The Nothing Man Read online

  The words carried no discernible accent, but the way the caller spoke had a kind of theatrical menace about it. It reminded Tommy of the teen horror movie Scream. In its opening sequence, Drew Barrymore’s character is home alone when she receives a phone call that at first seems like a playful prank. But the caller is soon revealed to be a masked murderer who gains entry to the house and kills her. This was fresh in Tommy’s mind because he and his friends had watched the movie on Halloween night. Now it was New Year’s Eve and Tommy was the only member of that same group who wasn’t at Mike Hickey’s free gaff, drinking spirits smuggled out of parents’ cabinets and listening to music at a volume that, on any other night, would have guaranteed a visit from the guards. Instead, Tommy was stuck with babysitting duties, his parents at the same New Year Eve’s party as mine.

  He had never been happy about this arrangement but was even less so now, with the clock ticking down to midnight and the wrenching feeling of missing out, of being left out, approaching its most acute. Convinced that this phone call was one or more of his friends taunting him about this situation, Tommy muttered something like, ‘Oh fuck off, dickheads,’ and hung up. The following day, his friends would deny that they had made the call.

  A fortnight later, on the morning of 14 January 2000, Tommy was woken by the piano-key ringtone of his mobile phone. It was his first but second-hand, a hand-me-down from his father with a new pay-asyou-go SIM card inside. Tommy had had a Saturday job in the SuperValu in Carrigaline since the summer, restocking shelves and packing bags, and, each week, he set aside ten pounds of his earnings to spend on phone credit. That was more than enough because he only used the device to exchange text messages with the friends of his who also had mobile phones, names he could count on the fingers of one hand. His mother didn’t have one and his father only used his for work, which was why it was confusing that, according to the little green, square screen glowing in the dark of his bedroom, it was ‘DAD’ that was calling him now. When Tommy saw the time, he was even more confused: it was 5:02 a.m.

  ‘Tommy?’ His father’s voice sounded far away even though he was, presumably, just on the other side of the wall. ‘Is your door locked?’

  It felt like the middle of the night and he had just been jerked awake from a deep level of sleep; Tommy’s first thought was that his father was losing his mind. He asked him to repeat the question.

  ‘Is your bedroom door locked? Go check.’

  ‘Dad, what the f—’ Tommy caught the swear word he used so easily with his friends and bit down on his lip to stop it from slipping out. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  His father sounded weird. The weight of teenage tiredness was clawing at Tommy’s eyelids, pulling him towards his pillow, making his limbs heavy and slow. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep as soon as possible. He got out of bed with a groan and trudged to his bedroom door – which was, indeed, locked.

  When Tommy bent down to look through the keyhole, he could only see light: the key was missing.

  ‘Ours is locked too,’ his father said. ‘And your mother isn’t in here.’

  ‘What did she lock the doors for? Where is she?’

  His father didn’t answer either question. Tommy held the phone to his chest and called out, ‘Mam?’ No answer. Again, louder. ‘Mam?’ Still nothing. He banged on his door a couple of times. Then he went to the wall he shared with his brother David and thumped on that.

  ‘I’m going outside,’ his father said. ‘Through the window. I’ll let myself in with the spare key.’

  They ended the call.

  The next thing Tommy heard was a groan of protest through the shared wall: David had finally woken up. Tommy coaxed his younger brother out of bed and got him to check his door. Same deal: locked, key missing.

  Tommy went to the window. It was pitch black outside. The houses on Bally’s Lane had generous plots and there were no streetlights. He was pretty sure he could make out the shapes of two cars, though, meaning his mother must be in the house. But doing what? He thought of Christmas – Christmas Eve, specifically. There’d been a couple of years there where Nancy and Emer’s excitement over the imminent arrival of Santa Claus had become a kind of mania, each one amplifying the other’s, leaving both children wide-awake, wired, for nearly the whole night, and taking it in turns to tiptoe down the hall to the living room to see if their presents had been delivered yet. Exhausted and exasperated, his mother had eventually resorted to locking them into their rooms. Is that what this was? Was she planning some kind of surprise for them that she didn’t want them to discover until the morning? But if so, why take the keys? Why lock her own bedroom door too? Why not respond to his calls?

