That was what was supposed to happen, at least in the minds of the criminal gang. His employer, the country’s largest commercial bank, had been crystal clear on what to do if such an event occurred: disobey them. This was not, after all, an armed robbery. These guys were thieves, yes, but murderers? No. The Gardaí had special officers trained to deal with these situations, who would help him fake compliance until they could swoop in and snatch Alice back.
Shane scooped the keys up with one hand and went looking for their matches, trying key after key until one turned in the lock. Nancy and Emer were asleep in their beds. David was sitting up in his, his face a question. The room he shared with his wife was as he had left it. Tommy was standing on the other side of his door, waiting, holding out his phone: the 999 dispatcher was asking what was wrong. Shane quickly summarised the situation. The woman on the other end of the line assured him that a car was already on its way from Carrigaline station. He handed the phone back to Tommy and then realised that there was something in his left hand, pricking the skin of his palm: a key. Five keys, four bedrooms. Somewhere, a door was still locked.
When he opened the bathroom door, his foot hit his wife’s leg before he could turn on the light. Alice was woozy and incoherent; her face was a mess of swelling and blood. She had suffered a broken nose and a shallow head-wound, both of which she’d recover from quickly and completely, but that night her face was an unrecognisable pulp.
The first Garda car arrived five minutes later. There would be an investigation, but into what? There were no witnesses aside from Alice, who hadn’t seen the man’s face. He’d left no trace of himself inside the house. There’d been no sightings of a vehicle in the area in or around the time of the attack and, due to the location, there was no CCTV footage to check. No one could even say how the intruder had entered the home. He may as well have been a ghost.
Privately, Gardaí wondered if there’d even been an intruder at all. It would be months before a woman named Claire Bardin would report what she’d seen while driving along Bally’s Lane around the time of an attack: a man wearing dark clothing, who she’d surprised with her headlights. Bardin lived abroad and hadn’t realised the significance of her sighting until she’d heard a report about the case on a return visit to Cork. She worked with a police artist to create a sketch which was released to the public, but it failed to generate any new leads.
Meanwhile, the O’Sullivans installed new locks, security lights, electronic gates. They waited for news, for updates, for an arrest. None ever came. There were a handful of reports in the paper and on the local radio, all of which framed the incident as a tiger kidnapping gone wrong. Alice told family and friends that she was fine, that she just wanted to forget about it, but six months later she was still spending most nights wide awake on the sofa, looking at the flickering blue light of a TV screen but not seeing it at all. Doors and locks had lost all meaning. She now felt as at risk in her own home as she did on the side of a dark, deserted street. Eventually a FOR SALE sign went up on Aurora and Shane put in for a transfer to a branch in another part of the country, any part.
The children heard different versions of what had happened that night. Nancy and Emer were told almost nothing and for several more years would think that their mother had got up to go to the bathroom and tripped over something in the dark. David was told she’d disturbed a burglar, who wouldn’t be able to get in now thanks to all the new security measures. Tommy was told the truth but not the details. He didn’t know that the man who’d entered their home that night had said something to his mother about playing a game, just like the prank caller had said to him on New Year’s Eve. He had no reason to connect the two events at all.
The telephone in the O’Sullivans’ kitchen was a payphone: an angular boxy chunk of charcoal-grey plastic with big blue buttons and a slot for coins that looked utterly out of place on the wall of a private residential home. In Ireland in the 90s, this was a smart way for parents of teenagers to control their phone bills. A classmate of mine, Danielle, had one in her home, but she’d discovered where her mother kept the key for it. Whenever she needed to make a call, she’d simply wait for the opportunity to surreptitiously open the coin box, lift out a handful of pound coins and fifty-pence pieces and run them through the phone another time. Her mother never noticed because she herself often did the same thing.
I sometimes picture that phone, so incongruous in the O’Sullivans’ kitchen, on the night of 31 December 1999. I’m helped by the photographs I’ve seen of a country-style kitchen where crystal glasses and china plates are displayed neatly in glass-fronted cabinets above countertops cluttered with the detritus of family life. The phone is next to the fridge, which has a parish newsletter clipped to its door with a magnet, the paper folded to show Mass times. Everything is still and dark and inanimate, the only signs of life the sounds of them, muffled music and the yelps of hyperactive children coming from another room.
In this moment, we are all alive and safe, we still feel safe, and live in a world where when we enter our homes at night and close the door behind us, we believe that we have slid into place a barrier that divides everything warm and secure and familiar, and everything cold and dangerous and unknown.
And then in the next, a phone begins to ring.
Its shrill cuts through the air. Perhaps there is something on its little LCD screen or a light that indicates a live incoming call. Perhaps this intrusion is only aural. Either way, a monster waits on the other end, his whisper at the ready.
For years I have kept a mental list of things to ask the man who murdered my family if I ever get the chance, and third from the top (underneath why? and why us?) is why that night? There had never been a midnight so full of promise, this dawning of the year two thousand. A date that, even when it was finally here, still seemed so of the future that it was foreign on our tongues. What was it about that moment that made him make his move? What was he thinking that night when he decided to emerge from the shadows and call the O’Sullivan home? Had something happened to him that had finally flicked a switch? Or had he planned it for months in advance? And why call at all? What was the point of it?
But mostly I wonder what would’ve happened if Tommy O’Sullivan had known the combination of buttons to press that would call back the last incoming number. I wonder where, if he had, a phone would have rung. In a telephone booth, already deserted, on the side of a lonely country road? Somewhere unexpected, like a university, hospital or Garda station? Or in a house just like the O’Sullivans’, filled with music and children’s voices and fizzy celebrations, readying itself to join the rest of an entire nation in an historic countdown?
I know which scenario scares me the most. It’s also the most likely one.
The first thing Jim saw after he’d pulled the car into the drive was the big lump of sloppy dog shit sitting right in the middle of the front garden. The sight of it flash-boiled his blood. He stormed out the gate, along the path and up the driveway of the house next door. Where there was no dog shite in their garden. Funny that.
When he rang the bell, Karen came to the door.
Karen and Derek were in their early thirties. She was sallow-skinned with tumbling dark curls and a small, hard body that she wrapped in tight, stretchy fabrics. He was skinny and pale and didn’t make any sense standing beside her. They’d no kids and had mostly been inoffensive neighbours – until they ‘rescued’ some stupid, ageing dog, who had some kind of irreversible stomach problem that had him constantly evacuating his bowels in other people’s gardens.