I told all this to Ed and then added a disclaimer: you can’t trust me. I was only twelve when this happened. Even while I was still in the bathroom, my brain was preparing for my survival, opening the deepest vault in my memory bank so it could send the worst of what I was about to see straight in there. When the vault started to approach capacity, it just dumped some stuff straight out. This is how I’ve come to understand the effects of trauma on the mind of a child. That night is a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces and some parts of it have clearly been put together wrong.
For example: I called my grandmother from the phone in the kitchen but I have no recollection of going downstairs, a journey that would have involved stepping over my father’s body. I don’t know what I said to her, and I don’t remember calling 999 even though I did. There’s a recording of it. I don’t remember going back into our bedroom but I do remember seeing Anna’s hand, her little nails cut short and painted inexpertly with red polish, hanging out over the side of the bed. How did I see that if I didn’t go in? How could there have been no yelling or screaming? How much time passed between these events? Why did the Nothing Man leave me alive?
When I stopped talking, Ed was silent for a very long time. Then he told me what the Gardaí thought had happened that night. We went upstairs so he could show me.
No one could be sure of the exact sequence of events, but it made sense from an investigative standpoint that Anna had died first. The Nothing Man had tried to smother her with her pillow and he’d succeeded, albeit on a delay. She was in a coma when she arrived at the hospital and never woke up.
Our bedroom door was the first one you got to when you reached the top of the stairs, the first one he would have come to. Ed and I paused at its open doorway. There were no beds in the room now but back then, her bed had been directly across from you as you entered the room, pushed against the wall under the window. Mine was opposite it, behind the door.
After I told Ed this he gave me a look I would come to know well, the one that reminds me that he already knows, that he was at the scene, that he’s studied the pictures for hours on end. That he probably knows more about what my house was like in October 2001 than I do.
We moved on to my parents’ bedroom, stopping again at the threshold. I didn’t tend to go into the bedrooms. (When I stayed at the house I slept downstairs, in the room that had been my father’s office.) This room was empty but had a garish wallpaper hung by the tenants, pink flowers on green. The radiator was new too but it had been installed in the same place as its predecessor. Ed pointed to it and said it was there my father had been tied up, to the pipe underneath. They knew this because of the shredded blue rope they’d found there.
He’d managed to free himself from it, but his wrists and ankles were still tied. If he had fallen down the stairs, Ed said, this was likely why. It was also why the fall killed him – because he hadn’t been able to use his arms to slow his descent. Without the bindings, he might have been bruised and sore or, worst-case scenario, broken an arm or leg. With them, he severed his spinal cord at the neck. There was only one phone in the house at the time, a landline, and it was in our kitchen. Presumably he’d been trying to get to that.
My mother was found in the bed, face down, with the blankets pulled over her head. She had been stabbed fourteen times, mostly in the back and shoulder area. Her wrists and ankles had been bound just like my father’s, but the Nothing Man must have used brute force or his knife or maybe even the threat of a gun to keep her on the bed. He had raped her. I can’t think about this in any depth. I can’t even read back over this paragraph.
Abruptly I left and went back downstairs and into the kitchen. Ed followed me. I drank a glass of tap water and then flicked the kettle on for tea. I wasn’t certain I could speak. Those last ten minutes were the longest I’d spent thinking about what had happened in this house since the event itself.
I turned to face Ed, leaning against the countertop because I felt light-headed and hot, and didn’t trust my knees to keep me upright. I caught him looking at the phone, hanging from the wall next to the fridge. It wasn’t the same one but the newer model had been hung in the same place.
‘He never called us,’ I said. I looked to Ed. ‘Did he?’
Back on the night of the attack I’d said I couldn’t remember any prank calls, but that wasn’t to say they hadn’t happened. I wasn’t supposed to answer the phone so it was my mother who would’ve got them. Or maybe I’d just forgotten.
‘He might have,’ Ed said. ‘Maybe.’ He told me that, back in 2001, members of Operation Optic had pored over our phone logs, tracing every incoming call to our house of one minute or less. They had found five to flag as pertinent to the investigation. These had come in at various times of the day but each of them had come from a public telephone box located in or around Cork City. Two of them had come from the same public telephone box on Patrick Street, but beyond that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their locations or sequence. None of them were near the GAA stadium from where the Nothing Man had called Christine Kiernan and Linda O’Neill. ‘That could’ve been him,’ Ed said, ‘but we’ll never know.’
We took cups of tea into the living room and sat down, Ed in an armchair and me on the couch.
I asked another question that had just occurred to me.
‘If he didn’t call us,’ I said, ‘how do you know it was the Nothing Man who came here that night?’
‘The rope,’ Ed said. ‘Mainly. Plus the nature of the crime, the timing of it and the location. The rope was never described in the media.’
‘So he did leave something behind …’
‘That brand was widely available. Stocked in more than a hundred and fifty hardware stores all over the country. We visited every one in Cork county and within two hours’ drive of it but we had nothing to say to them other than, “Do you remember anyone buying this kind of rope recently, or a lot of it at any time at all?” It wasn’t fruitful.’
‘And the knife?’
‘The knife wasn’t as widely available but still, we only had a description of it from someone who was never attacked: Christine Kiernan’s neighbour. We don’t know if he brought the same kind to the other houses. The pathologist said that based on her description it could’ve been the same one used here, on your mother, but—’
‘It was. He did.’
Ed’s face changed. ‘What do you mean?’
I realised that he didn’t know about my finding the rope and the knife – because I hadn’t yet told him. I hadn’t told anyone. It wasn’t in my essay because I hadn’t realised its significance until after it’d been published and I’d started reading the other articles. So I told him now. About playing the game with Anna a few weeks before the attack. About lifting the sofa cushion and seeing the rope and the knife. Unlike the night itself, I could remember them clearly and described them in detail. The blue braid. The yellow handle that put me in mind of Fisher Price toys. The shiny, unsullied blade.
Ed got up, paced a bit, then sat back down. He took out his Garda notebook, flipped up the cover and dug in his shirt pocket for a pen. He asked me to repeat everything I’d said.