The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  The only reason Jim even remembered the interaction was because of Aisling Feeney. She was one of the two Gardaí who had visited the woman at Covent Court and taken the knife and the rope she’d found under her sofa cushion. It was Feeney who’d submitted it into evidence officially; it had been her signature on the bags.

  Ever since Jim had taken them from the evidence room and made them disappear, he’d been aware of the name.

  But that was years ago, and Gardaí were involved in all sorts of business, and for all Jim knew the woman asking for her was a relative …

  But it had been Eve bloody Black.

  ‘Have you lost Noreen?’ Ed asked him. Then, to Eve, ‘He got dragged here by his wife tonight. She’s probably waiting for you in the signing queue.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Eve said. To Jim, ‘Noreen? I’ll keep an eye out for her. I’ll tell her that her husband helped with the book. To keep an eye out for his name. It’s there.’

  It’s there.

  ‘How are you?’ Jim blurted out. He asked it because he thought that’s what a normal person in this situation would ask. They would be concerned for Eve. They would feel sorry for her. They would hope that despite everything, she had found a way to have a good life afterwards. ‘I mean—’ He cleared his throat. ‘How are you now, these days?’

  For a moment, Eve seemed bemused.

  ‘I’m—’ Before she could say any more, someone tapped her on the shoulder. A staff member, it looked like. They whispered something to her about the queue and she nodded and said she’d be right there. She turned back to Jim. ‘I’m in demand, it seems like. I better get over there and start scribbling my name in other people’s books. Lovely to meet you, Jim. And please don’t feel bad. I was only messing with you. I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. Thanks for your help, though. I appreciate it. I’ll keep an eye out for Noreen so I can sing your praises.’ Now she did reach out, but not to offer her hand. Instead, she coiled her fingers around Jim’s left wrist, clasping it. She met his eyes. ‘Thanks for coming. I hope we meet again soon.’

  The voice in Jim’s head, the other voice, the one that told him all the risky things were good ideas, scrambled up out of the depths and made the words—

  ‘And I hope you catch him.’

  —come out of his mouth.

  ‘Thank you.’ Eve smiled. ‘Fingers crossed.’

  And then she was gone, and Ed was saying goodbye, and Jim was hearing a buzzing inside his head, growing louder, and he moved to go, pushing his way out of the shop, the crowd now dispersed throughout it, most of them holding their copies of the book, and then he was going through the swinging door and now he was outside, on the street, the sky dark and the cobbles glistening with rain, drizzle on his face, trying to steady his breathing, to reset the rhythm of his heart.

  She knows.

  She knows he’s the Nothing Man.

  But she couldn’t know. It wasn’t possible.

  But she’d told him his name was in the book. Why would she write about someone who’d spoken to her for a couple of minutes three years ago?

  And what the fuck was this about them finding out the connection? That wasn’t possible either.

  He needed to get home. He needed to read the rest of the book.

  The door behind him swung open and Noreen came out.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks for waiting for me.’

  Jim mumbled something about it being too stuffy inside.

  They started off down the street, Noreen buttoning up her coat against the cold.

  ‘You got the book signed?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did she say anything to you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The writer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Inside, Jim was screaming.

  ‘When you went up to her to get the book signed,’ he said, pointedly pronouncing each word individually, ‘what did she say to you?’

  He could feel Noreen turning to look at him but he kept his eyes front and picked up the pace so she had to hurry to keep beside him.

  ‘She just asked me what name to put on it and said thanks for coming. What else would you expect her to say?’

  Katie.

  It was Katie’s name that had gone on the book. That’s why Eve hadn’t said anything to her – because she was waiting for a woman named Noreen.

  The drive home was nearly entirely silent. When they got in, Jim asked Noreen for the book. She frowned, but handed it over.

  He opened it to the title page. Katie’s name and Eve’s signature were both scrawled in the same loose, loopy handwriting.

  Noreen was looking at it too.

  ‘She’ll be delighted,’ she said.

  It took everything Jim had in him not to rip out the page right then and there and tear it into a thousand tiny pieces.

