The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  The very same store where Jim had purchased his copy of The Nothing Man.

  He immediately decided that he would go see her.

  – 5 –

  Westpark

  There are some terrible places where rooms wait ready for children.

  The one they took me to that night was small and uncomfortably bright, harshly lit from above by fluorescent strips. There were no windows unless you counted the little pane in the door through which I could see the reflective vest of the Garda who was standing outside, a neon-yellow sentry. The furniture looked like the window display from a charity shop: two saggy couches, a coffee table covered in water rings and a mahogany floor lamp whose shade had a fringe of tassels. Posters hung on the walls, the kind you see at the cinema, all for kids’ movies a few years old. A red bin sat in one corner, filled with plastic action figures, dolls with knotted hair and battered board-game boxes that you just knew didn’t have all the necessary pieces. For years I thought this room was in a Garda station but I’ve recently learned it was in Cork University Hospital, a place Corkonians still tend to call by a shortening of its original name, the Regional.

  Everything about that room was deeply wrong. The fact that we were there at all, for a start. Nannie was with me, her hair loose around her shoulders, out of its neat bun for the first time in my life. She was mostly staring into space. Another woman was there too, a social worker, who I can remember almost nothing about. She was just a blur of grey in the corner. It was so late it was early, probably around six in the morning. I was wearing borrowed pyjamas with my feet in adult-sized socks. The socks were the heavy wool kind and itchy. No one was talking and there was no noise to distract us from that fact. I wanted to ask what was happening to Anna and my parents – where they were now, how they were, what had happened in our house – but I also didn’t want to know the answers. That room was an airlock between my life as I knew it and my life as I feared it would be from now on. So long as I was in there, I could stay suspended between the two. So long as we didn’t leave, it hadn’t happened. Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.

  Eventually the door opened and two people came in, a man and a woman. They were in plain clothes and looked like schoolteachers. As they spoke to Nannie about being very sorry and having to ask questions and my well-being being their priority, I began to hear a strange noise, a kind of rushing in my ears. It was as if I was getting slowly submerged in water while they remained standing on the surface. Everyone’s voice got muffled, then distant, then became utterly indistinct as I sank. I was drowning and I had no way of raising the alarm.

  The man came and crouched down in front of me. He had reddish hair and freckles across his nose. He was so close that when he spoke I could feel the warmth of his breath tickling the skin on my face. But I couldn’t make out any of his words.

  Detective Garda Sergeant Edward Healy can tell you the exact day, time and place he decided to become a guard. It was 14 August 1980, just after nine o’clock in the evening. He was eight years old and sitting in his parents’ living room in Ballysheedy, Co. Limerick. Two uniformed Gardaí were side by side on the couch in identical poses: elbows on knees, hats in hands, buttocks perched right on the edge of their seats. Their black boots were very shiny. His mother was standing by the fireplace, having refused to sit. Tears were streaming down her face. A few minutes earlier, when she’d heard the knock, she’d rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘Finally,’ because she thought it was Eddie Senior who was late home for dinner and hadn’t called to tell her why. The uniformed men gently explained that there’d been an accident on the quays in Limerick City. One car had careened into another, forcing them both into the river. There’d been no survivors. The driver of the first car was drunk. The driver of the second was Healy’s father.

  Healy knew he wanted to become a guard, and he knew the wanting had started that terrible night, but he could never quite articulate what one had to do with the other. It would be many years before he’d figure it out. In a world where all the adults were upset and crying and breaking apart, those two men in uniform had remained stoic, solid and in control, everything eight-year-old Healy desperately wished he could be. Really, it had nothing to do with their being guards. They were just the only adults who were there that day who were outside the family’s circle of grief. But by the time Healy realised this, it would be too late to turn back.

  The day he passed out at Templemore, his pride was like a steel rod in the back of his uniform, pushing his shoulders back, chest out, chin up. He’d always looked to the navy blues for a sign that help was coming, that everything would be all right, and now he was wearing that same uniform. He was proud that he could bring that reassurance to other people. But his graduation day was also the peak of his relationship with An Garda Síochána. Almost as soon as he was on the job, Healy began a slide into bleak disillusionment. He found himself in an organisation bloated by bureaucracy and infected with levels of laziness and corruption that, in his eyes, it had no feasible way to recover from. There was an especially acute heartbreak in having secured the job you’d dreamed of having for more than half your life only to discover that, firstly, it was nothing like you’d imagined it would be and then that, secondly, it had never really been your dream job at all.

  By March 1999, this disappointment had become a corrosive force. There’d been a brief reprieve following Healy’s appointment to detective and a move from Ballincollig station in the west of the city to Anglesea Street, the district HQ, before the hope that things would be different for him in plain clothes had died too. Now things felt as dark as ever. His marriage, less than three years old, was one bad argument away from breaking down. Healy worried about the frequency and extent of his drinking, and then drank more so he could stop worrying about it for a while. At night he would lie awake, tormented by the feeling that he was standing at a crossroads and if he didn’t move soon – if he didn’t make a decision, a drastic change in his life – something would burst out of the shadows and run him over, and after that there’d be no coming back.

