I collect them and try them on, but so far not one of them has fit. Not completely. What does it feel like to lose both your parents and your younger sister to a violent crime when you were just twelve years old and the first person to come upon the bodies? Who has written about that? Who can give me the words? Because in all these years I’ve never quite been able to find them. If pushed, I’d say I’d felt numb. Empty. Alone and lost. I’d drag out all the usual suspects, the standard metaphors, which, I’ve noticed, are all weirdly meteorological: an earthquake, a fog, rolling waves. I could talk about how, when Nannie and I were hiding out in Spanish Point, my grief felt like the effort required to live your entire life with your back pressed against bulging closet doors because if you move from them and they open, everything will come spilling out.
Jim yawned.
He had only just come out to the shed. Noreen had gone to bed early and had been sleeping so soundly when he went upstairs at eleven that he’d chanced coming straight back down. But he was already yawning. Maybe Noreen was right. Maybe he needed to ditch the reading for the evening and get a full night’s sleep instead.
Or maybe it was just the reading material that was the problem.
Jim scanned the rest of the page, then the two pages overleaf. More grief and loss and feeling sad. Her grandmother feeling sad but pretending not to. Having to lie and say her parents were in a car crash when she started school. Feeling sad about that – and guilty.
He yawned again.
Tonight he’d had the foresight to make a flask of tea before coming outside and he set down the book now so he could swallow a few mouthfuls of it.
Jim was just over halfway through The Nothing Man. That wasn’t quite far enough to feel confident about what exactly it was he was walking into tomorrow night. He needed to stay awake, to read as much as he could. He needed to get to the part where Eve wrote about what had happened in her family home that night, with Jim. He needed to know what she remembered, or claimed she did.
He picked the book back up, found the page where he’d left off and then flicked ahead.
Enough with the grief already. It didn’t interest him and it wasn’t important. He could skip it.
Jim found the first page of the next chapter and started to read on.
– 7 –
Blind Witness
In early July 2015, Professor Eglin arranged for me to meet a friend of his named Bernadette O’Brien. She was an editor at Iveagh Press, a publishing house. Since the ‘The Girl Who’ article had gone viral, I’d been fielding offers for all sorts – books, a primetime television interview, a podcast, something terrifying called life rights – but I was at sea in a strange world and had asked Eglin for his help. He’d suggested I meet with Bernadette.
Iveagh Press was a series of small rooms over a café on Dawson Street called Bestseller, a play on its previous incarnation as the headquarters of the National Bible Society of Ireland. I arrived early and was directed to wait in a room with a large bay window that I recognised from outside, a huge conference table and walls lined with books. The air smelled faintly of coffee even before some underling brought me a cup of it. As I sipped, I started to have second thoughts.
Was I really doing this? Seriously considering writing a book? How did I expect to be able to do that when writing two thousand words of an article had been such an ordeal? I tried to imagine a world in which my story and his were bound together between glossy covers and stacked deep on shelves with price-tags on. I couldn’t. I looked through the open door. The reception desk was deserted. I could just get up and leave. I put down my coffee, pushed back my chair. I should leave. But then Bernadette came in, eyes bright and arms outstretched, and I decided the polite thing to do was to stay and hear her out.
She had just celebrated her sixtieth birthday but looked five or even ten years younger than that, with a razor-cut bob of jet black hair and thin, delicate gold things dripping from her wrists and ears. That day she was wearing black leggings and a huge knitted jumper that must have been several sizes too big but looked, on her, somehow trendy and fashionable. I was surprised to see that she was walking around the itchy grey office carpet in her bare feet, showing off a shiny gloss of red on her toes that distracted me. Even though she knew exactly who I was and what I’d been through, she didn’t tread on eggshells. She talked to me like I was a normal person. I liked her instantly.
If I were to write a book, she explained, it wouldn’t be the first about the Nothing Man. There was already a book out there about him, with a title as imaginative as this one: The Case of the Nothing Man. It had been written by a journalist named Stephen Ardle and published back in October 2002. I’d never read it but Bernadette had, and she said it offered little in the way of new information. Ardle had been a crime reporter, primarily for the Irish Examiner, and the book was essentially a collection of the articles he’d written about the case in real time. (Ardle passed away in 2012.) Since then the genre had moved on. So now, I had the opportunity to write the definitive book on the case woven through with my own story.
My facial expression must have been screaming my misgivings.
‘Think of it this way,’ Bernadette said. ‘Yes, you’ll have to open a vein and let whatever comes out dry on the page. You’ll have to relive all this. But just once. Then it’s done. And writing can be very therapeutic. It may help you. And while you must tell the truth, you don’t need to tell us all of it. You can hold back as much or as little as you like, so long as what you do put on the page feels like the whole story to the reader. But here’s the kicker: people don’t just read true-crime books now, they study them. They go looking for more. They listen to podcasts and meet up at conventions and trade theories’ – Bernadette mimed typing on a computer keyboard – ‘online until all hours of the night. Armies of armchair sleuths. Someone has to know who this man is. People change. Relationships end. Consciences grow. A book about the case will renew interest. Jog a few memories. A book about this case by you will get everyone’s attention. It might move things forward. We might very well end up finding out who he is – and where he is. This could be what gets the creep arrested. Because at this point, my dear, it’s not going to be the Gardaí.’
I don’t doubt that our mutual friend had prepped her to say this. Eglin knew that the idea of catching the Nothing Man was what had persuaded me to publish the original essay and now Bernadette was dangling the same hypothetical carrot in order to get me to agree to write a book. But that didn’t make what she was saying untrue.
On that day, my parents and Anna had been dead for fourteen years and no one had ever been punished for it. Whenever I thought about that I felt a white-hot rage bubbling up inside of me, and I had to clench my fists and bite down on my lip to stop it from spilling out in tears or words or something worse, and wait for it to pass. But what if I used that rage instead? Channelled it into the courage I’d need to turn and face the past head-on, examine it closely, write this book? And what if I could make it go away entirely? What if I didn’t need to feel it any more, because he’d finally been caught, and instead I could think about how he was going to spend the rest of his days locked in a tiny dark cell somewhere where he had nothing to do except think about what he’d done and rot away and die?