The Minders

by John Marrs

  Bruno barely breathed as footage gradually closed in on his wife. She was writhing on the lap of a man he didn’t recognise. She wore a shirt but no skirt, and his trousers were just about visible around his ankles.

  “He’s making her do this,” Bruno protested, but he could barely hear his own voice. “He’s forcing her.”

  Now the sick feeling rose up into his throat as he desperately hoped an alternative camera angle might show Zoe resisting the actions of her colleague. When he realised that would mean the sex was nonconsensual, he was selfishly unsure of which would be the lesser of two evils. The unrelenting footage panned close in on her face. Cheers rang out from the cameraman’s teammates when Zoe appeared to climax, none the wiser to her audience. Then when her companion finished moments later, she pulled his face to hers and kissed him with a passion Bruno could barely remember her sharing with him.

  He tore himself away from the screen and glared at the smug expressions of the defence team. When Emily made no effort to reassure him, he knew both the battle and the war were over.

  “It has also come to our attention that Mrs. Yorke had been involved in and attempted to initiate sexual liaisons with several members of staff managed directly by her,” Graph added. “They have come forward to claim that they were also harassed by her into performing sex acts if they stood any hope of career progression. The fatal accident that followed was as a result of autonomous vehicles being hacked, but that does not affect the facts. Your wife was a sexual predator. And as per Mrs. Yorke’s contract, her employment can be terminated immediately, or even retrospectively, after her passing. Our client feels this is their only option.”

  Bruno allowed the sofa to swallow him, his thoughts suddenly turning to someone else. “What about our son?” he choked. “What will happen to him now?”

  CHAPTER 6

  FLICK, LONDON

  Flick skimmed through her phone, deleting hundreds of bookmarked websites and news feeds she had visited over the last three years. Most of them were about her Match, Christopher, and his crimes. But a slip of the finger meant that instead of deleting one, she opened it in error.

  SERIAL KILLER MURDERS PREGNANT WOMAN

  The twenty-seventh murder victim of London’s serial killer was pregnant, police have revealed.

  Syrian-born Dominika Bosko was five months pregnant with a baby son when she was found dead in her kitchen, garrotted by cheese wire. The body was discovered yesterday by a colleague concerned by her absence from the bookmaker’s where they both worked.

  Detective Sergeant Sean O’Brien said: “We can confirm the body of the child was discovered by his mother’s side but we won’t speculate on the cause of his death until a full postmortem has been carried out.”

  Flick closed her eyes. All this time later and the impact of her Match was not lessening. She continued to erase her bookmarks until none remained. Next, she would cut out those she followed on social media who were leading more fulfilling lives than her. Flick’s television and socials were her only windows to the outside world. She’d long ceased following online the comings and goings of her brothers, her friends, members of her Muay Thai martial arts club, and employees at the restaurant she co-owned. It’d become too much for her to read about their perfect lives, perfect families, and perfect homes. She’d been robbed of all those things because her DNA had been Matched to that of a psychopath.

  She had not been a bitter person until post-Christopher. Her glass had mostly been half-full, and positively overflowing when she’d first learned she had a Match. Now, not only did she hate him for leaving her dreams in tatters, but she also loathed her own cursed body for their biological link. With no one else to punish for the cards she’d been dealt, she took it out on herself with harmful behaviours. Smoking, alcohol, and highly saturated convenience foods were her weapons for a slow, torturous suicide.

  Now, as Flick culled more former friends she envied on Instagram, an advertisement caught her attention. It was familiar, having appeared to have followed her around other sites she’d surfed that day. Clickbait, she thought.

  Click here to start your life again.

  The notion was enticing. Who hadn’t dreamed of starting afresh? Flick fantasised about it regularly. But if something appeared too good to be true, then it probably was. You couldn’t press a restart button by clicking on a link. Or could you? She paused and then, throwing caution to the wind, she hit the link and was immediately taken to a website that she mirrored on her TV screen for a clearer view.

  Less than one percent of the British population can solve this puzzle. Can you?

  The screen was taken over by dozens and dozens of three-dimensional graphics, along with brightly coloured random floating letters, numbers, and shapes, all of them moving in indiscriminate directions. Flick sat upright to gain a better view, then allowed the television’s sensor to pick up her line of vision so that she could control the screen with her eye movements.

  In her head, ordered sequences including letters and numbers or even months of the year had specific appearances and personalities. “Your daughter has a type of synaesthesia called ordinal linguistic personification,” a psychiatrist had told her worried parents when she was nine. He went on to assure them she wasn’t suffering mental health issues when Flick admitted she saw a woman with red hair when she thought of the number nine or that March was represented by an introverted teenager in a beanie hat. “Duke Ellington, Marilyn Monroe, Kanye West, and Stevie Wonder have all lived with synaesthesia,” the psychiatrist added.

  Now, in under a minute, she’d rearranged everything to form a sphere with various words and patterns across it. She waited, expecting her “reward” to be getting redirected to a website where she’d be given the hard sell for a product she had no interest in buying. Instead, her screen went blank, then returned to the television channel she’d been half watching. Is that it? she thought, deflated.

