As Ed had warned me the very first day we met, the Nothing Man was a meticulous offender. He had never left any physical evidence behind that would connect him to his crimes and the way he chose his victims was so subtle that it wasn’t discovered until nearly two decades later. Even if we found him, a conviction would be impossible without a confession. And why, with no physical evidence to back up the charges, would he ever confess? The publication of the book might stir him up a bit, might make him do something stupid like contact the media or make a drunken confession to a friend, but there were no guarantees there either and the only action we could take was to wait and see.
‘The only other way,’ Ed said to me late one night, ‘would be if we caught him in the act, but we’re about twenty years too late for that.’
That’s when the idea first occurred to me. I could use The Nothing Man – and myself, its author – as bait.
In the summer of 2017 Ed had an apartment overlooking the waters of Cork’s inner harbour at Jacob’s Island and, that July, we packed up our rented office space and moved Operation Write The Nothing Man into his spare room. Our research and investigations, for the most part, were over. The case files had been returned to Anglesea Street. It was now time to actually start writing the book.
Although Ed could help, this part was really my responsibility. I wrote the story of the Nothing Man and what his visit that night long ago had done to my life, but I also wrote to the Nothing Man. I imagined him reading every sentence I typed. When it came to his crimes, I put in just enough detail to rekindle his memories. I made sure to tell him what I really thought of him. I wanted to make him mad and, specifically, mad at me. After a lifetime spent hiding away, of being paranoid about my personal safety, of not even telling close friends my real last name, I told every reader of this book where I would sleep at night when I was in Cork: back in the house where, for me, this had all started.
Every reader including him.
The Nothing Man was to be a true-crime book that, if all went well, would lead the Nothing Man to commit one more crime. But I had absolutely no idea if my plan would work.
The book came out on 29 August 2019. Exactly a week later, on 5 September, my publisher organised an event at a bookshop in Cork city centre. Just before it was due to begin, Ed appeared by my side and whispered something into my ear: Jim Doyle is here. In a move that surprised us both, I turned to him and said, ‘Introduce me.’
As Ed led me to him, I had no plans to do anything other than pretend this was a normal exchange, that I was merely meeting an old colleague of Ed’s, another Garda. But when the crowds parted and I saw him standing there, I recognised him – not just as the Nothing Man, but as someone I’d met in the course of my research. The Nothing Man was youthful and strong and lean, as was the picture of Jim Doyle in his Garda uniform that Ed had found. But this Jim Doyle was grey and balding, with a turkey-neck of loose skin and a bulge around his middle, and he looked sweaty and ill-at-ease under the harsh lights of the shop. He also looked like the man who’d been on the reception desk at Togher Garda Station when I’d visited there looking to speak with someone about the missing knife and rope.
I told him we’d met before but that I’d looked different then. I admit it: I was toying with him. I also admit this: I enjoyed it. I didn’t feel afraid. I was in a public place filled with people and Ed was by my side and Doyle didn’t know what I knew. For once, the power was mine. When Ed said that Doyle had been ‘dragged’ to the event by his wife, I told him his name was in its pages because I wanted to ensure that he would read it too. Technically, that wasn’t a lie. If Ed and I were right about him, his name – his other name – did appear in my book, probably more than a hundred times.
Since publication day I had been staying at the house in Passage West. Over Ed’s objections, I was staying there alone. He wanted to put protection outside or even keep a guard in the house, and failing that have other people staying with me, but I vetoed it. If Doyle was the Nothing Man, he was also a former guard. He would know the signs of a police presence, no matter how hidden, and I didn’t want to inadvertently put anyone else in danger. We compromised on a panic button. If I pushed it, it wouldn’t make any noise but it would ring an alarm in Carrigaline Garda Station, where the members were on alert for it. Officers would arrive within minutes.
The night after the bookshop event, Friday 6 September, the Nothing Man returned to the scene of his last crime at around three in the morning. I don’t sleep well and was awake when he broke his way in via the rear door. He was probably thirty feet from me. I pushed the panic button, threw an old blanket over my bed and ran upstairs into my room, the one I had shared with Anna. For several minutes I listened to the sounds of him moving around a floor below, then the suspicious silence that I correctly assumed was him ascending the stairs. I saw him appear in the bedroom doorway, masked with gun drawn, and realised I was seeing the very same thing that the women I had written about – Alice O’Sullivan, Christine Kiernan, Linda O’Neill and Marie O’Meara – had also seen.
That my mother had seen.
And Anna.
I felt, in a weird way, closer to them. With them. Part of their exclusive, awful club.
But I wasn’t scared. What I was, honestly, was relieved. I was relieved that the thing I had been scared of my entire life was finally happening. It meant I wouldn’t have to be frightened of it any more.
The night he died, Jim Doyle was sixty-three years old. He’d been married to his wife for more than thirty years and their only child, a daughter, was about to start her second year of university. He lived in a nondescript semi-D in a southside suburb of Cork City known for its high property prices and good schools. He had been a guard but not a very good one. There had been further incidents after the mug-throwing, although not as serious, and for most of his career in the force he’d been ‘put on paper’, essentially blocked from doing anything except the most menial of tasks. On the day he banked his requisite thirty years, he retired.
There were signs that he was unravelling, losing the control he’d maintained for so many years. I have no idea if it was the book that prompted this, but no fewer than three copies of it were found at his home. (One of them even had handwritten notes inside the front cover.) Hours before he arrived at my house to kill me, he was fired from his job as a security guard at a supermarket following complaints that he’d made female customers uncomfortable. After he was given the news, he’d assaulted his boss in a bizarre attack, forcing food down the man’s throat. That same morning his next-door neighbours, a couple called Derek and Karen Finch, called the Gardaí to report that someone was trying to poison their dog. They presented the officers with dog biscuits they’d found with pellets of rat poison pushed inside. A bag of that same rat poison would be found in Doyle’s garden shed, along with an old hoover whose bag contained DNA traces that matched Linda O’Neill, Marie Meara and my mother. When Gardaí interviewed Doyle’s wife, she had visible injuries to the side of her face. She would only speak to Gardaí long enough to tell them that she wasn’t going to speak to them, that she knew nothing about the Nothing Man.
Doyle was born in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, in July 1956, seven months after his parents married. Sean Delaney was forty-two to Emer Doyle’s twenty-one at the time. After the wedding, Emer moved into the house on Delaney’s farmland. There is no written record of what their marriage was like and no one left living who can tell us about it, but we do know this much: Delaney was known around town as a fella driven mad by the drink – a violent drunk – and on 26 December 1961, he shot his wife in the head before turning the gun on himself. Five-year-old Jim was unharmed but spent two days alone in the house before a neighbour raised the alarm. When Garda entered they found the boy sleeping soundly in bed, curled up against his mother’s dead and bloodied body.