There was one more yet to be made. In light of this new information, DI Harris decided that Healy should do a follow-up segment on the next edition of Crimecall, which aired monthly. On the night of 21 September 2001, Healy sat behind a desk on the Crimecall set, sweating under the lights, and explained to the host about connecting the cases with phone calls. An audio recording of Christine Kiernan’s voicemails was played, and a transcript of what Linda O’Neill had heard on the prank call was shown on screen.
Sitting in his student flat in Bishopstown, Tommy O’Sullivan, now a fresher at University College Cork, straightened up when he saw the words on screen. Would you like it if we played another game? He called his mother and told her about the prank call he’d received on New Year’s Eve two weeks before her attack. She confirmed that her attacker had used similar language. Mother and son would meet at Anglesea Street first thing the next morning to report their revelation to the Gardaí.
The world was still reeling from 9/11, still getting up every morning to turn on the news to see if it had really happened, still seeing inexplicable scenes of smouldering ruins broadcast from the heart of Manhattan. But Healy saw none of it. His world had shrunk to the borders of his desk. He knew now that there was no tiger kidnapping gone wrong. No random rapist. No criminal gang come hunting for loot. Instead, there was a faceless monster who had toyed with his victims, lingered around their homes before and after his attacks, and taunted them with phone calls. Who had started with a knife, then got a gun. Who had begun his horror spree with a physical assault and then moved on to rape before graduating to murder. And for all they knew about him, he may as well be a ghost. When a junior member of the team said as much to a journalist friend, a headline containing the moniker ‘The Nothing Man’ appeared for the first time in the press the next day.
Anglesea Street’s regional Garda HQ was next door to Cork’s biggest fire station. A few days after the Nothing Man made his first appearance in the press, Healy was walking its halls when he happened to witness members of the fire brigade’s Hazardous Materials Unit engaged in a training session outside. A special rig had been built behind the station for this purpose: a narrow, hollow square five or six storeys high with stairs on its exterior, a stand-in for a real office building or apartment block. These training sessions happened regularly and Healy had seen them many times before. But on this occasion, as he stood there watching, a word materialised in his mind: practising. That’s what the firefighters were doing – and that’s what had been going on in the Westpark estate, too. Before anyone had moved into those houses, someone had been practising getting in and out of them. Their killer had used the place as his own personal training ground. Healy had never seen that level of pre-meditation before. It unnerved him. It also motivated him.
Thus Detective Sergeant Edward Healy took four hitherto unconnected, unsolved cases – Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan, Linda O’Neill and the double murder of Marie Meara and Martin Connolly – and linked them, advancing Operation Optic more than any other single member of the force. He was the one to identify that a serial attacker was at work in Cork city and county. He stopped thinking about resigning, or moving to another city, or going back to college to study something else. He could only think about catching this man.
Detective Sergeant Edward Healy felt alive again. My mother, father and sister only had a week left to live.
Back in that awful room in the hospital on the night of my family’s attack, the man with the reddish hair and freckles on his nose was crouched down in front of me, talking.
I looked into his face and willed myself to pay attention. I could still hear that odd rushing noise in my ears. I wanted my mother. I wanted to hear a knock on the door and look up and see her poking her head in, saying, ‘Is Eve in— Oh, there you are. Come on!’ But instead the door stayed closed and the man kept talking.
Gradually, a few words began to get through.
Remember … Telephone … Anna.
‘Where is she?’ I said, surfacing suddenly. ‘Is she okay?’
Freckled Man looked relieved and moved to sit beside me. When he spoke again it was very quietly, as if he was telling me a secret. He called me Evelyn. He said Anna was very, very sick but she was in hospital and the doctors and nurses were looking after her. It was an explanation for someone much younger than me and I bristled with anger. I was twelve. I wasn’t a child. I wanted to shout that at him.
He said that after I had some sleep, we’d need to talk about what had happened back at the house. I stayed perfectly still, working to keep my face blank, my whole body tense with terror. Because I couldn’t talk about it. It was taking all I had to keep it locked away inside my head. Every so often an image would break free – Anna’s limp hand hanging off the side of her bed; a spray of red on the wallpaper in my parents’ room; the angle of my father’s head as he lay at the bottom of the stairs – and I’d physically jolt, whipping my head to the side as if it wasn’t a memory but something real right in front of me, and I had the option of shutting my eyes and turning my head away.
Freckled Man said there were two questions he had to ask me now because they were so very important. Just two questions and then Nannie and I could leave and get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow I’d even be able to visit Anna.
‘What about my parents?’ I asked.
He smiled with his mouth closed. Later, I would look back on this and catch the pity on his face.
‘Them too,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’
I felt a stab of jealousy. ‘Are they with Anna?’
‘Just two questions, Evelyn.’ Freckled Man lightly tapped my knee. ‘All right?’
I nodded.
The first question was if I knew anything about prank phone calls, if I could remember anything strange like someone ringing our house lately but then hanging up without saying anything, or maybe I’d heard my parents talking about something like that …? What I knew about prank calls came from kids’ movies. They were funny. They were harmless. They were jokes. In my head, there was no path that could connect such a thing to what had happened in our house. Why was he asking me about that? I thought Freckled Man must be mad. I told him no.
The next question was the most important one, he said. The man who’d been in our house tonight, the stranger who’d hurt my parents and Anna – he wanted to catch him, to stop him hurting anyone else. But he needed my help. Had I seen this stranger? Could I say how tall he was, or what he was wearing? Or perhaps I’d heard his voice? I told him no, I hadn’t seen anyone. He asked me if I was sure and I said I was. I could tell he was disappointed, but trying to pretend not to be. He thanked me for answering his questions and said we could go now.
Nannie took my hand and led me out of the room.
I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I’d be sleeping in my own bed, but I was surprised when we didn’t go to Nannie’s house. Instead, she and I were brought to a big, dark hotel. The schoolteacher woman came with us, but not into the room where we’d sleep. I think she said something to Nannie about being right outside.
There were two beds but we both got into the same one. She left the bedside lamps on. I asked what we were going to do in the morning, without clean clothes or my toothbrush, but Nannie didn’t answer. She was silent but I knew she was awake because I could feel her body shaking. I slept in fits and starts, and at some point woke up to see that Nannie had turned over, rolled away from me. I touched a hand to the stretch of pillow she’d vacated. It was cold and damp.