  As Tommy watched, a shaft of yellow light fell on to the gravel drive, followed by the dull thunk of a window opening. His father was climbing outside. It took the man a minute but then gravel was crunching underfoot and a shape was hurrying past Tommy’s own window, a shadow moving in the night. He listened for the sound of a key in the front door, but it never came.

  Instead, he heard his father shouting.

  He was telling Tommy to ring the Gardaí.

  The ring-tone on Jim’s mobile phone suddenly annihilated the silence of the car, startling him. Still in the fog of memory the book’s pages had generated, he answered it without thinking.

  ‘Oh,’ he heard Noreen say. ‘I didn’t expect you to pick up. I was just going to leave a message. Aren’t you at work?’

  ‘What is it, Nor?’

  ‘Katie’s coming for dinner.’ Even though their daughter had allegedly moved out, into student digs near the university on College Road, she seemed to be around their house as much as ever. ‘So I need you to grab a few things from Centra on the way home.’

  Jim looked at the book on his lap. ‘And why can’t you walk up there and get them?’

  ‘Money,’ Noreen said quietly.

  ‘But I gave you plenty on Friday. Where did it all go?’

  ‘On the bills, Jim. And the food we’ve eaten so far this week. I can’t just—’

  ‘Text me a list.’

  Jim ended the call and threw the phone back on to the passenger seat. He refused to listen to her when she was hysterical. It gave him a headache.

  And he wanted to get back to the book.

  Eve Black had found the knife and the rope, then. That was news to him. They’d still been there when he went to collect them on the night of the attack, so there was no way he could’ve known. That was an interesting revelation, even if it changed nothing. And Spanish Point. He’d never been there, but he knew where it was. That was a question answered. He’d always wondered where she’d disappeared to after the attack. Childhood memories: boring. He didn’t care who any of these people had been.

  The lie was interesting, though.

  Or, to give Eve the benefit of the doubt for now, the mis-remembering.

  Would she describe the events of that night in detail, of the night? What would she say? He was very tempted to skip ahead and see.

  But he also wanted to savour it.

  Reading it was stirring something. A feeling. The feeling. It was just like the voice of a great friend you’d lost touch with: you couldn’t remember it at all but once you were reminded of it, you couldn’t believe you’d ever forgotten it.

  He would have to, though. He was nearly sixty-three years old. He couldn’t move as fast as he used to.

  He didn’t have the energy any more for all … that.

  It was half past one. He normally got home from work around three fifteen, so allowing for him to get out to the suburbs in after-school traffic and stop at the shop, he figured he was safe for another forty-five minutes or so.

  Jim’s phone beeped: a text from Noreen.

  Chicken breasts, oven chips, mushrooms, bottle of white wine.

  No please or thank you. And she could forget about the white wine. Jim wasn’t about to serve his own eighteen-year-old daughter alcohol on
a Tuesday night and anyway, Katie wouldn’t want it. She got up at the crack of dawn every morning to hit the gym.

  And did Noreen think he was made of money?

  Jim set a timer on his phone and went back to his book.

  Instead, he heard his father shouting.

  He was telling Tommy to ring the Gardaí.

  From the outside, the O’Sullivan house was aggressively unremarkable. It was a bungalow, typical of the kind that littered the Irish countryside but made no effort to connect with it: a squat, rectangular box built of dirty grey brick, set back from the road. The windows looked both too short and too wide, as if they were being uncomfortably compressed by the pressure of the pitched roof, heavy with dirty slate tiles. Aurora – the name was etched into a brass plaque by the front door – had been built from a book of plans in 1978. Since then, its only update had been a conservatory built on to the back by a cowboy builder who’d disappeared before the job was done, leaving a room too cold to sit in for ten months of the year and a set of French doors that didn’t lock properly.

