The Nothing Man Read online

  When the incidents first began, Linda took little notice of them. So much so that, later, it would be impossible to discern exactly when they had started, or the order in which they’d occurred. She could only say that it had been after Conor left for San Francisco and that she could clearly remember:

  – Swearing that she had left the hall light on when she went upstairs to bed the night before, only to come down and discover it off in the morning. It wasn’t that the bulb had gone, a quick flick of the switch proved that. Linda had shrugged it off, presuming she had misremembered.

  – The television in the living room coming on by itself. It had happened early one evening when Linda was in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher. She’d been frightened by the sudden voices, then confused when she’d realised they were coming from the TV in the next room. It didn’t occur to her to worry that someone was in there and had turned it on – at that time, that was outside her realm of what was possible. She found the remote control wedged between two sofa cushions and told herself that, somehow, a pressure change on the red power button was what had made this happen. Failing that, an electronic malfunction. She’d turn the set off, put the remote on the TV stand and gone back to the dishes. It had never happened again.

  – Finding a sopping-wet towel in the bathroom with no apparent explanation for why it was wet. A hand towel, in the upstairs bathroom. Linda thought she remembered using it the night before, just before she’d gone to bed. She’d dried her hands with it. Even for it to be damp all these hours later would be a bit of a stretch, but when Linda shuffled into the bathroom just after waking up around 7:00 a.m., the towel was so wet it was dripping on to the tiled floor below. There was no leak she could see and, even if she’d found one, what kind of leak dripped directly on to a hand towel hung on a rail directly below a medicine cabinet that itself wasn’t wet at all? It didn’t make any sense. But again, Linda told herself that her own memory was the problem, and that one of the builders had used the towel the day before to surreptitiously mop something up, and that’s how it had got wet. She didn’t ask any of them about it.

  – A number of items going missing or being moved. Little things, like a lipstick Linda thought she’d dropped into a bowl on her dressing table that later reappeared in the living room. A knife that she always put back in the block on the kitchen counter but which, for some reason, was now in a junk drawer. One evening she’d settled down to watch the movie Gladiator on DVD only to discover that the disc inside the case was actually an instalment of Jurassic Park, and in that case was another mismatched disc and so on and on for several more of them. Conor was proud of his DVD collection and kept them alphabetised, while Linda liked to have everything in its place. This was no accident. Were the movers messing with their heads? The foreman, Johnnie Murphy, was an old school friend of Conor’s; that was inside the realm of possibility. On a transatlantic phone call, this was the explanation the couple settled on. They’d laughed about it.

  The presence of the builders made all of this relatively easy to explain away. The house wasn’t secure. Vehicles pulled up outside and men in heavy boots and hard hats stomped in and out all day, every day. The quantity surveyor, Roisin, had a habit of arriving without warning and leaving without saying goodbye. The front door was rarely closed for very long and the electronic gates at the end of the drive never were. Linda may have been home alone, but she was barely alone in the house. She couldn’t demand that things remain where she’d put them, or that other things stay untouched. She was living in a building site. She had to allow for that.

  Then the diary disappeared.

  Linda kept track of her life in a blue Moleskine diary, about the same size as a DVD case. Stateside, its pages had managed her workdays, each one packed tight with her unusually tiny scrawl, the flap at the back stuffed with business cards, receipts and ticket stubs. By the closing months of each year it would be bloated, refusing to close, and Linda would be eyeing up a new, fresh, unblemished one, which she would christen ceremonially on 1 January with a list of her life goals. When it disappeared that April, the 2001 edition was still practically pristine. This was unusual but, since coming to Fermoy, it had been demoted – there were no workdays now, after all – and its new purpose was to be the holder of pertinent information about the house renovation. Its pages were consulted for things like the plumber’s telephone number, the measurements of the kitchen tile and the date the new sectional sofa was due to arrive, but most days it never made it out of the shallow drawer in the hall table where it lived. Then, one day, it disappeared from there and was never seen again.

