The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Eve started protesting, squirming.

  Her skin was warm and soft. She was wearing a top with a low, round neck and no sleeves. He traced the edges of the material from one shoulder to the other with a single finger.

  Once left to right. Once right to left.

  Then he slipped the finger underneath and on to the soft pillow of her breast, pulling the material away from the skin, putting his whole hand inside, cupping her bare breast, feeling the nipple turn hard against the palm, moving to squeeze it—

  Eve screamed.

  A sound as loud and as piercing as anything Jim had ever heard.

  But not, then, the only sound.

  Beyond it, underneath it, there was an oncoming rush of noise.

  What the—

  Footsteps.

  Shouting.

  People.

  Then suddenly bodies were rushing into the room and someone was shouting.

  ‘Drop it! Drop your weapon! Drop it right now!’

  Jim didn’t have time to react.

  There was a flash and an impact that rocked his entire body, sending him backwards off the bed and on to the floor. He lost the gun. He landed on his side and rolled until he was face-down on the carpet. He touched a hand to his left side where the epicentre of whatever had just happened seemed to be. When he lifted it to his face, he saw that it was covered in blood, glistening and red.

  ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’

  A new voice. Male.

  Jim tried to say, ‘No,’ but no words came out.

  He tried to roll over on to his back so he could see what was happening. He only made it halfway, but that was far enough.

  Ed Fucking Healy.

  He was on the bed, gathering a crying Eve into his arms.

  There were dark figures all around the room, coming towards him, bending down.

  Gardaí.

  With guns and baseball caps.

  The Armed Response Unit.

  The pain began to subside but Jim understood now what was happening, that that wasn’t good news.

  It’s time for you to end this, Noreen had told him.

  The darkness came creeping slowly on to the edges of his vision, then suddenly rushed in from all sides until there was nothing left but a tiny pinprick of light in the middle.

  And then there was nothing at all.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Katie lies awake, waiting for her alarm to go off. The tent is hot and stuffy and smells of someone else’s body odour. She can feel the springs of the camp bed’s thin mattress poking into her back. Her sleeping bag, only pulled up to her knees, holds a warm sweat that glues the synthetic lining to her calves.

  She lasts another minute before she gets up, disables the alarm and pulls on her uniform of brightly coloured cotton shorts and a matching T-shirt. She grabs a towel and walks outside.

  The campsite feels deserted at this hour. The only sound is birdsong and the soft rhythm of distant waves. The forecast has promised another thirty-degree day and the air is already warm.

  Katie takes a long, cold shower in the toilet block and has a breakfast of coffee and two cigarettes at the site’s poolside café. Technically staff are not supposed to sit in guest areas in uniform and certainly not while they’re smoking, but no one else is here yet except the waiter and the guy with a net lifting leaves from the pool. They speak to each other in French and act as if Katie isn’t there. That’s the best she can hope for these days: to be ignored.

  She’s been here, a seaside resort on the south-west coast of France, for months. She heard about the job while eavesdropping on a couple of British Inter-Railers at a restaurant in the nearest town, where she’d just spent her last ten euro on a hot meal and was facing a second night of sleeping on the beach. She’d hitched a ride here with a Frenchman who was leering at her before her seatbelt was even on, but Katie is no longer afraid of men. It feels pointless to be. She’s already seen the worst of them and called him her father.

  She doesn’t often think about time and dates but now that the season is winding down, the new arrivals thinning out, it’s hard to ignore the fact that in a few days, it’ll be September. The first anniversary of the end of everything.

  Katie is in exile. The rest of the world feels separate here, far away. She has no phone. The only TVs on site are the ones in the bar, which always seem to be tuned to football matches. The work is menial so she doesn’t have to think about it, the accommodation monastic, her days monotonous and simple.

  It suits her.

  It’s penance.