  She made her way to the open doors of the Juliet balcony, picking up a cigarette packet from the table. As she scanned the communal gardens below, she flipped open the lid but it was empty. When she returned to the kitchen, there were no packets left in the cupboards either. It was against the law for cigarettes to be dispatched with online grocery deliveries, leaving her little choice but to leave the flat for the first time in weeks and bulk-buy them in their hundreds.

  The nearest supermarket was a fifteen-minute walk from her East London apartment, and once she was outside, it felt like Flick’s first day on earth. Everything was alien to her, from the close proximity to people who brushed past her to the revolving advertising billboards adorning building walls. The world outside was moving too quickly for her and it made her anxious.

  Beds of brightly coloured flowers in a pocket park caught her attention. It was like an oasis in a desert of concrete and asphalt. Once upon a time, London had felt like an exciting, boisterous, vibrant city and a perfect place in which to be young and single. But as she approached her midthirties, it became overpriced, overcrowded, and designed for a youthful, woke generation. She desired wide open spaces now more than ever. If only I could start my life again, I’d live it by the sea, she thought. A home by an endless ocean.

  Flick spied in the centre of the park a line of street-food vendors cooking on mobile pop-up stands. Clad in her typical uniform of shapeless tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt, she felt self-conscious next to the smartly dressed office workers on their lunch breaks. They queued to order freshly cooked, steaming cartons of exotic foods. Flick couldn’t remember a time when she’d eaten a meal that hadn’t required a clear film lid to be pierced first, so she joined a line for Thai food.

  “Can I have the beef with sticky rice, please?” she asked. The chef poured the contents of two plastic boxes into the pan, where they sizzled as they came into contact with the cooking oil. But almost immediately, the noise and smell they emitted triggered Flick’s imagination.
She put her hand over her nose and mouth as the crackling of raw meat and the beef’s aroma conjured up the night of Christopher’s death.

  Someone had intercepted him at the home of his planned thirtieth victim. There, they had strangled him with cheese wire, the murder weapon he favoured, before dragging his body into the rear garden, covering him with a duvet and white spirits, and setting him alight. Once he’d been identified by his DNA, teardrops were found on the dead bodies of a baby and his mother which linked Christopher to at least two of the murders. Eventually, there was enough evidence to connect him to eleven more. But it was widely assumed he was guilty of all twenty-nine. However, the person who had turned the tables and killed Christopher remained aloof.

  Months later when Flick had taken the test and been informed of her Match, his name hadn’t sunk in even when she’d typed in his email address to contact him. Police had kept his account open in the hope someone they had not questioned and who was unaware of his murder might get in touch. An officer monitoring it responded with a visit to her restaurant, questioning her on the nature of their relationship. Only then did she learn she had been paired with the most prolific serial killer of the last forty years. Unwilling to accept it, Flick paid twice more to be tested but received the same results.

  Over the following three years, her need to learn more about him became an obsession. She’d visit his crime scenes or track down his victims’ families and engineer casual meetings with them to learn more about their lost loved one. She’d even lurked outside Christopher’s boarded-up home in West London, trying to find a way of breaking through the metal shutters that blocked every entrance.

  Now, as her lunch sizzled and spat, Flick imagined it being Christopher’s flesh as the flames burned his corpse. She couldn’t remain there a moment longer. She pushed past others in the queue and ran to the edge of the park, steadying herself against the railings. She inhaled deeply, searching for cleansing breaths to rid herself of the stench of beef clinging to her lungs.

  Back home, she locked and bolted the door behind her, leaned her back against it, and slid to the floor. It was only as she went to reach for the cigarettes that she remembered she had not made it as far as the supermarket. She would have to do without as she wouldn’t be leaving the house again today.

  Flick held her head in her hands and sobbed as long and hard as she had the day she’d discovered on the dark web a poster who had access to Polaroid photographs Christopher had taken of his victims and kept as mementos. She’d paid a month’s wages in bitcoins to download them, partly to see how depraved the man who biology had paired her with was, and partly to put paid to the doubts creeping into her mind about her own self and what she too might be capable of. Perhaps as well as their DNA, they shared the same latent desires, the same latent tendencies?

  When she vomited after seeing the fourth garrotted, bloated victim, she knew for certain she and Christopher were nothing alike. Nature had played a very cruel trick on her. Time might have passed for the rest of the world since that day, but it remained frozen for her. And she was at a loss as to how it was going to get any better.

  She wiped her eyes, closed the curtains, and made her way into the kitchen to pour herself a rum and Coke. As she took a handful of ice from the freezer, a message alert appeared on her phone.

  FAO: FLICK KENNEDY

  Private and Confidential

  Dear Miss Kennedy, following your successful completion of our puzzle, we are offering you a unique opportunity to start your life afresh. Please find attached to this email an address, date, and time, along with nondisclosure agreements and brief notes of what will be expected of you. You will be financially compensated for your time.

