The Nothing Man Read online

  And then, finally, things began to change.

  I started to sleep at night, bringing my days back into focus. That made me feel restless and jittery in the flat during the day, but there was nothing I had to do, no one to see and nowhere to go. So I started to walk. For miles and miles, on paths that hugged the edges of Dublin Bay. Usually heading off around eight o’clock in the morning, pushing against the workers striding into the city until I was out of it and free of them, and feeling free as the rising sun broke into shards of light on the water feet away from me. My go-to route was north out of town and along the water as far as Clontarf, but sometimes I pushed on to Howth Head, and once I walked south across the river and kept going until I found myself in Dun Laoghaire hours later, where I collapsed into a seat on the 46A and slept all the way back.

  But it wasn’t the same on dull days and I had no interest in doing it on the wet ones. I started searching for an alternative rainy-day activity, something that would get me out of the flat but into another dry, warm place. I choose the library, the largest one I could find, right in the heart of the city centre. There was a steady stream of people into and out of it so I could be anonymous, moving among them unnoticed if not unseen. I started hiding in corners, eyes skimming the same page for the umpteenth time as rain drummed against the windows and our collective breath turned them misty and opaque. Eventually I began to forget myself, falling into whatever book I’d selected as a prop. I found I had an attention span again. Soon after that I was borrowing, bringing books home to read into the evening or even bring with me on my walks. Then came cooking: simple, wholesome meals from scratch. Taking care of the rooms in which I lived. Taking care of myself. I didn’t recognise it as such at the time, but I was doing for myself what Nannie had once done for me: keeping a simple, quiet life that would help to heal me. I had always assumed we were merely hiding.

  I can’t say exactly when the last wisps of my fog disappeared, but they did. When they did, I bought a notebook and a pack of sharp pencils, because I knew what it was that I was going to do next: take a chance.

  If you think you’ve read some of these words before, you may have. If you have, you already know what I did next.

  In September 2014, I began a Masters in Creative Writing at St John’s College in Dublin. I choose St John’s partly because they were willing to choose me, but also because the campus was already associated with horrific crimes. Several years before, five female first-years had been snatched from the paths that ran along the Grand Canal, their route back to their halls of residence after a night out in the city’s pubs and clubs. Each one was left unconscious beneath the black waters to drown, and drown they did. The Nothing Man may have been a headline for a time, but the Canal Killer was an industry, spawning documentaries and blogs and – the latest thing – podcasts, even then, years after the fact. (Unbeknownst to anyone but the Canal Killer himself, the story would soon be continuing. There were three new murders connected to St John’s and one attempted one while I was writing this book.) I figured this was the only university in Ireland that already had its own monster and he was even more notorious than mine. I might go unnoticed. I might get not to be the Girl Who in the Place Where.

  I wanted to write. Had always wanted to. What or how or for whom, I didn’t know, but since I had dragged myself out from under the darkness, I had been thinking about it more and more and now, finally, I’d made a decision. I would learn how and then I would do it. I had notions of writing a novel, something dark and twisty into which I could – anonymously – pour all of my pain. This path was fraught with danger but I was stronger now and once again ready to pretend. That’s what fiction was, wasn’t it? Pretending?

  Not according to our course director, the renowned novelist Jonathan Eglin, whose debut novel The Essentialists was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He told us this in our very first class. He said that fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth. That was our aim, regardless of what form our writing took. He then proceeded, over the course of those first few weeks and months, to systematically sandpaper away all of our armour, our masks, our carefully constructed personhoods, until we were left naked and bleeding directly on to the page.

  I resisted as long as I could. I was sure, I was absolutely certain, that if I as much as put the words when I was twelve years old a man broke into our home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever on to a virtual page or dared write them in ink on a real one, what little ground I’d secured to stand on would collapse beneath my feet. There’d be no coming back from the depths of that abyss. So I wrote short stories about happy families who loved each other. The act of creating them comforted me. Whenever I wrote, I got to go back and see them, and find out what had happened to them since. The time I spent at my laptop were my visiting hours.

  Then came the day of the forgotten deadline. It dawned on me one afternoon like a bullet of stone-cold dread to the chest: I had to submit two thousand new words first thing the following morning, for a grade, and I had completely forgotten about it until that moment. I holed up in the library late into the night, but found myself paralysed by the blinking cursor. No matter what I tried, the words just wouldn’t come. I walked home on dark, wet streets and sat in my bedroom, staring helplessly at the still-blank white space onscreen.

  The clock ticked past midnight, bringing a new date to the display on my computer: 21 March. Anna’s birthday. That one would’ve been her twenty-first.

  The words began to bubble up inside me, unbidden. I would write about her, I decided, and change the names once I was done. It wasn’t a good idea but, in that moment, all I was really concerned about was getting myself out of this jam, away from the blank page and its awful emptiness. I started typing. When I was twelve years old a man broke into our home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever…

  Eglin wasn’t fooled. The piece had a quality to it, a scalpel-grade sharpness, that none of my previous work had even hinted at the promise of. Half an hour after I emailed him the piece in the grey light of the early hours, Elgin emailed back to ask me to come to his office first thing. I steeled myself as I walked down his corridor of the Arts building, ready to deny all, but he didn’t even bother asking me if it was true. He already knew it was.

