In mid-December, we travelled to Dublin Airport to meet Tommy off his flight. We waited at Arrivals as people came streaming out of the sliding doors and into the outstretched arms of waiting loved ones. All around us were squeals of delight, tears and even a few handmade WELCOME HOME signs. I was holding a sign that said the name of a man I’d never met and I was waiting to talk to him about a murderer who’d changed the course of both of our lives. This was typical of what being the victim of a violent crime often felt like to me. I looked fine; I looked normal; I could blend in with everyone else. But I had a secret that set me apart, that made me an Other. The lives of the people around me were so different to mine they may as well have been science-fiction. I would never stand in an Arrivals hall to wait for my family. I had lost all the family I’d had. And if I somehow found a way in the future to make a family of my own – something that, when I thought about all the steps I would need to take to make that happen, seemed utterly impossible – I would never let them go anywhere without me. I’d be too scared to. Because even when you were at home, altogether, you still weren’t safe. I had seen the proof of this first hand.
Tommy O’Sullivan was thirty-three now and working as an engineer for an aerospace company. His black hair and bushy beard were flecked with grey, and he was dressed casually in jeans with a leather messenger bag slung over one shoulder. He’d flown from Abu Dhabi to London and then from London to here, but his bags had only made the first journey. He wore a wedding ring. His wife, Amanda, had family in England and was spending a few days with them before joining her husband at Nancy’s house in Malahide. Tommy was warm and open, easy to chat to and generous with his time, repeatedly reassuring us that he was in no rush to leave. We found a table at the bar on the mezzanine level and ordered a round of coffees. I asked if I could record the conversation on my phone and he agreed.
He told us he’d been waiting a long time for this day. Seventeen years, give or take a few weeks.
The Gardaí had interviewed Tommy at the house, but only for a short time and on the morning after the incident, when Tommy – in his own words – was still half-dazed by the event. Months later, when the Crimecall episode had made him realise the prank call was connected, he’d spoken to them again, but that meeting was brief. He’d always believed he knew more than they’d got out of him. Tommy was convinced what happened wasn’t a random attack, but that his family had been targeted. Chosen was the word he used. Even now, all these years later, he was tormented by why. Why them? Why had this man done what he did? And why had he never been caught?
Tommy talked us through the events of that night, which for him had really only begun in the early hours of the morning, after the Nothing Man had left. He described his phone ringing and hearing his father’s voice on the other end of the line, despite the early hour and being in the room next door. The locked bedroom door. His father going outside and then calling out for Tommy to ring the Gardaí. A glimpse of his mother’s nightgown through a partially open bathroom door. Not seeing her properly until later that day, when she was discharged from hospital, clean and sterile and bandaged up. The Garda response. The immediate assumption, by them and his own father, that this was a tiger kidnapping gone wrong.
‘But gone wrong how?’ Tommy said to us, throwing up his hands, the frustration at that assumption still bubbling just below the surface all these years later. ‘A tiger kidnapping involves a gang and a vehicle. Where were they? There was one guy and no car that we know of. So at what point did it go wrong, exactly? It never went right, because it was never a kidnapping. There was zero evidence of that. The only reason that even came up at all was because my dad was a bank manager and made the mistake of telling them that. And they were like, “Oh, great. Mystery solved. Tiger kidnapping it is. Next!”’ He backtracked to the phone call two weeks before the attack, the one he’d thought was a friend of his playing a New Year’s Eve prank. He described the voice and then did an impression of it. It was raspy, odd and unnatural. A theatrical whisper. Let’s play a game. He described watching Crimecall – which he’d only happened to catch during a bored channel-surf – and feeling a sudden chill when he realised that the call was part of this, that he’d actually spoken to the Nothing Man.
I asked him if he had ever found anything odd in the house, particularly in the weeks leading up to the attack, and told him about my own discovery of the knife and the rope. But Tommy couldn’t remember any similar incident at the house on Bally’s Lane.
Ed explained why we’d wanted to meet with Tommy in the first place, why we were hoping to meet with as many survivors as we could. Our priority was finding a connection between the people the Nothing Man had chosen. There had to be something, but it was hard to find it when we didn’t know exactly what it was we were looking for.
But we had Tommy and me, two eldest children from two Nothing Man targets, who’d lived only miles from each other growing up. Perhaps if we both shared everything we could remember from our families’ lives around the time of the attacks, we might hit on something we had in common. It was like a perverse game of Nothing Man Snap, and it was a long shot. But it was all we had.
We started with the basics: schools and teachers, friends, relatives, clubs and other activities. Then we spread out from there. We talked about the restaurants we went to, cinemas we frequented, shopping centres we returned to again and again. Where our mothers did the weekly Big Shop. Where we went on holiday. Where we went if the day was sunny. Where we went if it was not. Bus routes, hairdressers, hospitals. Things that got delivered to the house. Tommy’s memory was markedly better than mine, but then he’d been older. He could remember which library his family went to, the name of the piano teacher two of his younger siblings had and where his mother’s favourite garden centre was. He could even remember what he liked to order from the café there when she took him along. But we found nothing that connected us.
Tommy had been four years older than me when the Nothing Man came to his house. He had had the beginnings of a life outside his family. He was spending a lot of time with friends. It had widened his world. His family did a lot of things together like go for drives on a Sunday afternoon, go on holiday, go to the beach in good weather to swim in the sea, whereas what counted as activities in my family was going to Nannie’s house for lunch or playing outside for a while. If our mother had things to do, she normally dropped us off at our grandmother’s on the way there and collected us on her way back. It suited all parties better. I would visit friends’ houses on weekends but didn’t do much in the way of activities outside of school, and Anna was too young to. Tommy had a large extended family, while both my parents were only children and of our grandparents we only had Nannie left. Thus our universes at the turn of the millennium were two parts of a Venn diagram where his circle was several sizes larger than mine and there was nothing to put in the place where they overlapped.
We clutched at straws until the conversation petered out. Tommy was clearly exhausted, although still reassuring us that he could stay longer. He seemed determined to find the link. We ordered more coffee.
On this section of my recording of the conversation, there’s a lot of silence punctuated with the tinkling of teaspoons against the inside of ceramic cups.