And, as the sky lightened, she went in search of help.
Christine was an only child. Her father owned a chain of fast-food restaurants and her mother ran a public relations agency, well known around the city for its embarrassingly lavish product launches and D-list celebrity photo-calls. The Kiernan family home was an architect-designed glass-fronted mansion overlooking the estuary on the Rochestown Road. Built on a rise for the views, their friends said, or so everyone could see how much money they had, their enemies muttered. It was known locally as the house with the swimming pool. Christine had attended a school in the city which educated similarly moneyed daughters for generations, but even there she had stood out as being separate and other, a tier up and a world apart, because her family put their money on display. When she’d enrolled in University College Cork, she’d found herself at sea, so disconnected from the worlds of her classmates, what with their part-time jobs, their fiery political views and their dingy student digs, that it was as if she had arrived from another planet speaking another language. She had few friends and didn’t share her feelings with the ones she did have. Three months before the attack, Christine sat her final exams and left campus without looking back.
She took a job as an executive assistant in a firm of solicitors that bore her father’s best friend’s name and quickly grew close to another new hire, the son of one of the partners. There’d been a few summer weekends spent with him, his family and his friends, including one where the two of them had decided, on a whim, to fly to Paris for the day. Christine had been close with one of her first cousins, Emma, growing up and had traded letters with her ever since Emma and her family had emigrated to Dubai in 1996. These days they exchanged emails and in them, earlier that summer, Christine had told Emma she was happy or at least getting there.
Christine had had every privilege in life. She’d been heading for a future that would be easy, comfortable and financially successful. But then a man came walking up her stairs in the middle of the night. When it came to what was needed to recover from it, it quickly became apparent that, in that area, Christine was poor to the point of poverty. She wasn’t close with her parents, had no siblings and few, if any, close friends. Her relationship ended, instantly crushed under the weight of what had happened to her body. She didn’t want to be touched, which was understandable, but neither did he want to touch her, which seemed cruel. Meanwhile, her neighbours in Covent Court seemed more concerned with the inconvenience of the Garda presence and the bad publicity than they were with Christine’s welfare. In a decision that was inexplicable to many, Christine returned to Covent Court and continued living there, alone, after the attack. She did have an alarm system and new locks installed, but still.
Nothing like this had ever happened in the area before and in the immediate aftermath, the story dominated the headlines. None of these reports included Christine’s name but locally everyone knew who she was. There was seemingly a long line of former classmates lining up to add colour to the various threads of local gossip. Like how she’d driven a Land Rover to school in fifth and sixth year, her own Land Rover, and how her father had arranged special permission for her to park it in a staff space. How she’d worn labels to school and carried her textbooks in a designer handbag. How her mother had purchased an apartment in the Elysian for her to live in while she was at college so she could avoid the thirty-minute commute to and from the family home. No one dared come out and say it, but it was there in the subtext: everyone has to suffer something. Christine had never suffered, so it made a kind of sense that her first serving came in such a devastating portion. And hey, it wasn’t like she’d died.
Seven weeks after the attack, Detective Garda Geraldine Roche, the lead officer on Christine’s case, arrived at Covent Court for a pre-arranged visit. When Christine didn’t answer the door or her phone, Roche became concerned and forced her way into the property. She found Christine unconscious on her bed. She had ingested a lethal dose of painkillers and would pass away in hospital two days later.
The victim of a violent crime had been found unconscious at the scene of it so, once again, the house at Covent Court was processed by Gardaí as part of a criminal investigation. Every inch of it was explored, photographed and catalogued – perhaps even more thoroughly than before as, this time, Christine wasn’t able to tell the story of what had happened there.
During this, a civilian forensic technician noticed there was an active landline installed but, due to the lack of a telephone, apparently not in use. The unit was found packed away in a cupboard, its corresponding cable wound around the receiver. It was a large, beige rotary model that had most likely belonged to Christine’s grandmother and probably never been used by Christine herself. Still, the Gardaí needed to make sure.
The civilian technician knew there was a quick way to find out. She plugged in the phone and dialled the three-digit number that, in the summer of 2000, accessed Eircom’s built-in voicemail service. The access code had never been changed from the default 1-2-3-4 and she was able to listen to the messages.
The first thing the technician heard was a robotic voice warning her that the mailbox was full. The second was the first of a number of near identical voicemails, distinguishable only by the various times and dates they had been left. Each lasted between one and two minutes and featured the same male, raspy voice whispering, ‘Here I am, Christine. Come down and let me in,’ over and over again while, in the background, the tinkling sound of wind chimes could be heard loud and clear. Christine’s wind chimes.
The date on the first voicemail was 20 July, six days after the attack. The most recent one had been left two weeks before, on 19 August. Christine’s attacker had been returning to Covent Court.
There were thirteen voicemails in all.
The day of my second visit to Covent Court was a much better one: blue skies, light breeze, warm sun. I had been trading emails with Margaret Barry, the neighbour who had found the knife and rope beneath her couch cushion two weeks before Christine’s attack, and after weeks of tentative correspondence she had finally agreed to meet me.
As I crossed the courtyard, I passed a huddle of what looked like college students. I felt their eyes follow me as I walked by. I assumed they were here for the architecture but when I mentioned them to Margaret, she said that since my article had come out, it was hard to know. The Nothing Man was back in the news and bringing a different kind of enthusiast to Covent Court: the true-crime tourist.
Margaret is in her sixties now with short, steel-grey hair. She goes by Maggie. A first-generation Irish-American, she grew up in Berkeley, California, with her Cork-born parents, and came to live in Ireland at the age of twenty-six. In the summer of 2000, she was working in University College Cork’s International Office. She had bought the house in Covent Court less than a year earlier, when a long-term relationship that she’d thought was heading for marriage had instead fallen apart. She’d seen Christine’s grandmother, Mary Malloy, around but had never spoken to her; they lived on opposite ends of the complex. She didn’t know Christine existed until the morning after the attack, when Maggie opened her curtains to find a fleet of Garda vehicles parked outside and two uniformed members about to knock on her front door.