Jim mumbled something about it being too stuffy inside.
They started off down the street, Noreen buttoning up her coat against the cold.
‘You got the book signed?’ Jim asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘Who?’
‘The writer.’
‘What do you mean?’
Inside, Jim was screaming.
‘When you went up to her to get the book signed,’ he said, pointedly pronouncing each word individually, ‘what did she say to you?’
He could feel Noreen turning to look at him but he kept his eyes front and picked up the pace so she had to hurry to keep beside him.
‘She just asked me what name to put on it and said thanks for coming. What else would you expect her to say?’
Katie.
It was Katie’s name that had gone on the book. That’s why Eve hadn’t said anything to her – because she was waiting for a woman named Noreen.
The drive home was nearly entirely silent. When they got in, Jim asked Noreen for the book. She frowned, but handed it over.
He opened it to the title page. Katie’s name and Eve’s signature were both scrawled in the same loose, loopy handwriting.
Noreen was looking at it too.
‘She’ll be delighted,’ she said.
It took everything Jim had in him not to rip out the page right then and there and tear it into a thousand tiny pieces.
– 9 –
Connection
I wanted to start work on the book immediately, but I still had to finish my masters. For several months I tried to keep my mind off the Nothing Man, but for the most part I failed miserably. I was itching to get back to Cork and to start our search for him proper. The day after I submitted my final work, I met again with Bernadette and signed the contract for the book. Then I went home to pack a case and prep my apartment to survive an absence that may last weeks or months.
The last thing I did before I left was squeeze in a muted, uneasy dinner with Jo and Rhiannon, the only friends I’d ever managed to keep a hold of for longer than a couple of months. We had met in NUI Galway during a Freshers’ Week pub crawl and so they now qualified as my oldest friends, by a very long shot. Our trio was weighted unequally, with them seeing each other far more often than I saw either one. But I didn’t want to lose them. Ever since the article had come out, I had felt them slipping away. This dinner was supposed to be celebratory, but they were still adjusting uneasily to my reveal as Famous Crime Victim and none of us felt quite right having a champagne toast to the fact that I was going to spend the next year of my life, at least, excavating the worst thing that had ever happened to my family and four other families as well.
As we parted, I said they should visit me in Cork, come stay with me for a weekend. It was a casual invitation, off-the-cuff, not thought through.
‘Where are you staying?’ Jo asked.
My hesitation answered her question and she blanched. Rhiannon looked away, unable to hide her disgust.
I didn’t know if our friendship was going to survive this. What was worse was that I didn’t really care. The truth was I was itching to get away from them, to get back on the road, to get back to Ed and Cork and the darkest depths of the case. Everything else was a distraction. I had spent all my adult life working hard to hide who I really was and now I wanted nothing else except to be myself entirely.
It was exhilarating. It was terrifying.
First thing the following morning, I drove to Cork.
The only space I had there was the house, and it felt blasphemous to bring any part of writing the book into its rooms. Ed’s office was barely that and as a civilian I couldn’t simply waltz in and out of Anglesea Street whenever I liked. The sensitive nature of the material meant that we needed somewhere private to work, so coffee shops and libraries were out too. As luck would have it, there was a co-working space on Eglinton Street, not even five minutes’ walk away from Ed’s so-called office. I rented the smallest private space they had on offer and installed two desks, a bookshelf and three filing cabinets I could lock. I hung a huge whiteboard and bought a little coffee machine. I closed the blinds so we were free to stick whatever we needed to on the walls. I told the building manager that we were working on a book about Irish politics and that we would clean the office ourselves.
On the first Tuesday in November 2015, Ed arrived towing a stack of blue plastic bins behind him on a little cart with wheels. They were stamped ‘An Garda Síochána’ but he’d stuck masking tape over this so as not to arouse any curiosity among our office neighbours. It was delivery one of eight. Ed’s superintendent had agreed to the transfer on the condition that our office remain secure, that we not disclose its location or our activities to anyone who wasn’t directly assisting us with the case, and that we not move them again unless it was back to Anglesea Street. Ed joked that the higher-ups were probably glad of it; they had more room for dusty computers and old printer cables now.
For hours we unpacked and organised the files. Ed hung an Ordnance Survey map of Cork city and county on the wall and marked spots on it with a red marker pen. I put my favourite family photo on my desk: Nannie, my parents, Anna and me on our last holiday together in Clare in August 2001. It’s also the last photo ever taken of all five of us together.
We made a loose plan: we would give ourselves until the summer to find out as much as we could about the Nothing Man. We made lists of things to check, people to talk to, places to visit. The bulk of the tasks would have to be done by me – Ed would still be working full time, but would spare what hours he could. (This would turn out to be all his spare time, for the next eighteen months.) Then, in September, I would start actually writing the book.
The following morning I woke up in my makeshift bedroom long before my alarm was due to go off. Something was different. I started, thinking it was the house, that someone had got inside in the night. But it was me. I was different. Lighter, somehow. Energised. Almost … excited? Yes, that’s what it was. I was excited about what Ed and I were about to embark on, which in turn made me feel ashamed.
But I couldn’t stay in bed. I couldn’t even stay in the house. I wanted to get started. After all this, I needed to. I drove into town on dark, deserted roads and was at my desk, halfway down my first cup of coffee, when the alarm set to wake me up went off.
The first thing we did was to simulate a complete review of the case. This involved going through every single piece of paper – statement, report, map, etc., – that had been generated during the course of the original investigation, trying to examine it with fresh eyes. Our progress was hampered by two factors: that I needed Ed to be there for the technical stuff and his time was limited, and the sheer amount of paper involved. More than 5,000 calls had come in to the tip-line, for starters, which made 5,000 one-page summaries of those calls that needed to be looked at again. An old college mate of mine had grown up in Boston where her father worked as a cop and now, as an adult, she had a habit of swearing loudly at anything fictional – TV shows, books or movies – that took liberties with police procedure. ‘That’s not realistic,’ she’d shout. ‘That’s not what happens.’ Many times over the course of those months in our little office in Eglinton Street, I thought of her, because if any of those things actually depicted reality, it would be merely hours and hours of people squinting at pieces of paper, and it would be exceedingly dull.