  Not having anyone to talk to about this made it all the worse. Mental health wasn’t something the force even acknowledged back then, let alone prioritised. Members who’d had to deal with horrific scenes and frightening situations worked through what many of them would later come to suspect was PTSD over pints in the pub, and even then … As one member put it, the prevailing mood at the time was not one of support, but one-upmanship. ‘You think that’s bad? Wait until I tell you what I saw today!’

  Then one dull Tuesday morning, Healy went to investigate reports of a burglary at a place called Westpark, a housing estate off the Maryborough Road on the southside of Cork City. Or at least it would be a housing estate. For now it was still a building site. Rows of semi-detached houses, smoothly finished and painted cream with the flourish of a red-brick band across their ground floors. The concrete in the driveways was pale and unblemished, but the roads that linked the houses were still loose-gravel tracks. The STOP signs were covered with black refuse bags and the milky plastic film hadn’t yet been removed from the houses’ windows.

  A man in a high-vis vest appeared from the prefab marked SITE OFFICE and introduced himself as David Walsh, project manager at Browne Developments Ltd, the company that was building Westpark. He gave Healy a folded map of the estate. It showed upwards of a hundred houses arranged in rows, their rear gardens nose to nose, feeding into a central roadway that went all the way to the back of the estate. On the map, each house was an empty box about the size of a thumbnail. At least a dozen of them had been marked with a big ‘X’ in red marker pen.

  It had started six months ago, Walsh explained. Westpark had been built in stages, starting with the houses closest to the road and then extending on back into the muddy fields beyond. Almost as soon as the first phase was completed, contractors reported odd activity on site. Materials would move during the night, from one room to ano
ther or from downstairs to up. Locking mechanisms were discovered missing from internal doors, removed cleanly, leaving nothing but the empty space where the lock had been. Other items – tools, an electric drill, light fixtures – disappeared too. Sometimes things appeared, most notably a rolled-up sleeping bag.

  Vandalism was a common problem on building sites and usually only a sign that bored teenagers were living nearby, but what was odd about this activity was that it only happened in the finished homes. They were sealed to the elements, their front doors locked, sitting empty and awaiting their buyers to move in. Browne Developments had stepped up their on-site security, employing two full-time security guards to patrol the estate overnight, but this hadn’t curtailed the activity and their insurance company had urged them to make a formal report to the Gardaí.

  ‘It was one of the security guards,’ Walsh said, ‘who found the lair.’

  The two men took Healy’s car to the back of the estate, where a dense dark wood met a row of empty foundations, patiently awaiting bricks and mortar. Walsh led the way to a break in the treeline.

  Once they were standing there, Healy could see that the ground dropped away sharply a few feet further in, leading to a small clearing. The clearing itself was six or eight feet below the level of the estate and this, combined with the fact that it was surrounded by tall, evergreen trees, hid it from view. Sitting in the middle of it was what looked at first glance like the makings of a bonfire. But once Healy had slipped and slid his way down the slope, he saw he was actually looking at a pile of building materials. Sheets of MDF. PVC pipes. Various tools. And, as far as Browne Developments could figure, every single lock that had been removed from the houses’ internal doors.

  Healy looked from Walsh to the pile and fought the urge to laugh. What was this? Why was he here? Moving things wasn’t punishable by law. If whoever had done this was planning on selling the items, surely they would’ve done it before now. This was no storage place; it would’ve been a nightmare to get the loot back up to the road. Since nearly all the items were still in the protective plastic wrapping they’d arrived on site in, even criminal damage was a stretch.

  He asked some questions and wrote some things down because that’s what people who called the Gardaí to report things liked to see happen. He recommended that the so-called lair be blocked off and that CCTV cameras be installed until the homes were occupied. Browne Developments complied and, when Healy made a follow-up call a few weeks later, they had no new activity to report. After that there was nothing else to do but occasionally puzzle over it and, over pints, tell a few colleagues the strange story of the thefts in Westpark. One of them said it sounded like the start of some kind of shady insurance claim, and Healy was inclined to agree.

  Time passed. Healy and his wife began a period of official separation; under Irish law they’d need to prove four years of it before either one of them could ask for a divorce and she was anxious to get started. Living alone now, Healy’s drinking got a little worse before it got a little better. The turn of the millennium came and went. He got promoted to sergeant. He considered resigning from the force. He found himself wondering what it would be like to move away, to go back to college, to become a psychologist. But every morning he got up and went into work and every night he went to bed having done nothing about it.

  Alice O’Sullivan was attacked.

  And Christine Kiernan.

  Linda O’Neill.

  And then it was early on a Sunday morning in June 2001 and a colleague of his was calling to ask if he’d heard the news. A young couple had been murdered in their home on the south side of the city the previous night. Initial reports indicated that the woman had also been sexually assaulted. What Gardaí had found at the scene wasn’t making any sense.

  ‘You might be able to help them,’ his colleague said. ‘It’s Westpark.’