  At first, Linda assumed that one of the men working on the house had taken it to find a phone number and then never put it back. But each of the four men on site at the time denied this. Linda called Johnnie, their foreman, who promised he’d get to the bottom of it but arrived at the house the following morning empty-handed, both figuratively and literally. No one on his crew had taken the diary, he said, and he trusted his men. But Linda was sure she’d put it in the drawer. Where had it gone?

  Unlike the other incidents, Linda knows for sure when this one happened. She discovered the diary was missing on 9 April 2001. Johnnie reported that none of his guys had taken it the following morning, 10 April. She knows this because it was late that night, just as the clock ticked into 11 April, that Linda awoke to find a masked man standing at the side of her bed.

  She didn’t know what woke her up but he was the first thing she saw when she did. A tall, well-built man looming over her. Wearing a black mask with just one slit for his eyes. Holding what she would describe as a ‘small’ gun that he held over her stomach, pointed straight down. He warned her that he would pull the trigger if she screamed, and that death by bullet wound to the stomach was slow and excruciatingly painful.

  She asked him what he wanted. He didn’t respond. She pleaded with him to take whatever he liked from the house and to leave her alone. He handed her a blindfold and told her to put it on. When she hesitated, he pressed the muzzle of the gun against her flesh. The blindfold felt like it might be a silk neck tie. Once she’d tied it behind her head, the masked man warned her that if she made a single sound, he would pull the trigger and she would die. Then he raped her.

  There was a part of Linda that just refused to believe what was happening. She had lived for ten years in a major American city famously plagued by petty crime. San Francisco could lay claim to the highest rate of vehicle break-ins and burglaries in the whole of the United States. Now here she was in a little Irish country town where the word crime only had to stretch to cover incidents of public drunkenness and drink-driving, and she was being raped by a masked man in her own bed. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be real. Was she still asleep? Was she just dreaming this? All her life, Linda had been able to wake herself up from her nightmares. She desperately tried to do it now.

  Afterwards, her attacker tied her wrists and ankles with lengths of rope – bright blue and braided – and ordered her off the bed and into the bathroom. He told her to climb into the bath and, once she had done this, he looped another length of rope through the ties on her wrists and then around the safety grip on the side of the bathtub. She was now trapped in there, blind and hurting and naked and terrified. Then the masked man left the bathroom and went downstairs, but remained in the house.

  Judging by the distant noise that accompanied his movements, he spent time in the kitchen and the living room. He opened and closed doors, ran a tap, turned on the TV. Then the squeak of a hinge signalled that the back door had been opened and a dull thump suggested it had swung closed again. Had he left? Linda’s body temperature had been dropping ever since he’d left her in the bath, bare flesh against cold ceramic, and now her teeth were chattering. The cold was almost all she could think about. It made it increasingly difficult to follow her own thoughts, let alone the sounds from downstairs. She couldn’t hear anything now. Was that because there was nothing to hear? Had he left? Was he gon
e?

  Linda thought if she rubbed her head against the tiles on the bathroom wall beside her, she’d push the blindfold up and off. Her movement was limited to a foot or so of rope, but she thought there might be a disposable razor on the side of the bath behind her. If she could reach it, she might be able to fray the rope enough to break it in two.

  But she wasn’t sure he was gone, so she waited. She clenched her jaw. She tried to ignore the stabbing pain of the cold. She listened as hard as she could. All around her, the house seemed silent and still. She seemed to be the only living, breathing, moving creature inside it. Still, she waited. She thought of the gun and what he could do with it if he caught her trying to escape. Eventually Linda had the sense that a weak grey light was forcing its way around the edges of the blindfold. It seemed like a long time had passed since she’d last heard him make a noise, many maybe hours. It must be if it was getting light outside. He was gone, surely. She waited five more minutes, counting the seconds out in her head. Finally, Linda moved to rub her head against the tile.

  There was a noise, a whoosh, and then warm breath against her ear.

  ‘You fucking bitch, I told you not to move.’