  ‘Excuse me?’ A customer – the short, smiling, chubby woman who’s been staying with her family in one of their Riviera Deluxe models for the past week – is standing in front of Katie, blocking her sun. ‘Sorry to bother you, love, but we’re about to hit the road to Roscoff and I’m just wondering if there’s any chance you can let me into reception for a second just to switch out these books …?’ She’s holding two bloated, battered paperbacks that have been evidently tarnished by sea water and sunscreen. Her other hand is pointing over her shoulder at a car stuffed with children. The husband is in the driver’s seat. When he sees them looking, he pointedly raises his watch to the window.

  ‘Sure,’ Katie says, stubbing out her breakfast in the ashtray. ‘No problem.’

  Whenever she speaks to customers she does her best to shave the Irish edges off her accent. She learned her lesson back at the start. Is that an Irish accent I hear? What part? Oh, I have a cousin there! What’s your last name?

  Reception is a modified mobile home steps from the café. Katie unlocks the door and lets the customer in ahead of her, giving the thick, airless heat inside a chance to become a shade more bearable before she herself steps in.

  The books are on a stand just inside the door. It’s an exchange: leave a book, take a book. The woman returns her paperbacks and tilts her head to study the spines of the others.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I don’t know … Have you read any of these? Anything you’d recommend?’

  Katie steps closer so she can see the books too. She spies a historical saga another customer raved about last week.

  ‘That one is really good,’ she says. ‘And it’s set in Perpignan, which isn’t far from here.’

  The customer takes that and a memoir about restoring a chateau in Provence.

  After she leaves, Katie takes a second to tidy up the books. Her hand is already on it before she realises what it is. She’s never seen it in this smaller size, with a soft cover. It must be new. The colours on the spine are different. The font is, too. It looks absolutely nothing like the book she read, actually. The only thing that’s the same is the title and the author.

  The Nothing Man: A Survivor’s Search for the Truth.

  Eve Black.

  And at the bottom of the spine, in tiny lettering: UPDATED WITH A NEW POSTSCRIPT.

  The aftertaste of cigarette smoke is suddenly sour on Katie’s tongue and the bitter coffee swirls sickeningly around her otherwise empty stomach.

  She should put it back. It won’t do her any good. She doesn’t need to know any more details. Her nightmares already have more than enough fuel for years to come.

  Katie is still telling herself this when she slides the book from the shelf.

  She sees her father’s face on the cover – half of it. The other half is covered in a black mask except for the eye. The two images have been blended into the other. She traces a finger down the seam in the middle.

  But really, she has no interest in him.

  It’s Eve she wants to know about.

  She wants to know how she is, if she’s okay, if she’s managing to somehow move on and live a life. Katie desperately hopes so. She’s not religious but she has been saying silent prayers to the universe asking for this very thing.

  Her father was a rapist and a murderer but she had eighteen years of a happy childhood before she found that out. He ended Eve’s at twelve. He took both her parents from her. Rob
bed her of her little sister. Left their bodies in the house so Eve could see exactly what he’d done to them.

  Katie holds all his victims in her heart. This includes her mother, at least the version of her that was young and naïve and didn’t know what she was in love with. The woman she mourns, because she may as well be dead now. The woman that’s still alive knew what he was but she stayed and helped him anyway. Katie feels nothing for her. She may as well be a stranger.

  But it’s Eve she thinks of the most.

  Katie locks the door to reception from the inside and goes into the closet-sized office at the back. She locks that door too, just in case. She sits down and flicks through the book until she reaches the new part.

  She takes a deep breath of hot, musty air.

  She starts to read.

  – POSTSCRIPT –

  The Woman Who

  When I was twelve years old a man broke into my home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever. When I was thirty years old I wrote a book about it. Eight days after it was published, on 6 September 2019, that same man broke into that same house and tried to murder me. He was shot and killed by Gardaí. His name was Jim Doyle.