  Marie Meara and Martin Connolly had met in the summer of 1998, when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven. They both worked in confectionery. Martin was an account manager for a well-known chocolate brand and Marie had founded her own artisanal business, which she was hoping to eventually expand into a café. That’s how they’d met, first crossing paths at a Bord Bia trade show. When their wedding invites went out two years later, a specially commissioned cartoon depicted the couple as a pair of hand-holding M&Ms, a joke their friends had long been making. The words most often used to describe the couple were nice and generous and hardworking.

  At the beginning of June 2001, they had been living at number fifteen Westpark for less than three weeks. The move was so recent, it was still in progress. They hadn’t yet received confirmation that the utilities in their rented apartment in Ballincollig had been transferred out of their names, and their landlord, a solicitor named Kevin Prendergast, still hadn’t had the chance to return their security deposit. He’d been carrying the cheque around in an envelope for a week, meaning to post it.

  As it happened, early on the Sunday of the June Bank Holiday weekend, Prendergast was due to meet friends for a golf game in Frankfield. His route there took him not quite past Westpark, but near enough to it. He could make a little detour and hand-deliver the cheque. He wasn’t intending to make contact with Marie and Martin. His plan was to push the envelope through the letterbox and go.

  Shortly before 8:00 a.m., he parked on the street outside their house. The morning was warm and muggy, the heat trapped by cloudy skies. As he walked up the drive, he was thinking about the likelihood of rain and hoping that, if it did come, it would wait until after the ninth hole. He registered that Martin’s silver Ford Mondeo was parked outside, pointing towards the garage door, but he didn’t look too closely at it. The driveway sloped downwards, the house a foot or two below the level of the road.

  Prendergast was fond of Marie and Martin – they’d been excellent tenants – and as he approached the front door he was admiring the house and thinking, Haven’t they done well for themselves? He was happy they had. In the next moment, he got his first inkling that something was wrong: the front door was open five or six inches and the ceiling light in the hallway beyond was on.

  Beep-beep.

  The phone lying on the passenger seat suddenly lit up, its screen showing a message that read BATTERY CHARGED. Jim put down the book and picked up the phone, unplugging the connecting cable from the port on the dash with his other hand.

  Once his shift had ended, he’d gone to Electric City in the retail park across the road from Centrepoint. He told a clerk there that his wife had dropped her phone in the sink and that he just needed something to hold her over for a few days. Something she could browse the internet on, but not anything that would require a contract. Something cheap.

  He needed to watch Eve’s interview but he wouldn’t do it on the computer at home or his own phone, the one registered to him, and going to an internet café felt like overkill. Instead, he’d bought a burner phone and parked on the Marina after work. It was quiet, with only the occasional passing jogger or dog-walker.

  Ever since he’d discovered the existence of The Nothing Man, he’d felt himself oscillating between paranoid caution and confident nonchalance. This was him splitting the difference.

  Jim booted up the phone and navigated to its internet browser. First, he had to find out what channel the interview with Eve had aired on, and what the name of the show was. That was easy: he had both within seconds thanks to a simple Google search. One of the links that came up in the results deposited him right where he needed to be: on the channel’s online catch-up service, a PLAY button partially obscuring Eve’s pinched face.

  The video was six minutes long. He turned up the phone’s volume as high as it would go and tapped PLAY on the screen.

  The two presenters were sitting side by side on a bright pink couch and looking earnestly at the camera. The man was in a suit ruined by the floral shirt he was wearing underneath it, the woman in a dress so tight and unyielding that it looked as if it might have been desig
ned primarily for compression.

  The woman looked into the camera and smiled, revealing unnaturally white teeth. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘to our next guest. This coming January, it will be twenty years since a faceless killer began to terrorise the city and county of Cork. In October 2001, on the night of his final attack, a masked intruder entered a house in Passage West on the westside of the city and murdered three members of the Black family: Ross, his wife Deirdre and their seven-year-old daughter Anna.’ On seven, the host intensified her stare into the lens. ‘Miraculously, their eldest daughter, Eve, just twelve at the time, survived the attack by hiding in an upstairs bathroom. She joins us this morning to tell us about her new book, her amazing book – I’m reading it at the moment and I just cannot put it down – The Nothing Man, which she hopes will finally lead authorities to his identity. Eve, good morning. You’re very welcome to the show.’

  The shot widened, revealing Eve sitting on another, identical couch just a foot away from the one on which the hosts were perched. She was sitting with her knees together and her hands in her lap, managing to look both rigid and fidgety. Clearly nervous. She mumbled, ‘Thanks for having me,’ just as a graphic appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  THE NOTHING MAN MURDERED MY FAMILY: AUTHOR EVE BLACK ON HER NEW TRUE-CRIME MEMOIR.

  ‘This book,’ the female host said. She picked up the copy that had been sitting in her lap. ‘Wow. I have to tell you, it’s a harrowing read but I just can’t put it down. It’s riveting, it’s devastating … I was up until all hours last night because of it. They had to go thick with the concealer on me this morning.’ She flashed a smile, then resumed looking serious. ‘Tell me: why write this book? And why now?’

  ‘Well …’ Eve licked her red lips. ‘I suppose the simple answer is that, um … I want to find him. To identify him and find him so he can be caught and punished for what he did. As for why now …’ She paused. ‘To be honest, I just wasn’t ready until now.’