  Linda had no idea how long he’d been there, in the room, right beside her. She hadn’t even heard him come back up the stairs.

  That was the last thing she’d remember. Because then he pushed her head against the tiles with such force that a spider-web of fractures exploded across her skull, one of which cracked so violently that it ejected a tiny shard of bone which lodged itself in the soft tissue of her brain.

  Linda would lay in that bath, slowly dying, for the next thirty-five hours.

  After four of those hours, Johnnie Murphy and two of his men would arrive at the house just like they did every morning. They had keys and let themselves in. Nothing struck them as being wrong. Linda was there to greet them most mornings but not every one; they just assumed she was out somewhere. When she hadn’t appeared by the end of the day, Johnnie left a note on the kitchen table asking her to call him about some light fittings that had failed to arrive.

  Twenty-seven hours in, when Johnnie let himself into the house for the second morning in a row, the note was still there but Linda wasn’t. Now he did begin to think that something was up. He walked through the house, upstairs and down, calling her name. The door to the master bedroom was open, the curtains still drawn in the room beyond. He poked his head in. The bed was unmade but there was no sign of Linda. The door to the en suite was open too but from where Johnnie was standing he couldn’t see Linda’s body in the bath. He assumed that because the door was open, she wasn’t in there. He called Conor’s mobile phone but it was after 11 p.m. in California and Conor, an early riser, was already asleep in bed. Six more hours would pass before he’d hear Johnnie’s voice-message.

  Thirty-three hours in, Conor tried calling his wife’s phone. It went straight to voicemail. He then called Johnnie, who told him he hadn’t seen Linda in a day and a half. Next, Conor tried the numbers he had for friends and relatives who lived locally, who might have seen Linda or even be with her now. No one had or was. Feeling the first ripples of panic, Conor called his parents. They were at a wedding in Gorey, Co. Wexford, at least two and a half hours’ drive away from the house in Fermoy, but his father assured him they’d get straight in the car and head to the house now. Before they did, Conor’s father called a buddy of his whose son was now a Garda sergeant based out of North Cork’s district headquarters, which happened to be in Fermoy. Sergeant Brendan Byrne would later admit that he’d rolled his eyes as he’d listened to his father going on about Conor O’Neill’s wife going AWOL while he was off being some big-shot in San Francisco, and had probably said something like, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ But despite being nearly forty years old and a sergeant, Byrne still felt uneasy about not doing what his father told him to, so he agreed to call out to the house. After he hung up he decided he was too busy to bother with it and directed a junior member of his team, a newly qualified Garda who’d been on the job less than six months, to go there instead.

  Thirty-five hours in, having repeatedly got lost on the drive there, Garda Patricia Kearns finally arrived at the O’Neill house. After talking to Johnnie for a few minutes, she commenced a thorough search of the house. She was the one who found Linda in the bathtub.

  This delay not only exponentially increased Linda’s suffering but also handicapped the investigation into her attack right from the very start. For a day and a half before blue and white Garda tape got tied to the house’s front gate, the scene lay unpreserved, getting trampled on, disturbed and repeatedly walked through. Even with elimination samples from everyone working at the house, the collection of DNA and other physical evidence was seriously compromised. And there was only one witness who, having suffered a traumatic brain injury, couldn’t speak.

  For several weeks, the investigation floundered. Then, in early June, Linda had recovered enough to be able to provide investigators with a short statement. The Gardaí seized upon one detail from it and fixated on it with a laser-like focus: the handgun.

  This was Ireland, a nation policed by unarmed officers, in early 2001. South of the border and outside the M50 motorway, which ring-fenced the areas in which Dublin’s criminal gangs jostled each other for supremacy, handguns were not commonplace. They were anomalies. Ordinary decent criminals didn’t have them. They couldn’t get them. Linda’s attack was, in fact, the first sexual assault in the county of Cork where the attacker reportedly had one. It was all the Gardaí needed to tie the crime with the original owner of the house.

