The Nothing Man Page 8

  Seven weeks after the attack, Detective Garda Geraldine Roche, the lead officer on Christine’s case, arrived at Covent Court for a pre-arranged visit. When Christine didn’t answer the door or her phone, Roche became concerned and forced her way into the property. She found Christine unconscious on her bed. She had ingested a lethal dose of painkillers and would pass away in hospital two days later.

  The victim of a violent crime had been found unconscious at the scene of it so, once again, the house at Covent Court was processed by Gardaí as part of a criminal investigation. Every inch of it was explored, photographed and catalogued – perhaps even more thoroughly than before as, this time, Christine wasn’t able to tell the story of what had happened there.

  During this, a civilian forensic technician noticed there was an active landline installed but, due to the lack of a telephone, apparently not in use. The unit was found packed away in a cupboard, its corresponding cable wound around the receiver. It was a large, beige rotary model that had most likely belonged to Christine’s grandmother and probably never been used by Christine herself. Still, the Gardaí needed to make sure.

  The civilian technician knew there was a quick way to find out. She plugged in the phone and dialled the three-digit number that, in the summer of 2000, accessed Eircom’s built-in voicemail service. The access code had never been changed from the default 1-2-3-4 and she was able to listen to the messages.

  The first thing the technician heard was a robotic voice warning her that the mailbox was full. The second was the first of a number of near identical voicemails, distinguishable only by the various times and dates they had been left. Each lasted between one and two minutes and featured the same male, raspy voice whispering, ‘Here I am, Christine. Come down and let me in,’ over and over again while, in the background, the tinkling sound of wind chimes could be heard loud and clear. Christine’s wind chimes.

  The date on the first voicemail was 20 July, six days after the attack. The most recent one had been left two weeks before, on 19 August. Christine’s attacker had been returning to Covent Court.

  There were thirteen voicemails in all.

  The day of my second visit to Covent Court was a much better one: blue skies, light breeze, warm sun. I had been trading emails with Margaret Barry, the neighbour who had found the knife and rope beneath her couch cushion two weeks before Christine’s attack, and after weeks of tentative correspondence she had finally agreed to meet me.

  As I crossed the courtyard, I passed a huddle of what looked like college students. I felt their eyes follow me as I walked by. I assumed they were here for the architecture but when I mentioned them to Margaret, she said that since my article had come out, it was hard to know. The Nothing Man was back in the news and bringing a different kind of enthusiast to Covent Court: the true-crime tourist.

  Margaret is in her sixties now with short, steel-grey hair. She goes by Maggie. A first-generation Irish-American, she grew up in Berkeley, California, with her Cork-born parents, and came to live in Ireland at the age of twenty-six. In the summer of 2000, she was working in University College Cork’s International Office. She had bought the house in Covent Court less than a year earlier, when a long-term relationship that she’d thought was heading for marriage had instead fallen apart. She’d seen Christine’s grandmother, Mary Malloy, around but had never spoken to her; they lived on opposite ends of the complex. She didn’t know Christine existed until the morning after the attack, when Maggie opened her curtains to find a fleet of Garda vehicles parked outside and two uniformed members about to knock on her front door.

  The day we met she was wearing a long, flowing summer dress in a bold print and glittery sandals. When I remarked on them, she told me she was going to a friend’s birthday barbeque later that afternoon. Her American accent was still intact. We sat in the slice of sun that bisected her rear garden and drank strong, bitter coffee from delicate little cups. She told me she’d read my article but wasn’t sure if she’d have the stomach to read this book.

  Maggie had been hoovering her living room when she’d found the knife and rope. It was a Saturday morning; she ‘blitzed’ the place at the same time every week. At first she didn’t do anything, didn’t react at all. She just stood there, unmoving, staring, with the hoover humming loudly at her feet. Waiting for what she was seeing to start making sense. After a beat she turned the hoover off with a stab of her foot and stared at the items some more. How could they be there? They weren’t hers. She was sure she had done this same thing seven days ago and they hadn’t been there then. No one but her had been in the house since.

  She’d called 999, waiting outside her front door until the car came because for some reason it felt safer out there. Eventually two uniformed Gardaí arrived, both female. They took a statement from Maggie, had a look around and took the knife and rope away with them. They advised her to keep her windows and doors locked and left a card with a number she could call if there were any other incidents. ‘They did take me seriously,’ Maggie said, ‘but there just wasn’t anything else they could do.’

  This wasn’t a world in which masked men broke into suburban homes in Cork City in the middle of the night to attack the women who lived alone there. Not yet. For close to two weeks, what tormented Maggie about the discovery was not so much its threat as its mystery. She tried on all sorts of explanations, canvassed her friends and even called the company who had manufactured the sofa to ask about what tools they used, but nothing she could come with up quite fit. It didn’t feel plausible that someone had broken into her home to leave something beneath a couch cushion, left again without taking anything and made sure not to damage any window or door coming or going. Why would anyone do such at thing? It just didn’t make any sense.