  – 9 –

  Connection

  I wanted to start work on the book immediately, but I still had to finish my masters. For several months I tried to keep my mind off the Nothing Man, but for the most part I failed miserably. I was itching to get back to Cork and to start our search for him proper. The day after I submitted my final work, I met again with Bernadette and signed the contract for the book. Then I went home to pack a case and prep my apartment to survive an absence that may last weeks or months.

  The last thing I did before I left was squeeze in a muted, uneasy dinner with Jo and Rhiannon, the only friends I’d ever managed to keep a hold of for longer than a couple of months. We had met in NUI Galway during a Freshers’ Week pub crawl and so they now qualified as my oldest friends, by a very long shot. Our trio was weighted unequally, with them seeing each other far more often than I saw either one. But I didn’t want to lose them. Ever since the article had come out, I had felt them slipping away. This dinner was supposed to be celebratory, but they were still adjusting uneasily to my reveal as Famous Crime Victim and none of us felt quite right having a champagne toast to the fact that I was going to spend the next year of my life, at least, excavating the worst thing that had ever happened to my family and four other families as well.

  As we parted, I said they should visit me in Cork, come stay with me for a weekend. It was a casual invitation, off-the-cuff, not thought through.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Jo asked.

  My hesitation answered her question and she blanched. Rhiannon looked away, unable to hide her disgust.

  I didn’t know if our friendship was going to survive this. What was worse was that I didn’t really care. The truth was I was itching to get away from them, to get back on the road, to get back to Ed and Cork and the darkest depths of the case. Everything else was a distraction. I had spent all my adult life working hard to hide who I really was and now I wanted nothing else except to be myself entirely.

  It was exhilarating. It was terrifying.

  First thing the following morning, I drove to Cork.

  The only space I had there was the house, and it felt blasphemous to bring any part of writing the book into its rooms. Ed’s office was barely that and as a civilian I couldn’t simply waltz in and out of Anglesea Street whenever I liked. The sensitive nature of the material meant that we needed somewhere private to work, so coffee shops and libraries were out too. As luck would have it, there was a co-working space on Eglinton Street, not even five minutes’ walk away from Ed’s so-called office. I rented the smallest private space they had on offer and installed two desks, a bookshelf and three filing cabinets I could lock. I hung a huge whiteboard and bought a little coffee machine. I closed the blinds so we were free to stick whatever we needed to on the walls. I told the building manager that we were working on a book about Irish politics and that we would clean the office ourselves.

  On the first Tuesday in November 2015, Ed arrived towing a stack of blue plastic bins behind him on a little cart with wheels. They were stamped ‘An Garda Síochána’ but he’d stuck masking tape over this so as not to arouse any curi
osity among our office neighbours. It was delivery one of eight. Ed’s superintendent had agreed to the transfer on the condition that our office remain secure, that we not disclose its location or our activities to anyone who wasn’t directly assisting us with the case, and that we not move them again unless it was back to Anglesea Street. Ed joked that the higher-ups were probably glad of it; they had more room for dusty computers and old printer cables now.

  For hours we unpacked and organised the files. Ed hung an Ordnance Survey map of Cork city and county on the wall and marked spots on it with a red marker pen. I put my favourite family photo on my desk: Nannie, my parents, Anna and me on our last holiday together in Clare in August 2001. It’s also the last photo ever taken of all five of us together.

  We made a loose plan: we would give ourselves until the summer to find out as much as we could about the Nothing Man. We made lists of things to check, people to talk to, places to visit. The bulk of the tasks would have to be done by me – Ed would still be working full time, but would spare what hours he could. (This would turn out to be all his spare time, for the next eighteen months.) Then, in September, I would start actually writing the book.

  The following morning I woke up in my makeshift bedroom long before my alarm was due to go off. Something was different. I started, thinking it was the house, that someone had got inside in the night. But it was me. I was different. Lighter, somehow. Energised. Almost … excited? Yes, that’s what it was. I was excited about what Ed and I were about to embark on, which in turn made me feel ashamed.