  The coincidence of a crime happening in Richard Pike’s former home had never sat well with the detectives assigned to the case, and now it didn’t have to sit with them at all. A connection felt logical. Plausible. Comfortable. They threw themselves into following it as their primary line of inquiry and, quite quickly, it became their only one. Now the evidence was written in a language they could understand. This wasn’t some random monster who was out prowling the Irish countryside looking for women to violate. This was gangland, organised crime, your garden-variety criminal activity. They knew what to do with that.

  Several known associates of Richard Pike, including the evidently law-abiding son who’d lived at the house previously, were hauled in for questioning, along with the man himself. None of them gave investigators anything except soon-to-be-dead ends but a rumour that Pike had hidden large amounts of cash in the wall cavities of the house stayed alight for a time, with Gardaí working on the assumption that someone who knew it was there had been watching the house, waiting for an opportunity to go and get it, but once inside had changed their mind and assaulted Linda instead. No evidence of this was ever found. Two local men with sexual assault and domestic violence convictions were questioned too, but those lines of inquiry eventually fizzled out just like the rest of them. By the time Linda was discharged from a rehabilitation facility six months after the attack, Gardaí had made no progress except for a list of men they could confidently say hadn’t entered the house in Fermoy that night.

  Conor and Linda were left broken and destroyed. She was dealing with the horrors in her head and the injuries to her body while he was drowning in the guilt of pushing the move to Fermoy and then his leaving her there alone. And they both had to deal with the phone calls.

  Linda had waived her right to anonymity after the attack. It seemed pointless to try to preserve it when the entire population of Fermoy and probably most of the surrounding area could tell you it was Linda O’Neill, Conor’s wife, just back from America, you know the two … who’d been attacked. Moreover, by the time she returned home from hospital months later, she thought a couple of media interviews was the only way to reignite interest in a case the Garda seemed to have given up on. Unfortunately it just brought out the crazies.

  The landline began to ring at all hours of the day and night. A psychic who knew where Linda’s attacker lived. Religious nu
ts who said this wouldn’t have happened if Linda and Conor were regular Mass goers. Other men, threatening to do the same. And hang-ups. Mostly hang-ups. Silence or heavy breathing on the line for a second, then an abrupt dial tone. These were the most innocuous and the most likely to be perpetrated by idiot teenagers. Conor wanted to disconnect the line but Linda had herself convinced that someone might call with actionable information. In the meantime, Gardaí advised them to log all these nuisance calls, but neither of them saw the point of including the silent ones or hang-ups.

  One afternoon, Linda happened to pick up the extension just as Conor lifted the phone downstairs. At first, this one sounded like one of the many they’d already received: there was nothing but heavy breathing on the line. Conor muttered something like, ‘Fuck off,’ and slammed the phone back on the cradle. Linda, still struggling with her hands, wasn’t as quick to do the same, giving the breather time to say, ‘Linda? Is that you?’ And then, after a brief pause, ‘Would you like it if we played another game?’ There was no doubt in her mind. It was him.

  Gardaí were able to trace the call. It was made from a public payphone at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, a Gaelic sports stadium in Cork City, three minutes after the final whistle blew in a Munster hurling quarter-final that had seen Limerick beat Cork. During it, more than forty thousand punters were streaming out of the stadium.

  Patricia and I walk slowly around the perimeter of the house. There’s not much to see. Different people live here now. Conor and Linda O’Neill were divorced five years after the attack and both have since remarried. Neither of them lives anywhere near Fermoy.

  Patricia isn’t a guard any more. She hasn’t been for years. She tells me that what she saw in the O’Neills’ bathroom that day changed her in ways she didn’t appreciate at the time. After her first child was born, she didn’t want to go back to work at all. She felt afraid to. She didn’t want to run the risk of witnessing another scene like that, didn’t want to have to bring it home with her. It felt like a threat of contamination. But she liked the area and the friends she’d made there. For the last seventeen years she’s raised her family and worked part time at various jobs, most recently at a local garden centre.