A Thousand Small Explosions

by John Marrs

Jenny and Emma paused, unsure of how to respond for fear of giving away something they shouldn’t if they’d grasped the wrong end of the stick. ‘I’m not sure what you mean?’ replied Jenny.

  ‘I met Michelle Nicholls today, Richard’s ex girlfriend. She told me a lot of interesting things about him, like that he was quite the ladies’ man and that he didn’t want kids of his own. But that’s not even the half of it, is it?’

  ‘Whatever she’s told you, she’s lying,’ said Emma immediately. ‘Michelle is a mixed-up little slag, bitter because Richard dumped her.’

  ‘So you didn’t beg her to have Richard’s baby and then harass her when she said no?’

  Amanda fixed her glare on an anxious Emma. ‘No, of course we didn’t. Before he died, Rich told me he never loved her.’

  ‘But Richard didn’t die, did he Emma? Because if he were dead, then who did I spend the afternoon with in a nursing home that your mum pays for?’

  Jenny covered her mouth with her hand and her daughter fell silent.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ continued Amanda. ‘Why did you tell me he was dead?’

  ‘We didn’t mean to,’ Emma replied, her voice beginning to tremble. ‘But when you turned up at the memorial service, you assumed we’d lost him…’

  ‘…but you didn’t correct me, did you? You just let me believe he was dead. You even showed me where you had sprinkled his ashes, Jenny. What kind of mother would say that when her son was still alive?’

  ‘For all intents and purposes he is dead,’ said Emma. ‘We’ve lost my little brother and we wanted him back so, so badly and you wanted a child. We’re sorry we lied to you but it’s worked out for us all, hasn’t it?’

  ‘What was the plan then, to replace Richard with my baby?’

  ‘No, we could never replace him,’ interrupted Jenny.

  ‘Then what? Because from what his nurse told me, you never go and visit him. You pay for his care but you’ve had nothing else to do with him since before you met me.’

  ‘It’s too hard,’ said Emma. ‘To see someone who was so full of life, drained of everything that made him exist. It’s just too damn hard.’

  ‘You’ve only seen him the way he is now,’ added Jenny, ‘you’ve got no idea what he was like back then. Watching him in some form of suspended animation is just heartbreaking. You have no idea.’

  ‘So what am I to you then? Just a vessel to carry his baby?’

  ‘No, of course you’re not. If we’d just wanted that, we’d have found a surrogate.’

  ‘But that’s what you wanted from Michelle, wasn’t it? Her womb.’

  ‘We weren’t thinking clearly back then; we were grieving and still in shock. We understand that now, that’s why we sent his DNA swab away to find his correct Match, to find the person to have his child with. And that’s you.’

  ‘What?’ Amanda lost her grip of the suitcase handle and it fell to the floor. ‘You did the test for him? It was planned all along to dupe his Match into having his baby?’

  Jenny hesitated, unsure of how to respond. ‘You make it sound worse than it is,’ she said, and lowered her head in shame.

  ‘Please Amanda,’ interjected Emma, ‘just leave your suitcase there and come downstairs and let’s talk about this. You’re part of our family, just like the baby will be.’

  Amanda shook her head and laughed. ‘You’re wrong because I am not part of this family and I’ll be damned if my baby will be either. You’ve lied to me from the word go so how can I ever trust you? I need to go home and start putting my life back together, without you two in it.’

  Amanda grabbed her suitcases and pulled them towards her and down the stairs. But when one of the wheels snapped and the case became stuck, she yanked it harder, only to send it crashing into her leg. Suddenly, she lost her balance and fell forward, cracking her forehead on the handrail. She managed to grip it just before her legs gave way and held herself steady until she felt blood running down her forehead and into her eyes. She touched her wound, and when she realised it was a deep one, she immediately fell faint and looked to a terrified Jenny and Emma for help.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said Jenny, and dropped the bag containing their takeaway dinners and ran up the stairs to meet Amanda. Amanda’s eyes opened saucer-wide and her face was ashen as her body began to go into shock.

