The Nothing Man Read online

  That my mother had seen.

  And Anna.

  I felt, in a weird way, closer to them. With them. Part of their exclusive, awful club.

  But I wasn’t scared. What I was, honestly, was relieved. I was relieved that the thing I had been scared of my entire life was finally happening. It meant I wouldn’t have to be frightened of it any more.

  The night he died, Jim Doyle was sixty-three years old. He’d been married to his wife for more than thirty years and their only child, a daughter, was about to start her second year of university. He lived in a nondescript semi-D in a southside suburb of Cork City known for its high property prices and good schools. He had been a guard but not a very good one. There had been further incidents after the mug-throwing, although not as serious, and for most of his career in the force he’d been ‘put on paper’, essentially blocked from doing anything except the most menial of tasks. On the day he banked his requisite thirty years, he retired.

  There were signs that he was unravelling, losing the control he’d maintained for so many years. I have no idea if it was the book that prompted this, but no fewer than three copies of it were found at his home. (One of them even had handwritten notes inside the front cover.) Hours before he arrived at my house to kill me, he was fired from his job as a security guard at a supermarket following complaints that he’d made female customers uncomfortable. After he was given the news, he’d assaulted his boss in a bizarre attack, forcing food down the man’s throat. That same morning his next-door neighbours, a couple called Derek and Karen Finch, called the Gardaí to report that someone was trying to poison their dog. They presented the officers with dog biscuits they’d found with pellets of rat poison pushed inside. A bag of that same rat poison would be found in Doyle’s garden shed, along with an old hoover whose bag contained DNA traces that matched Linda O’Neill, Marie Meara and my mother. When Gardaí interviewed Doyle’s wife, she had visible injuries to the side of her face. She would only speak to Gardaí long enough to tell them that she wasn’t going to speak to them, that she knew nothing about the Nothing Man.

  Doyle was born in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, in July 1956, seven months after his parents married. Sean Delaney was forty-two to Emer Doyle’s twenty-one at the time. After the wedding, Emer moved into the house on Delaney’s farmland. There is no written record of what their marriage was like and no one left living who can tell us about it, but we do know this much: Delaney was known around town as a fella driven mad by the drink – a violent drunk – and on 26 December 1961, he shot his wife in the head before turning the gun on himself. Five-year-old Jim was unharmed but spent two days alone in the house before a neighbour raised the alarm. When Garda entered they found the boy sleeping soundly in bed, curled up against his mother’s dead and bloodied body.

  After that, Doyle was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Agnes, in Rathmines in Dublin. She gave him his mother’s maiden name and enrolled him in the local school, where he was a good if unexceptional student. Agnes was a single woman who enjoyed socialising and on Saturday nights, young Jim was often left in the care of teenage babysitters. One of them, Jean Long, contacted me after his death. She described him as an intense little boy who grew into a somewhat unnerving adolescent, prone to staring and saying inappropriate, sexualised things. He had once tried to grab her breasts.

  As soon as Doyle turned eighteen in 1974, he tried to enrol in the army but failed the fitness test. Agnes died suddenly the following year, in April 1975, of a brain aneurism. After that, public records lose Doyle for more than a decade, until a marriage certificate marks his wedding to eighteen-year-old Mary White1, of Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, in January 1986. Months later, Doyle joined the ranks of the Gardaí.

  Why did he do what he did? I didn’t get a chance to ask him. Armed Gardaí burst into the room, saw that Doyle was armed and shot him dead before either of us could speak. We might, however, have an answer for why he stopped, for why the attack on my family was his last. Dr Weir said that one of the reasons serial killers stop killing is that they ‘age out’ and Doyle would’ve been forty-five in 2001. But she also said that sometimes their stopping is down to a change in their circumstances. 2001 is also the year his daughter was born.

  The short version of Jim Doyle’s life is that he was a wholly unremarkable man. He failed at everything he tried to do. He didn’t get into the army, he failed to advance in the guards and he even got himself fired from the supermarket where he worked security. As far as I’m concerned, the injuries to his wife’s face on the day of his death also indicate that he had failed as a husband, and his daughter having to live the rest of her life knowing who he really was qualifies as a fatherhood failure too. Everyone who knew him disliked him and physically he was well past his prime. In the absence of contrary information, it seems as if his motivation for committing his crimes is standard Serial Killing 101: misogyny. He didn’t like women because they didn’t like him. Even that is unremarkable, unfortunately. As Dr Weir had pointed out, the Nothing Man is an exceptionally apt name for a serial killer. ‘When you find him,’ she’d said to me, ‘you’ll probably be shocked at just how much of nothing he really is.’ She was right.

  A few months ago, Ed gave me a book called Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe. On its cover was a picture of a dead little girl in a yellow dress whose face was smeared with blood and whose dark hair was matted with it. It was only on second glance I realised that the girl was in fact a doll. I looked to Ed for an explanation, half-wondering if the man had lost his mind. He pointed to a page he’d marked with a Post-It note. When I turned to it, I found a phrase underlined in dark, smudgy pencil. You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself. It was part of a section of the book called ‘The Victim’. The shock of recognition was electric.

