Noreen arrived into the kitchen.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ Jim said, ‘I’m doing longer days for the rest of this week. Someone’s out sick. They need me to stay until five.’
She paused in the doorway and blinked at him.
‘Well.’ She pulled her grubby robe around her, the one that made her look even fatter than her clothes did, and went to the kettle. ‘Good morning to you, too.’
She was behind him now but he could tell what she doing by the sounds.
Taking down two cups. Getting teabags from the tin on the counter. Milk from the fridge.
‘You were up early,’ she said after a while. ‘Why?’
The water in the kettle started to bubble.
‘Because I was awake’. Jim turned a page of the newspaper. ‘So I said I might as well get up. No point lying there just staring at the ceiling.’
‘What time was that?’
‘A while ago.’
Jim turned another page. He hadn’t been registering anything in front of him except for the shape of the headlines and the size of the photographs, but now the words NOTHING MAN suddenly jumped into focus.
For a second he forgot where he was, who he was, that Noreen was there. He leaned over the paper and traced the headline with his finger.
NOTHING MAN CASE REOPENED IN NEW BOOK.
The headline was above a picture of the family in Bally’s Lane, one of the front of the house in Fermoy and that goddamn pencil sketch again – and a thumbnail-sized cover of the book itself. Speedily, he scanned the text. The case that terrorised Corkonians nearly twenty years ago is the focus of a new book … sole survivor of the Nothing Man’s worst attack, Eve Black, who was just twelve years old at the time … Detective Inspector Edward Healy welcomed the book and said he hopes it will reignite interest in the case … ‘He’s still out there, yes, but we’re still looking.’
A cup of tea was hovering in the air in front of him.
‘Finally,’ he said, taking the cup from Noreen so quickly that some of the liquid spilled out and on to the newspaper. He turned another page and leaned over to look with feigned interest at a story about fishing quotas off the Irish coast.
He was waiting for her to move off, to get her tea and go back upstairs with it like she did most mornings.
But she lingered, stayed standing behind him.
‘I think that’s a couple of days old, that paper,’ she said. ‘Katie brought it with her last night.’
The shopping centre was busier than it had been the day before, but that still didn’t make it busy. Aside from a car that had been abandoned by the loading dock and a handbag that had been reported lost but was quickly found in the Ladies’ dressing rooms, Jim had nothing much to do except count down the minutes until his shift was over and he could resume reading The Nothing Man.
While Noreen was in the shower, he’d moved the book from the shed to his car, where it was now once again locked in the glove compartment. His plan was to drive somewhere after work, maybe down to the Marina, where he could park up and read for a few hours without drawing attention or being disturbed. He could do it because as far as Noreen was concerned, he’d be at the centre until five at least.
In the meantime, he was doomed to be excruciatingly bored. This morning’s minutes seemed to be passing by at the speed of sludge.
Until he saw the woman in the trench coat.
Her hair was pulled back today and she was wearing a skirt instead of trousers, but it was the same coat and she was carrying the same bag. He was sure it was her. She must live locally or work nearby or both. She was walking through the fresh produce section of Grocery, holding a wire basket. All that was in it so far was a bag of apples.
The last time he’d seen her, twenty-four hours ago, she’d been heading for the tills with a copy of The Nothing Man. Had she actually bought it? Had she started reading it yet? How much did she know about what he’d done?
How would she feel if she knew the Nothing Man was standing just a few feet away from her right now, watching her, studying her?
When she set off in the direction of the frozen food, Jim – on impulse – went too. He kept his distance and made sure to make it look like he was just patrolling the store, but his eyes never left her.
Today the coat was buttoned up, its belt wrapped tightly around her waist, revealing the lines of her body. He watched as she filled her basket with a bottle of wine, two microwavable meals and a four-pack of toilet roll.
Did those choices indicate that she lived alone? Did she ever come in here on her way home after work? If she did, could he follow her there? What would he do to her in the dark?
What would he like to do?
And would he still be physically able to do it?
‘Just the man I was looking for.’
Steve O’Reilly had stepped in front of Jim, blocking his view of the woman. His hair was looking even more thick with sticky gel than usual and standing as he was, with his hands on his hips, exposed the fact that he was wearing cufflinks.
He was the manager in a low-cost department store and he was coming to work with cufflinks on. How unbearably pathetic.
Jim almost couldn’t stand to look at the man.
‘What happened to you yesterday?’ Steve asked.
Jim put his hands on his own hips, mirroring Steve’s stance.
‘Migraine,’ he said.
‘Migraine,’ Steve repeated.
The two men stared at each other hard.
‘And what did you do about that?’
Jim feigned confusion. ‘Do about it?’
‘Do you have a doctor’s note or …?’
‘I just went to bed. In a dark room.’
‘You just went to bed? In a dark room?’
Repeating everything back but phrased as a question: An Amateur’s Interrogation Technique, chapter 1. Jim refused to respond to it.
‘No painkillers?’ Steve raised his eyebrows. ‘For a migraine?’
His radio beeped. He lifted it off his belt and said into it, ‘Steve here, go ahead.’ After a squawk of static, a tinny voice said something about a problem with the computer at the customer service desk. ‘I’ll be right there.’ He looked Jim right in the eye and added, deadpan, ‘Over.’
The next sound to come from the radio was the sound of a short, sharp laugh and three words that were, in contrast to what had come before, mercilessly distinct.
‘Copy that, Jim.’
Even tinny from the speaker on the radio, the sarcasm was easily detected.
Steve grinned triumphantly.
Jim felt his cheeks beginning to burn.
True, no one else said that on the radio around here. But Jim did it because a habit formed over twenty years was difficult to break, and because he was right to. It was an established protocol for ensuring clear radio communication. They could make fun of him all they wanted, but who would have the last laugh here: the intelligent man who’d already had an illustrious career as a member of An Garda Síochána or the idiots stuck working in this dump for minimum wage for the rest of their lives?
Steve was holstering the radio, the smirk having spread into an expression of smug satisfaction.
Jim lurched at the younger man, grabbed Steve’s throat with one hand and pushed a closed fist into his sneering mouth with the other, forcing open the artificially whitened teeth until his fingers felt Steve’s soft palate, and then Jim opened his fingers, flexing and stretching, until he heard the crack of a jawbone, the crunch of a tooth, the scream of someone being made to bear unbearable pain. Just at the point where Steve had taken almost as much pain as a human could, when he felt his skull was breaking open from the inside out, Jim yanked out his fist and used it to smash Steve face-first into the nearest glass door of a freezer cabinet, through it, repeatedly, until his face was pierced all over with shards of broken glass. Then he pulled him back out by his greasy hair and pushed him down the aisle, door to door, rubbing what was left of his face against them, leaving a long smear of Steve’s blood—