  Tommy’s parents, Alice and Shane O’Sullivan, had met at a birthday party in Blarney when they were both nineteen. She was originally from Clonakilty, he from Bandon; on that first evening they’d drawn vocal maps of mutual friends and common places and marvelled at how they had never crossed paths before. Since then, their shared life had moved easily along the path it was supposed to. They’d dated for three years, then married and bought the house. Alice was pregnant with Tommy within twelve months. Shane got into the bank and began working his way up. Three more kids arrived, one more than Alice had imagined having.

  It’d been tough there for a while, manic even, but now the kids were growing up and Alice felt she had some space to breathe again. Shane had been appointed branch manager in Douglas three months ago, so there was not only time to think but a little money to spend, too. Alice had started saving her Children’s Allowance when, not that long ago, she had relied on it. And she’d started making plans. A family holiday abroad, ideally in France. A new extension that would give them the extra bedroom they needed to give each child their own. Knocking down that God-awful conservatory.

  It was Alice who met him first.

  In the early hours of 14 January 2000, she awoke to find herself blinded by a bright, white light. It was all she could see. When she closed her eyes, it seemed to barely dim. It crossed her mind that she might be having a stroke or some kind of brain haemorrhage. That headache she’d had the other day – should she have gone to the doctor about it? Was it too late now? Frantic, Alice patted the bed beside her, searching for the warm shape of Shane’s body, trying to alert him that something was terribly, terribly wrong, but something – someone – grabbed her before she could. The light changed, its epicentre swinging away from her, replaced with a heavy weight on her body, pressing her down, pushing something sharp into the soft flesh of her neck.

  It all came together in one horrific flash of understanding. The light was a head torch strapped to the forehead of a masked man who shouldn’t be in her home but who was, who was now climbing on top of her, his right arm pinning her left to the bed just inches from the fabric of Shane’s T-shirt and his left pressing something sharp into her neck. He smelled like wet leaves and earth and there was something on his breath, familiar but mildly unpleasant. Was that … coffee?

  A gloved hand clamped down so hard on her mouth that Alice tasted metal. The force of it had made her gums bleed.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ the intruder whispered. ‘I’ll slit your throat. Then I’ll slit everyone else’s, one by one. Nod if you understand.’

  Alice did.

  Her whole body was shaking so badly, she couldn’t understand why Shane hadn’t already woken up. But then Shane did stir. She felt the movement beneath her own body, heard the creak of the springs in the mattress as he rearranged his limbs. But then there was the sigh of her husband’s breath as he settled back to sleep.

  The weight disappeared off her body and the light in the room changed, returning to the state she would’ve expected: dark, with a sliver of weak light from the bulb further down the hall pushing through the few inches of open door. It happened so fast, Alice thought for a moment that she had only now woken up and that everything in the last ten seconds had been the tail-end of a dream, a horribly vivid nightmare, like those ones where you think you’re late only to wake up and discover that you still have plenty of time. Relief was flooding her veins when, under the covers, a hand came at her from the wrong side and yanked hard on her foot.

  He was under the bed, or crouched on the floor beside it. Holding her ankle now with a gloved hand. Tracing the tip of the knife’s blade down the back of her leg, lingering at the heel, making a figure-8 motion with the tip. Then back up the leg, inside her thigh, pricking at the lace trim of her underwear. Alice was trembling with fear, a phrase she’d heard and read many times but had never actually experienced, and she was worried that the involuntary movements of her own body would push her skin into the knife. Now the masked man was tugging on her other leg, then her arm too, pulling her out of the bed, and whispering in her ear. ‘We’re going to play a game.’

  With the knife pressed against her neck, the intruder pushed Alice out of the bedroom and down the hall, towards the front door. She made no effort to escape him. She didn’t think she could. She thought, He’s taking me from here. He’s going to kill me. As they passed the doors to her children’s bedrooms – Tommy’s, David’s, the one Nancy and Emer shared – Alice felt as if this masked man had already driven the knife into her chest. They passed the front door and went on into the living room. Why was he bringing her here, to the opposite end of the house from where everyone was sleeping? She thought he was about to rape her.