  But I couldn’t stay in bed. I couldn’t even stay in the house. I wanted to get started. After all this, I needed to. I drove into town on dark, deserted roads and was at my desk, halfway down my first cup of coffee, when the alarm set to wake me up went off.

  The first thing we did was to simulate a complete review of the case. This involved going through every single piece of paper – statement, report, map, etc., – that had been generated during the course of the original investigation, trying to examine it with fresh eyes. Our progress was hampered by two factors: that I needed Ed to be there for the technical stuff and his time was limited, and the sheer amount of paper involved. More than 5,000 calls had come in to the tip-line, for starters, which made 5,000 one-page summaries of those calls that needed to be looked at again. An old college mate of mine had grown up in Boston where her father worked as a cop and now, as an adult, she had a habit of swearing loudly at anything fictional – TV shows, books or movies – that took liberties with police procedure. ‘That’s not realistic,’ she’d shout. ‘That’s not what happens.’ Many times over the course of those months in our little office in Eglinton Street, I thought of her, because if any of those things actually depicted reality, it would be merely hours and hours of people squinting at pieces of paper, and it would be exceedingly dull.

  We started to build a kind of master file into which we put what we thought was the most relevant information. I quickly learned from Ed that it is just as important to rule out things and jettison statements, evidence, etc., as it is to include them. Still, every time I came to decide in which category something belonged, I hesitated, momentarily paralysed by the idea that we were about to dismiss the smoking gun that would finally crack this case. Sometimes I’d lie awake at night, plagued by indecision.

  Our goal was to find the needle in a haystack that potentially had the power to blow the entire haystack away: the connection between the Nothing Man’s victims. I worried there wasn’t one. Wasn’t it possible that he just drove around in the dark and targeted people at random? The O’Sullivans were a family of four children and two adults who lived just outside Carrigaline, a commuter town fourteen kilometres from Cork’s city limits. Christine Kiernan lived in Cork City’s southwest suburbs, alone. Linda O’Neill lived thirty-five kilometres away with her husband in Fermoy, a town in the north of the county, but was attacked when her husband wasn’t there. With Westpark, the Nothing Man had returned to the city to attack a couple living in a suburban housing estate, and then left it again to attack us in Passage West, ten kilometres away. Three of the homes were detached, one was semi-detached and another was a townhouse with neighbours on either side. The women were in their twenties, thirties and forties and shared no physical attribute aside from being conventionally attractive, and at the Westpark house the Nothing Man had murdered a man. In my house, a man, woman and child had died.

  But there were similarities, Ed pointed out. Despite the seemingly scattered locations, if you plotted them on a map – and we did – all but one fit into a relatively small circle in the south-west of Cork county. Fermoy was the only anomaly. (Had the Nothing Man lived or worked in that area? Did he operate there because he was familiar with it?) Women were clearly the common denominator. His first three attacks focused on a woman and there was no attack that didn’t include one. And then there was the most obvious, glaring connection between the victims, one I hadn’t even thought about before because it was so obvious: all the victims were attacked in their own homes. He hadn’t snatched them from a road or taken them to a second location. Two of them, including my mother, hadn’t even been moved from their own beds.

  We knew because of my finding the knife and rope under our sofa cushions and Christine’s neighbour doing the same that the Nothing Man visited the homes before he arrived to attack the occupants, perhaps on more than one occasion. The phone calls told us that he liked to tease and terrorise his victims, and the fact that he knew their telephone numbers meant he had collected information about them. He knew their names. On Bally’s Lane, he’d whispered the names of all four children into Alice O’Sullivan’s ear as a threat. Ed was convinced the Nothing Man stalked his victims for weeks, maybe even months, prior to their attacks, and that before Westpark had any residents, he had used the empty but finished houses to practise things like picking locks, breaking windows and moving around in the dark. He was meticulous, never leaving anything behind at his scenes except for trauma, grief and lengths of his favoured blue rope, which had never given up any useful fibres or DNA. There had only been one sighting of him, by Claire Bardin on the road outside the O’Sullivans’, and no one had ever come forward to ID the man in her sketch.

