The One

by John Marrs

  The phone in his pocket vibrated, and taking it out, he saw Sally’s name with a text message.

  ‘I need to see you,’ it read.

  Nick rolled his eyes. He didn’t wish to be cruel but he had nothing left to say to her.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he replied.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  Her reply came in the form of a picture and the bottom fell out of Nick’s world. It was an ultrasound scan.

  Chapter 70

  ELLIE

  An agitated Ellie drummed her fingernails against her glass-topped desk and stared at the painting on the wall ahead of her. She’d spent £40,000 on the canvas two years earlier, purchased on impulse when she spotted it on an easel in the window of a Knightsbridge gallery. It was a painting of a little girl with huge green eyes, dressed in a blue coat, who stared beyond her framed confines and out into the world. A group of adults surrounded her, standing with their backs to her like they hadn’t noticed she was there. She was very skinny, almost waif-like, and through the gap in her unbuttoned coat, under her top, the outline of her heart was barely visible. You could only see it if you looked closely. There was something about the forlorn expression in the girl’s face and in the depth of her eyes that Ellie often lost herself for moments at a time. Almost everyone failed to notice the child’s heart and Ellie never felt the need to point it out. But for Tim, in fact, it had been the first thing he’d spotted when he first visited her office.

  When Ellie stared at the painting now, she thought of Tim, and more precisely, why, like the girl, he had chosen to hide something.

  The moment she saw Tim’s mother in the photos he’d kept hidden from her, she recognised her. She was someone she’d worked closely with some fifteen years earlier. Samantha Ward. Though much younger in the pictures with her son, she was a lab assistant in a team Ellie had put together when she first discovered the Match Your DNA gene. Ellie was sure Samantha was one of the members of the group she’d nicknamed ‘the seedlings’ – a batch of colleagues she’d tested her theory on. Only back then, when Ellie was desperate for guinea pigs, she hadn’t necessarily followed the rules.

  Ellie knew Samantha as a grey haired, softly spoke middle-aged woman. She’d said little, and as Ellie outgrew the lab and her staff, Samantha, like most of the others back then, slipped from her radar after they were no longer of use to her.

  She had saved the photo of Tim and his mother on her iPad and opened it up once again. There was an unquestionable resemblance between mother and son, and they shared the same warm smile and hazel, almond-shaped eyes. Tim didn’t talk of her frequently, but when he did it was always in glowing terms. He was grateful to her for working ludicrous hours in multiple jobs so that she could afford to send him on school trips and to help support him at university. Ellie knew he still felt the pain of his loss from her sudden heart attack.

  Ellie was positive it wasn’t coincidence that the son of one of her former employees had come into her life, and she was desperate to know why. Did she really know Tim at all? The simplest solution was to question him face to face, but Ellie wanted to find the answers herself.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Kat asked, when Ellie walked into her head of personnel’s office unannounced.

  ‘I need your help and I need to keep this between the two of us,’ Ellie began, and they sat down on the sofa. Ellie inched closer to Kat and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve told me before that you pride yourself on never forgetting a face, is that right?’

  ‘Um yes,’ Kat replied nervously.

  ‘The night of the Christmas party, you told me you thought you recognised my partner from a job interview here, only he had a different name – Matthew, I think you said?’

  Kat nodded.

  ‘How sure are you?’

  ‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ Kat said, her voice trembling.

  ‘I’m not, why?’

  ‘The day after the party, I went back through Matthew’s file and called up his interview notes and his CV. It was just irritating me that I might’ve got him mixed up.’

  Ellie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘And what did you find?’

  Kat moved quickly across the office, her high heels clicking against the marble floor like tap shoes. She flicked though folders in a filing cabinet, then passed one with a white sticker on the front to Ellie. She felt her heart sink when she read the words ‘Matthew Ward’. He was definitely Samantha’s son.

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner, but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. His online record has been deleted from our files, but I always keep a hard copy too. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera, the picture came out blank. I tried with my iPhone, but that was blank too. I remember joking with him about it.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

  ‘Oh God no, of course not.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ellie said, then left Kat’s office and hurried back to her own. Ula glanced up at her from her laptop and was about to ask her a question but stopped herself as Ellie closed the door firmly behind her.

  She sat behind her desk and opened the folder apprehensively. She scanned the copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, and compared it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned of her Match. Both worked in the computing field but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, home town, exam qualifications, email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.

  Next, she needed to see photographic evidence of the Matthew Ward who’d visited her building some eighteen months earlier. She logged into the online check-in system where visitors to the company’s reception desk signed in and out electronically. She checked the names of visitors on the day he’d been interviewed but found no one of that name.

  She asked Ula to contact the company’s head of buildings security to request footage from the time and date of Matthew’s visit. She paced around her office as she waited, looking out across the London skyline and trying to quell the rising anger inside of her.

