The Nothing Man Read online

  Dinner had been about as tasteless as he’d come to expect. The only highlight was the little tub of shortbread biscuits Katie had brought: her roommate had made them. She’d talked animatedly about college, which she seemed to be enjoying. Katie had always been active, but now things had kicked up a notch. She had joined a rowing team and a daily running group. When Jim hugged her goodbye, he felt the sharpness of her shoulder blades through her clothes. That was new but also showed that she was working hard.

  Of course, Noreen had had to mention it as soon as the door was closed. How thin Katie had got, how she should start eating properly and resting more, wondering why she hadn’t eaten the biscuits herself. Jim told Noreen she could stand to learn a thing or two from their disciplined daughter and that had been the end of that.

  Noreen was sleeping beside him now. Her breaths were deep and regular, her body settled. She slept on her back and made wet nasal sounds in her throat. One hand was over the covers and even in this almost-dark, Jim could see the ripples of mottled, ageing skin loosening itself from the back of her hands. The crêpe-like surface of her fingers. The swollen flesh threatening to swallow the gold band of her wedding ring. Noreen was so much younger than him and yet, due to her complete refusal to take care of herself, these days she looked like the older one.

  At 1:00 a.m., she hadn’t stirred in half an hour. Slowly and stealthily, Jim extricated himself from their bed.

  They had lived in this house all their married life, so Jim knew the exact location of every creaky stair and whining door hinge. As he moved silently through the dark house, he couldn’t help but marvel at the weirdness of the situation. How many nights had he done this very thing on his way out into the dark? How many times had he slid the front door lock open, silently, expertly, wondering if tonight would be one of those nights, if he would find circumstances to be just right? And now here he was, years later, making the very same journey so he could sit and read a book someone else had written about what he’d done. It was weird. It was thrilling. By the time he got outside, he didn’t need the shock of the cold to make him feel awake.

  Jim was in his pyjamas and slippers and a coat he’d lifted from the rack in the hall. He would be an odd sight if anyone happened to see him. He paused by the front door and scanned the street. Theirs was the second-last house in a row of identical pairs of semi-Ds, which faced another row of houses that looked just like it. He scanned their windows but found only drawn curtains and darkness. A couple of porch lights had been left on but that was it. This was a housing estate of young kids, nine-to-fivers and mature couples like him and Noreen. At this time of the night, everyone was already asleep in their beds.

  Satisfied, he walked around the side of the house and let himself into the shed. He checked the blackout blind was covering the entire window before switching on the lamp. He pulled the book out from under the armchair’s cushion and then sat down.

  It seemed colder in the shed than it had outside and he thought maybe he should invest in a little heater or bring a blanket from the house. A cup of tea wouldn’t go amiss either, but kettles were noisy. Maybe he’d get a flask he could fill earlier in the day.

  Jim opened The Nothing Man, found where he’d left off and read on.

  – 3 –

  Dreamcatcher

  In the summer of 2000, Christine Kiernan was twenty-three years old and living alone for the first time in her life. She had inherited a property from her grandmother, a two-bed unit in a complex called Covent Court, off the Blackrock Road in the suburbs of Cork City. It would have been called a mid-terrace house were it not for the fact that Covent Court was famous. The development had been designed by a Northern Irish architect named Paul Berry and was considered an especially fine example of 1960s modernist design. Groups of college students still travelled from abroad to behold it, sketching its elevations while sitting cross-legged in the central courtyard, while curtains twitched and residents rolled their eyes, long bored by the attention if not secretly still pleased about their residence’s hallowed status. A little plaque by the vehicle entrance even noted that Covent Court had won the RIAI Silver Medal for Housing in 1972. Whenever any of its number came up for sale, the listing would invariably describe it as a ‘townhouse’ and the assigned estate agent would quickly tire of correcting prospective buyers on the name. Actually, it’s cov-ent. Yes. No, there’s no ‘n’ in it.

