One afternoon, Linda happened to pick up the extension just as Conor lifted the phone downstairs. At first, this one sounded like one of the many they’d already received: there was nothing but heavy breathing on the line. Conor muttered something like, ‘Fuck off,’ and slammed the phone back on the cradle. Linda, still struggling with her hands, wasn’t as quick to do the same, giving the breather time to say, ‘Linda? Is that you?’ And then, after a brief pause, ‘Would you like it if we played another game?’ There was no doubt in her mind. It was him.
Gardaí were able to trace the call. It was made from a public payphone at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, a Gaelic sports stadium in Cork City, three minutes after the final whistle blew in a Munster hurling quarter-final that had seen Limerick beat Cork. During it, more than forty thousand punters were streaming out of the stadium.
Patricia and I walk slowly around the perimeter of the house. There’s not much to see. Different people live here now. Conor and Linda O’Neill were divorced five years after the attack and both have since remarried. Neither of them lives anywhere near Fermoy.
Patricia isn’t a guard any more. She hasn’t been for years. She tells me that what she saw in the O’Neills’ bathroom that day changed her in ways she didn’t appreciate at the time. After her first child was born, she didn’t want to go back to work at all. She felt afraid to. She didn’t want to run the risk of witnessing another scene like that, didn’t want to have to bring it home with her. It felt like a threat of contamination. But she liked the area and the friends she’d made there. For the last seventeen years she’s raised her family and worked part time at various jobs, most recently at a local garden centre.
When I ask her what she saw when she entered the bathroom, Patricia looks disappointed in me. I tell her that I want people to understand how bad he is, this man, how dangerous and vile and violent, because I want readers to get angry about his continued freedom. She nods, thinks for a bit. Then she says, ‘I won’t tell you what I saw. That poor woman has suffered enough indignities. But I will tell you this: when I called it in, I said I had a suspicious death. I couldn’t feel a pulse, but it was more because of what she looked like. The colour of her, the injuries to her face … When I saw Linda O’Neill in that bath, I thought she’d be going from there straight into a body bag.’
Jim woke up with a start, sending his copy of The Nothing Man flying off his lap and on to the floor. He’d been dreaming of the house in Fermoy; of moving through its unfinished rooms; of the woman who’d lived there. Mixed in were his very real memories of standing over her while she tossed and turned in her sleep, breathing on her shower curtain while she stood beneath the stream of hot water on the other side, and listening in the dark to what her husband did to her so that he could do the same, so that she’d know he’d been listening. He was desperate to return, to surrender himself to his dream-memories, but the last wisps of sleep had already darted beyond his reach and—
Was that birdsong?
It was no longer silent outside the shed’s walls. The dawn chorus was warming up. What time was it? Jim pulled the blackout blind away from the window and cursed at the bright sunlight that immediately assaulted his eyes.
His next thought was that his phone was upstairs in the bedroom.
And he’d set an alarm on it.
Jim shoved the book under the seat cushion and left the shed, hurrying around to the front of the house and getting to the front door just as he heard the angry beep-beep-beep coming from upstairs.
His alarm, feet from Noreen’s head. It was set for seven.
He’d spent the entire night in the shed.
As Jim closed the front door, the beeping stopped. Then came the sounds of Noreen hoisting herself out of bed.
Too late.
He went into the kitchen and took a seat, his seat at the head of the dining table. There was a newspaper lying neatly folded on the nearest chair. An issue of the Echo, which covered Cork. Jim grabbed it and put it in front of him, opening it up but not looking at it at all. He took a few deep breaths. He worked to still himself, to stop feeling flustered and hurried and caught out.
Upstairs, a toilet flushed.
He wasn’t panicked so much as annoyed at himself. He didn’t like it when things didn’t go to plan. And there was enough noise in his head right now without adding a barrage of Noreen’s idiotic questions into the mix as well.
Why was he up already? How long had he been up? Why hadn’t he turned off the alarm?
It was enough to drive a man insane.
Everything had been so much easier before, back then. All he had to do was say he was on an operation and that he couldn’t say any more than that. He could disappear from the house for days on end and she wouldn’t raise a single objection, or ask him where he’d been and what he’d been doing there when he got back. She knew what answer she’d get. But these days, things were very different. He had a job that kept him in one location, the Centrepoint Shopping Mall in Douglas, every weekday between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. Centrepoint was only a fifteen-minute drive from their house. Noreen wasn’t the sharpest tool, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She knew if Jim wasn’t at work, he had nowhere else he needed to be.
Their relatives lived hours away and Jim had no interest in either side of the family; a get-together at Christmastime was all he was willing to suffer through, if even that. He would never meet up with any of his old colleagues because he hated them all intensely, and the last thing he wanted to talk about was his time in the Gardaí. Sometimes he wished he’d put more effort into cultivating friends or hobbies, or even just pretending to, so that he could announce he was off on a golf weekend or going out for a couple of hours to meet someone for coffee. But he hadn’t, and it was too late now. He’d never expected there to be a need for it, not at this hour of his life.
But he did need to finish the book. Sooner rather than later. He’d have to think of something.
Heavy steps on the stairs: Noreen on her way down.
She didn’t drive. There was that, at least. She’d always been too nervous to, and Jim made sure she’d only ever got more so by telling her in detail about every horrific accident scene he’d heard a colleague describe. Bodies crushed beyond recognition. Skulls split open like eggshells. Brain matter splattered on tarmac. She occasionally took the bus into town, but most of her life outside of their house was confined to the consecrated acres on which sat their local church, community centre and cemetery. She was a Minister of the Eucharist, a member of the Legion of Mary and helped out twice a week with Meals on Wheels. Then there were the events in aid of various things throughout the year. She was friendly with a few of the other women who did the same, but rarely saw them under other circumstances. The first thing Noreen did every morning was go for a walk around the estate, out on to the road, up to the church, around its perimeter and back again, and as far as Jim knew after that she came home and stayed there.
Shuffling slippered feet in the hall.
Noreen could, theoretically, walk to Centrepoint, but Jim didn’t think she ever had. She was vocal about hating the place. She complained that half the shops in there were closed down and said she preferred to get her groceries from Tesco and Aldi, neither of which were Centrepoint tenants. He’d be very unlucky if she suddenly decided, six months after he’d started working there and possibly years after her last visit, to suddenly go now.