The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  He didn’t yet have permission to share anything with me beyond what had been reported in the press – that would come later from his superintendent who, like Ed, just wanted the guy caught – so he stuck to bullet points for now. His goal at this point was for me to understand what the Nothing Man was and what he had done before he’d arrived at our house that night. He started by saying that what happened at our house was the worst.

  He told me about the O’Sullivans on Bally’s Lane in Carrigaline. Christine Kiernan in Covent Court. Linda O’Neill in the house in Fermoy. Marie Meara and Martin Connolly in Westpark. That poor man, trapped under the wheels of his own car, perhaps slowly dying while knowing that, back inside the house, his wife was dying too or was maybe even already dead – when I tried to go to sleep that night, he was all I could think about.

  Ed and I had many of the same unanswered questions. Why these people? These houses? What connected them? Ed said they had tried every which way to find a link between the victims, painstakingly going through their lives with fine toothcombs looking for some point of overlap, but they’d always come up empty. He believed that if he found the connection, he would find the man. Cork was a city of half a million that felt much smaller; it was notably unusual that Gardaí had failed to connect any of the victims with each other in any meaningful way. Normally in any random group of Corkonians this size you would find some kind of connection, like two people who went to the same school at the same time or even a familial link. None at all was notably strange.

  I mentioned something about our house, the family home in Passage West, and Ed asked me if I’d ever been back there. I said I’d been there that morning, that I was staying there while I was down in Cork. I had never sold it and since the long-term tenants had moved out a couple of years ago, I hadn’t replaced them. Instead, I’d started occasionally staying there myself.

  ‘I know it sounds strange,’ I said, ‘but I kind of like it. It’s the place where we were all together. Aside from one night, it’s all good memories. I feel close to them when I’m there.’

  When I told people this, I invariably got the same reaction: disgust. Staying in the house where my family were slaughtered? What kind of sicko would want to do that?

  But Ed had a different one.

  He asked me if we could go there. Together. Now.

  Jim was wide awake now.

  – 8 –

  That Night

  Passage West, population: 6,000, is a port town on the west bank of Cork Harbour. Coming from the city, our house forced you to avoid the town altogether, taking a right on to our lane before you’d even reached the WELCOME TO PASSAGE WEST sign erected by the Tidy Towns committee. We lived in a dormer bungalow that had been extended by, essentially, building a facsimile of the original house and them sticking the two of them together, end-to-end but at an angle, giving the building an odd V-shape. We had four acres, with the house sitting right in its centre at the end of a loose-gravel drive.

  I had offered to drive us there but Ed said he’d take his car, and then I offered to lead him before realising that he knew very well where it was. We arrived within minutes of each other. He was surprised, I think, to see how untouched it was, how unchanged it had been in all these years. That was unintentional. I wasn’t building a mausoleum, I just hadn’t got around to changing anything yet.

  I surprised myself by saying, ‘Let’s retrace his steps.’

  We started outside, at the back door. It had been unlocked that night and probably every other night before. This whole area was a place of unlocked doors, of keys left in the ignition, of all the neighbours knowing you were away – or at least it had been back then, until then. No one knew how the Nothing Man had approached the house, or what direction he had come from, or how he had travelled from his home to here. It was like he simply appeared, materialising out of the blackness. A ghost of a man, made entirely of shadows.

  His clothes helped him do this. Ed described what he was probably wearing when he came to our house, based on Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan and Linda O’Neill’s accounts of their attacks: all black clothes, black gloves, black balaclava-style mask. He might have had a torch strapped to his forehead, something not unlike a bike lamp attached to an elastic headband; he had in some of the attacks but not all. Somewhere on his person there was also a knife and perhaps a gun, although if there was a gun he hadn’t fired it. Ed pointed out that outside the grounds of our house, beyond the shadows, his Serial Killer Ensemble would’ve had the opposite effect: it would have made him stand out. This suggested there was a point in his approach where he stopped to put it on. Standing outside our back door, Ed said, ‘It was probably here.’

  It was daytime, and Ed is fair-skinned, freckled and lean, but for a moment there was a flash of a man in black, pulling down his mask and reaching for the door handle. I shivered even though it wasn’t cold.

  Ed said to me, ‘Ready?’ and I nodded even though I wasn’t, not at all—

  We went inside.

  Investigators estimate that the Nothing Man commenced his attack on my family sometime between three and four in the morning. This was predominately based on my calling 999 at 4:10 a.m. And the findings of the pathologist when he came to examine my mother and father’s bodies. They also knew from the items they had found in the kitchen that he had spent time there before coming upstairs, but it was impossible to say how much. As ever, he had left no physical evidence, going so far as to spray the rim of the coffee cup he’d drunk from with the bottle of bleach cleaner my mother had kept on the sink. Ed and I walked through there and into the hall.

  He paused at the end of the stairs and asked me if I could tell him what I knew before we went up to the bedrooms.

