There was a noise, a whoosh, and then warm breath against her ear.
‘You fucking bitch, I told you not to move.’
Linda had no idea how long he’d been there, in the room, right beside her. She hadn’t even heard him come back up the stairs.
That was the last thing she’d remember. Because then he pushed her head against the tiles with such force that a spider-web of fractures exploded across her skull, one of which cracked so violently that it ejected a tiny shard of bone which lodged itself in the soft tissue of her brain.
Linda would lay in that bath, slowly dying, for the next thirty-five hours.
After four of those hours, Johnnie Murphy and two of his men would arrive at the house just like they did every morning. They had keys and let themselves in. Nothing struck them as being wrong. Linda was there to greet them most mornings but not every one; they just assumed she was out somewhere. When she hadn’t appeared by the end of the day, Johnnie left a note on the kitchen table asking her to call him about some light fittings that had failed to arrive.
Twenty-seven hours in, when Johnnie let himself into the house for the second morning in a row, the note was still there but Linda wasn’t. Now he did begin to think that something was up. He walked through the house, upstairs and down, calling her name. The door to the master bedroom was open, the curtains still drawn in the room beyond. He poked his head in. The bed was unmade but there was no sign of Linda. The door to the en suite was open too but from where Johnnie was standing he couldn’t see Linda’s body in the bath. He assumed that because the door was open, she wasn’t in there. He called Conor’s mobile phone but it was after 11 p.m. in California and Conor, an early riser, was already asleep in bed. Six more hours would pass before he’d hear Johnnie’s voice-message.
Thirty-three hours in, Conor tried calling his wife’s phone. It went straight to voicemail. He then called Johnnie, who told him he hadn’t seen Linda in a day and a half. Next, Conor tried the numbers he had for friends and relatives who lived locally, who might have seen Linda or even be with her now. No one had or was. Feeling the first ripples of panic, Conor called his parents. They were at a wedding in Gorey, Co. Wexford, at least two and a half hours’ drive away from the house in Fermoy, but his father assured him they’d get straight in the car and head to the house now. Before they did, Conor’s father called a buddy of his whose son was now a Garda sergeant based out of North Cork’s district headquarters, which happened to be in Fermoy. Sergeant Brendan Byrne would later admit that he’d rolled his eyes as he’d listened to his father going on about Conor O’Neill’s wife going AWOL while he was off being some big-shot in San Francisco, and had probably said something like, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ But despite being nearly forty years old and a sergeant, Byrne still felt uneasy about not doing what his father told him to, so he agreed to call out to the house. After he hung up he decided he was too busy to bother with it and directed a junior member of his team, a newly qualified Garda who’d been on the job less than six months, to go there instead.
Thirty-five hours in, having repeatedly got lost on the drive there, Garda Patricia Kearns finally arrived at the O’Neill house. After talking to Johnnie for a few minutes, she commenced a thorough search of the house. She was the one who found Linda in the bathtub.
This delay not only exponentially increased Linda’s suffering but also handicapped the investigation into her attack right from the very start. For a day and a half before blue and white Garda tape got tied to the house’s front gate, the scene lay unpreserved, getting trampled on, disturbed and repeatedly walked through. Even with elimination samples from everyone working at the house, the collection of DNA and other physical evidence was seriously compromised. And there was only one witness who, having suffered a traumatic brain injury, couldn’t speak.
For several weeks, the investigation floundered. Then, in early June, Linda had recovered enough to be able to provide investigators with a short statement. The Gardaí seized upon one detail from it and fixated on it with a laser-like focus: the handgun.
This was Ireland, a nation policed by unarmed officers, in early 2001. South of the border and outside the M50 motorway, which ring-fenced the areas in which Dublin’s criminal gangs jostled each other for supremacy, handguns were not commonplace. They were anomalies. Ordinary decent criminals didn’t have them. They couldn’t get them. Linda’s attack was, in fact, the first sexual assault in the county of Cork where the attacker reportedly had one. It was all the Gardaí needed to tie the crime with the original owner of the house.
The coincidence of a crime happening in Richard Pike’s former home had never sat well with the detectives assigned to the case, and now it didn’t have to sit with them at all. A connection felt logical. Plausible. Comfortable. They threw themselves into following it as their primary line of inquiry and, quite quickly, it became their only one. Now the evidence was written in a language they could understand. This wasn’t some random monster who was out prowling the Irish countryside looking for women to violate. This was gangland, organised crime, your garden-variety criminal activity. They knew what to do with that.
Several known associates of Richard Pike, including the evidently law-abiding son who’d lived at the house previously, were hauled in for questioning, along with the man himself. None of them gave investigators anything except soon-to-be-dead ends but a rumour that Pike had hidden large amounts of cash in the wall cavities of the house stayed alight for a time, with Gardaí working on the assumption that someone who knew it was there had been watching the house, waiting for an opportunity to go and get it, but once inside had changed their mind and assaulted Linda instead. No evidence of this was ever found. Two local men with sexual assault and domestic violence convictions were questioned too, but those lines of inquiry eventually fizzled out just like the rest of them. By the time Linda was discharged from a rehabilitation facility six months after the attack, Gardaí had made no progress except for a list of men they could confidently say hadn’t entered the house in Fermoy that night.
Conor and Linda were left broken and destroyed. She was dealing with the horrors in her head and the injuries to her body while he was drowning in the guilt of pushing the move to Fermoy and then his leaving her there alone. And they both had to deal with the phone calls.
Linda had waived her right to anonymity after the attack. It seemed pointless to try to preserve it when the entire population of Fermoy and probably most of the surrounding area could tell you it was Linda O’Neill, Conor’s wife, just back from America, you know the two … who’d been attacked. Moreover, by the time she returned home from hospital months later, she thought a couple of media interviews was the only way to reignite interest in a case the Garda seemed to have given up on. Unfortunately it just brought out the crazies.
The landline began to ring at all hours of the day and night. A psychic who knew where Linda’s attacker lived. Religious nuts who said this wouldn’t have happened if Linda and Conor were regular Mass goers. Other men, threatening to do the same. And hang-ups. Mostly hang-ups. Silence or heavy breathing on the line for a second, then an abrupt dial tone. These were the most innocuous and the most likely to be perpetrated by idiot teenagers. Conor wanted to disconnect the line but Linda had herself convinced that someone might call with actionable information. In the meantime, Gardaí advised them to log all these nuisance calls, but neither of them saw the point of including the silent ones or hang-ups.