The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  What had happened was this: the night before, in a sprawling estate of affordable semi-Ds called Meadowbrook, three separate houses had been burgled while their occupants slept. The thieves had taken living-room electronics, cash and whatever jewellery they found on the sleeping female’s side of the bed. The targets were dotted throughout the estate but whoever had done this had moved quickly, hitting one right after the other and getting in and out before anyone even knew they’d been there. Clearly pre-planned. A white van had been spotted in the area at the time and on a number of occasions in recent weeks. Jim and David Twomey were to help knock on every door in the estate to see if any other residents could recall seeing this white van too.

  They could’ve done this as a pair – there were enough warm bodies already on the scene – but when they met with the member-in-charge, David piped up with a suggestion: they could split up and cover twice the ground in the same amount of time. This was factually correct, but Jim knew why David had said it: because he wanted shot of him. That was fine with Jim, because he wanted to be shot of that streak of shite as well.

  They divided a long row of houses in two, with Jim taking the doors on one side of the street and David the ones on the other. The first four knocks were standard fare. There was the usual over-eagerness to help the Gardaí, so people kept him talking on their doorsteps, or invited him in, and made him wait while they racked their brains over the endless monotony of their days looking for something, anything, they could offer up to the man in the uniform. They wanted him to be pleased with them, to impress. They wanted him to think they were important too. But no one had anything substantial.

  And then, at the fifth door, there was Alba.

  She’d opened the door in a state of distraction, frazzled, already readying herself to turn back towards the screeching noise that was coming from the space beyond.

  Jim saw dark eyes and a huge mess of tightly curled hair.

  She saw his uniform and her face changed. She stepped forward, into the light—

  And Jim saw Jean standing there.

  It wasn’t Jean, of course. It couldn’t be. Truth be told, the two women didn’t even look very much alike. It was more that they felt alike. Somewhere deep inside of him, a door opened. Up until that moment on the doorstep of a house in Meadowbrook, he had thought only Jean possessed the key.

  Jean had been his babysitter. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, nearly every other Saturday night, she’d come to look after him while his aunt Agnes went out on the town with whatever toy boy she was into that week. Jean was fun. She would organise elaborate games, bring funny films for them to watch and make him toasted cheese sandwiches with honey inside which, she said, was her trademark secret ingredient. She was a bright light in the darkness and after every visit, Jim counted down the days until she was due to come again.

  Somewhere along the line, though, they both got older. She had always seemed so much older than him but as the years passed, it started to seem that, by some alchemy, he might be able to catch her. Over years’ worth of Saturday nights, Jean lost her braces, changed her hair and started to wear things that made her look different. And then she was different, a different shape. And Jim – Jimmy, she always called him – began to notice this, and feel a certain way about it, and think about her when she wasn’t there beyond waiting for her to come back. This made him act differently when she did come around, charging their Saturday nights together with a new, treacherous tension – at least on his part.

  Jim ached for her. The only balm for it was to think of her, to bathe himself in thoughts of her, to close his eyes and sink into them. In his imagination, they were together all the time. In his fantasies, he could touch that pale pink flesh, push his hand up to the band of her bra and then under it, while Jean closed her eyes and moaned. The next steps were blurry and vague, the exact process unclear to him, but he could see them in a bed together afterwards, her lying with her head buried against his neck. He dreamed of this sometimes, waking up alone with a cold, sticky dampness berating him for it beneath the sheets.

  Then one night that last summer, Jean was making pizza in the kitchen when she stretched to pull her sweatshirt off and lifted her T-shirt too, offering Jim a glimpse of, first, pale skin and the smooth curve of her right side and, then, the edge of the blue band of her bra. There was something about the movement – it was oddly slow, deliberate, performed – that made him think it had been for him. Convinced him it was. She was sending him a message, he thought. Letting him know that whatever he was feeling, she was feeling too.

  But it was a lie. A tease. Because when Jim reached for her the way he had seen men reach for women on TV, she recoiled.

  Then she got angry.

  Then she laughed.

  She laughed until she was doubled over and her eyes had filled with tears. She laughed until the smell of burnt bread filled the kitchen and she had to go and open the oven, which billowed smoke. She laughed until every cell in Jim’s body was a burning white fireball of hot, sticky shame. She was still laughing when Jim turned and ran, upstairs and into his bedroom, and banged on the walls with his fists until his hands were numb and his knuckles were split and there were smears of red on the wallpaper.

  Jean never came back after that night. No one did. Agnes called him ‘a little pervert’ and said he was old enough now to stay at home on his own. But she believed this only up until midnight, at which point she’d come home, bringing whoever she’d gone out to meet back with her. Jim would be sent to bed and they’d stay in the living room. The first time this happened, he heard strange noises and went down to investigate, thinking that maybe the man wasn’t being very nice and Agnes needed his help. To save her now would undo some of the damage from the incident with Jean. But she wasn’t in trouble. From what he could see through the open living-room door, Agnes was enjoying what the man was doing. And after a few minutes hidden in the shadows on the stairs, Jim realised he was enjoying watching it.

