The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  ‘It started with an article,’ the female host prompted.

  ‘Yes. I wrote a piece, in college – I went back, as a mature student, to study English – and it got published, got lots of attention, quite unexpectedly, and then because of that I got the opportunity to write this book, so …’ Eve’s voice trailed off and she looked at the female host uncertainly, as if for further instruction.

  ‘It must have been very hard,’ the male host said.

  ‘It was,’ Eve said.

  ‘Because you don’t just write about what happened to your own family, but you write about his other crimes as well. In detail.’ He paused. ‘Was that hard?’

  Eve nodded. She was biting her lip and her hands had slipped from her lap to between her thighs. She looked even more nervous now than when they’d started.

  This was not the woman Jim had been expecting based on what he’d read of The Nothing Man thus far.

  ‘Eve and I,’ the female host said, ‘visited her childhood home earlier this week and spoke in some detail about that horrific night’ – the screen changed to the family photograph – ‘and her motivation for writing this book, which, really, is what has stayed with me. Because, Eve, to be honest, I read a lot of true crime, and I watch all the documentaries’ – footage now of Eve and a woman Jim realised was the host, walking with their backs to the camera – ‘and listen to the podcasts, and I’d never thought about these men, these serial killers, the way you talk about him, about the Nothing Man.’ The footage disappeared leaving the screen filled with the female host, looking hopefully at Eve. ‘Could you speak about that, for a moment? The “nothing” part?’

  ‘It’s just that …Well, we mythologise them, don’t we?’ Eve stopped to swallow, then started again. ‘These men. Ted Bundy. The Golden State Killer. The Canal Killer. We talk about them like they’re others, a different kind of being. A monster in a human costume. We look at their crimes and we just can’t figure out how they did it – but that’s only because we don’t have all the facts. Take the case of the Golden State Killer, for instance. They used to marvel at how he could get in and out of people’s homes without being attacked by their dogs. In fact, there was one occasion where, while he was actually physically attacking someone, the dog was just sitting there watching. It was like he had some kind of superpower, some dark magic that separated him from us. He could control these dogs. That’s what they thought, anyway. But when they caught the guy, he had a charge for shoplifting, and one of the items he’d shoplifted was a can of dog repellent. And so that was it. That’s all it was. He didn’t have any special powers. None of these men do.’ She was speaking louder now, looking stronger, gesticulating to punctuate her points. ‘We know their names because they got caught. These men, they’re not over-achievers or particularly successful in any other area of their lives. They’re boring, unremarkable failures. And that’s what I want to prove: that the Nothing Man is too. The Gardaí called him that because they didn’t have anything on him, but I call him that because that’s what he is: nothing. A nonentity. A loser. And I want to prove that by identifying him.’

  The shot narrowed, cutting Eve out and focusing entirely on the female host, who was blinking. ‘Yes, that’s … That’s so true. Well, I’m afraid that’s all we have time for …’ She held up her copy of her book. ‘The Nothing Man is out now in all good bookshops. My full interview with Eve will air on Wednesday night on RTÉ One and trust me, you won’t want to miss that. Or this book.’

  ‘And Eve,’ the male host piped up as the shot went wide again, showing all three of them, ‘will be signing copies of her book in Eason O’Connell Street …’

  The graphic with the dates and times came up on screen.

  The interview was over.

  Jim stopped the video and sat staring out the windscreen at the smooth waters of the River Lee. The grey sky was reflected in them. A canoe slid past filled with half a dozen rowers, their oars effortlessly slicing through the water with perfect synchronicity. Idly, Jim wondered if one of them was Katie. The college rowing club was around here somewhere, wasn’t it?

  He would have to kill her. He’d have to kill Eve. She deserved it, after what she’d said about him. He’d make sure the last thought she ever had in this life was that she’d been wrong.