  Christine hated the place. When I visited there on a dreary April day, it wasn’t difficult for me to see why. Many of the features that had made Covent Court a cutting-edge construction six decades before – flat roofs, aluminium sliding doors, cedar-clad ceilings and exterior sliding – now looked decrepit and crumbling, a poor choice of materials left to be weather-beaten by the rain. If the complex reminded me of anything, it was of the swathes of social housing built elsewhere in the city around the same time, where costs were cut at every opportunity and things had started to fall apart before they were even complete.

  Inside, Covent Court had more in common with the set of an old James Bond movie or a Life magazine photospread of astronaut wives. The interiors were a series of strangely shaped rooms hostile to modern furniture that I imagined must be dim on even the brightest days. The exposed brick, the cladding on the ceilings, the huge slabs of polished concrete that made features like fireplaces, kitchen counters and stairs – they all snatched at the daylight and swallowed it down whole.

  The estate agent who showed me around the unit for sale near the entrance suggested painting everything white and hanging mirrors. It was the middle of the day but I noticed he’d turned on every lamp and ceiling light.

  Christine’s unit at Covent Court was hers to sell, but it was also the last connection between her and her grandmother, and between her grandmother and the rest of the wider family. Mary Malloy had died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of sixty-four, the pedestrian fatality in a car accident, and the entire Kiernan clan was still reeling. It seemed cruel to dispose of what had been the woman’s home so quickly, to obliterate this house of memories, to sell it on to strangers. Christine didn’t want to be responsible for doing that and, anyway, she suspected that her mother, Mary’s eldest daughter, wouldn’t let her.

  So she redecorated. She put photos of faraway places in brightly coloured picture frames and hung them around the house in little galleries. She changed the couch, opting for a modern design in emerald velvet that she snapped up in an ex-display sale. She put a hanging basket of petunias just outside the front door and a dreamcatcher outside the rear one, the one that led through her little back garden to the alley that offered a shortcut to the main road. The dreamcatcher had wind chimes and whenever they caught in a breeze, it made a soothing, tinkling sound, soft and gentle enough not to get on anyone’s nerves. In the hope that it would let in more light, she wondered about taking down the net curtains.

  Covent Court is all windows. They had been one of its most innovative features: floor-to-ceiling panes, more window than wall. The buildings are arranged in a tight, angular U-shape around the courtyard and although Christine knew from looking out of her own windows that the people directly across from her couldn’t really see into her home, she still felt exposed. Not least because despite the PRIVATE PROPERTY signs littered throughout the complex, there was no gate or barrier – although, after a recent burglary in the neighbourhood, there was chatter among the residents that perhaps there should be. Technically, anyone could come walking in.

  Early one morning in the first week of July, most likely the fourth but no later than the sixth, Christine removed the net curtains from her ground-floor windows. The effect on the light was dramatic, and she was pleased. A little uncomfortable, perhaps, but pleased. It would take some getting used to, but the pay-off was a much brighter room. Christine was intent on getting used to it and keeping the curtains down.

  Then she saw the handprints.

  Jim set the book aside and hoisted himself out of the chair with a groan before r
emembering that it was the middle of the night and he was striving to be silent. He opened the tool cabinet and scanned its contents for something to write with. There was a stubby pencil in a jar of loose screws and Allen keys. Barely a nib on it, but it would do for tonight. Tomorrow, he’d come to his reading room better prepared.

  There was an old compact hoover sitting on the bottom shelf of the cabinet. Just the unit itself – its hose and other attachments were missing. It was turquoise green and said GOBLIN on the front. Jim had taken it from a skip parked near the entrance to the estate years before. He bent down and went to lift the cover off it, but then changed his mind and stood up again.

  Not yet. Not now.

  Reading the book was one thing, but opening that was quite another.

  He locked up the tool cabinet and sat back into his chair. He flipped to the inside cover of The Nothing Man and wrote:

  Eglin – who/where now?

  Irish Times article – May 2015

  Knife/rope – neighbour new report?