  He hadn’t thought of Jean in years. She’d be older than him now, wrinkled and loose, fattened and spoiled by having children like they all were. But here, on the doorstep in Meadowbrook, was Alba. She was probably seventeen or eighteen. When she spoke, it was in a thick Spanish accent. She didn’t live at the house, she was staying there as the family’s au pair. She hadn’t seen any white van but maybe the owners had. Both mother and father would be at home later that evening. The hem of her T-shirt, the neckline of which was cut in a deep V, didn’t quite reach the waistband of her jeans, and the skin she’d left exposed was smooth and darkly tanned. He wanted to touch it. He wanted her in the same way he’d wanted Jean.

  But he wasn’t fourteen years old any more. She was younger than him, so much younger.

  And he was a guard now, standing in front of her in uniform.

  She wouldn’t laugh at him. She wouldn’t dare to.

  That night, after dinner, Jim told Noreen he had to go back to the station for an hour. He took his uniform with him in a bag and changed into it in a lay-by off the Cork-Dublin road. Then he drove to Meadowbrook. He parked his car in a turnaround at the rear of the estate, got out and started walking to Alba’s house, keeping his hat off until he was right outside it.

  But he hadn’t thought it through. Now that her employers were home, there was no need for her to come to the door. The owners were a pleasant, professional couple in their thirties who worked in the city. He asked them about white vans and suspicious characters, but they had seen nothing.

  ‘We’re hardly ever here,’ the husband said. ‘Unfortunately. And you spoke to Alba already, right?’

  Jim said he had. ‘She’s your, ah’ – he pretended to refer to his notebook – ‘au pair?’

  The couple nodded enthusiastically and launched into a spiel about how amazing the young girl was, how they’d never cope without her, how they hoped she’d stay with them for longer than the last one had. They told him how old she was (nineteen), where she was from (Girona
, Spain) and what days off she had (half of Saturday if they could manage it, and all of Sunday). They told him that since the only spare bedroom was the tiny box room upstairs, they had converted the garage into a little self-contained studio, and that Alba stayed there. Still, they said, it was a small enough space, and she was probably looking forward to the following week, when the couple and their two young children would go to London to visit his family and Alba would have the whole house to herself. Well, they added, not all to herself: her sister was coming from Girona to stay for a few days.

  People, Jim mused on the drive home, can be so fucking stupid.

  He came back the following week, on three separate occasions, to watch Alba and her sister from the shadows outside the house. On the last one, he entered the house while the women slept, moving through the kitchen, pocketing a couple of delicate things from the laundry basket, standing in the open doorway of the room where Alba slept. He watched her turn over, one bare leg thrown on top of the blankets. She had got up to go to the bathroom and passed right by him as he hid in a recess in the hall and never even knew he was there.

  It set him alight, that night. Switched him on, brought him to life. He didn’t care about how bad the days were any more when there could be nights like this. Everything that happened elsewhere – pasty, soft Noreen; the crap he got at the station; the things he saw Aunt Agnes doing when he closed his eyes at night – it all just slid off him, melted away.

  This was how everyone else must have learned to live in the world, Jim thought. This is how they managed to move around it calmly, with a smile on their face, taking shit day in, day out. They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation.

  And now he had found his.

  But Meadowbrook was spent. The morning after his third and final visit to Alba, he’d come into work to discover a neighbour had reported a prowler the previous night. He’d just missed a car containing two of his colleagues.

  He needed to find somewhere else.

  And then somewhere else after that.

  What Jim needed was a supply.

  One night soon after, he told Noreen he was on a surveillance op and drove to a new housing estate fifteen minutes outside the town. He changed into his uniform while parked on the side of the road. He started knocking on doors.

  When the occupants opened them, he flashed his badge. He had slipped a new ID card into the clear pocket below it, which had his own picture but a different name. He had photocopied his own ID, modified the details by hand, then photocopied that. It was just a slip of paper with faded ink and wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, but on a doorstep after dark with his fingers partially obscuring it – and when you just saw it for a flash – it did the job fine. ‘Sorry to bother you, but there’s been a burglary in the area, and we’re just canvassing residents to see if they’ve noticed anything strange in the last few weeks or months, seen any suspicious vehicles, that kind of thing …’

  One thing immediately became apparent with this approach: all the questions were being directed at him. Because there hadn’t actually been a burglary, this was the first time the residents were hearing of one. They were shocked and concerned and demanding of more details. Jim fluffed the first two homes but, in the third, he found himself face-to-face with the chairman of the local residents’ association. The following day, that man would ring the station asking about the supposed incident. Jim got lucky: he was the one who took the call. But he couldn’t risk a similar thing happening again.

  It was easier, he realised, to hide in plain sight. Jim started watching out for small, residential incidents – burglary, theft, vandalism. Sometimes they’d necessitated an actual house-to-house, sometimes not. He’d wait it out a week or more, until he was sure the investigation had tied itself up or petered out, and then he’d drive to the area in the evening with his modified ID and his uniform on the back seat of his car. The burglaries he was ‘warning’ them about had really happened, but his visits had three, unrelated objectives: evaluate the residents, observe the homes, collect information.

