The day we met she was wearing a long, flowing summer dress in a bold print and glittery sandals. When I remarked on them, she told me she was going to a friend’s birthday barbeque later that afternoon. Her American accent was still intact. We sat in the slice of sun that bisected her rear garden and drank strong, bitter coffee from delicate little cups. She told me she’d read my article but wasn’t sure if she’d have the stomach to read this book.
Maggie had been hoovering her living room when she’d found the knife and rope. It was a Saturday morning; she ‘blitzed’ the place at the same time every week. At first she didn’t do anything, didn’t react at all. She just stood there, unmoving, staring, with the hoover humming loudly at her feet. Waiting for what she was seeing to start making sense. After a beat she turned the hoover off with a stab of her foot and stared at the items some more. How could they be there? They weren’t hers. She was sure she had done this same thing seven days ago and they hadn’t been there then. No one but her had been in the house since.
She’d called 999, waiting outside her front door until the car came because for some reason it felt safer out there. Eventually two uniformed Gardaí arrived, both female. They took a statement from Maggie, had a look around and took the knife and rope away with them. They advised her to keep her windows and doors locked and left a card with a number she could call if there were any other incidents. ‘They did take me seriously,’ Maggie said, ‘but there just wasn’t anything else they could do.’
This wasn’t a world in which masked men broke into suburban homes in Cork City in the middle of the night to attack the women who lived alone there. Not yet. For close to two weeks, what tormented Maggie about the discovery was not so much its threat as its mystery. She tried on all sorts of explanations, canvassed her friends and even called the company who had manufactured the sofa to ask about what tools they used, but nothing she could come with up quite fit. It didn’t feel plausible that someone had broken into her home to leave something beneath a couch cushion, left again without taking anything and made sure not to damage any window or door coming or going. Why would anyone do such at thing? It just didn’t make any sense.
Then Christine was attacked and everything took on a new, horrible meaning. The knife had reminded Maggie of DIY stores but now it made her think of stabbing motions. The rope had seemed like something climbers might use but in her mind’s eye, Maggie could see it wrapped tightly around delicate wrists and ankles. She went to Togher Garda Station to make a statement. She noticed that the Garda she spoke to spent a lot of time asking her to describe in minute detail what the rope and knife had looked like.
‘Don’t you have them?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you just go look?’
‘We’re having trouble locating them,’ he eventually admitted. ‘Looks like they might have been labelled wrong. We’re sure they’ll turn up eventually.’
I asked Maggie about the moment she connected what had happened to Christine with the items under her cushion, when she realised that they belonged to the rapist and that, at some point, she had likely been his intended target.
I wanted her to say that she felt like she had done all she could, because even though she had reported the find it hadn’t prevented Christine’s attack from happening. I wanted her to say this to absolve me of my failure to do the same. Perhaps I could relieve myself of some of my own guilt about saying nothing if I knew that saying something wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.
Maggie didn’t answer immediately. I took a sip of my coffee to give her a chance to think. When I looked at her again, I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.
‘Relief,’ she said quietly. ‘What I felt was relief.’
Jim could still smell it, that vomit. The acrid sourness of it. And the confusing, foreign heat of it against his skin. It had been yellow-green and stringy, flecked with orange bits. It hadn’t just soiled the sheets but the entire affair. He knew he’d never be able to replay the memory of that night without recalling the smell too. It was forever ruined. There seemed no point in continuing so he’d just got up and left.
Even though he could’ve killed her.
Should’ve, seeing as she was going to end up doing it herself anyway.
If only that other stupid woman, her neighbour, hadn’t found the knife and rope hours before he was planning to return to her house and use them on her.
At least he’d learned something that night: no socks. A neck tie across the jaw and knotted at the back of the head, forcing the mouth to remain open, was better at keeping them quiet and also removed the gagging risk. The penultimate time, at the house in Westpark, he’d used the man’s own tie. He hadn’t killed anybody yet and no one even knew that the Nothing Man existed – that was all to come, still. The couple probably thought he was a burglar. He needed to let them know that he wasn’t; that this was going to be something much, much worse. He wanted to see the terror in their eyes, feel it in their shaking limbs.
So he stood in their bedroom door and pulled a tie from his pocket, a distinctive one whose design was made up of little cartoons of brand-name chocolate bars. It belonged to the man. They knew as soon as they saw it that this couldn’t be the first time he’d been in their house. The crying and shaking had started immediately.
He’d always been especially proud of that.
– 4 –
Night Terrors
I will never find the house on my own, I’m warned, so Patricia Kearns suggests we meet in Fermoy town so she can drive us there. She tells me to park outside the Aldi and look for a red coat and short blonde hair. I see her as soon as I pull in, standing near the entrance, holding a cardboard tray with two takeaway coffee cups. After introductions and me thanking her, again, for doing this, she steers me towards her car, a Dacia Duster the colour of glazed terracotta. ‘It takes the whole team,’ she tells me, patting the chassis fondly. Patricia has three kids, ranging in age from eleven to nineteen. She apologises for the state of the car and I wave a hand, telling her I’ll take no notice, but when I pull open the door I see an interior covered in crumbs and empty food packets, and pulling my seatbelt across my chest leaves my fingers feeling sticky.
Patricia drives fast and in a couple of minutes we’ve cleared Fermoy and are hurtling down narrow country roads lined with hedgerows that twist relentlessly. At first, I try to keep up with the turns, mentally drawing a map of the route, ready to assure myself that actually I could have found the house myself if only she’d let me try. But soon I realise that even if I were to come back a second time, I’d have no hope. I lose track after the third left turn and we still have a crossroads and two forks to navigate. There are no street signs out here and every stretch of road looks like the one before. I give up and look out the window at the fields rushing by.
It takes ten minutes to get to the house. It’s on a stretch of road that dead-ends where five detached houses sit in a row – Patricia says the land all belonged to one farmer who chopped it into plots and sold them off – but she doesn’t need to tell me it’s the last one. Only it has the look of a sprawling American McMansion, with multiple roof levels and a double-height window at its centre through which you can see the smooth curve of spiral stairs. There are no cars parked outside and all the window blinds are down. ‘They’re in Florida,’ Patricia says as she cuts the engine. She’s parked right outside the gates. ‘But Jean said we’re okay to have a walk around.’ She means outside, around the perimeter.