  Now, I must come clean and tell you the truth. I left out one very important detail in the first edition of The Nothing Man: his name. I knew it was Jim Doyle. I knew what he looked like and where he lived and what kind of a person he was. Ed and I had found him before I’d even finished the first chapter of the book. But our evidence was circumstantial. At best, writing about our discovery would be pointless and, at worst, doing so would get me charged with libel and slander in a case that Jim Doyle would definitely win. For a time, I thought having to leave this detail out made writing the book itself pointless and I came close to calling the whole thing off. But Ed convinced me that the book might be the very thing to draw him out. It might be the only thing that could. So I wrote it and it was published and thousands of you went out and bought it, and I thank you deeply for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for not telling you the whole story – until now.

  When I visited Maggie Barry, Christine Kiernan’s neighbour in Covent Court, she told me about the knife and the rope being mislaid at Togher Garda Station. What I didn’t include in the first edition of this book was that Maggie remembered the name of the guard who told her that: Jim Doyle. It meant nothing to me at the time. I presumed the loss of the knife and the rope had been a team effort and it had merely fallen to this Garda Doyle to deliver the bad news. It was just another detail to add to the master file Ed and I had been building during our re-examining of the case.

  But Ed knew Jim Doyle, a little. He’d worked with him at Togher. He also knew that before that, Doyle had been in Mallow – which was just thirty kilometres from Fermoy. Moreover, Togher was just off Cork’s primary orbital road which linked various southside locations, as well as the N28 to Carrigaline. Blackrock and Passage West were easily accessed from it. In fact, if you plotted Fermoy, Mallow and Cork City on a map, you’d make a neat triangle. What interested Ed the most, however, was why Doyle had been moved to Mallow from his previous posting in Millstreet: because in a fit of rage, he’d thrown a cup of hot liquid at his boss’s head.

  Ed found a photo of Jim Doyle in his navy blues, taken in the summer of 2004. When I saw it, I had a visceral reaction. That’s the only way I can describe it. I felt hot and light-headed and panicky all at once and, as I held the print-out in my hand, it began to flutter wildly. I was shaking. I felt as if I might be on the verge of a panic attack. Because it was him. I was looking at a picture of the Nothing Man. I knew it on an instinctual level.

  And yet on an intellectual one, there was no way for me to know that for sure. I never saw the Nothing Man in our house that night – or at least, I couldn’t remember seeing him. But there were discrepancies in what I did remember that suggested the version of events as I recalled them were not entirely trustworthy. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a whole reel missing from my memory of that night. Perhaps the most important one. Had I actually seen the Nothing Man and then blocked it out? What were the circumstances? Did we speak? Did he try to hurt me? Was that something to do with why he left me alive?

  The only way I would ever get answers was if the Nothing Man himself told me them. But we couldn’t approach Doyle. A physiological reaction to a photo does not a successful prosecution make.

  We showed Doyle’s photo along with four other Garda headshots to Johnnie Murphy, the foreman in Fermoy, and at first he picked out Doyle’s. But then, on second thought, he decided another photo was more like ‘Ronan Donoghue’ and ultimately he settled on that as his choice. We were unable to track down Claire Bardin, the woman whose sighting of a man on Bally’s Lane had given rise to the police sketch, but when we compared the sketch and Doyle’s photo, there were clear similarities. This was by far the most promising lead we’d ever had that included a name but, when we took my reaction out of the equation – and we had to – we weren’t left with anything near enough to justify fingering Doyle as the man who had murdered my family. We needed more. Much more. Undeniable, empirical evidence. If Jim Doyle was indeed the Nothing Man, how could we prove it?

  As Ed had warned me the very first day we met, the Nothing Man was a meticulous offender. He had never left any physical evidence behind that would connect him to his crimes and the way he chose his victims was so subtle that it wasn’t discovered until nearly two decades later. Even if we found him, a conviction would be impossible without a confession. And why, with no physical evidence to back up the charges, would he ever confess? The publication of the book might stir him up a bit, might make him do something stupid like contact the media or make a drunken confession to a friend, but there were no guarantees there either and the only action we could take was to wait and see.