  Instead, he urged me to publish it.

  I remember not knowing what to say, not knowing where to begin with why that could never happen. And then him saying, very softly, ‘But, Eve, you might catch him with it.’

  And that, then, changed everything.

  It felt like flinging myself off a cliff. The night before I knew the piece was due to go live, I dreamed of Anna, crawling out of the sea like the Spanish sailors had when I was a child. She looked like a banshee. She came clawing at me with rotting fingers, her blonde hair wild and tangled with seaweed, screaming at me for failing to protect myself. But I was beginning to realise that protecting myself was also protecting him. I couldn’t get them back. But I could, maybe, make him pay for their taking.

  My piece went live on the Irish Times website at 4:00 a.m. on the last day of May 2015 and appeared in their print edition later that morning. By close of business, I had officially gone viral. It started on social media, where a few influential accounts shared a link, and then the people following them started to share it. It was picked up by a broadsheet in the UK, then a monthly magazine in the US. Everyone, it seemed, had always wondered what had happened to that girl who’d survived the Nothing Man’s worst and final attack. Now they knew some, they wanted more and more.

  Intrepid reporters found my contact details via the St John’s College student portal and invitations to appear on radio and TV shows started to stream in. I couldn’t possibly talk about what had happened in real time – I wasn’t physically able for that yet – but I wanted to do something. Eglin put me in touch wi
th his editor at Iveagh Press (pronounced like ivy), who encouraged me to expand the article into a book. She said if I did, she would publish it. This is the book you hold in your hands now.

  Just a few weeks earlier, agreeing to write a book about what had happened to my family would’ve been utterly unthinkable. But when ‘The Girl Who’ went viral, something else important had happened to me too.

  Within hours, articles about my article began to pop up online. Classmates of mine kept sending me links to them, excited that one of us was making such a splash with our written words, seemingly oblivious to the pain behind my story. At first I ignored them. I’d never read anything about the Nothing Man case. I had steadfastly avoided doing so. In the years since that night, I’d never learned anything more than the broad strokes of what he had done to my family, and they were bad enough. I didn’t want the blurry shapes to come into focus. I knew I’d never be able to unsee them again.

  But eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I started clicking on the links, scanning rather than reading the articles they led to, keeping the text moving ever upwards on the screen.

  In the fourth or fifth one I looked at, I was stopped cold by a phrase.

  rope and knife beneath one of her sofa cushions

  I went back to read the sentence from the beginning. Gardaí had already been to the apartment complex two weeks before, when another tenant, a single woman living alone, discovered a rope and a knife beneath one of her sofa cushions. She hoovered there on the same day every week and was certain the items had not been there the week before, and to her knowledge, no one else had been in the apartment since. She immediately reported the find to her local station. Gardaí would come to believe that the Nothing Man had planted them there on a preparatory visit, ready to use on his return.

  My pulse pounded in my ears. Because I, too, had once found a rope and a knife beneath a couch cushion.

  But I’d never told anyone about it.

  It was shortly before the attack, maybe mere days. I was watching Anna for half an hour while our mother popped to the shops, and she’d convinced me to play a game that, for some reason lost to me now, necessitated that every cushion from every chair in the living room be tossed on to the floor in a pile. When I lifted the last remaining cushion from the couch, the action revealed two items lying amid the biscuit crumbs, lost hair-ties and sticky copper coins: a rope and a knife. The rope was braided and blue, and was still looped neatly inside the glossy band that served as its packaging. The knife was about the length of a hardback book, with a thick yellow plastic handle that reminded me of Fisher Price toys. The blade had little jags along the edge and it looked very, very clean, if not brand new. Shiny.

  I didn’t wonder what they were doing there. My mother had a habit of storing things under couch cushions – the post mostly, the bills she wanted to hide from my father, but also the odd magazine or knitting pattern – so although I thought these were strange items to find there, it didn’t strike me as particularly odd. I knew enough to know the knife was a potential danger, so I put the cushion back and told Anna the game was over.

  Weeks later, when I saw that same blue rope tied around my father’s wrists and ankles as he lay broken and contorted at the bottom of our stairs, the connection my brain made was that man used my dad’s rope. It never occurred to me that the Nothing Man had been to our house in advance of the attack, that he’d put the items under the cushion. That doing so was part of his preparation, that he was going to come back and use them. After the attack I had had one Garda interview, during which I cried endlessly and choked out one-word answers. The rope had never come up. I was numb and in shock and twelve years old; it never crossed my mind to connect the two events. At some point I’d forgotten about it altogether.