  Once the time coded security footage arrived in her inbox she played the files in order. Cameras covered the building’s ground floor entrance, lifts, the reception desk and the main corridors, but there was no footage of anyone who resembled Tim or Matthew.

  She rewound and fast-forwarded for the best part of an hour, desperate to find something, when suddenly, she spotted an inconsistency in the footage at the reception desk. The time code at the top of the screen flickered ever so slightly to reveal that a full minute of film had disappeared. Ellie felt her stomach knot. Someone had accessed and edited the clip she was watching. It was the same for the images taken inside the lifts and the ground floor; they all missed approximately sixty seconds.

  The last file she opened was of the corridor leading to the interview suite. She watched in dismay as, moments before Kat’s time-logged interview with Matthew, the man she knew as Tim appeared dressed in a smart, tailored suit. He was walking confidently along the corridor with a satchel over his shoulder, and as he approached the final camera outside the interview room, he paused and looked directly into it.

  She felt her blood run cold when she saw him clearly mouth the words ‘Hello, Ellie’.

  Chapter 71

  MANDY

  ‘He doesn’t get many visitors,’ the young nurse said, as she led Mandy along a corridor.

  The nursing home where Richard was being looked after smelled of antiseptic and air freshener. The lino on the floors was clean and unblemished, and reproduction watercolour paintings of historic British landscapes hung on the walls. At the end of the corridor there was a spacious, open-plan, brightly lit day room, where Mandy could spy residents sitting in wheelchairs in various states of consciousness.

  ‘How long has he been kept here?’ Mandy asked.

  ‘Around
ten months now, I think. His family used to visit quite often at first, but not so much anymore. It’s a pity.’

  ‘Did they give any reason why they stopped?’

  ‘No, but you’d be surprised by how many of our patients don’t get any visitors. For some of them, once they’re dropped off at the gate, they don’t see anything of their families again.’

  ‘Someone told me Richard’s family banned friends from visiting him?’

  The nurse nodded. ‘It wasn’t an official order, but we were asked not to encourage it.’

  ‘Well, thanks for allowing me in.’

  ‘I’m sure being his Match must give you some rights.’

  Mandy assumed it was nerves making her stomach anxious and then she felt a sharp kick from inside. She rubbed her belly to reassure her baby everything would be all right but, secretly, she was terrified by how she would feel when she saw Richard.

  ‘Right, here we are,’ said the nurse as she opened the door. ‘There’s a chair by his bed, and just speak to him normally, like you would to anyone else.’

  Mandy mentally prepared herself before entering, and when she walked in, she waited until the last moment to turn her eyes in the direction of the bed where Richard lay.

  He bore little resemblance to the photographs on his bedroom wall or to those in the folder she kept; the handsome, toned, angular man she’d become accustomed to staring at and fantasising about was now a shred of his former self – more skin and bones held together covered with plastic tubes and breathing apparatus.

  His arms were sapling thin and there was a rash under his chin where someone had shaved him too closely. His hair was long and clumsily combed into an old-fashioned side parting. His skin was grey and his pyjamas were hanging off him. But despite his appearance and the strained noises that came from his throat as the ventilator pumped oxygen into his frail body, Mandy knew for certain she was completely in love with her Match.

  She pulled up an armchair and sat down; the closer their proximity, the faster the rhythm of her heart became. And when – instinctively – she reached to hold his hand, it felt like an electric charge was running through her veins.

  ‘Hi Richard,’ she began, her voice quivering, unsure what to say. ‘I’m Mandy. You don’t know me but I know a lot about you.’

  Mandy didn’t know what she expected to happen; the last few months had shown her that the impossible could become possible, and deep down she hoped that maybe some miracle might occur – he would react to her sound, her smell or just her presence. But he didn’t stir.

  ‘It seems pretty nice here,’ she continued, looking out of the window at the gardens surrounding the home. ‘And the nurses seem very friendly. I hope they’re looking after you.’

  Without warning, she felt her eyes brimming and once the first few tears fell down her cheek, she couldn’t stop the rest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this … I was supposed to meet you and we were going to fall in love like they do in the films and in those real-life stories you read in trashy magazines in doctors’ surgeries. And even though I know it’s never going to be like that with us, I still can’t stop myself from thinking about what could have been. I’ve spent God knows how many hours looking through old photographs of you and watching your childhood videos. I feel like I know you even though I thought you were dead. And now here we are together, and you’re still alive and I have your baby inside me. It should be the happiest time of my life but it’s not. Because you have no idea who I am or that I’m even here.’

  Mandy brought Richard’s palm up to her cheek. He felt cold, she thought, and held it tighter in an attempt to warm him up. His touch was like nothing she had ever felt before. It was as if his skin was permeating hers and she could feel his, her own and their baby’s heartbeats all inside her body.