  ‘It’s okay darling, you’re going to be okay,’ Jenny soothed. ‘Emma, call for an ambulance.’

  As Emma hurried into the kitchen to grab her phone, Jenny took hold of Amanda’s arms and held her steady.

  ‘I’m so sorry it’s come to this,’ Jenny whispered, ‘you have honestly been like another daughter to me. But you’ve left me with no choice.’

  Then she turned Amanda round and deliberately pushed her so hard that she tumbled down the stairs, cracking her head against the bannisters and spindles before landing in a crumpled, unconscious heap, face down on the floor.

  CHAPTER 82

  CHRISTOPHER

  The odorous molecules of Number Twenty-Eight’s auburn hair charged up Christopher’s nostrils, reached his olfactory cleft and dissolved in his mucus, creating a signal to his brain.

  But there was something about the fruit infused ingredients in her generic brand of shampoo that repelled him and to the best of his recollection, it was the first time a smell had ever had a negative effect on him.

  Christopher wanted to get her demise over with as briskly and efficiently as possible, but the skin around her neck was thin and he’d wrapped the wire around it too tightly, causing it to penetrate the epidermis. He loosened the slack a little, concerned that it might pierce her jugular and release a jet of blood across the room. Cleaning up each microscopic droplet would be far too time consuming and Christopher wasn’t in the mood.

  His partly-released grip meant he had to wait an agonising eight minutes for her to finally lose full consciousness and drop to the floor like a bag of spanners. She’d put up a brave fight, he conceded, with her futile attempts to kick, scratch and bite him. But he’d learned from the thumb incident of Number Nine not to be that careless again with the positioning of his digits. And in the end, experience and the element of surprise were on his side so the duel was weighted in his favour.

  Christopher followed the unconscious girl to the ground and wrapped the wire around her neck again, using just enough pressure to completely starve her brain of oxygen. He watched the hunter take down his prey in an ill-fated tango in the reflection of the bi-fold doors for a moment before turning away. He no longer resembled or recognised his old self.

  The racket emitting from Number Twenty-Eight’s throat as she slowly died was just as unpleasant as the odour from her hair, and he chose to ignore the mucus dripping from her nose or the frothy white bubbles pooling in the corners of her mouth.

  With her life finally drained, Christopher released his grip and lay shattered by her side, staring at the ceiling as images of another woman on his list flooded his head. Number Twenty-Six had haunted him for days and had been a turning point for him; between her and Amy, the psychopath had developed empathy and a conscience.

  Twenty-Six had been dead for the best part of three days when he’d returned to her kitchen to leave a Polaroid snapshot of Number Twenty-Seven. And it became the one and only time in Christopher’s life that he’d been truly shocked and mesmerised by what he saw. Lying between her swollen, discoloured, legs was a small, perfectly formed foetus, no bigger than an apple. To begin with, all Christopher could do was stare at it transfixed, wondering if the pressure he’d placed upon himself to reach his goal was causing him to hallucinate. But each time he held his eyes shut and released them again, the foetus remained.

  Number Twenty-Six’s name was Dominika Bosko and he wouldn’t forget it because she and her baby were the only two Christopher had considered victims. He felt compelled to wrap the foetus in a tea towel and gently move it into the crook of its mother’s arm.

  Christopher imagined how he might feel if he wer
e looking at Amy and their child lying before him, cold and lifeless and with all their potential quashed because of the actions of another. And for the very first time in his adult life, he could feel tears forming in the corner of his eyes. It was too late to stop the first few from splashing mother and child.

  It was only when he arrived home and researched it on the internet that he discovered that her unborn child had been a victim of a rare occurrence named coffin birth. The pressure of abdominal gases inside Dominika had built up as she began to decompose and forced her child out from her body.

  Christopher spent the rest of the day working his way through every piece of information he had on her, trawling her emails, text messages and social media interactions. Then in four separate emails to friends back home in Poland, she revealed she was pregnant. He crosschecked the dates – they’d been sent the weekend he was away in Aldeburgh with Amy.

