I had never been inside the station at Anglesea Street before that day and was surprised by its interior. From the outside, the building looked like a nondescript, squared-off office block. But it was hiding a light-filled atrium and the bare stone on its floor granted it the respectful hush of a grand cathedral. Ed’s ‘office’ was not like that. It was clearly a storage room for obsolete computer equipment into which a desk had been shoved. There were spreading stains on the ceiling tiles and a dusty, dried-out water dispenser in one corner. The chairs were plastic and mismatched and uncomfortable. Ed got us more coffee but it was, at best, a distant cousin of the substance we’d drunk back in the café.
He reached into a drawer and plonked a thick manila file down on the desk between us. There was a grubby OP OPTIC label stuck on its front. The room felt charged by it, as if the file was emitting some kind of pulse. In my naivety I thought it was the file, the whole thing. In fact, it was just a short summary of the five attacks that Ed kept to hand for easy reference.
Later I would work my way through all the Operation Optic files, boxes and boxes of them, reading through the documents with Ed by my side to explain and contextualise. I would spend endless days in the reference section of the Cork Central Library on the Grand Parade, poring over every published article I could find about the case. I would meet with survivors and listen to them recount their personal horrors in excruciating detail. I would even, eventually, look at some crime-scene photos. But this was the beginning, the first day, and all I could manage was to hold myself together while Ed talked me slowly through sanitised overviews of each of the Nothing Man’s five crimes.
He didn’t yet have permission to share anything with me beyond what had been reported in the press – that would come later from his superintendent who, like Ed, just wanted the guy caught – so he stuck to bullet points for now. His goal at this point was for me to understand what the Nothing Man was and what he had done before he’d arrived at our house that night. He started by saying that what happened at our house was the worst.
He told me about the O’Sullivans on Bally’s Lane in Carrigaline. Christine Kiernan in Covent Court. Linda O’Neill in the house in Fermoy. Marie Meara and Martin Connolly in Westpark. That poor man, trapped under the wheels of his own car, perhaps slowly dying while knowing that, back inside the house, his wife was dying too or was maybe even already dead – when I tried to go to sleep that night, he was all I could think about.
Ed and I had many of the same unanswered questions. Why these people? These houses? What connected them? Ed said they had tried every which way to find a link between the victims, painstakingly going through their lives with fine toothcombs looking for some point of overlap, but they’d always come up empty. He believed that if he found the connection, he would find the man. Cork was a city of half a million that felt much smaller; it was notably unusual that Gardaí had failed to connect any of the victims with each other in any meaningful way. Normally in any random group of Corkonians this size you would find some kind of connection, like two people who went to the same school at the same time or even a familial link. None at all was notably strange.
I mentioned something about our house, the family home in Passage West, and Ed asked me if I’d ever been back there. I said I’d been there that morning, that I was staying there while I was down in Cork. I had never sold it and since the long-term tenants had moved out a couple of years ago, I hadn’t replaced them. Instead, I’d started occasionally staying there myself.
‘I know it sounds strange,’ I said, ‘but I kind of like it. It’s the place where we were all together. Aside from one night, it’s all good memories. I feel close to them when I’m there.’
When I told people this, I invariably got the same reaction: disgust. Staying in the house where my family were slaughtered? What kind of sicko would want to do that?
But Ed had a different one.
He asked me if we could go there. Together. Now.
Jim was wide awake now.
– 8 –
That Night
Passage West, population: 6,000, is a port town on the west bank of Cork Harbour. Coming from the city, our house forced you to avoid the town altogether, taking a right on to our lane before you’d even reached the WELCOME TO PASSAGE WEST sign erected by the Tidy Towns committee. We lived in a dormer bungalow that had been extended by, essentially, building a facsimile of the original house and them sticking the two of them together, end-to-end but at an angle, giving the building an odd V-shape. We had four acres, with the house sitting right in its centre at the end of a loose-gravel drive.
I had offered to drive us there but Ed said he’d take his car, and then I offered to lead him before realising that he knew very well where it was. We arrived within minutes of each other. He was surprised, I think, to see how untouched it was, how unchanged it had been in all these years. That was unintentional. I wasn’t building a mausoleum, I just hadn’t got around to changing anything yet.
I surprised myself by saying, ‘Let’s retrace his steps.’
We started outside, at the back door. It had been unlocked that night and probably every other night before. This whole area was a place of unlocked doors, of keys left in the ignition, of all the neighbours knowing you were away – or at least it had been back then, until then. No one knew how the Nothing Man had approached the house, or what direction he had come from, or how he had travelled from his home to here. It was like he simply appeared, materialising out of the blackness. A ghost of a man, made entirely of shadows.
His clothes helped him do this. Ed described what he was probably wearing when he came to our house, based on Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan and Linda O’Neill’s accounts of their attacks: all black clothes, black gloves, black balaclava-style mask. He might have had a torch strapped to his forehead, something not unlike a bike lamp attached to an elastic headband; he had in some of the attacks but not all. Somewhere on his person there was also a knife and perhaps a gun, although if there was a gun he hadn’t fired it. Ed pointed out that outside the grounds of our house, beyond the shadows, his Serial Killer Ensemble would’ve had the opposite effect: it would have made him stand out. This suggested there was a point in his approach where he stopped to put it on. Standing outside our back door, Ed said, ‘It was probably here.’
It was daytime, and Ed is fair-skinned, freckled and lean, but for a moment there was a flash of a man in black, pulling down his mask and reaching for the door handle. I shivered even though it wasn’t cold.
Ed said to me, ‘Ready?’ and I nodded even though I wasn’t, not at all—
We went inside.
Investigators estimate that the Nothing Man commenced his attack on my family sometime between three and four in the morning. This was predominately based on my calling 999 at 4:10 a.m. And the findings of the pathologist when he came to examine my mother and father’s bodies. They also knew from the items they had found in the kitchen that he had spent time there before coming upstairs, but it was impossible to say how much. As ever, he had left no physical evidence, going so far as to spray the rim of the coffee cup he’d drunk from with the bottle of bleach cleaner my mother had kept on the sink. Ed and I walked through there and into the hall.