  ‘recent burglary’ – more??? Check!

  with the stubby pencil. It made his letters thick and smudged.

  Then Jim returned to where he’d left off and, pencil in hand now, read on.

  They were on the living room’s window the following morning, the largest one to the front. She was certain they hadn’t been there the day before. Two large impressions, a little more than halfway up and side by side, as if someone had been standing with two hands pressed flat against the glass, looking in. Christine went outdoors to examine them more closely. They were smears rather than prints, as if the leaver had touched something greasy first. The fingers were unnaturally splayed, like children’s finger-paintings.

  It was as if the matching hands had been trying to leave evidence there, Christine thought. She cleaned them off and, later that day, put the net curtains back up.

  One night, when I was nine or ten, I woke up to the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, a steady rhythm of distinct, alternative creaks. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. I knew instantly that something was very wrong, because I could also hear the soft snoring that meant my father was asleep in the bedroom next door and, as my eyes adjusted, see the little mound of blankets in the bed across from mine that was Anna, still asleep too. The timbre of the footsteps sounded nothing like my mother’s light tread, so who was coming up the stairs in our house in the middle of the night? And why were they taking so long?

  I held my breath and lay stiff with fear for what felt like an eternity, but was probably closer to several seconds in reality. Then, happily, I realised my mistake. What I was actually hearing was my own bedroom door, trapped in the draught of some forgotten open window, repeatedly opening half an inch, closing half an inch, the hinges protesting every time.

  On the night of 14 July 2000, Christine Kiernan had a similar experience, in that she woke up to the sound of footsteps coming up her stairs and felt her limbs freeze up with fear. But this was no aural illusion. The sound drew closer and closer. It changed as the steps left the bare wood of the stairs and crossed the carpeted floor of the landing. And then a shadow detached itself from the darkness and moved towards her until it became a masked man standing at the end of her bed.

  None of her neighbours would recall hearing it, but Christine managed to let out a short, piercing scream before a gloved hand was clamped over her mouth and the sharp tip of what she knew must be a knife was pressed against the skin of her neck. In a strange, almost theatrical whisper, her attacker told her that if she stayed quiet, he would ‘only’ rape her. If she made a noise or tried to escape, she would die. Then he rolled her on to her stomach so he could bind her wrists behind her back, and after that there was only pain.

  Christine was five-foot-six and weighed less than eight stone. Physically, she was no match for this broad, tall, heavy man on top of her – and he had a weapon. So while he violated her body, she did the only thing she could and rolled down steel shutters around her mind. She tried to detach herself from what was happening now and focus instead on what she was already determined to make happen next: she’d make sure he was caught, tried and locked up.

  She mentally catalogued what she knew about him. She could picture him standing in the doorway, so she’d be able to tell them how tall he was. There’d been no real accent to his weird whispering, but that in itself told a story: he was Irish, probably from around here. She had seen the skin around his eyes: he was white. She got the impression he was in his thirties or forties. There was a strange, earthy smell off him. Wet leaves and mud. She told herself that, if she got the opportunity, she would rake her nails across his skin. She knew from TV that she would end up with pieces of him beneath her fingernails and that the Gardaí could scrape it out and test it for things. But with her hands tied behind her back, Christine never got the chance. When he was done, her rapist turned her over and roughly stuffed some woolly material – a balled-up sock – deep into her mouth. She couldn’t breathe and began to gag.

  She tried to pull herself into a kind of sitting position, hoping that would help. It didn’t. She began to feel faint. Her attacker didn’t react. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her choking and spluttering. All she could feel was pain, as if a sustained electrical shock was cursing through her skeleton. And now there was the burning in her chest too, the panic of not being able to breathe. At the very last moment, just when Christine thought she’d have to give in, to give up, her rapist held the knife in front of her face, then pointed the tip off to the side. It was a question and Christine nodded the answer desperately. She wouldn’t scream. He pulled the sock from her mouth and she immediately vomited, sending the spray all over his sleeves, the T-shirt she slept in and the sheets.