  The sudden realisation that I may have been able to stop it, to prevent it – the idea that if I had just told someone about the rope and the knife I might have saved my family – was too much to bear. It was a pressure that pushed down on me, crushing my lungs, smashing my heart into sharp pieces all over again. It is still the most intense pain I have ever experienced. Even worse, somehow, than the original loss, because now I saw that it didn’t have to happen.

  But mixed in with this was another, more welcome revelation: after all this time, the Nothing Man investigation might have a new lead.

  The night he came and killed my family wasn’t the first time he’d been in our house. He’d been there before, perhaps more than once. Could someone have seen him on those occasions? I could describe the knife. What if it was an especially distinctive one, only available to buy from certain places? Would that help find him? Could it, now, even though nearly twenty years had passed?

  What else did I know? Could I have other useful information, hidden in plain sight in my memories? Could the other survivors, the other victims? And what about things like DNA, forensic science? They were better now than they’d been then, and were getting better all the time. What if we went back and looked for the Nothing Man again, now?

  What if, this time, we found him?

  What if I did?

  So ask me again. Am I the girl who …? Because this time – these days – I’ll tell you the truth: no, but I was.

  I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man.

  Now I am the woman who is going to catch him.

  – I –

  FROM THE DARK

  – 1 –

  True Life

  Before the events of 4 October 2001, crime came regularly into our home, but only on twin spools of glossy black tape encased in shells of hard plastic – and it was me who carried it inside.

  That last Christmas, I got a portable television with a built-in VCR player for my room. My mother had reluctantly agreed to this on the basis that it would never be connected to any TV channels, that I could only use it to watch videotapes. (I’m sure another deciding factor was that if I was in my room watching that TV, I couldn’t also be whinging and moaning about whatever my mother was trying to watch on the one downstairs, in the living room.) In a house where technology meant a cumbersome Compaq Presario that took half an hour to come to life, a sluggish dial-up connection and the fax machine my father had for work, the novelty of there suddenly being a TV screen in my bedroom was on a par with there being an alien spaceship in the back garden. Whenever I turned it on, its power spread out beyond the set itself, electrifying the entire room with its hum, bringing every molecule in the air alive with the excitement of endless possibility. Sitting on my bed, facing it, with the remote in one hand and something sugary within reach of the other, was my happiest place – until I ran out of things to watch.

  We had a typical home library of VHS tapes for the time: Disney movies, things recorded off the TV, a few random series of Friends that we’d got on sale. Having quickly exhausted these offerings, I negotiated a deal with my dad: I would be allowed to use my parents’ account at our local video rental shop provided I paid for the tapes and assumed responsibility for returning them on time. I soon figured out that in order to maximise my weekly budget – three of my five pocket-money pounds – I needed to avoid the New Releases and instead dig around at the back of the shop where a handwritten sign threatened ‘TRUE LIFE’. Here, the cover designs were predominately a palette of bruising, all black and dark blues, and the ominous red titles on them dripped blood for effect.

  These were made-for-TV American movies based on infamous American crimes, for some reason available to rent on VHS in Ireland. They had low production values, cheesy dialogue and at best a tenuous relationship with the truth. When I first encountered them in spring 2001, the vast majority were already at least a decade old, covering cases that had happened even further back. But you could rent two for a week for the same price as a new movie for one night, so I started working my way through them. I quickly became obsessed.

  A Killing in Beverly Hills told the story of the Menendez brothers, who shot their parents dead so they could either escape t
heir father’s abuse, as they claimed, or start spending their inheritance, as the prosecution did. Ambush in Waco re-enacted the siege in Texas sparked by a bungled government raid that resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and seventy-six members of a cult called the Branch Davidians. In Small Sacrifices, Diane Downs, played by Farrah Fawcett’s hair, stops her car on a dark country road so she can shoot her three young children, before driving slowly to the nearest hospital and claiming that a bushy-haired stranger did it instead. A flame-haired, teenage Drew Barrymore played the title role in The Amy Fisher Story, in which a sixteen-year-old girl dubbed the Long Island Lolita, a moniker completely lost on me at the time, had an affair with thirty-five-year-old Joey Buttafuoco and then attempted to murder his wife by shooting her in the head.

  If I had a ‘favourite’, though, it was Victim of Beauty: The Dawn Smith Story. Dawn’s seventeen-year-old sister, Shari, was kidnapped in broad daylight from the end of her own driveway by Larry Gene Bell in May 1985, then murdered by him. The made-for-TV version of events, starring Star Trek: Voyager’s Jeri Ryan, focused on Bell’s obsession with Dawn – a blonde, blue-eyed beauty pageant contestant – in the twenty-eight-day period between Shari’s disappearance and Bell’s capture.

  These VHS movies weren’t all crime. I vaguely remember one about a young couple with a baby whose car got snowed in on a mountainside and who then had to take cover in a cave in order to survive, and another about a pair of blonde girls who’d been accidentally switched at birth and then, as teens, found that out. But they were mostly crime, and it was the crime ones that I liked the most.