‘Sure,’ Katie says, stubbing out her breakfast in the ashtray. ‘No problem.’
Whenever she speaks to customers she does her best to shave the Irish edges off her accent. She learned her lesson back at the start. Is that an Irish accent I hear? What part? Oh, I have a cousin there! What’s your last name?
Reception is a modified mobile home steps from the café. Katie unlocks the door and lets the customer in ahead of her, giving the thick, airless heat inside a chance to become a shade more bearable before she herself steps in.
The books are on a stand just inside the door. It’s an exchange: leave a book, take a book. The woman returns her paperbacks and tilts her head to study the spines of the others.
‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I don’t know … Have you read any of these? Anything you’d recommend?’
Katie steps closer so she can see the books too. She spies a historical saga another customer raved about last week.
‘That one is really good,’ she says. ‘And it’s set in Perpignan, which isn’t far from here.’
The customer takes that and a memoir about restoring a chateau in Provence.
After she leaves, Katie takes a second to tidy up the books. Her hand is already on it before she realises what it is. She’s never seen it in this smaller size, with a soft cover. It must be new. The colours on the spine are different. The font is, too. It looks absolutely nothing like the book she read, actually. The only thing that’s the same is the title and the author.
The Nothing Man: A Survivor’s Search for the Truth.
Eve Black.
And at the bottom of the spine, in tiny lettering: UPDATED WITH A NEW POSTSCRIPT.
The aftertaste of cigarette smoke is suddenly sour on Katie’s tongue and the bitter coffee swirls sickeningly around her otherwise empty stomach.
She should put it back. It won’t do her any good. She doesn’t need to know any more details. Her nightmares already have more than enough fuel for years to come.
Katie is still telling herself this when she slides the book from the shelf.
She sees her father’s face on the cover – half of it. The other half is covered in a black mask except for the eye. The two images have been blended into the other. She traces a finger down the seam in the middle.
But really, she has no interest in him.
It’s Eve she wants to know about.
She wants to know how she is, if she’s okay, if she’s managing to somehow move on and live a life. Katie desperately hopes so. She’s not religious but she has been saying silent prayers to the universe asking for this very thing.
Her father was a rapist and a murderer but she had eighteen years of a happy childhood before she found that out. He ended Eve’s at twelve. He took both her parents from her. Robbed her of her little sister. Left their bodies in the house so Eve could see exactly what he’d done to them.
Katie holds all his victims in her heart. This includes her mother, at least the version of her that was young and naïve and didn’t know what she was in love with. The woman she mourns, because she may as well be dead now. The woman that’s still alive knew what he was but she stayed and helped him anyway. Katie feels nothing for her. She may as well be a stranger.
But it’s Eve she thinks of the most.
Katie locks the door to reception from the inside and goes into the closet-sized office at the back. She locks that door too, just in case. She sits down and flicks through the book until she reaches the new part.
She takes a deep breath of hot, musty air.
She starts to read.
– POSTSCRIPT –
The Woman Who
When I was twelve years old a man broke into my home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever. When I was thirty years old I wrote a book about it. Eight days after it was published, on 6 September 2019, that same man broke into that same house and tried to murder me. He was shot and killed by Gardaí. His name was Jim Doyle.
Now, I must come clean and tell you the truth. I left out one very important detail in the first edition of The Nothing Man: his name. I knew it was Jim Doyle. I knew what he looked like and where he lived and what kind of a person he was. Ed and I had found him before I’d even finished the first chapter of the book. But our evidence was circumstantial. At best, writing about our discovery would be pointless and, at worst, doing so would get me charged with libel and slander in a case that Jim Doyle would definitely win. For a time, I thought having to leave this detail out made writing the book itself pointless and I came close to calling the whole thing off. But Ed convinced me that the book might be the very thing to draw him out. It might be the only thing that could. So I wrote it and it was published and thousands of you went out and bought it, and I thank you deeply for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for not telling you the whole story – until now.
When I visited Maggie Barry, Christine Kiernan’s neighbour in Covent Court, she told me about the knife and the rope being mislaid at Togher Garda Station. What I didn’t include in the first edition of this book was that Maggie remembered the name of the guard who told her that: Jim Doyle. It meant nothing to me at the time. I presumed the loss of the knife and the rope had been a team effort and it had merely fallen to this Garda Doyle to deliver the bad news. It was just another detail to add to the master file Ed and I had been building during our re-examining of the case.
But Ed knew Jim Doyle, a little. He’d worked with him at Togher. He also knew that before that, Doyle had been in Mallow – which was just thirty kilometres from Fermoy. Moreover, Togher was just off Cork’s primary orbital road which linked various southside locations, as well as the N28 to Carrigaline. Blackrock and Passage West were easily accessed from it. In fact, if you plotted Fermoy, Mallow and Cork City on a map, you’d make a neat triangle. What interested Ed the most, however, was why Doyle had been moved to Mallow from his previous posting in Millstreet: because in a fit of rage, he’d thrown a cup of hot liquid at his boss’s head.
Ed found a photo of Jim Doyle in his navy blues, taken in the summer of 2004. When I saw it, I had a visceral reaction. That’s the only way I can describe it. I felt hot and light-headed and panicky all at once and, as I held the print-out in my hand, it began to flutter wildly. I was shaking. I felt as if I might be on the verge of a panic attack. Because it was him. I was looking at a picture of the Nothing Man. I knew it on an instinctual level.
And yet on an intellectual one, there was no way for me to know that for sure. I never saw the Nothing Man in our house that night – or at least, I couldn’t remember seeing him. But there were discrepancies in what I did remember that suggested the version of events as I recalled them were not entirely trustworthy. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a whole reel missing from my memory of that night. Perhaps the most important one. Had I actually seen the Nothing Man and then blocked it out? What were the circumstances? Did we speak? Did he try to hurt me? Was that something to do with why he left me alive?
The only way I would ever get answers was if the Nothing Man himself told me them. But we couldn’t approach Doyle. A physiological reaction to a photo does not a successful prosecution make.
We showed Doyle’s photo along with four other Garda headshots to Johnnie Murphy, the foreman in Fermoy, and at first he picked out Doyle’s. But then, on second thought, he decided another photo was more like ‘Ronan Donoghue’ and ultimately he settled on that as his choice. We were unable to track down Claire Bardin, the woman whose sighting of a man on Bally’s Lane had given rise to the police sketch, but when we compared the sketch and Doyle’s photo, there were clear similarities. This was by far the most promising lead we’d ever had that included a name but, when we took my reaction out of the equation – and we had to – we weren’t left with anything near enough to justify fingering Doyle as the man who had murdered my family. We needed more. Much more. Undeniable, empirical evidence. If Jim Doyle was indeed the Nothing Man, how could we prove it?