  His relationship with Amy had made him complacent. He’d invested more time in her than keeping up to date with other aspects of the women’s lives and if he’d known of Dominika’s pregnancy, he’d have removed her from his shortlist.

  There were two more Numbers left before Christopher’s work was complete, but whether he could stomach the remaining kills was up for debate.

  CHAPTER 83

  BETHANY

  Bethany had never felt more vulnerable or heartless as when she stood partially clothed before Mark’s mother Susan, still flushed from having made love to her son.

  The light from Susan’s bedroom illuminated the distress on her face, the shadows making her a more foreboding presence. She glared at both of them in turn, disgusted by what she saw, then turned her back and walked away towards the lounge.

  Mark panicked and scrambled to find the underwear Bethany had stripped from him and thrown across the room. Once pulled on, he grabbed a T-shirt and pushed past her to follow his mother.

  ‘Mum,’ Bethany heard him say, as she found a towelling dressing gown hanging from a hook on the back of Mark’s door and slipped it on. Then, with her legs quaking, she went to join him so they could face the music together.

  ‘How could you both?’ began Susan, tears already streaming down her face. ‘Kevin is your brother Mark and your husband Bethany and you do this to him! We’ve only just buried him, he’s not even cold in the ground yet.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to find us,’ Mark said desperately.

  ‘Oh no, of course you didn’t, it’s pretty bloody obvious that you wanted to carry on behind everybody’s backs,’ Susan replied, raising her voice.

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘And you!’ continued Susan, pointing her finger towards Bethany. ‘We welcomed you into our home and treated you like a daughter. And this is how you act? Screwing your brother-in-law the whole time?’

  ‘It hasn’t been the whole time,’ began Bethany, ‘it was just this once.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Yes, because it’s the truth.’

  ‘You two don’t know what the bloody truth is. Mark, I thought we raised you better than this.’

  ‘You did … you have,’ Mark tried to interject.

  ‘Clearly I didn’t… you’re disgusting!’

  ‘There was never anything physical between Kevin and me,’ Bethany said firmly, hoping to defend Mark’s actions and diffuse the situation. ‘We didn’t have the chemistry and I don’t know why.’

  Susan’s eyebrows knitted as she glared at her daughter-in-law. ‘Yes there was, he was your Match! I saw how he was around you. He loved you.’

  ‘And I loved him but I wasn’t in love with him. I know we were Matched but there was no romance there, at least not on my part.’

  ‘What you mean is that as soon as you found out he was sick, you were no longer interested.’

  ‘No, that’s not the case, honestly Susan. If I didn’t care about him I wouldn’t have stayed.’

  ‘He was besotted by you Bethany. I could see it in his eyes. You were his Match so why didn’t you feel the same way? You were supposed to feel the same way!’

  ‘I don’t know, please believe me, I tried so hard to fall in love with him... I wanted to love him like he loved me but I couldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think you tried at all.’

  ‘She’s telling the truth Mum,’ Mark interrupted, ‘Bethany couldn’t fall in love with him because she isn’t his Match.’

  Both women turned their heads quickly to stare at Mark. He swallowed hard before he spoke.

  ‘I know Kev wasn’t her DNA Match because she’s Matched with me.’

  CHAPTER 84

  NICK

  It was Alex who had found the note waiting for him in Nick’s empty hotel room.

  When he had still not heard from Nick after a dozen texts and numerous voicemails, he cancelled his remaining physiotherapy clients and took a taxi to the hotel where he knew Nick had stayed before. And when Nick hadn’t answered the door, a worried Alex talked the receptionist into contacting someone from the security department to let him in.

  As the electronic keycard opened the door, Alex held his breath, scared of what he might find. Inside, the room was empty and tidy, but a bin was crammed with scraps of paper, curled up into tight balls and tossed away, along with cigarette packets and minibar bottles.