  “Start your life afresh,” she repeated as she scanned through the attached contents. It looked too elaborate to be a scam. She pressed the accept button and hoped whatever lay ahead of her was better than what had preceded it.

  CHAPTER 7

  CHARLIE, PORTSMOUTH

  There was very little left of Charlie’s fingernails for him to bite by the time the coach driver steered the vehicle into an empty bay at London’s Waterloo station.

  Charlie used the last of his transdermal patches to combat his fluctuating anxiety levels and tapped at a copper-coloured wristband. His doctor had suggested that wearable therapy, with its electrical, vibrational, and temperature- and scent-based stimulants, would also assist with his unease. But today it was having little effect.

  He questioned whether he was about to become the victim of an elaborate hoax. But there was something too tempting to ignore about the offer to start his life again. The invitation to London first appeared by email minutes after he had deciphered the puzzle. He’d been informed that his speed and accuracy had taken him through to the next round of a competition, the winners of which would be offered the opportunity to enter a programme to restart their lives. Naturally, he was sceptical. But the allure of the unattainable was too tempting not to explore.

  As his fellow commuters removed luggage from overhead storage areas, however, Charlie remained stationary, once again weighing up the pros and cons and wondering whether he was doing the right thing.

  Way into the early hours of the previous night, he had been online searching for clues as to the advert’s origin and what previous participants had to say about their experiences. But it had seemingly flown under most of the conspiracy-theory community’s radar. Some users had spotted the puzzle but failed to solve it. Regulars on scientific forums suggested it could only be solved by people whose brains were in a particular stage of evolution or wired in an alternative way to the majority. Charlie wondered if that included his synaesthesia. Others claimed it was simply clickbait. But clickbait rarely lured you out of the virtual world and into the real one.

  He was the last to disembark the coach as he threw his bag over his shoulder and stretched his legs. He considered taking a taxi to the address he’d been emailed, but chose to walk when he struggled to find a non-autonomous one. He slipped in his earbuds and left it to a map projected into the left lens of his glasses to direct him.

  His mind wandered and he found himself asking his OS to play the latest news headlines about the Hacking Collective, a popular subject within his online communities this week. As Charlie crossed Westminster bridge, he mulled over what might happen if the United Kingdom were next to be held to ransom. He had still been a child when the post-Brexit riots divided the country, but all these years later, divisions between leavers and remainers lingered. He could foresee history repeating itself and opinions being split as to whether they should pay up or stand their ground.

  What the Collective was doing around the world was inexcusable, he reasoned, but his obsession with conspiracy theories had taught him that governments brought the threat of public exposure upon themselves. If they were more transparent there’d be no need to keep so many secrets.

  His irises flicked towards the map—he was only minutes from his destination, a side street running adjacent to the Embankment. His anxiety levels were on the rise.

  What if I’m not being duped, what if this offer is genuine? he asked himself. What if they really are giving me the opportunity to start my life from scratch? Perhaps he might make a better job of it the second time around.

  What would I be turning my back on if I accepted? I have very little family; even Mum and Dad split up and moved away to be with their DNA Matches. Who would miss me?

  A Match was never far from his mind, and he removed his phone from his pocket and asked his OS to log on to his Match Your DNA account. Charlie had registered his details five years earlier but his counterpart had yet to do the same. At this point, he no longer cared if she was decades older than him, or located on the other side of the world, or if she was in fact a he. He was desperate to know what it felt like to be wanted. No messages, the website’s inbox read. The hollowness inside him was to remain but it
helped to make his mind up for him. Whatever was going to happen today, he had little to lose.

  “You have reached your destination.” An automated voice spoke through his earbuds. Adjacent to the Embankment’s dual carriageway was a narrow side street accessed only by concrete steps and a passageway under a building. There, he found himself in an oblong courtyard surrounded by six-storey offices.

  Charlie glanced at them all, searching for a building number. There were none above any doors, no keypads, handles, locks, or intercoms, and each window was tinted so it couldn’t be peered into. He paced around the courtyard, double-checking the address in the email and scanning the buildings again to see if he’d missed an obvious entrance. Again, he drew a blank.

  I’m an idiot. He sighed. I knew this was too good to be true. It’s a con.

  But for what purpose? Why had they gone to so much effort to get him there? They’d paid for his travel and compensated his bitcoin account handsomely for his loss of earnings.

  Charlie turned and headed back towards the staircase when a set of double doors to his right opened inwards. He paused, waiting for someone to either exit or greet him, but no one came. He’d viewed enough thrillers to know that he should keep on walking in the opposite direction to whatever lay beyond a pitch-black lobby. But a sudden confidence stirred inside him. Instead, he tapped a button on the arm of his glasses to zoom in ahead; whatever lay inside was too dark to focus on, with the exception of a pattern on the wall. It was barely visible but Charlie recognised it immediately. It was the solution to the puzzle that had brought him there.