  I don’t remember the whole thing in sequence, just flashes. But over the years I had managed to piece them together in a linear string. Now I can just about play them through, although the picture is jumpy and the cuts are rough.

  It was like making a movie out of a series of photographs, I explained to Ed. All the key moments are there but the connective tissue between them is missing. This memory doesn’t unfold, it flickers.

  I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom. I never did normally but I had snuck a can of Club Orange up with me to bed. The door to the room Anna and I shared was closed. I know this not because I can remember that the door was closed, but because I remember that the room was dark. I liked it that way. Anna had a little plug-in nightlight that she would fall asleep with but the first thing I did when I went up to bed every night was unplug it. If the door had been open, the light from the hall would’ve lit up the room and I would have noticed that something was different.

  Tiptoeing, I moved from my bedroom to the bathroom. This was a journey of mere seconds; it was the next door along. The main light switch was outside but during the night my parents left a smaller light over the mirror on. I closed the bathroom door behind me as softly as I could. The key was in the lock but I didn’t turn it because it would make a clicking sound, which I knew from experience would be loud at this time of the night when it had no competitors. I didn’t flush the toilet for the same reason.

  I had just pulled my underwear back up when I heard a strange noise. My first thought was asthma attack because it reminded me of the sounds a girl in school had made when she had an attack in PE class a few months before, a kind of muffled gasping. I thought Anna must be having a bad dream.

  I can remember standing in front of the bathroom door, gripping the handle but not depressing it, when footsteps crossed the landing outside. They were moving away from me, left to right, towards my parents’ bedroom. They had a rhythm and weight to them that was unfamiliar.

  I doubt that at that point it crossed my mind that there was anyone in my house except for members of my own family. It was beyond the realm of my own possible realities that a stranger would be in my home.

  And yet, something made me stay where I was. A gut instinct.
A few moments later, that same feeling made me turn the key in the lock and reach out to pull the string that would turn the light over the mirror off, leaving me hiding in the dark.

  There was no screaming or yelling. All I could hear was the low hum of quiet voices and then several minutes, maybe, of a rhythmic whimpering I didn’t understand. This was followed by a series of heavy thumps. At one point I thought I heard my father’s voice saying no, just once, as in please no. There might have also been some scuffling, someone moving around on a carpeted floor.

  I had no idea what was happening in my parents’ bedroom but I also had a profound sense that I shouldn’t know, that it was something dark and adult and frightening, and that the best plan was for me to wait it out, to stay exactly where I was, and not alert them to my wakeful state.

  I can’t say if I thought about Anna. If I did it was to presume that she was fast asleep.

  Minutes passed. The weird sounds died down and I pushed my ear to the gap between the door and frame, straining to hear. I thought I could hear something, muffled and distant, but I didn’t understand what activity could match it and, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t just imagining it, that it wasn’t merely the kind of pattern in the white noise you hear when you try to listen really, really hard. If I was scared, I mistook it for confusion. Maybe I made that mistake on purpose, to protect myself. But whatever I was thinking, feeling or hearing, I know I stayed in the bathroom. Standing with my nose to the back of the door. My hand on the key. Waiting.

  Footsteps, suddenly, on the landing. Crossing it quickly, right to left. Towards the stairs.

  I thought they must be my father’s. I moved to turn the key.

  But then I heard another set of footsteps crossing the landing, and they also sounded like my father’s.

  I froze.

  Who was out there? What were they doing?

  A yelp. Just the slightest sound, the kind of noise you might make if you slipped on ice and thought your legs were about to go from underneath you. This was followed by a series of thumps and bangs, and for some reason I knew exactly what the corresponding action to that soundtrack was: someone had just gone tumbling down the stairs.

  There was one loud painful groan, then nothing else.

  I don’t know how long I waited for the silence that followed that to end, but when it didn’t, I left the bathroom. I remember turning the key in the lock and wincing because the clicking of it seemed as loud as a siren. I remember opening the door. I remember that it was now dark outside, the ceiling light on the landing having been switched off at some point while I’d been in the bathroom.

  But there was a light on downstairs. I moved towards it.

  When I reached the top step and looked down, I saw a figure lying crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. The light illuminated him mercilessly but kept everything else in shadow. I remember it like a stage spotlight, even though that couldn’t have been how it was.

  My father’s body was spread across the bottom three steps of the stairs. His head was pressed against the wall and his feet seemed tangled in the banisters. Everything seemed strangely angular and broken and wrong. I called out for him but he didn’t respond. I started towards him, descending a step or two, but there was something about the positioning of his body, its stillness … I got too scared. I ran back up and into my parents’ bedroom to wake my mother instead.

  The door to the room I shared with Anna was closed now, I think, but I can’t be sure.