  All this told us a lot about who the Nothing Man was, how he operated and what was driving him. This was an attacker who studied and prepared, who did his research. He felt superior and was convinced he was smarter than his victims and the Gardaí too. The prior visits to the home suggested a thread of voyeurism in his tendencies – he had probably begun his criminal career as a peeping Tom. It just didn’t make sense that, alongside all this, he would choose his victims at random. He was finding them, somehow. There was a why to this. But the original investigation hadn’t found it and now Ed and I, ten months into our unofficial case review, had failed to as well. We were back to square one, stuck.

  It was now September 2016. Whatever warm weather constituted the Irish summer could be relied upon to reach its peak the week schools reopened. Ed and I took a rare break to sit in the evening sun outside a bar on Bachelor’s Quay. The place was busy with office workers in rolled-up shirtsleeves and bare legs, leaning back in their chairs and tilting their faces to the sun. It was easy to forget why we were there, what Ed and I were doing, and that evening there was a part of me that wanted to. This was all starting to feel hopeless. We had looked at everything and seen nothing new. We distractedly peeled the labels off our sweating beer bottles and took turns saying, ‘There must be something we haven’t thought of,’ in between sips.

  Then something occurred to me. We hadn’t found anything new in the case files, but we were looking at them because we’d found something new – my discovery of the rope and knife under the cushion all those years ago. That was a piece of the puzzle I’d had, but until recently I didn’t know I had it.

  Would it be worth talking to the other survivors to see if maybe they unknowingly had such a piece, too?

  It wasn’t
going to be easy. Christine Kiernan had been so traumatised by her visit from the Nothing Man that just weeks later, she’d taken her own life. Linda O’Neill had remarried and was living in San Francisco; she told Ed over the phone that while she sympathised with my need to discover the Nothing Man’s identity, she had no interest in revisiting that time in her life. She asked us not to reveal her new married name, apologised and hung up. There were no survivors of the Westpark attack, so that left Alice O’Sullivan, the very first victim of the Nothing Man, who we quickly discovered no longer lived in the house on Bally’s Lane. After several phone calls and numerous dead ends, we finally tracked down a number for her in Malahide, Co. Dublin. When we called it we were told that, tragically, Alice had passed away two years before from bone cancer. I was speaking to her daughter, Nancy, now aged twenty-seven.

  Nancy was married with two children and living in the house to which the family had moved directly from Bally’s Lane. Her father was gone too, having suffered a heart attack five years earlier. But she said the relocation to Malahide had enabled the family to put the events of that night far enough behind them to move forward, and that afterwards her parents had managed to have a good life filled with family, fun and foreign travel. Nancy deeply understood my need for justice and was happy to help, but there wasn’t much she could add to our information. She had been in her bedroom, blissfully unaware of the events inside the house and, at ten then, too young to now be able to recall much from that time. But she had a suggestion: I should call Tommy, her older brother. Not only was he likely to remember more, but he had actually spoken to the Nothing Man on the telephone on New Year’s Eve 1999.

  Tommy was eager to speak with us. As the eldest child in the O’Sullivan family, he had been sitting much closer to the aftermath of the attack. Nancy had been telling the truth when she said her parents had managed to have a happy life but it was her truth, her perspective. Being older, Tommy had a different one. He told us that his mother had suffered from bouts of debilitating depression and had been attending a weekly therapy session for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder until her cancer diagnosis. Even though the Nothing Man had spent less than an hour in their lives, the trauma of it was an incurable infection. They could never feel completely safe again. He was the faceless monster who had crouched in the corner of his mother’s mind and it made Tommy angry the man responsible had never been caught, let alone punished. He welcomed the book and the research Ed and I were doing for it. But he was now living in Abu Dhabi. It would be three long months before he returned home for Christmas and we could speak to him in person, which was our preference. Both Ed and I felt that phone calls and video chats just weren’t the same, and we couldn’t justify the travel. We busied ourselves with other items on our endless list and settled in to wait.