‘There’s a problem, though,’ I told Bernadette. ‘With the details.’ I explained that, all my life, I’d done what I could to avoid them, not just when it came to my own family’s attack but the other ones, too. So I knew only the broadest of strokes. What had elbowed its way in, despite my best efforts. What I had found out by accident. And as for the night itself, I’d been locked in a bathroom. I’d heard sounds and I witnessed the aftermath, but beyond that …
I was saying I wasn’t sure I could handle knowing exactly what had happened that night and the four other nights the Nothing Man had struck, but Bernadette misunderstood me. She thought I was asking her how I would go about finding out. She’d reached for the phone on her desk.
‘One of our crime writers uses a retired Garda inspector as a consultant,’ she said to me, while on the other end of the line, someone’s phone rang once, twice, three times. ‘She’s a friend of mine. She’ll ask him who we need to speak to, and we’ll get ourselves a meeting with them ASAP.’
All I knew about Edward Healy in advance of our first meeting was that he was a detective and the man I was supposed to talk to if I wanted to know more about the Nothing Man. We arranged to meet in Lafayette’s, the café off the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Cork, early one Tuesday morning. The night before, I googled images of him. The first picture that came up showed him posing proudly with a medal at the end of some race. He had reddish hair and a spray of freckles across his nose. I recognised him instantly: Edward Healy was Freckled Man. This wouldn’t be our first meeting. Fourteen years after that, we were having our second.
Ed – that’s what I call him now and it feels weird to refer to him as anything else – looks like the kind of airline pilot who comes out from the cockpit to say goodbye to his passengers as they deplane: friendly and approachable, but also confident and authoritative. He is boyishly handsome. Colleagues joke that it’s younger he’s getting and based on the pictures I’ve seen, I’d tend to agree. A health scare around his fortieth birthday six years ago forced him to give up drinking, smoking and – in his words – eating things that tasted good. Now he spends his free time hiking, cooking dishes from vegetarian cookbooks and, when he can, sea-swimming in Fountainstown. He does not look like he has danced with darkness. He does not look like the leading authority on the Nothing Man. But he has and he is. And he is more than that. He is the Nothing Man’s nemesis.
This wasn’t just another case for Ed. It was the case, his obsession. The one ‘unsolved’ all conscientious detectives have that haunt them, that keep them awake at night. Ed had even stopped his ascent through the ranks because to go any further than sergeant would’ve taken him away from this case. He had paid for his obsession with his personal life. After sacrificing so much, Ed made a vow to himself that he wouldn’t stop until he found the Nothing Man, and he hadn’t. But for nearly fifteen years there hadn’t been as much as a crumb to add to the case files. Ed had only another ten to go until he’d be forced to retire. Time was running out.
I didn’t know all this that morning in the café, but I do remember Ed’s eagerness for meeting me being a little off-putting. He remembered asking me questions at the hospital and made polite enquiries as to how I’d been since, how my life had been. He’d read my essay and commended me on it. He welcomed the idea of me writing a book and assured me he would help in any way he could. But our conversation was underpinned by an anxiousness, a palpable impatience on his part. He was desperate to talk to me about back then, about that night. The hope I might have something for him was coming off him in waves. As soon as I could, I ripped off the Band-Aid: I told him I was here to get information from him, that I didn’t have any I could give.
‘I don’t remember it,’ I explained. ‘What I mean is, I don’t have anything to remember. I was in the bathroom. I mostly just heard sounds. And what I saw afterwards … I know very little. That’s why I wanted to talk to you: I want to know what happened. In my house and the others. Or at least, I think I do.’
It was mid-morning and only a few tables in the café were occupied. Ed suggested we continue our conversation at Anglesea Street, the Garda district HQ, which was only a few minutes’ walk away across the river. He had a small office there, he said, commandeered for his unofficial one-man cold-case unit that only ever looked at the one cold case.
It was a grey, cloudy day and the sky felt heavy with threat. I was warming to Ed but there was a current of doubt running through me that kept me from feeling wholly at ease. Was this a mistake? Was I going to find out something I didn’t want to know, that I wouldn’t be able to forget? Was I wasting Ed’s time? Perhaps sensing my unease, he asked me what my aim was for the book. I could state that clearly: I wanted to catch him with it. I repeated what Bernadette had said about armchair sleuths and he nodded in agreement. Someone must know something, I said. If they read the book and took in the extent of what he had done, the hurt he’d caused, how dangerous he is … Well, maybe their conscience would make them pick up the phone and call the Gardaí.
Ed winced at this and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. He put a hand out to stop me and we paused by a bench on the quay that looked across the greenish tinge of the River Lee to the grandeur of the City Hall on the opposite bank.
‘I will tell you now,’ he said gently, ‘even if we identify him, and find him, and bring him in, without a confession it will be impossible to charge him.’ The Nothing Man had committed five awful acts and taken lives during two of them, but he had done it all without leaving any trace of himself behind. There was no physical evidence to pin anyone to the crimes. ‘TV makes people think that if we have fingerprints we can just run them through some supercomputer and match them to the owner, but that’s fiction. We need to have collected the match, too. In this case, we don’t even have a set to test. And that’s true of all kinds of evidence in this case. DNA. Fibres. Witness statements. Vehicle movements, even. Licence plates, tyre tracks, that sort of thing. Even if someone calls us with a name and we can drive straight to the guy’s house and pick him up, how will we prove that we have the right guy? What can we check him against? If it wasn’t for the phone calls, we wouldn’t even know the same guy had done all five crimes.’
‘You’re telling me I shouldn’t bother,’ I said, defeated.
‘I’m telling you that if your goal is to find out who this man is, that may well be achievable. But you might have to make do with that. The chances of being able to get him convicted and punished for what he did are about on a par with winning the Lottery. So if it has to be that, if that’s all that would be enough …’ Ed sighed. ‘I want you to do this but I must tell you if that’s what you need, you almost certainly won’t get it. Not unless he confesses, which, after all these years and no physical evidence, he’d be very unlikely to do. And that’s if we find him.’
I told him I understood, but my insides were churning. I’d always assumed the problem was that the Gardaí hadn’t found him, that finding him would automatically mean he’d get put away. Losing that as the compass point I was striding towards left me rudderless and lost, but I told Ed I wanted to keep moving forward. I didn’t know what else to do for now.