E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Howard The Nothing Man
Main
ISBN: 978-1-78649-660-7
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The No. 1 bestseller. A brilliantly twisty blend of true crime and psychological thriller
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78649-660-7
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Catherine Ryan Howard's debut novel Distress Signals was published by Corvus in 2016 while she was studying English literature at Trinity College Dublin. It went on to be shortlisted for both the Irish Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA John Creasey/New Blood Dagger. Her second novel, The Liar's Girl, was published to critical acclaim in 2018 and was a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel 2019. That same year, Rewind was shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year and was an Irish Times bestseller. She is currently based in Dublin.
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True Life
Before the events of 4 October 2001, crime came regularly into our home, but only on twin spools of glossy black tape encased in shells of hard plastic – and it was me who carried it inside.
That last Christmas, I got a portable television with a built-in VCR player for my room. My mother had reluctantly agreed to this on the basis that it would never be connected to any TV channels, that I could only use it to watch videotapes. (I’m sure another deciding factor was that if I was in my room watching that TV, I couldn’t also be whinging and moaning about whatever my mother was trying to watch on the one downstairs, in the living room.) In a house where technology meant a cumbersome Compaq Presario that took half an hour to come to life, a sluggish dial-up connection and the fax machine my father had for work, the novelty of there suddenly being a TV screen in my bedroom was on a par with there being an alien spaceship in the back garden. Whenever I turned it on, its power spread out beyond the set itself, electrifying the entire room with its hum, bringing every molecule in the air alive with the excitement of endless possibility. Sitting on my bed, facing it, with the remote in one hand and something sugary within reach of the other, was my happiest place – until I ran out of things to watch.
We had a typical home library of VHS tapes for the time: Disney movies, things recorded off the TV, a few random series of Friends that we’d got on sale. Having quickly exhausted these offerings, I negotiated a deal with my dad: I would be allowed to use my parents’ account at our local video rental shop provided I paid for the tapes and assumed responsibility for returning them on time. I soon figured out that in order to maximise my weekly budget – three of my five pocket-money pounds – I needed to avoid the New Releases and instead dig around at the back of the shop where a handwritten sign threatened ‘TRUE LIFE’. Here, the cover designs were predominately a palette of bruising, all black and dark blues, and the ominous red titles on them dripped blood for effect.
These were made-for-TV American movies based on infamous American crimes, for some reason available to rent on VHS in Ireland. They had low production values, cheesy dialogue and at best a tenuous relationship with the truth. When I first encountered them in spring 2001, the vast majority were already at least a decade old, covering cases that had happened even further back. But you could rent two for a week for the same price as a new movie for one night, so I started working my way through them. I quickly became obsessed.
A Killing in Beverly Hills told the story of the Menendez brothers, who shot their parents dead so they could either escape their father’s abuse, as they claimed, or start spending their inheritance, as the prosecution did. Ambush in Waco re-enacted the siege in Texas sparked by a bungled government raid that resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and seventy-six members of a cult called the Branch Davidians. In Small Sacrifices, Diane Downs, played by Farrah Fawcett’s hair, stops her car on a dark country road so she can shoot her three young children, before driving slowly to the nearest hospital and claiming that a bushy-haired stranger did it instead. A flame-haired, teenage Drew Barrymore played the title role in The Amy Fisher Story, in which a sixteen-year-old girl dubbed the Long Island Lolita, a moniker completely lost on me at the time, had an affair with thirty-five-year-old Joey Buttafuoco and then attempted to murder his wife by shooting her in the head.
If I had a ‘favourite’, though, it was Victim of Beauty: The Dawn Smith Story. Dawn’s seventeen-year-old sister, Shari, was kidnapped in broad daylight from the end of her own driveway by Larry Gene Bell in May 1985, then murdered by him. The made-for-TV version of events, starring Star Trek: Voyager’s Jeri Ryan, focused on Bell’s obsession with Dawn – a blonde, blue-eyed beauty pageant contestant – in the twenty-eight-day period between Shari’s disappearance and Bell’s capture.
