Eventually Ed, who had mostly been quiet all this time, spoke up.
‘Maybe he came to you,’ he said. ‘Maybe this wasn’t someone you encountered outside the home. Can you remember any callers to the house around that time? Strangers or perhaps new friends of your parents who you didn’t see afterwards? Any sales people, charity collectors, workmen – things like that?’
I was searching my memory for something, anything, that might fit that bill when Tommy said, very quietly, ‘There was a guard.’
Ed was instantly alert. ‘A guard? Before the attack?’
Tommy nodded. ‘Yeah. A few months before.’ This is what he could remember:
One evening, when it was not yet dark but getting there, the doorbell went. Tommy was watching TV in the living room while his mother ironed school shirts. They were new shirts, coming out of their plastic packing; she was ironing the creases out. This, according to Tommy, sets the event firmly at the start of the school year, so September 1999.
From his perch on the couch, Tommy had a line of sight through the open living-room door, across the hall, to the last six inches or so of the entranceway. When his mother opened the front door, he could see the right arm and shoulder of what was unmistakably a Garda uniform. Curious, Tommy muted the TV so he could eavesdrop. He heard a man’s voice say something about a burglary in the area. Gardaí were going door-to-door to make residents aware of this, to encourage them to step up their own home security if need be. At some point, Tommy’s father went to the door too.
‘And that’s why I remember it,’ Tommy said. ‘Because my mother turned to him and said something like, “I told you: we need to get that conservatory door fixed.” In front of the guard. She was always on about that bloody door and my dad was always saying he’d get someone out to have a look at it, but it never happened … And then, just a few months later, the Nothing Man got in through that door and I cursed the fact that they hadn’t done anything about it, even after the visit from the guard, even after there being a burglary nearby. But now I’m thinking …’ Tommy paused. ‘Maybe the man wasn’t really a guard.’
‘Did you see a car?’ Ed asked.
Tommy said he didn’t remember seeing or hearing one.
‘Do you remember who it was who was burgled?’
‘No.’
‘Can you describe what the man looked like? Did you see his face?’
‘Sorry, no. I’d guess he was about the same height as my dad, but that’s it.’
A beat passed, pregnant with disappointment.
I took a deep breath.
‘I think a guard may have come to our house, too,’ I said. ‘I think.’
The two men turned to look at me with such intensity that I immediately regretted saying those words aloud – because what I remembered was more of a possibility than an actual event.
The doorbell going after dark, sounding strange and intrusive at that hour. Me leaving my homework to go stand at the top of the stairs to see what I could see, drawn by this unusual event but knowing better than to rush down and pull open the door myself. The light coming on in the hall. A stretched shadow in it. A man’s voice saying words I couldn’t make out. And then my mother saying something like, ‘Oh God, who is it? Ross? Collette?’ – my father and grandmother’s first names, which I never heard her use. The unseen man saying more and my mother making the sounds of relief. Then her saying something about not even locking doors.
‘That’s all I remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t know when it was, but that could’ve been a guard, right? She thought he was coming to tell her someone had died, that there’d been an accident. But he was telling her – probably – about a burglary. Right? It sounds like it could’ve been that?’ Neither of the two men answered me and I blushed with embarrassment. ‘I know, I know, it’s all very vague. I’m not even one hundred per cent sure I didn’t dream it. Never mind.’
Ed looked from me to Tommy.
Tommy looked at him.
Ed said, ‘That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.’
The words swam in front of Jim’s eyes. He closed the book and let it fall on to his lap. His hands were shaking.
So they knew. They knew and they didn’t know. They had gathered the puzzle pieces and it would only be a matter of time now before they put them together. It was hard to gauge how much time he had left, but the clock was ticking.
He could see that now.
Feel it.
Jim was in the living room, reading Katie’s copy of The Nothing Man. Noreen had gone to bed hours ago, not long after they’d got home from the event, muttering something about having a headache. She’d been looking for one of those painkillers that she liked because a side effect of them was a good night’s sleep. He had considered going out to the shed as before, but it was cold out there, and Katie’s copy of the book was in here, where it was warm and there was a comfortable chair.
Even if Noreen came downstairs, which he doubted she’d do, he’d have no questions to answer. He was just having a flick through, he’d say. He knew Ed. Turns out he’d met Eve Black at Togher station while she was researching the book.
While she was looking for him.
She may not have found him, but she had found the path that led his way.
Jim set the book aside and headed for the drinks cabinet, a foreign land to him. He almost never drank. But he needed something to take the edge off, to settle the electricity sparking inside his brain, to quieten things down so he could think a bit more clearly.
He selected a dusty, half-drunk bottle of whiskey and poured what he thought was a measure of it into a short glass filled to the brim with ice. He took it back to his chair and set it on the table. He watched it sweat for a while, the condensation dripping down the outside of the glass. The ice began to melt.
He took the barest of sips and winced at the taste, then at the burn as it slid down his throat and into his chest.
Jim picked up the book again but didn’t open it. Instead, he ran his hand over the dust jacket as he had done before, but which he hadn’t been able to do since he’d discarded the jacket on his own copy as a precautionary measure.
Now there was no need to be as careful.
The letters were embossed, smooth and glossy. They raised up to meet him.
The Nothing Man.
Emerging from the shadows, now. After all this time.
Or being dragged from them.
Only if he let it happen.
All because of a casual comment from Tommy O’Sullivan. A teenager at the time. Another one! Him and Eve, in cahoots.
All of Jim’s work, his caution, his skills, his planning, his genius – it was all being undone by two overgrown children.
How fucking infuriating.
The idea had come to him in July 1990.
Back then, Jim was the new guy at the station in Mallow. He’d been reassigned after a situation had arisen between him and his superintendent back at Millstreet, where he’d been for three years – his first assignment out of Templemore. All he’d done was pick up a mug and throw it at the wall, but the super had been standing in front of that wall and the mug had been filled with hot tea. Jim had just attended a scene where a seven-year-old boy had been ejected through a windscreen and thrown twenty-five feet further down the road, where he was then run over by an articulated lorry driving in the opposite direction. They hadn’t had to remove his body so much as scrape it up. Jim said he’d been struggling with what he’d seen and pushed out a few tears to add plausibility, and the performance got him disciplined and a move to Mallow. But the truth was Jim had had his fill of being treated like an idiot by idiots, and that day he’d finally blown his top.