  Because he was special. He wasn’t one of those ordinary idiots who sleepwalked through the orbits of this earth and called it living. He was smarter. Stronger. Superior. He would emerge from the shadows one last time to kill his most famous survivor, then disappear back into them once again. No one would see him. He wouldn’t be caught. He’d force everyone to marvel at him. They’d ask themselves, how could a normal, boring man – what was it Eve had said? – a loser do something like that? They couldn’t. That was the simple answer. The only answer. Only he could.

  The Nothing Man.

  They’d start to whisper those words again, because they’d fear that saying them aloud would summon him. He’d make sure of it. In the meantime, let Eve Black say whatever she wanted. Let her double-down, dig that hole she’d made deeper and deeper. It would just make the next chapter – the Nothing Man’s final one – all the sweeter.

  There was much work to do. This wouldn’t be like those times before. He’d have to prepare for longer, take greater care.

  He’d have to start now.

  He already knew the two items at the top of his list: go to her event in the bookshop tomorrow night and, before then, read as much as he could of her book.

  Puzzled, Prendergast called out, ‘Hello?’ two or three times. When he got no response, he rang the doorbell. He thinks he also called out the couple’s names. No one answered and, beyond, the house was utterly quiet. No voices, no radio, no television. It didn’t seem like anyone was even home.

  He thought maybe the couple had walked somewhere local, perhaps to Mass or the shop, and accidentally left the door open on their way out. He reached out and pulled it closed, listening for the click of the lock, then pressed the same hand against it and pushed to check that he hadn’t made the same mistake. The envelope with the cheque was still in his pants pocket. He posted it through the letterbox. He turned around and, with his back to the door, tapped out a text message to Martin explaining about the door and the cheque, and pressed SEND.

  Prendergast hadn’t even managed to put the phone back in his pocket before he heard the sound of a text message arriving on a Nokia phone. Three quick beats, two long pulses, three quick beats more. He had a Nokia himself and he looked down at the device in his hand, confused, because he hadn’t received a message. The sound had come from another phone. Martin’s phone, surely, going by the timing. But it had been too loud and clear, Prendergast thought, to have come from inside the house.

  He typed another text message, this time consisting of just the word ‘TEST’, and sent that to Martin too. Just like before, this action was immediately followed by the text alert noise which, paying attention now, he sensed was coming from somewhere on the ground to his right. He scanned the area and quickly found the corresponding phone. It was lying on the ground between a terracotta plant pot and the front wall of the house, inches away from the frame of the garage door and two feet from the front of the Mondeo in the driveway.

  When Prendergast bent down to get it, his peripheral vision picked up something monstrously wrong: Martin’s eyes, open and staring, in the darkness underneath the car.

  The shock made him lose his balance and the fall had the unfortunate consequence of bringing him even closer to Martin’s body. And it was, without doubt, a body. Martin was dead. His face was a colour it shouldn’t have been and his head was twisted at an angle that didn’t make any sense. He had, somehow, been run over by his own car in his own driveway. Prendergast scrambled to his feet and called the emergency services even though he knew there was no emergency here. It was too late.

  He went and sat on the low wall that bordered the front garden while he waited for the flashing lights and
sirens, for the people in uniforms who would know what to do next. His hands were shaking and one leg was bouncing uncontrollably. All he could see were Martin’s wide-open eyes, whether his own were open or closed.

  Marie must be out somewhere, he thought, or maybe away overnight. He prayed she wouldn’t get here before the ambulance did, so he wouldn’t have to be the one to tell her.

  Gardaí Elaine Grady and Peter Fine were the first to arrive at the house. They’d been nearby when the call came in and beat the ambulance. Fine stayed with Prendergast while Grady went to make an initial examination of the scene.

  Martin’s body was wedged beneath the bonnet of the car, in front of the wheels, with the exception of his right hand and right foot, which were trapped underneath one. There wasn’t enough room for him under there, which was why his body looked as contorted as it did, and why Grady didn’t need the coroner’s office to tell her that the cause of death was asphyxiation. Prendergast had told her about the phone and she theorised that Martin had been on the ground looking for the device when the car rolled forward and trapped him underneath. But what had caused the car to roll forward in the first place? Grady snapped on a latex glove and tried the driver’s side door. It was unlocked.