  The light from downstairs couldn’t reach this corner of the landing so once I crossed the threshold of my parents’ room, I was in the dark and navigating by memory. I walked forward, knowing that in a few steps I would hit my mother’s bedside table and then, a few inches after that, her side of the bed. I think I whispered her name, then said it, then called her. No response. There was a weird smell. Just as I reached the bed, my foot touched something wet and sticky. I started patting the blankets, trying to find an arm to grip and shake, but stopped when my hands felt the same wet and sticky substance. I reached out to my left, slicing the air in search of the bedside lamp. When I found it, I felt for the switch up under the shade. Pushed. In the sudden light I saw that the blanket was pulled right up to the headboard and there was blood everywhere: on the blanket, on the walls, on the lampshade.

  I pushed the switch again, plunging the room back into darkness.

  That’s it.

  After that there’s just flashing lights and my grandmother with her hair loose around her shoulders and wrong rooms, and someone carving out a hollow at the core of me with something rusty and blunt, a void that will remain there for ever.

  Jim took his pencil and went back over the last few pages, underlining all the sentences that were inaccurate or untrue. Then he circled the words ‘That’s it’ and wrote, Is it? Where’s the rest??? alongside them.

  Did Eve really remember it this way?

  Or was this a lie of omission?

  I told all this to Ed and then added a disclaimer: you can’t trust me. I was only twelve when this happened. Even while I was still in the bathroom, my brain was preparing for my survival, opening the deepest vault in my memory bank so it could send the worst of what I was about to see straight in there. When the vault started to approach capacity, it just dumped some stuff straight out. This is how I’ve come to understand the effects of trauma on the mind of a child. That night is a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces and some parts of it have clearly been put together wrong.

  For example: I called my grandmother from the phone in the kitchen but I have no recollection of going downstairs, a journey that would have involved stepping over my father’s body. I don’t know what I said to her, and I don’t remember calling 999 even though I did. There’s a recording of it. I don’t remember going back into our bedroom but I do remember seeing Anna’s hand, her little nails cut short and painted inexpertly with red polish, hanging out over the side of the bed. How did I see that if I didn’t go in? How could there have been no yelling or screaming? How much time passed between these events? Why did the Nothing Man leave me alive?

  When I stopped talking, Ed was silent for a very long time. Then he told me what the Gardaí thought had happened that night. We went upstairs so he could show me.

  No one could be sure of the exact sequence of events, but it made sense from an investigative standpoint that Anna had died first. The Nothing Man had tried to smother her with her pillow and he’d succeeded, albeit on a delay. She was in a coma when she arrived at the hospital and never woke up.

  Our bedroom door was the first one you got to when you reached the top of the stairs, the first one he would have come to. Ed and I paused at its open doorway. There were no beds in the room now but back then, her bed had been directly across from you as you entered the room, pushed against the wall under the window. Mine was opposite it, behind the door.

  After I told Ed this he gave me a look I would come to know well, the one that reminds me that he already knows, that he was at the scene, that he’s studied the pictures for hours on end. That he probably knows more about what my house was like in October 2001 than I do.

  We moved on to my parents’ bedroom, stopping again at the threshold. I didn’t tend to go into the bedrooms. (When I stayed at the house I slept downstairs, in the room that had been my father’s office.) This room was empty but had a garish wallpaper hung by the tenants, pink flowers on green. The radiator was new too but it had been installed in the same place as its predecessor. Ed pointed to it and said it was there my father had been tied up, to the pipe underneath. They knew this because of the shredded blue rope they’d found there.

  He’d managed to free himself from it, but his wrists and ankles were still tied. If he had fallen down the stairs, Ed said, this was likely why. It was also why the fall killed him – because he hadn’t been able to use his arms to slow his descent. Without the bindings, he might have been bruised and sore or, worst-case scenario, broken an arm or leg. With t
hem, he severed his spinal cord at the neck. There was only one phone in the house at the time, a landline, and it was in our kitchen. Presumably he’d been trying to get to that.

  My mother was found in the bed, face down, with the blankets pulled over her head. She had been stabbed fourteen times, mostly in the back and shoulder area. Her wrists and ankles had been bound just like my father’s, but the Nothing Man must have used brute force or his knife or maybe even the threat of a gun to keep her on the bed. He had raped her. I can’t think about this in any depth. I can’t even read back over this paragraph.

  Abruptly I left and went back downstairs and into the kitchen. Ed followed me. I drank a glass of tap water and then flicked the kettle on for tea. I wasn’t certain I could speak. Those last ten minutes were the longest I’d spent thinking about what had happened in this house since the event itself.

  I turned to face Ed, leaning against the countertop because I felt light-headed and hot, and didn’t trust my knees to keep me upright. I caught him looking at the phone, hanging from the wall next to the fridge. It wasn’t the same one but the newer model had been hung in the same place.

  ‘He never called us,’ I said. I looked to Ed. ‘Did he?’

  Back on the night of the attack I’d said I couldn’t remember any prank calls, but that wasn’t to say they hadn’t happened. I wasn’t supposed to answer the phone so it was my mother who would’ve got them. Or maybe I’d just forgotten.