  Then for the briefest of moments, Richard’s body jolted as if it had been struck by lightning. Mandy stared at him, sure that her eyes were playing tricks on her, but again, his body jerked as if his heart had been restarted with defibrillators.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off his face, staring as his eyelids blinked, languidly at first and then more rapidly. The corners of his mouth under the breathing apparatus lifted, turning upwards ever so slightly. Mandy held her breath as she waited for his pupils to focus and see her for the first time. This was it. The moment she’d been waiting for.

  Mandy dashed out of the room into the corridor frantically searching for assistance.

  ‘Richard Taylor, he just moved!’ she blurted out to a confused nurse. ‘He needs help.’

  ‘He just moved?’ the nurse repeated.

  ‘Yes, I put his hand to my face and his body moved and then his arm and his eyes opened. Please, can you call a doctor? I think he’s waking up.’

  Chapter 72

  CHRISTOPHER

  For precisely eighty-two days, Christopher juggled his mission to kill thirty women while maintaining his burgeoning relationship with Amy.

  It hadn’t been easy to devote time to either, particularly when he and Amy spent every other evening and weekend together. And it didn’t leave him with many opportunities to keep regular tabs on the remaining five women. He’d check his computers when possible and occasionally resorted to drugging Amy’s drinks with a small measure of propofol he’d purchased from the dark web, which rendered her unconscious for up to seven hours at a time. That left him undisturbed to continue his research at home until the early hours or, in the cases of numbers Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five, snuff them out before a groggy Amy awoke.

  Amy had been the first to hesitantly use the ‘L’ word, surprising him as they took her sister’s dog for a walk across Hampstead Heath one morning. Oscar, the scruffy, ginger Border Terrier, had been staying with her for a week while her sister was away on holiday and, while Christopher didn’t see the point in pets, he liked how he felt when the three of them went for long walks together, their arms linked. He told her that he loved her too and, while he’d said the same to several partners over the years, it’d always been in order to get something from them. With Amy, it was the first time he had meant it.

  He permitted himself to imagine what it could be like if they remained this way for the rest of their lives. Maybe one day they could even buy a dog of their own, he thought, or a house in a countryside village? A marriage and a family of their own might follow. Everything he’d assumed he didn’t want or need was now appearing very likely, and it was all because of his DNA Match.

  When Amy wasn’t around, he found himself thinking about her, and when she was in his vicinity, he felt something he could only compare to the thrill of killing. Or at least how killing used to feel when he’d first started all those months ago, because now it was different; Amy had made everything different. She made his skin feel tender to the touch even when she wasn’t touching him; his eyes softened as they followed her around a room and he longed for the nights he could finally complete his project so that he could spend undistracted time with her instead.

  Even the act of murder no longer felt as joyous as it once had. The final gasps that had once been music to his ears were now simply a means to an end. Revisiting the women’s homes days later to leave a photograph of his next victim was a chore. Everything that did not involve Amy was burdensome.

  Their lives together were quite secluded – neither had yet shared the other with an outside party. Christopher had no one to call a friend, but he’d lied and told her how his university pals were now spread out internationally and that it was problematic for them to see each other regularly. In truth, he had never been to university and the only people he had occasional contact with were his two older brothers. And, if put on the spot, he wouldn’t be able to remember the names of all five of his nieces and nephews, or who was the offspring of whom.

  Likewise, Amy hadn’t mentioned Christopher to any member of her family. She’d explained that being the only girl and the youngest of five children,
her protective parents and siblings didn’t approve of her dangerous job as a police officer. And they couldn’t understand why she, as yet, had no desire to marry, settle down and start a family of her own.

  ‘I want to continue with my career for at least another three years,’ she’d explained. ‘My parents are from a different generation and haven’t done the test, but they believe in it and, if I told them I’d met my Match, the pressure they’d put on us would be relentless. I’ll tell them about you eventually.’

  ‘Do your work colleagues know you’re seeing me?’ Christopher asked, hoping she’d boasted about her wealthy, handsome boyfriend – who just so happened to be the police’s most wanted man.

  ‘They know I’m dating, but I haven’t told them it’s anything serious. I like keeping you as my dirty little secret.’

  Christopher smiled to mask his disappointment. The mischievous side of him wanted to meet her colleagues, especially those investigating his case. He’d pictured himself enthusiastically shaking their hands without them knowing just how close they were to the killer they were hunting.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘We all have our dirty little secrets, don’t we?’

  Chapter 73

  JADE

  It had been close to a fortnight since Kevin’s funeral and Jade was feeling increasingly claustrophobic living in the confines of his family’s farm.

  To watch someone die so young was both heartbreaking and inspiring. Kevin had wanted so desperately to embrace life but had been robbed of the opportunity, and the best way that she could pay tribute to him was to begin the next chapter of her life by immersing herself in what the world had to offer.