‘Well, let’s hope there’s no migraines today, eh?’ Steve winked at Jim. ‘Or for the rest of this week.’
Back in reality, Jim just glared at Steve’s back while he walked away.
Jim turned and faced his reflection in the nearest freezer cabinet, then pressed his forehead to the cool glass.
He felt shaky and light-headed. He needed to calm down. He was letting himself get too worked up.
And the likes of Steve were decidedly unworthy of it.
He started back towards the entrance to the department store. He often positioned himself there for fifteen-, thirty-minute blocks throughout his shift, as that was the most effective place for security personnel to be seen. Standing there made him a deterrent, but also put him within feet of the security sensors. As an added bonus it was a great place to look like he was working when he wasn’t at all.
But Jim didn’t make it that far.
At the start of Grocery, just after the flowers and magazines but before the fruit and veg, there was a concession selling hot drinks. It had three high-top tables where people could perch, drink their coffee and crane their necks to stare up at a TV screen hung from the wall. It was permanently muted but sometimes showed subtitles.
This morning, the TV was tuned to one of those shows where a couple sat on a couch and interviewed people Jim never recognised sitting on another couch alongside. The interviewee was a blonde woman, late twenties or early thirties, pretty despite her attempts not to be. She had whiteblonde hair shorn very short, cut with jagged edges, and she had draped her thin frame in some kind of voluminous black thing. She was missing the heavy TV make-up that made everyone’s faces look like they belonged on wax dolls but in truth, she could’ve done with it, because there were purple shadows under her eyes and she was so pale she looked ill. This was all compounded by the fact that she or someone else had swept a bright red colour across her lips but not very neatly, and on a 42-inch high-definition flat-screen TV, you could see it had become smudged and was bleeding past the borders of her lips.
It was Eve Black.
Jim knew this not because he recognised her – he hadn’t seen her since she was twelve years old, and only then for a few moments – but because of the words at the bottom of the screen. THE NOTHING MAN MURDERED MY FAMILY: AUTHOR EVE BLACK ON HER NEW TRUE-CRIME MEMOIR.
He watched as it disappeared, then Eve did too.
She was replaced by a floating family photograph, grainy and slightly out of focus: mother, father and two blonde girls holding hands.
Then they were gone, replaced by a travelling shot of Eve and another woman walking towards a house, their backs to the cameras. Eve stopped and pointing to something in the middle distance.
The subtitles were off. Jim had no idea what they were saying.
Back to the studio.
A shot of the presenters, their faces pinched with seriousness.
On to Eve.
She nodded and then started talking, moving her hands.
The longer Jim looked at her, the more he could see the face of that little girl in her features.
He should’ve seen this coming. He’d been so focused on the book, on his reading it, that he’d failed to think about the bigger picture – the far worse, much more pressing problem at hand: other people reading it. The story in the newspaper was one thing. It was a Cork newspaper, and anyway who read those any more? This was a TV show. It was national.
Now the female presenter was holding up a copy of the book. Jim could guess what she was saying because a graphic had appeared on screen with times and dates.
Tonight, Eve Black was going to be signing copies of her book at a store in Dublin city centre. Tomorrow, she was going to be doing the same at a store here, in Cork.
The very same store where Jim had purchased his copy of The Nothing Man.
He immediately decided that he would go see her.
– 5 –
Westpark
There are some terrible places where rooms wait ready for children.
The one they took me to that night was small and uncomfortably bright, harshly lit from above by fluorescent strips. There were no windows unless you counted the little pane in the door through which I could see the reflective vest of the Garda who was standing outside, a neon-yellow sentry. The furniture looked like the window display from a charity shop: two saggy couches, a coffee table covered in water rings and a mahogany floor lamp whose shade had a fringe of tassels. Posters hung on the walls, the kind you see at the cinema, all for kids’ movies a few years old. A red bin sat in one corner, filled with plastic action figures, dolls with knotted hair and battered board-game boxes that you just knew didn’t have all the necessary pieces. For years I thought this room was in a Garda station but I’ve recently learned it was in Cork University Hospital, a place Corkonians still tend to call by a shortening of its original name, the Regional.
Everything about that room was deeply wrong. The fact that we were there at all, for a start. Nannie was with me, her hair loose around her shoulders, out of its neat bun for the first time in my life. She was mostly staring into space. Another woman was there too, a social worker, who I can remember almost nothing about. She was just a blur of grey in the corner. It was so late it was early, probably around six in the morning. I was wearing borrowed pyjamas with my feet in adult-sized socks. The socks were the heavy wool kind and itchy. No one was talking and there was no noise to distract us from that fact. I wanted to ask what was happening to Anna and my parents – where they were now, how they were, what had happened in our house – but I also didn’t want to know the answers. That room was an airlock between my life as I knew it and my life as I feared it would be from now on. So long as I was in there, I could stay suspended between the two. So long as we didn’t leave, it hadn’t happened. Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.
Eventually the door opened and two people came in, a man and a woman. They were in plain clothes and looked like schoolteachers. As they spoke to Nannie about being very sorry and having to ask questions and my well-being being their priority, I began to hear a strange noise, a kind of rushing in my ears. It was as if I was getting slowly submerged in water while they remained standing on the surface. Everyone’s voice got muffled, then distant, then became utterly indistinct as I sank. I was drowning and I had no way of raising the alarm.
The man came and crouched down in front of me. He had reddish hair and freckles across his nose. He was so close that when he spoke I could feel the warmth of his breath tickling the skin on my face. But I couldn’t make out any of his words.
Detective Garda Sergeant Edward Healy can tell you the exact day, time and place he decided to become a guard. It was 14 August 1980, just after nine o’clock in the evening. He was eight years old and sitting in his parents’ living room in Ballysheedy, Co. Limerick. Two uniformed Gardaí were side by side on the couch in identical poses: elbows on knees, hats in hands, buttocks perched right on the edge of their seats. Their black boots were very shiny. His mother was standing by the fireplace, having refused to sit. Tears were streaming down her face. A few minutes earlier, when she’d heard the knock, she’d rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘Finally,’ because she thought it was Eddie Senior who was late home for dinner and hadn’t called to tell her why. The uniformed men gently explained that there’d been an accident on the quays in Limerick City. One car had careened into another, forcing them both into the river. There’d been no survivors. The driver of the first car was drunk. The driver of the second was Healy’s father.