice saying words I couldn’t make out. And then my mother saying something like, ‘Oh God, who is it? Ross? Collette?’ – my father and grandmother’s first names, which I never heard her use. The unseen man saying more and my mother making the sounds of relief. Then her saying something about not even locking doors.

  ‘That’s all I remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t know when it was, but that could’ve been a guard, right? She thought he was coming to tell her someone had died, that there’d been an accident. But he was telling her – probably – about a burglary. Right? It sounds like it could’ve been that?’ Neither of the two men answered me and I blushed with embarrassment. ‘I know, I know, it’s all very vague. I’m not even one hundred per cent sure I didn’t dream it. Never mind.’

  Ed looked from me to Tommy.

  Tommy looked at him.

  Ed said, ‘That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.’

  The words swam in front of Jim’s eyes. He closed the book and let it fall on to his lap. His hands were shaking.

  So they knew. They knew and they didn’t know. They had gathered the puzzle pieces and it would only be a matter of time now before they put them together. It was hard to gauge how much time he had left, but the clock was ticking.

  He could see that now.

  Feel it.

  Jim was in the living room, reading Katie’s copy of The Nothing Man. Noreen had gone to bed hours ago, not long after they’d got home from the event, muttering something about having a headache. She’d been looking for one of those painkillers that she liked because a side effect of them was a good night’s sleep. He had considered going out to the shed as before, but it was cold out there, and Katie’s copy of the book was in here, where it was warm and there was a comfortable chair.

  Even if Noreen came downstairs, which he doubted she’d do, he’d have no questions to answer. He was just having a flick through, he’d say. He knew Ed. Turns out he’d met Eve Black at Togher station while she was researching the book.

  While she was looking for him.

  She may not have found him, but she had found the path that led his way.

  Jim set the book aside and headed for the drinks cabinet, a foreign land to him. He almost never drank. But he needed something to take the edge off, to settle the electricity sparking inside his brain, to quieten things down so he could think a bit more clearly.

  He selected a dusty, half-drunk bottle of whiskey and poured what he thought was a measure of it into a short glass filled to the brim with ice. He took it back to his chair and set it on the table. He watched it sweat for a while, the condensation dripping down the outside of the glass. The ice began to melt.

  He took the barest of sips and winced at the taste, then at the burn as it slid down his throat and into his chest.

  Jim picked up the book again but didn’t open it. Instead, he ran his hand over the dust jacket as he had done before, but which he hadn’t been able to do since he’d discarded the jacket on his own copy as a precautionary measure.

  Now there was no need to be as careful.

  The letters were embossed, smooth and glossy. They raised up to meet him.

  The Nothing Man.

  Emerging from the shadows, now. After all this time.

  Or being dragged from them.

  Only if he let it happen.

  All because of a casual comment from Tommy O’Sullivan. A teenager at the time. Another one! Him and Eve, in cahoots.

  All of Jim’s work, his caution, his skills, his planning, his genius – it was all being undone by two overgrown children.

  How fucking infuriating.

  The idea had come to him in July 1990.

  Back then, Jim was the new guy at the station in Mallow. He’d been reassigned after a situation had arisen between him and his superintendent back at Millstreet, where he’d been for three years – his first assignment out of Templemore. All he’d done was pick up a mug and throw it at the wall, but the super had been standing in front of that wall and the mug had been filled with hot tea. Jim had just attended a scene where a seven-year-old boy had been ejected through a windscreen and thrown twenty-five feet further down the road, where he was then run over by an articulated lorry driving in the opposite direction. They hadn’t had to remove his body so much as scrape it up. Jim said he’d been struggling with what he’d seen and pushed out a few tears to add plausibility, and the performance got him disciplined and a move to Mallow. But the truth was Jim had had his fill of being treated like an idiot by idiots, and that day he’d finally blown his top.

  Outside the station, he got the respect he deserved. The uniform was a power differential, separating him from the gormless public and criminal lowlifes, the idiots who drove too fast and drank too much and came stumbling out of the pub at closing time to punch other idiots just because they’d looked at them the wrong way. Whenever he walked down the street, thumbs hooked into his vest, the weight of the belt and everything that hung from it pushing down on his hips, he felt good about himself. Taller. Stronger. He could see passers-by clocking him but pretending not to, having second thoughts about crossing before the green man or leaving their car in the disabled spot or littering. Little things, yes, but it was about them noticing him.

  Seeing him.

  Deferring to him.

  Whenever he had to attend a scene, interview witnesses or get someone handcuffed and into the back of the car, it was the same feeling only turned up to the max, practically pumping out a bass-line he couldn’t hear but could feel in his chest. Those moments made him feel like his whole life had just
been a series of events to bring him to this place, to this point, to this job. That he was doing what he was supposed to.

  Inside the station, it was a different story. He was the lowest member on the totem pole. A joke, even. No one respected him. No one even liked him, although he didn’t give a fuck about that. They tolerated him and, he’d begun to suspect, traded jibes about him behind his back. One of the guys had a buddy in Millstreet who’d told the whole station about Jim losing his shite over the boy in the car accident. A couple of times since other members had come back from scenes wiping away pretend tears, asking for a mug and looking for the super.

  All because he was better than them and they knew it. They knew it and they just couldn’t stand it.

  Even on that day, the day that started it all, when the call came in about Meadowbrook and Jim and David Twomey were directed to go help with the house-to-house, Jim caught the other man making a face about the pairing. They’d driven to the scene in stony silence, which was probably just as well because David was a terrible driver and Jim didn’t want to make things worse by distracting him.