  The first thing she noticed was that the handbrake was engaged.

  The second was that the handle was smeared with blood, which changed everything.

  She and Fine locked Prendergast into the back seat of their car and, together, advanced towards the house. There was side access to the rear garden and they found a door at the back unlocked. It deposited them into a small utility room off the kitchen. There were items on the dining table that suggested a meal had been interrupted, but only one person appeared to have been dining. All the curtains on the ground floor were drawn.

  They advanced up the stairs. The main bathroom was at the top. When they opened its door they found Marie on the floor. She was wearing only her underwear, her hands and wrists were tied with thin nylon rope and her skin was covered in puncture wounds and slashes. The air was thick with the smell of wet pennies and much of the bathroom was splashed and smeared with blood.

  The two Gardaí stood stock still in the threshold, staring and disbelieving, until the wail of approaching sirens reminded them that this was a crime scene and dozens of people were about to descend on it. They retraced their steps to their car. Fine got a roll of Garda tape out of the boot. Grady got on the radio and called absolutely everybody. Forensic testing would show that the blood in the bathroom and the blood on the handbrake both belonged to Marie. The handbrake sample also contained fibres consistent with the blue nylon rope that had been used to bind her arms and legs, which suggested that the blood in the car had left Marie’s body after the attack in the bathroom, when her blood and that rope were both present. Seeing as there were no blood smears or drops in the spaces between the bathroom and the car – the carpeted landing and stairs, the hallway, the front door and first couple of feet of the drive – Gardaí had to conclude that it wasn’t Marie who’d left the blood in the car, but the person or persons unknown who’d attacked her.

  That wasn’t Martin. He had no blood on his skin or clothing that wasn’t his own. The only sequence of events that made forensic sense was that Marie was attacked, her attacker then came downstairs, went outside and got into the car, lifted the handbrake and let the vehicle roll over Martin, who for some reason was already in front of it.

  Why any of those things had happened was anyone’s guess.

  Detective Inspector Graham Harris was to be the lead officer on the case. When Healy went to him and told him about the 1999 burglaries, Harris assigned him a desk in the incident room and tasked him with determining whether or not there was a connection to the murders. Healy was buoyed by the interesting task but not sure where to start with it. Was it even plausible the two things were related? On one hand it would be a staggering coincidence for a double-murder to take place in a home where, when the homes were still mere houses, someone had repeatedly broken in – and in the sphere of criminal investigation, there were no coincidences. But on the other hand, what could some moved tools and removed locks have to do with a woman dead in her own bathroom and a man dead under his own car? One was a petty crime, the other one of the worst crimes imaginable.

  Healy made repeated visits to Westpark. He checked security footage, looked into the backgrounds of the men and women who’d worked on the site and tracked down David Walsh, the former project manager. He even looked at the firm of estate agents tasked with selling the finished homes, the shareholders behind Browne Developments and the rest of that first wave of Westpark residents. None of it turned up anything useful.

  Despite a month’s worth of intensive, round-the-clock work, Operation Optic (a nod to The Invisible Man) was, as a whole, having the same problem. The couple at fifteen Westpark had seemingly had no enemies. There were no secrets in their lives. Nothing was missing from the house and there was no apparent motive. In an effort to move things along, DI Harris appeared on Crimecall, the primetime television show where solemn TV presenters sat alongside Gardaí and pleaded for the public’s help amid grim reconstructions.