  He recoiled as if the substance was radioactive. He scrambled off the bed and stood at the end of it, regarding her. Then he abruptly turned around and left.

  For Christine, one of the most horrific aspects of this most horrific experience was that she didn’t know how long she would have to suffer it or what might happen next. Would it get worse? What else would he do? Would she be able to take the pain? What kind of injuries would she have? Wouldn’t he just kill her anyway? As long as he was in her bedroom, there was a terror much worse than the violation of her body: the not knowing just how bad this might get. His sudden leaving, the end point, already here – it allowed her to think about what had happened as what had happened, past tense, to know the parameters of what had to be dealt with, moving forward. And it was so unexpected, Christine didn’t know quite what to do. She listened as he hurried down the stairs and slammed a door closed behind him. Then she sat still in the silence that followed. She cried and hurt and bled.

  And, as the sky lightened, she went in search of help.

  Christine was an only child. Her father owned a chain of fast-food restaurants and her mother ran a public relations agency, well known around the city for its embarrassingly lavish product launches and D-list celebrity photo-calls. The Kiernan family home was an architect-designed glass-fronted mansion overlooking the estuary on the Rochestown Road. Built on a rise for the views, their friends said, or so everyone could see how much money they had, their enemies muttered. It was known locally as the house with the swimming pool. Christine had attended a school in the city which educated similarly moneyed daughters for generations, but even there she had stood out as being separate and other, a tier up and a world apart, because her family put their money on display. When she’d enrolled in University College Cork, she’d found herself at sea, so disconnected from the worlds of her classmates, what with their part-time jobs, their fiery political views and their dingy student digs, that it was as if she had arrived from another planet speaking another language. She had few friends and didn’t share her feelings with the ones she did have. Three months before the attack, Christine sat her final exams and left campus without looking back.

  She took a job as an execu
tive assistant in a firm of solicitors that bore her father’s best friend’s name and quickly grew close to another new hire, the son of one of the partners. There’d been a few summer weekends spent with him, his family and his friends, including one where the two of them had decided, on a whim, to fly to Paris for the day. Christine had been close with one of her first cousins, Emma, growing up and had traded letters with her ever since Emma and her family had emigrated to Dubai in 1996. These days they exchanged emails and in them, earlier that summer, Christine had told Emma she was happy or at least getting there.

  Christine had had every privilege in life. She’d been heading for a future that would be easy, comfortable and financially successful. But then a man came walking up her stairs in the middle of the night. When it came to what was needed to recover from it, it quickly became apparent that, in that area, Christine was poor to the point of poverty. She wasn’t close with her parents, had no siblings and few, if any, close friends. Her relationship ended, instantly crushed under the weight of what had happened to her body. She didn’t want to be touched, which was understandable, but neither did he want to touch her, which seemed cruel. Meanwhile, her neighbours in Covent Court seemed more concerned with the inconvenience of the Garda presence and the bad publicity than they were with Christine’s welfare. In a decision that was inexplicable to many, Christine returned to Covent Court and continued living there, alone, after the attack. She did have an alarm system and new locks installed, but still.

  Nothing like this had ever happened in the area before and in the immediate aftermath, the story dominated the headlines. None of these reports included Christine’s name but locally everyone knew who she was. There was seemingly a long line of former classmates lining up to add colour to the various threads of local gossip. Like how she’d driven a Land Rover to school in fifth and sixth year, her own Land Rover, and how her father had arranged special permission for her to park it in a staff space. How she’d worn labels to school and carried her textbooks in a designer handbag. How her mother had purchased an apartment in the Elysian for her to live in while she was at college so she could avoid the thirty-minute commute to and from the family home. No one dared come out and say it, but it was there in the subtext: everyone has to suffer something. Christine had never suffered, so it made a kind of sense that her first serving came in such a devastating portion. And hey, it wasn’t like she’d died.