  Then Christine was attacked and everything took on a new, horrible meaning. The knife had reminded Maggie of DIY stores but now it made her think of stabbing motions. The rope had seemed like something climbers might use but in her mind’s eye, Maggie could see it wrapped tightly around delicate wrists and ankles. She went to Togher Garda Station to make a statement. She noticed that the Garda she spoke to spent a lot of time asking her to describe in minute detail what the rope and knife had looked like.

  ‘Don’t you have them?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you just go look?’

  ‘We’re having trouble locating them,’ he eventually admitted. ‘Looks like they might have been labelled wrong. We’re sure they’ll turn up eventually.’

  I asked Maggie about the moment she connected what had happened to Christine with the items under her cushion, when she realised that they belonged to the rapist and that, at some point, she had likely been his intended target.

  I wanted her to say that she felt like she had done all she could, because even though she had reported the find it hadn’t prevented Christine’s attack from happening. I wanted her to say this to absolve me of my failure to do the same. Perhaps I could relieve myself of some of my own guilt about saying nothing if I knew that saying something wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.

  Maggie didn’t answer immediately. I took a sip of my coffee to give her a chance to think. When I looked at her again, I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.

  ‘Relief,’ she said quietly. ‘What I felt was relief.’

  Jim could still smell it, that vomit. The acrid sourness of it. And the confusing, foreign heat of it against his skin. It had been yellow-green and stringy, flecked with orange bits. It hadn’t just soiled the sheets but the entire affair. He knew he’d never be able to replay the memory of that night without recalling the smell too. It was forever ruined. There seemed no point in continuing so he’d just got up and left.

  Even though he could’ve killed her.

  Should’ve, seeing as she was going to end up doing it herself anyway.

  If only that other stupid woman, her neighbour, hadn’t found the knife and rope hours before he was planning to return to her house and use them on her.

  At l
east he’d learned something that night: no socks. A neck tie across the jaw and knotted at the back of the head, forcing the mouth to remain open, was better at keeping them quiet and also removed the gagging risk. The penultimate time, at the house in Westpark, he’d used the man’s own tie. He hadn’t killed anybody yet and no one even knew that the Nothing Man existed – that was all to come, still. The couple probably thought he was a burglar. He needed to let them know that he wasn’t; that this was going to be something much, much worse. He wanted to see the terror in their eyes, feel it in their shaking limbs.

  So he stood in their bedroom door and pulled a tie from his pocket, a distinctive one whose design was made up of little cartoons of brand-name chocolate bars. It belonged to the man. They knew as soon as they saw it that this couldn’t be the first time he’d been in their house. The crying and shaking had started immediately.

  He’d always been especially proud of that.

  – 4 –

  Night Terrors

  I will never find the house on my own, I’m warned, so Patricia Kearns suggests we meet in Fermoy town so she can drive us there. She tells me to park outside the Aldi and look for a red coat and short blonde hair. I see her as soon as I pull in, standing near the entrance, holding a cardboard tray with two takeaway coffee cups. After introductions and me thanking her, again, for doing this, she steers me towards her car, a Dacia Duster the colour of glazed terracotta. ‘It takes the whole team,’ she tells me, patting the chassis fondly. Patricia has three kids, ranging in age from eleven to nineteen. She apologises for the state of the car and I wave a hand, telling her I’ll take no notice, but when I pull open the door I see an interior covered in crumbs and empty food packets, and pulling my seatbelt across my chest leaves my fingers feeling sticky.

  Patricia drives fast and in a couple of minutes we’ve cleared Fermoy and are hurtling down narrow country roads lined with hedgerows that twist relentlessly. At first, I try to keep up with the turns, mentally drawing a map of the route, ready to assure myself that actually I could have found the house myself if only she’d let me try. But soon I realise that even if I were to come back a second time, I’d have no hope. I lose track after the third left turn and we still have a crossroads and two forks to navigate. There are no street signs out here and every stretch of road looks like the one before. I give up and look out the window at the fields rushing by.

  It takes ten minutes to get to the house. It’s on a stretch of road that dead-ends where five detached houses sit in a row – Patricia says the land all belonged to one farmer who chopped it into plots and sold them off – but she doesn’t need to tell me it’s the last one. Only it has the look of a sprawling American McMansion, with multiple roof levels and a double-height window at its centre through which you can see the smooth curve of spiral stairs. There are no cars parked outside and all the window blinds are down. ‘They’re in Florida,’ Patricia says as she cuts the engine. She’s parked right outside the gates. ‘But Jean said we’re okay to have a walk around.’ She means outside, around the perimeter.

  Gravel crunches underfoot as we walk up the drive. The sun is behind the house and I have to shield my eyes to look up at it. I ask Patricia if she had ever been here before the day she was sent here.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’d only driven past it.’

  She’s looking up too. Her lips are pressed together and turned down at the ends, as if she can taste something sour.

  ‘Awful,’ she says. ‘Probably the worse thing I’ve ever seen.’

  There’s no need for her to clarify that she’s not talking about the house.