  For himself.

  Jim got braver and braver. He began returning to the houses he liked during the night, sometimes watching from outside, sometimes letting himself in. Occasionally he watched the women sleep, standing just inches from their beds. In one house he stood in the shower with the curtain drawn while the woman who lived there took her make-up off in front of the sink.

  But over time, the same old feelings crept back into his days: frustration, rage, shame. If his nocturnal activities were the antidote to the pain of being alive, then life began to develop a resistance. Noreen broke an arm. There was another incident at work. This time he was getting moved into Cork City, to Togher Garda Station, where he’d be confined to desk duty.

  Jim needed something new. Something stronger.

  – 10 –

  Password

  Burglary. After nearly twenty years, we thought we finally had the password that would unlock the entire Nothing Man case.

  What we needed to do now was to try to confirm that Tommy and I were remembering these events correctly, and then to determine if the same thing had happened at the other three Nothing Man homes. If we could establish that we were and they had, our next step would be to verify the nature of those visits. Was that man really a guard? Had there really been burglaries? How was this the connection?

  Ed quickly established that there had indeed been a burglary near Tommy’s family home on Bally’s Lane in September 1999. On the afternoon of 5 September, a property had been burgled during the funeral of its elderly owner. Numerous antiques worth thousands of pounds had been stolen, presumably in a van that had been spotted in the area at the time emblazoned with the name of a (fake) moving company. The theft had made the news, with the deceased man’s adult son growing tearful as he spoke live on air to a local radio host, pleading with the public to assist in the return of the items his late father had spent a lifetime collecting.

  This was the kind of crime the Gardaí called theft-to-order. It hadn’t been your run-of-the-mill home burglary – whoever had done this had known what was in the house and how to offload the goods afterwards. The way to solve this type of crime was through the cooperation of antique dealers. Someone would try to sell them one or more of the items; they’d alert the Gardaí; the Gardaí would trace the item back, seller-to-seller, until they got to the person or persons who had stolen them in the first place. It made no sense that anyone involved in the same investigation would be calling to local houses to warn them about it. Unless they also had a house full of antiques and were going to leave them unattended while the whole family went to a funeral, there was zero danger of them suffering a similar fate – which was why the Gardaí hadn’t done that. There was no record of any members being sent anywhere to do house-to-house calls aside from the homes immediately neighbouring the target, whose occupants had provided witness statements in the hours after the theft.

  There was no record of Christine Kiernan being visited by a guard in the weeks before her attack and after a delicate conversation with her parents, I determined she hadn’t mentioned such a thing to them either. But there had been talk at the time of installing gates at the entrance because of a recent burglary in the area. I’d already met with Maggie Barry, the neighbour who’d found the rope and knife, and I called her again to ask if she could remember anything about this or a visit from a guard. She said no. But Maggie was the current secretary of the Covent Court Residents’ Association and one of her duties was storing the association’s files, which included minutes from their AGMs and special meetings. She went through them and found this very issue raised at a special meeting at the beginning of June 2000, six weeks before Christine was attacked. The minutes referred to a ‘break-in on the Blackrock Road’. Whoever had recorded them had written this with the word ‘Florida’ in brackets afterwards.

  When Ed went searching, he found a report about a burglary in a detached house
on the Blackrock Road reported on 29 April 2000. A family had returned from a fortnight’s holiday at Walt Disney World in Orlando to discover their entire home ransacked and vandalised. What neither Ed nor I could find was any mention of this incident in the media. This meant one of three things: there had been media coverage and Ed just couldn’t find it; one or more of the residents of Covent Court personally knew the family involved or someone who knew them and had heard about it that way; or one or more residents of Covent Court had had a visit from the Gardaí warning them about it. It didn’t rule out anything and, as Ed liked to say, an absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. Our theory that this was somehow the connection between the victims could remain alive.

  Ed found two candidates to support my vague memory about the visit to our house. There had been equipment stolen from a farm in Monkstown, and electronics and cash taken from a house on Monastery Road on the outskirts of Passage West itself. Both of these incidents had occurred within six weeks of my family’s murders. The records kept by the investigating Gardaí were incomplete but one of the detectives involved was still an active member, and he told Ed he had no recollection of any house calls in relation to these events except for the homes, again, actually neighbouring the targets. It wasn’t much, but we had to take what we could get. When I asked Ed if there could’ve been some home safety initiative where members of the Gardaí, separate to official investigations, called to houses in an effort to prevent them falling victim to property crime, he laughed at me. There was no scenario, at any time or in any place, where the Gardaí would have had the resources to do that.

  We didn’t need to go searching for burglaries in Westpark or its surrounds, as Ed himself had investigated a spate of them, albeit before the residents arrived. He could find no reports of any subsequent incidents. We couldn’t, of course, ask Marie or Martin if they’d had any visits from a guard.