These VHS movies weren’t all crime. I vaguely remember one about a young couple with a baby whose car got snowed in on a mountainside and who then had to take cover in a cave in order to survive, and another about a pair of blonde girls who’d been accidentally switched at birth and then, as teens, found that out. But they were mostly crime, and it was the crime ones that I liked the most.
They were hardly appropriate viewing for a twelve-year-old, but the bored teenager manning the counter at the video shop didn’t care and my parents, I have to assume, didn’t know. The general rule in our house was that so long as you were being quiet, whatever else you were being wouldn’t be queried. These days I can easily minimise it by drawing comparisons to what children might watch now, when they can go to bed with a device small enough to hide under the covers that can effectively show them anything at all. In any case, to pontificate about what effect my true-crime habit might have had on me is very much a moot point seeing as I was, unknowingly, in line for a ticket to the live show. But the truth is I don’t think they had any effect on me at all.
I knew the events I saw re-enacted on my little TV screen were real on some level, but they weren’t my reality. This was Ireland at the turn of the millennium. Our police force didn’t carry guns. We’d never had a confirmed serial killer, defined by the FBI as a person who commits at least three murders over the span of a month or more, allowing time for a distinct ‘cooling off’ period between them. When murder made the news here, it was nearly always terrorism or gangland related. Your risk of being the random target of a murderous stranger was exceptionally low, if not practically non-existent. (In the popular podcast West Cork, which centres around one of Ireland’s most famous unsolved murders, the death in 1996 of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, hosts Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey describe how the locals refer to it as ‘the murder’ because there hasn’t been another one in the area since.) Besides, I knew how to avoid the bad men. The same lessons were repeated in every movie. Don’t walk home alone in the dark. Don’t accept lifts from strangers. Be a good girl.
I was a good girl and I was at home with my family. The doors were locked and the curtains were closed. I was safe.
How do you know what you know about your parents? Lately, I’ve been putting this question to friends of mine. Their answers generally fit into one of two categories: either they found out things from other people, like relatives or their parents’ friends, or their parents shared stories with them directly. The second one happened more and more as time went on, as in, they were told more the older they got. I should also say that these friends have adult siblings, uncles and aunts and, like all good Irish Catholic families, cousins to spare. They’ve been collecting friends all their lives and so too have their parents, dotting their social orbits with figures like the girl who lived next door to their childhood home and the guy they worked with in that place that time. One friend told me that, after thinking about it, most of what she knows about her parents’ initial meeting and pre-married life comes from snide comments her maternal grandmother, who never liked her father, would make during family get-togethers when she’d had one too many G&Ts.
But both of my parents were only children, and they and my only sibling died when I was twelve, an age when you have zero interest in who your parents are or ever were outside of their being your parents. After that I was left with just one familial link, Nannie, and in our remaining years together I didn’t dare question her about them. The sad truth is I know very little about who my parents were as people.
My mother’s name was Deirdre. She was short and slight; physically, Anna took after her. She had worn her hair the same way since before she’d got married, in a bob that stopped just above her shoulders in her natural light brown. She worked as an illustrator, adding images to a series of French and German textbooks aimed at the Junior Cert cycle and also, during term time, as a waitress in a café in Carrigaline. She would drive us to school on her way to work and pick us up on our way back, by which time a box of something from the café – creamy cakes, demi baguettes, fruit scones – would have appeared in the passenger-side footwell. She worshipped the sun and would be out the back garden on a sunlounger, oiled up and skin bare, at the merest suggestion of light peeking out from behind the clouds. She’d been born in a town called Killorglin in Co. Kerry, hadn’t been to college and spoke little of her own parents, who had died when she was just a teen. In secondary school she had been a competitive rower and was always saying she was going to get back into it, somehow, just for exercise, but we all knew the talking about it was the start and end of her efforts.
My mother was very easy-going, relaxed and unfussy. If Anna or I acted up, she would award us a bemused expression and then leave us to burn ourselves out – which, without a reaction to fuel our temper-tantrum or an audience to perform it to, we would quickly do. Her best friend was a woman called Joan who she’d known since secondary school. Joan...