  The security man looked puzzled by the wide-open window as the breeze blew the curtains back and forth, but failed to take away the smell of stale smoke that clung to the material. ‘He’ll be fined for that,’ the man mumbled in broken English, but Alex didn’t care.

  He glanced around the room and eventually towards the pillow on the neatly made bed, and spotted a sealed envelope with something hand-written on it. He felt a sudden chill from the wind when he recognised his name and the handwriting, then held his breath as he dashed to the window and looked to the concrete roof of the building nine floors below.

  CHAPTER 85

  ELLIE

  Ellie and Tim went about their day-to-day routines like everything in their world was perfectly normal.

  At 5.30am each day, Andrei picked Ellie up from Tim’s house and drove her to work in London, and each evening, Tim cooked her dinner. Then they’d either settle down to watch a drama Tim had recorded on his digibox, or retreat into their own little online worlds on their tablets.

  For all intents and purposes, they were a typical, contented couple but for one difference – Ellie knew that her relationship with her Match was a sham. While she didn’t doubt that she loved him, she could no longer trust him and she was determined to get to the bottom of why he’d lied about his identity and his family.

  She didn’t even know if his real name was Tim or Matthew, nor why he’d attended an interview at her company some eighteen months earlier. At some point, he’d anticipated that she’d find the footage of him mouthing “Hello Ellie” into a security camera, but what was his endgame? She was convinced he had one as nobody went to the trouble he had gone to, to disguise his identity and burrow that far into her world, if they didn’t have a plan. However, she didn’t want to provide him with any indication that she was aware he was hiding something until she knew exactly what it was. Until then, the uncomfortable charade would continue.

  Ellie delegated her forthcoming week’s agenda to her departmental heads, freeing up her own time to investigate her fiancé’s history. And based on her recognition of a logo on Tim’s mother’s name-badge in a twenty-five-year-old photograph, her first port of call was the Cambridge laboratory where Ellie had once worked and had discovered Match Your DNA.

  Soon after Andrei parked her vehicle in the university car park, she made her way towards the office of Professor Michael Haig. He was now in his seventies and his thick head of silvery white hair reflected the light from the fluorescent bulbs above him. He removed his glasses and offered her a warm smile and a hug.

  ‘Ellie,’ he smiled, taking her hands and scanning her from top to bottom. ‘My darling g
irl, I was so pleased when my secretary told me you were coming this way and wanted to stop by.’

  ‘It’s great to see you Michael. I can’t believe how much things have changed since I was last here. I haven’t been since the extension was opened.’

  ‘I know,’ he replied, ‘it’s because of your work that we’ve been able to take advantage of all these Government grants - and of course your more than generous donations have helped us to move forward.’

  Ellie lowered her eyes bashfully. While she was happy to have assisted financially, she still felt embarrassed when it was mentioned and it was the reason why she’d insisted her donation remain anonymous.

  ‘So to what do we owe this pleasure?’ Professor Haig continued and poured her a coffee from a cafetiere. He beckoned her to sit on the sofa while he slowly lowered himself into an armchair. ‘Have you come to check up on us and see where we’re spending your money, or do you want to poach some of our very talented staff?’

  ‘No neither,’ she reassured him. ‘It has nothing to do with work. I need your help with something. Do you remember any science fairs that may have been held here, say twenty-five to thirty years ago?’

  ‘Oh of course, frightfully dull affairs,’ Dr Haig continued and leaned back in his armchair. ‘It was a time when research using animals was prominent and anti-vivisectionists were targeting high-profile laboratories. They and their staff were often threatened or became the subject of attacks and while we never made a monkey smoke a cigar or put shampoo in a rabbit’s eye, we had to make sure everyone else knew that too. So the Dean decided we needed to be more transparent about the research we did here and for a while, we became the “friendly face of science”. We sponsored competitions in local schools and the most promising young scientists from each year could take part in a competition in this very building. The usual stuff, paper mache solar systems, home made volcanoes and the like.’