  ‘The only other way,’ Ed said to me late one night, ‘would be if we caught him in the act, but we’re about twenty years too late for that.’

  That’s when the idea first occurred to me. I could use The Nothing Man – and myself, its author – as bait.

  In the summer of 2017 Ed had an apartment overlooking the waters of Cork’s inner harbour at Jacob’s Island and, that July, we packed up our rented office space and moved Operation Write The Nothing Man into his spare room. Our research and investigations, for the most part, were over. The case files had been returned to Anglesea Street. It was now time to actually start writing the book.

  Although Ed could help, this part was really my responsibility. I wrote the story of the Nothing Man and what his visit that night long ago had done to my life, but I also wrote to the Nothing Man. I imagined him reading every sentence I typed. When it came to his crimes, I put in just enough detail to rekindle his memories. I made sure to tell him what I really thought of him. I wanted to make him mad and, specifically, mad at me. After a lifetime spent hiding away, of being paranoid about my personal safety, of not even telling close friends my real last name, I told every reader of this book where I would sleep at night when I was in Cork: back in the house where, for me, this had all started.

  Every reader including him.

  The Nothing Man was to be a true-crime book that, if all went well, would lead the Nothing Man to commit one more crime. But I had absolutely no idea if my plan would work.

  The book came out on 29 August 2019. Exactly a week later, on 5 September, my publisher organised an event at a bookshop in Cork city centre. Just before it was due to begin, Ed appeared by my side and whispered something into my ear: Jim Doyle is here. In a move that surprised us both, I turned to him and said, ‘Introduce me.’

  As Ed led me to him, I had no plans to do anything other than pretend this was a normal exchange, that I was merely meeting an old colleague of Ed’s, another Garda. But when the crowds parted and I saw him standing there, I recognised him – not just as the Nothing Man, but as someone I’d met in the course of my research. The Nothing Man was youthful and s
trong and lean, as was the picture of Jim Doyle in his Garda uniform that Ed had found. But this Jim Doyle was grey and balding, with a turkey-neck of loose skin and a bulge around his middle, and he looked sweaty and ill-at-ease under the harsh lights of the shop. He also looked like the man who’d been on the reception desk at Togher Garda Station when I’d visited there looking to speak with someone about the missing knife and rope.

  I told him we’d met before but that I’d looked different then. I admit it: I was toying with him. I also admit this: I enjoyed it. I didn’t feel afraid. I was in a public place filled with people and Ed was by my side and Doyle didn’t know what I knew. For once, the power was mine. When Ed said that Doyle had been ‘dragged’ to the event by his wife, I told him his name was in its pages because I wanted to ensure that he would read it too. Technically, that wasn’t a lie. If Ed and I were right about him, his name – his other name – did appear in my book, probably more than a hundred times.

  Since publication day I had been staying at the house in Passage West. Over Ed’s objections, I was staying there alone. He wanted to put protection outside or even keep a guard in the house, and failing that have other people staying with me, but I vetoed it. If Doyle was the Nothing Man, he was also a former guard. He would know the signs of a police presence, no matter how hidden, and I didn’t want to inadvertently put anyone else in danger. We compromised on a panic button. If I pushed it, it wouldn’t make any noise but it would ring an alarm in Carrigaline Garda Station, where the members were on alert for it. Officers would arrive within minutes.

  The night after the bookshop event, Friday 6 September, the Nothing Man returned to the scene of his last crime at around three in the morning. I don’t sleep well and was awake when he broke his way in via the rear door. He was probably thirty feet from me. I pushed the panic button, threw an old blanket over my bed and ran upstairs into my room, the one I had shared with Anna. For several minutes I listened to the sounds of him moving around a floor below, then the suspicious silence that I correctly assumed was him ascending the stairs. I saw him appear in the bedroom doorway, masked with gun drawn, and realised I was seeing the very same thing that the women I had written about – Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan, Linda O’Neill and Marie O’Meara – had also seen.