  On the night the appeal aired, Healy helped field calls to the dedicated tip-line. He took one from a sales assistant in an electronics store on Oliver Plunkett Street in the city centre who had sold Marie Meara a mobile phone six weeks or so before her death. This sales assistant, Denis Philips, said that when Marie came in to buy the phone, she had mentioned in passing that she was getting rid of her landline because she’d been receiving nuisance calls. He remembered her because there had been a problem with accessing her account and she’d been in the store for so long that Philips had been over an hour late in finishing his shift. He’d heard about the murders on the news previously, but hadn’t seen a good picture of Marie until now.

  If it were true that Marie and Martin were planning on disconnecting their landline, they’d never got around to doing it. It was still active on the night of the murders and there was no evidence to suggest they had ever made any move to disconnect it. Healy secured records going back three months and pored over them line by line. He found twenty-seven instances of incoming calls that lasted only moments – three seconds here, seven seconds there. They usually came in the evening, in batches of two or three, and they had all been made from public telephone boxes in busy urban areas. One of them had been made on the grounds of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, just minutes after the final whistle blew in the Munster hurling quarter-final between Cork and Limerick – just like the call Linda O’Sullivan in Fermoy had received.

  Healy knew about the O’Sullivan case. Everyone did. But everyone also thought of it as an incident of organised criminal activity, most likely former gang members looking for loot left hidden in the bossman’s house. Gardaí thought the subsequent calls had come from cranks. But whatever the chances of a building site that had been plagued with petty thefts coincidentally becoming a crime scene, there was no possible way this was a coincidence. It was, undeniably, a connection. And when Healy shared this information with the incident room, another member who’d worked the Christine Kiernan case reminded him of the disturbing voicemails they’d found after her tragic death. Thus, a second connection.

  There was one more yet to be made. In light of this new information, DI Harris decided that Healy should do a follow-up segment on the next edition of Crimecall, which aired monthly. On the night of 21 September 2001, Healy sat behind a desk on the Crimecall set, sweating under the lights, and explained to the host about connecting the cases with phone calls. An audio recording of Christine Kiernan’s voicemails was played, and a transcript of what Linda O’Neill had heard on the prank call was shown on screen.

  Sitting in his student flat in Bishopstown, Tommy O’Sullivan, now a fresher at University College Cork, straightened up when he saw the words on screen. Would you like it if we played another game? He called his mother and told her about the prank call he’d recei
ved on New Year’s Eve two weeks before her attack. She confirmed that her attacker had used similar language. Mother and son would meet at Anglesea Street first thing the next morning to report their revelation to the Gardaí.

  The world was still reeling from 9/11, still getting up every morning to turn on the news to see if it had really happened, still seeing inexplicable scenes of smouldering ruins broadcast from the heart of Manhattan. But Healy saw none of it. His world had shrunk to the borders of his desk. He knew now that there was no tiger kidnapping gone wrong. No random rapist. No criminal gang come hunting for loot. Instead, there was a faceless monster who had toyed with his victims, lingered around their homes before and after his attacks, and taunted them with phone calls. Who had started with a knife, then got a gun. Who had begun his horror spree with a physical assault and then moved on to rape before graduating to murder. And for all they knew about him, he may as well be a ghost. When a junior member of the team said as much to a journalist friend, a headline containing the moniker ‘The Nothing Man’ appeared for the first time in the press the next day.

  Anglesea Street’s regional Garda HQ was next door to Cork’s biggest fire station. A few days after the Nothing Man made his first appearance in the press, Healy was walking its halls when he happened to witness members of the fire brigade’s Hazardous Materials Unit engaged in a training session outside. A special rig had been built behind the station for this purpose: a narrow, hollow square five or six storeys high with stairs on its exterior, a stand-in for a real office building or apartment block. These training sessions happened regularly and Healy had seen them many times before. But on this occasion, as he stood there watching, a word materialised in his mind: practising. That’s what the firefighters were doing – and that’s what had been going on in the Westpark estate, too. Before anyone had moved into those houses, someone had been practising getting in and out of them. Their killer had used the place as his own personal training ground. Healy had never seen that level of pre-meditation before. It unnerved him. It also motivated him.