  For years I collected descriptions of grief, looking for the one that would put into words what I was feeling because I didn’t have the words for it myself. But none of them had ever fit. Now I know why. What I went through in the wake of my family’s visit from the Nothing Man wasn’t grief. It wasn’t just that. To lose family members to illness, accident or time, while just as painful, is a different kind of pain to losing a loved one to a violent crime. This one is more complex. Nowhere near as many people can relate to it and so it separates you from everyone else. I’ve been separated since I was twelve years old. I don’t know what it feels like to not be.

  I also carry a tremendous amount of guilt. I wish I had acted differently in the house that night. I wish I had told someone about the knife and the rope. I was the only one to get out alive and I didn’t deserve it. If there was to be one survivor, there should’ve been three other names on the list above mine. Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I run downstairs and raise the alarm? Why didn’t I protect my sister? How can I call myself a victim or a survivor when nothing happened to me, when I wasn’t even hurt?

  And what did I do with this blessing, with my escape, with all this extra time? Until very recently, nothing. I sleepwalked through life. I existed more than lived. I gave into the pain. That, in turn, gave rise to even more guilt. Because I know for sure that if Anna had lived, she’d be making the most of every moment. She’d have a family and a career and be a wonderful person who gave back as much if not more than she took. She would be worthy of surviving the Nothing Man. I feel like I will never be. People tell me to forgive myself but, trust me, that’s easier said than done.

  In the meantime, all I can do is try to make the most of my time on earth. That started with writing this book. My mother, father and Anna are immortalised in it. Everyone who reads it will know they were here. Writing this book also helped catch the man who took them away. And weirdly, inadvertently, it led me to the wonderful man who earlier this year became my husband. In a few weeks’ time, our daughter will arrive.

  A friend told me recently that when my daughter reaches the age I was on the night the Nothing Man entered
our home, I will see how innocent and small and young that is, how much of a child remains even right on the cusp of their becoming a teen, and I will finally understand how young I was. She says if I haven’t already, I will forgive myself then. I don’t know about that. We’ll see.

  Nearly nineteen years ago, Jim Doyle bought me a ticket to a planet where I had to live by myself. I didn’t want to go but I had no choice in the matter. I was too young and too numb to recall the journey, leaving me utterly lost, disorientated and unable to find my way back. I’m still here. Until recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would be for ever.

  But something unexpected has happened. A visitor has arrived and he knows the way back. He says he’ll take me with him. We leave soon. I’m finally getting to go home.

  EVE BLACK

  Dublin 2020

  ___________

  1 Not her real name.

  About the Author

  Eve Black lives in Dublin with her partner Ed and baby daughter Anna. The Nothing Man is her first book.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the people who continue to make it possible for me to do my dream job: my agent Jane Gregory and everyone at David Higham, Corvus/Atlantic Books, Blackstone Publishing and Gill Hess Ltd. To Sara O’Keeffe: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you (one for each book!). Best of luck in your new adventures. Thank you to Casey King, Garda procedure consultant extraordinaire, and my followers on Twitter who volunteered to have me use their names in Eve’s acknowledgements. To my fellow crime writer Mason Cross (and Pearl Jam) for the title, which turned out to be a perfect name not just for the book but for Jim, too. To the booksellers, reviewers and readers who so kindly support my work – I deeply appreciate it. To Hazel Gaynor and Carmel Harrington for keeping me sane, entertained and in excuses to drink French 75s. To Mum, Dad, John and Claire for everything but, really, you shouldn’t be moving stock around in bookshops unless you work there, okay? We’ve talked about this …

  You can really buy a Let’s talk about serial killers lips pin (I got mine from Krystan Saint Cat) but Hey! Ted Bundy isn’t hot! was printed on a bottle opener in real life (also by Krystan) and Talk true crime to me was on a greetings card I bought from Greenwich Letterpress in New York City.

  I got the idea for The Nothing Man from reading the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark less than a week after Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in California. I would urge you to read it too if you haven’t already, and to listen to the Audible Original Evil Has A Name as well. I also highly recommend Rachel Monroe’s book, Savage Appetites.

  Finally, a disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. That means I made everything up, including the facts.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  The Victims

  A Note on Sources

  Introduction: The Girl Who

  – I –: From the Dark

  – 1 –: True Life

  – 2 –: Let’s Play a Game

  – 3 –: Dreamcatcher

  – 4 –: Night Terrors

  – 5 –: Westpark

  – II –: Among the Shadows

  – 6 –: Aftermath

  – 7 –: Blind Witness

  – 8 –: That Night

  – 9 –: Connection

  – 10 –: Password

  – 11 –: The Nothing Man

  Acknowledgements

  One Year Later

  – Postscript –: The Woman Who

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements