The Nothing Man Read online

  Had Alice left the house? Shane scanned the garden, the gravel drive, the road, but there was little to see in the inky blackness. He should get a torch, he thought. There was one in the junk drawer next to the fridge. He went inside and started towards the kitchen, flicking light switches as he went. The air smelled like someone had been making coffee and, indeed, there was a cooling mug of black coffee on the kitchen counter.

  Everything about this was odd. Alice took her coffee with milk, only ever drank one cup of it first thing in the morning and would never have used that mug. It was part of a set of four they’d received as a Christmas present, expensive ones, handcrafted by a famous Irish homeware designer, which his wife had classified as ‘too good to use’. They normally sat in one of the glass-fronted cabinets, on display, brought out only for special visitors. Now one was sitting on the kitchen counter, splotchy with coffee stains, still warm in the middle of the night.

  But there was something even stranger on the kitchen table: five silver keys, long and slim and simple. The keys for their internal doors. The sight of them set a cold fear coiling like a snake in Shane’s stomach, because he knew what was happening now, he was sure. He called out for Tommy to ring the Gardaí, not caring any more who else he woke.

  It was all starting to add up: the front door open, the doors locked from the outside, Alice gone … and Shane a bank manager. He’d been briefed about this. Tiger kidnappings, they called them. A threat to his family, a warning not to contact the Gardaí. No doubt there’d be a phone call any minute, or maybe they’d left him a note with further instructions. Alice was probably in the back of a van somewhere, terrified but physically okay. He’d go into work as normal later in the morning and walk out again with tens of thousands of pounds in cash. Or they’d instruct him to go into work now, before anyone else did, disarm the alarms and clear out the safe for them. Later he’d give the money to a member of the gang and then, soon after, Alice would be returned to their home.

  That was what was supposed to happen, at least in the minds of the criminal gang. His employer, the country’s largest commercial bank, had been crystal clear on what to do if such an event occurred: disobey them. This was not, after all, an armed robbery. These guys were thieves, yes, but murderers? No. The Gardaí had special officers trained to deal with these situations, who would help him fake compliance until they could swoop in and snatch Alice back.

  Shane scooped the keys up with one hand and went looking for their matches, trying key after key until one turned in the lock. Nancy and Emer were asleep in their beds. David was sitting up in his, his face a question. The room he shared with his wife was as he had left it. Tommy was standing on the other side of his door, waiting, holding out his phone: the 999 dispatcher was asking what was wrong. Shane quickly summarised the situation. The woman on the other end of the line assured him that a car was already on its way from Carrigaline station. He handed the phone back to Tommy and then realised that there was something in his left hand, pricking the skin of his palm: a key. Five keys, four bedrooms. Somewhere, a door was still locked.

  When he opened the bathroom door, his foot hit his wife’s leg before he could turn on the light. Alice was woozy and incoherent; her face was a mess of swelling and blood. She had suffered a broken nose and a shallow head-wound, both of which she’d recover from quickly and completely, but that night her face was an unrecognisable pulp.

  The first Garda car arrived five minutes later. There would be an investigation, but into what? There were no witnesses aside from Alice, who hadn’t seen the man’s face. He’d left no trace of himself inside the house. There’d been no sightings of a vehicle in the area in or around the time of the attack and, due to the location, there was no CCTV footage to check. No one could even say how the intruder had entered the home. He may as well have been a ghost.

  Privately, Gardaí wondered if there’d even been an intruder at all. It would be months before a woman named Claire Bardin would report what she’d seen while driving along Bally’s Lane around the time of an attack: a man wearing dark clothing, who she’d surprised with her headlights. Bardin lived abroad and hadn’t realised the significance of her sighting until she’d heard a report about the case on a return visit to Cork. She worked with a police artist to create a sketch which was released to the public, but it failed to generate any new leads.

  Meanwhile, the O’Sullivans installed new locks, security lights, electronic gates. They waited for news, for updates, for an arrest. None ever came. There were a handful of reports in the paper and on the local radio, all of which framed the incident as a tiger kidnapping gone wrong. Alice told family and friends that she was fine, that she just wanted to forget about it, but six months later she was still spending most nights wide awake on the sofa, looking at the flickering blue light of a TV screen but not seeing it at all. Doors and locks had lost all meaning. She now felt as at risk in her own home as she did on the side of a dark, deserted street. Eventually a FOR SALE sign went up on Aurora and Shane put in for a transfer to a branch in another part of the country, any part.

  The children heard different versions of what had happened that night. Nancy and Emer were told almost nothing and for several more years would think that their mother had got up to go to the bathroom and tripped over something in the dark. David was told she’d disturbed a burglar, who wouldn’t be able to get in now thanks to all the new security measures. Tommy was told the truth but not the details. He didn’t know that the man who’d entered their home that night had said something to his mother about playing a game, just like the prank caller had said to him on New Year’s Eve. He had no reason to connect the two events at all.

  The telephone in the O’Sullivans’ kitchen was a payphone: an angular boxy chunk of charcoal-grey plastic with big blue buttons and a slot for coins that looked utterly out of place on the wall of a private residential home. In Ireland in the 90s, this was a smart way for parents of teenagers to control their phone bills. A classmate of mine, Danielle, had one in her home, but she’d discovered where her mother kept the key for it. Whenever she needed to make a call, she’d simply wait for the opportunity to surreptitiously open the coin box, lift out a handful of pound coins and fifty-pence pieces and run them through the phone another time. Her mother never noticed because she herself often did the same thing.

  I sometimes picture that phone, so incongruous in the O’Sullivans’ kitchen, on the night of 31 December 1999. I’m helped by the photographs I’ve seen of a country-style kitchen where crystal glasses and china plates are displayed neatly in glass-fronted cabinets above countertops cluttered with the detritus of family life. The phone is next to the fridge, which has a parish newsletter clipped to its door with a magnet, the paper folded to show Mass times. Everything is still and dark and inanimate, the only signs of life the sounds of them, muffled music and the yelps of hyperactive children coming from another room.

  In this moment, we are all alive and safe, we still feel safe, and live in a world where when we enter our homes at night and close the door behind us, we believe that we have slid into place a barrier that divides everything warm and secure and familiar, and everything cold and dangerous and unknown.

  And then in the next, a phone begins to ring.

  Its shrill cuts through the air. Perhaps there is something on its little LCD screen or a light that indicates a live incoming call. Perhaps this intrusion is only aural. Either way, a monster waits on the other end, his whisper at the ready.

  For years I have kept a mental list of things to ask the man who murdered my family if I ever get the chance, and third from the top (underneath why? and why us?) is why that night? There had never been a midnight so full of promise, this dawning of the year two thousand. A date that, even when it was finally here, still seemed so of the future that it was foreign on our tongues. What was it about that moment that made him make his move? What was he thinking that night when he decided to emerge from the shadows and call the O’Sullivan hom
e? Had something happened to him that had finally flicked a switch? Or had he planned it for months in advance? And why call at all? What was the point of it?

  But mostly I wonder what would’ve happened if Tommy O’Sullivan had known the combination of buttons to press that would call back the last incoming number. I wonder where, if he had, a phone would have rung. In a telephone booth, already deserted, on the side of a lonely country road? Somewhere unexpected, like a university, hospital or Garda station? Or in a house just like the O’Sullivans’, filled with music and children’s voices and fizzy celebrations, readying itself to join the rest of an entire nation in an historic countdown?

  I know which scenario scares me the most. It’s also the most likely one.

  The first thing Jim saw after he’d pulled the car into the drive was the big lump of sloppy dog shit sitting right in the middle of the front garden. The sight of it flash-boiled his blood. He stormed out the gate, along the path and up the driveway of the house next door. Where there was no dog shite in their garden. Funny that.

  When he rang the bell, Karen came to the door.

  Karen and Derek were in their early thirties. She was sallow-skinned with tumbling dark curls and a small, hard body that she wrapped in tight, stretchy fabrics. He was skinny and pale and didn’t make any sense standing beside her. They’d no kids and had mostly been inoffensive neighbours – until they ‘rescued’ some stupid, ageing dog, who had some kind of irreversible stomach problem that had him constantly evacuating his bowels in other people’s gardens.

  ‘Jim,’ she said, smiling tightly. ‘What can I do for you?’

  They both knew why he was there. He had been there for the same reason on two previous occasions in the last month.

  ‘It’s happened again,’ Jim said anyway.

  Karen pursed her lips. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But he’s a dog. I’m not sure what it is you want us to do.’

  ‘It’s very simple: keep him out of my garden.’

  Another tight smile. ‘We’ll do our best.’

  ‘If it happens again, we’ll have no choice but to take things further.’

  Karen glanced over her shoulder, back into the hall. At first Jim thought she was checking to see if Derek was in there, if he could come and back her up. But then he caught the tiny lift at the corner of her mouth, and the way her lips were pressed together when she turned back to face him, and he realised that what she was actually doing was covering up a laugh.

  Jim felt his face grow hot.

  He was the man who had let himself into the house on Bally’s Lane and pulled a sleeping woman from her bed. Who’d tied her up and whispered the names of her children into her ear. Who’d smashed her head into the side of a toilet bowl.

  And since then, so much worse than that.

  But what Karen saw standing in front of her was her pensioner neighbour. A man with only tufts of white hair left on either side of his head. Brown spots on the back of his hands. Strong and fit, yes, but with a qualifier: for his age. She saw a man who had already had his (unremarkable) life, who had given all he was going to give (not much), who couldn’t change things now (because it was too late). He’d made a point of telling them when they’d first moved in that he used to be a member of An Garda Síochána, but even that didn’t seem to have the same effect as it once had. People just had no respect these days.

  Some day soon, when age finally rendered him completely invisible, Karen wouldn’t see anyone standing there at all.

  But if she knew the truth, she wouldn’t be smirking at him.

  She’d be screaming and running away.

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ Karen said. She wasn’t even trying to sound convincing. ‘I better go, I’ve something in the oven.’ She started pulling the door towards her.

  ‘If you don’t get rid of that dog,’ Jim said, ‘I will.’

  It sounded like a threat and he meant for it to. Normally he wouldn’t have pushed things that far, but perhaps reading about that night on Bally’s Lane had warmed up something he’d let grow cold.

  He’d needed reminding of who he really was.

  All that he was.

  But Karen wasn’t fazed. She just said, ‘Have a good evening, Jim,’ and closed the door in his face.

  Jim had left The Nothing Man on the passenger seat of his car. It looked like some light-hearted summer beach thing, but in his car that seemed even more suspicious. It was obvious now: this was a mistake. He’d have been better off with a cover stolen from a sports biography or something about astronauts. He whipped off the ‘wrong’ cover, ripped it to shreds and dumped it in the bin round the side of the house, along with the book it’d originally belonged to. He did the same with The Nothing Man’s dust jacket and the birthday card he’d bought. Now, of his bookshop purchases, he was only left with The Nothing Man book itself, naked, a plain black linen cover with its title embossed in gold on the spine. He locked it into the glove box and took Noreen’s groceries into the house.

  She was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables at the counter. The table was neatly laid for three with place mats, good cutlery and napkins. Noreen was in short sleeves, a floaty thing whose cheap, sheer material only served to highlight the drooping outlines of the excess fat on her back. Jim hit the OFF button on the thermostat by the kitchen door.

  ‘Where were you?’ Noreen said without looking up.

  Jim dumped the bag of groceries on the table as heavily as he could by way of an answer.

  ‘I meant just now. I heard you pull in five minutes ago.’

  ‘Next door,’ Jim said. ‘That damn dog did it again.’

  Noreen set down the knife and turned to him, wiping her hands on her apron.

  Her eyes lingered on his face and he wondered if she could see it on him, somehow. His other self. His true one. Had his reading about what happened back then made it more obvious? Summoned it closer to the surface? Was he more at risk of being exposed than he had been this morning, yesterday, for the past eighteen years?

  Almost certainly not. Noreen was unfailingly oblivious.

  ‘I hope you didn’t cause a scene,’ she said. Her eyes dropped to the bag, whose contents were mostly identifiable through the shape of the thin plastic. ‘Where’s the wine?’

  ‘In the shop. You don’t need it.’

  ‘I do need it, that’s why I asked you to get it.’

  ‘Katie has no interest in drinking alcohol on a weeknight and you certainly don’t need to be doing it.’

  ‘It wasn’t for Katie. Or me. It was for our dinner. To put in our dinner. I needed it for—’ Noreen stopped, took a breath. Then, calmly, ‘It’s an ingredient in the dish I’m making.’

  ‘Then make something else.’

  Jim pulled open the fridge door. As ever, it seemed full of food. He pointed at it, but Noreen was rooting in the bag.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I said oven chips.’

  ‘They’re all the same, Nor.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘That’s just a marketing ploy. Jesus, you’d fall for anything.’

  Noreen glared at him.

  ‘What time’s Katie coming?’ Jim asked.

  ‘She’s already here.’ Noreen pulled open a drawer, took out a baking tray and slammed it down on to the countertop. This was the kind of childish temper-tantrum Jim refused to acknowledge. ‘She’s upstairs having a shower. Because I suppose it’s cheaper for her to do that here, in the house where she doesn’t have to pay the electricity bill.’

  ‘You don’t pay one anywhere, Nor.’

  If there was a response to that, Jim didn’t wait to hear it. He went back into the hall and paused at the end of the stairs to see if he could hear the shower running. He could. So long as Katie was in the bathroom and Noreen was in the kitchen, now was as good a time as any to transfer the book to a safer place.

  Jim retrieved the book from the car and walked quickly around the side of the house with it held low by h
is side. Tucked into the east corner of the rear garden was the shed. His shed. He kept the door locked with an industrial-sized padlock that only he had the combination for.

  The space was small, eight by ten, and wholly unremarkable, but it was the only space Jim had entirely to himself. There was a tall, steel tool cabinet in one corner with another, smaller padlock securing its doors. A folding picnic table with an old transistor radio sitting on top. A battered armchair, its upholstery bleached and torn, saved from the rest of the suite they’d dumped from the house a few years back. The shed only had one small window that Jim kept permanently covered with a blackout blind. A paint-splattered desk lamp sat on an upturned plastic milk crate next to a small, open shelving unit that held the standard garden-shed paraphernalia: old tins of paint, fertiliser, rat poison, a tub of bird feed, a neatly wound-up garden hose.

  There was no need to go overboard here: it was just a book and the shed was secure. He could leave it sitting in the open if he wanted to. No one came into the shed but him. In the end, he lifted the seat cushion of the armchair and slid the book underneath.

  For old time’s sake.

  Jim was turning to leave when his eyes landed on something on the open shelves.

  The rat poison.

  Jim lay awake in the dark, hands crossed on his chest, waiting. All around him the house was silent and still. Since the clock on the bedside table had ticked past midnight, he’d been struggling to stay awake. Exhaustion was pulling on his limbs, weighting his eyelids, slowing his breath. His curiosity was the only thing keeping him from slipping into slumber. The hours of darkness were his best opportunity to read more of The Nothing Man. He had to stay awake.