  The Criminal Assets Bureau, the CAB, was founded in October 1996, at a time when organised crime in Ireland was at epidemic levels. That June, Sunday Independent journalist Veronica Guerin had been assassinated in her car while stopped at a red light on the Naas Road just outside of Dublin City. Two men had pulled up alongside her on a motorbike; one of them had pulled a trigger six times. Both were known associates of a convicted criminal named John Gilligan. Guerin had been publicly asking how a man like Gilligan could enjoy a millionaire’s lifestyle despite being one of the country’s long-term unemployed. In the national outcry that followed her death, the Irish people were demanding answers to the same question.

  The formation of the CAB and the power given to it by the Proceeds of Crime Act enabled authorities to seize any and all assets they believed had been bankrolled by illegal activity, even if their registered owner wasn’t the one who’d committed the criminal act. Property, cars, cash – in the first fifteen years of existence, the CAB took control of more than €70 million worth of them. Contributing €250,000 to the pot was a six-bedroom detached house ten minutes’ drive outside the town of Fermoy, in north Cork.

  The deeds were in the name of Barry Pike. Pike’s father, Richard, was a perennially suntanned millionaire who told friends he was in overseas property development when what he was actually in was the counterfeit cigarette trade. After the elder Pike was forced to move into Mountjoy Jail in late 1999, the house in Fermoy was put on the market. It languished there for months. Viewings were brisk with the nosy but it seemed that no one wanted to live in a house that’d been on the nine o’clock news for all the wrong reasons. The asking price dropped three times. Eventually Conor and Linda O’Neill, thirty-somethings returning to Ireland after a ten-year stint in San Francisco, put in a rock-bottom bid which was, to their surprise, immediately accepted. They took possession of the keys on the last day of February 2001.

  Linda had no qualms about living in the house that a criminal built, but she wasn’t impressed with where he’d chosen to build it. Back in San Francisco, her and Conor had lived in a one-bed apartment in Pacific Heights with other people above, below and beside them. The soundtrack to their lives had been always-on televisions and constant car horns. Here in Fermoy, there was nothing but the birds and the odd rumble of a tractor engine. Their closest neighbour was far away enough to be rendered silent. There were no passing cars even, because the house was at the end of a lane that didn’t take you anywhere else.

  The town of Fermoy was a ten-minute drive away, and it had to be a drive as walking or cycling along the surrounding country roads was too dangerous, and there was no public transport. But it was hardly worth the effort. Linda told friends back in San Francisco that Fermoy was one street offering the bare essentials – bank, supermarket, hairdresser, hardware store, five pubs – and that you couldn’t go there without meeting someone you knew or someone who knew you. Like one of their new neighbours. Or a relative of Conor’s, who’d grown up in the area. Or one of the tradesmen who was working on the house. They were all nice people, but Linda pined for her lost anonymity. ‘So let me get this straight,’ Conor would tease her. ‘You don’t like that there’s no one here and then when you go into town, you don’t like that there is?’

  It wasn’t that Linda had grown up in a bustling metropolis. She was from Shanamore, a ‘glorified crossroads’ by the sea in East Cork, population 538 until she’d left to go to college in Dublin, where she’d met Conor in a queue for a nightclub during Freshers’ Week. But the ten years they’d spent in San Fran had been her happiest and now, marooned in the Irish countryside, it felt like that was because Linda was a city gal at heart. The fact that this was a preference she’d acquired didn’t change the fact that that’s how she felt.

  But there was nothing she could do now but get used to it. This was the first step in the plan her and Conor had agreed. Their American life had been far from perfect, what with its long hours, extortionate rent and constant pressure. They’d both yearned for a change of pace and eventually settled on the idea of returning to Ireland, to the township where Conor had grown up, where most of his family still lived and where the money they’d saved would go much further, maybe all the way to a forever home and having kids.

  It didn’t help that Conor had stayed working for the same company that had brought him to America in the first place, t
ransferring to their European headquarters in Cork City, while Linda had had to leave her job behind. She’d initially looked at this as an opportunity, a quiet pause in which she could decide what she really wanted to do. She had vague notions of writing a novel or starting her own consulting business or maybe opening a yoga retreat on one of the empty acres behind the house, but for the moment, she’d be spending most of her time dealing with tradesmen, overseeing the renovation of the house. The man who’d built it had doused it in his nouveau riche tastes and personal safety paranoia, installing bullet-proof windows, an elaborate CCTV system with a closet-sized ‘control room’, solid gold bathroom fittings, an elevator (that went up one floor) and a printed mural of a tropical beachscape that took up three walls of the master bedroom. Linda couldn’t wait for it to start looking like theirs.

  When Conor announced that he’d been recalled to San Francisco to steer an important project towards completion, Linda declined to go with him. It was only for three weeks, but she used the work on the house as an excuse. The real reason, the one Linda didn’t want to say, was that she feared it would be too wrenching a heartbreak to leave the city she loved for the second time in six months, this time with the knowledge of exactly what she was leaving it for. So she chose to stay at home, in Fermoy, alone.