  If she had a hope at this point, it was that that was all that was about to happen. She could at least physically survive that, she reasoned, and learn to live with the memories, somehow, in time. She said a silent prayer that everyone else in the house remained asleep – that everyone else was asleep, that this monster had started whatever this was by coming to her in her bed. The alternative was just too horrific to contemplate.

  The house had two bathrooms: the family one by the bedrooms and a smaller one off the kitchen. It was tiny, barely five foot by six, but they’d managed to squeeze in a toilet, a sink and a shower a tad too tight for the adults but sufficient for the kids, enough to ease the stress of school mornings. The masked man opened the door to it with a soft kick and shoved Alice inside. He told her to get on the floor, pointing the knife to the wedge of space between the foot of the toilet bowl and the shower door. Alice dropped to her knees, leaving him standing directly behind her.

  There was a blur of movement and a burst of red hot pain: he’d smacked her head, face-first, into the porcelain. Alice, stunned, let out a yelp and toppled over. She felt something slick and soft on her lip – blood – and thought her nose might be broken.

  Blankness.

  When she opened her eyes, she was half-lying on the floor, looking at the tiles. Her brain felt like it was trying to break free of her skull. Her vision had turned pink: blood was running from the gash in her forehead down into her eyes. Cautiously she raised a hand to assess the damage, but only got halfway. While she’d been stunned by the blow, the intruder had used a length of rope to secure her to the pipe behind the toilet. It was looped around her wrists several times and had been tied off in a series of neat, tight knots.

  He was standing in the doorway, making shadows of the hall light. He bent down so he could whisper in her ear, his breath a warm tickle on her skin.

  ‘Tommy. David. Nancy. Emer.’

  Alice got the message. She would behave.

  Thinking the real attack was about to start, she braced herself for it. But instead the intruder stepped outside, back into the hall, and closed the door gently behind him. There was a tinkling sound as the key turned in the lock.

  It was dark in the bat
hroom now and she was alone. Was he leaving? How long would she have to stay quiet? What would he do while she did that? How did she know he wouldn’t hurt the kids? Should she cry out now, to alert them? Or would that guarantee that they’d get hurt? What should she do?

  Over the next few minutes, the silence in the house grew steadily louder, like the electronic hum of a speaker system set at full volume but playing no music. It mixed with her own beating pulse, the thumping pain in her head. The pain was taking on a shape in her vision, a glow that she was struggling to see around. Or maybe that was because her eyes were swelling. Or maybe it was her nose that was. Alice heard sounds but she wasn’t sure if they were real or, if they were, what had made them. The gentle creak of a door hinge. The brush of a foot on the carpet. A distant clink of glass against something different, maybe wood.

  Alice closed her eyes and prayed for the lives of her children.

  Shane would tell the Gardaí it was possible he’d been woken by a noise but couldn’t say for sure. What struck him when he did wake was not necessarily the absence of his wife in the bed – she could’ve got up to go to the bathroom as she often did during the night – but the closed bedroom door. Ever since they’d brought a wailing Tommy home from the hospital, it had been left ajar. Shane had lain awake for a minute or two, listening and waiting, before his confusion became concern and forced him out of bed. He discovered the bedroom door locked, the key removed from it. That didn’t make any sense. Part of him wanted to call out for Alice, to find out what the hell was going on, even if he woke the whole house up. Part of him thought doing this would be a comical overreaction.

  He remembered Tommy’s mobile phone, and called it with his own which had been charging on his bedside table. When his son told him that his bedroom door was locked too, Shane knew something was terribly wrong. He put on shoes, awkwardly climbed out of his bedroom window and hurried around to the front door of the house. He was planning to let himself in with the spare key they kept under one of the terracotta planters, but he didn’t need it. The front door was open, pulled right back.