by John Marrs
Based on her typical pattern of behaviour, Number Seven would have just finished a shift at the no-frills Soho chicken restaurant where she worked until around 11pm. She would then have caught the number 29 bus home. He predicted she would be settled in her bed within the hour before her second job as an office cleaner began in central London at 6am. It was between those hours that Christopher’s work could begin.
When narrowing down his choices, he had factored in how he would reach them, and he knew fairly well the distance between his and every one of their homes. He’d learned from the error of others like him that there should be no pattern to the location of his marks – keep everything random on the surface but in perfect order underneath. And over time he’d worked out whose property he should drive to, who’d be best served by bike and which locations would be better reached on foot.
Number Seven’s flat was just a twenty-minute walk away from his house. ‘Perfect,’ he muttered, happy with himself.
But his attention was diverted from the red circle on one screen to the other, which displayed his dozens of email accounts. The email from Match Your DNA had remained unopened since it appeared in his inbox four nights earlier, when he’d been preoccupied with Number Six. But on seeing it again, he became curious as to the woman his biology had determined was best suited to him. At least he hoped it was a woman – he’d read stories about people being Matched with someone of the same sex or with people decades older than them. He didn’t want to be loved by a queer or a geriatric; in fact, Christopher didn’t really want to be loved by anyone. He’d wasted enough time in brief relationships throughout his thirty-three years to comprehend the amount of effort required to satisfy another person. It wasn’t for him.
Yet for all the drawbacks a potential Match presented, he was still inquisitive as to whom his would be. He glanced out of the window and into the darkness of his garden and allowed himself to imagine how amusing it would be to carry on with his project while pretending to live a normal, pedestrian existence as one half of a couple.
He opened the email. ‘Amy Brookbanks, female, 31, London, England’, it read, along with her email address. He liked the fact that she hadn’t given her mobile number; it showed caution. So many of the girls on his list hadn’t shown that degree of foresight and it had – and would continue to be – their downfall. He decided that when he returned home later that night he would send Amy an email and introduce himself, just to see what she had to say.
As predicted, on his other screen, the location of Number Seven’s telephone number remained stationary. Satisfied, he turned both monitors off, locked up the room and made a beeline for the kitchen cupboard where he kept his packed bag. He put his freshly disinfected cheese wire with the wooden handles in the bag, along with his pay-as-you-go phone with her number taped to the back of it, his gloves and his Polaroid camera.
As Christopher slipped on his gloves and overcoat, he glanced at the camera. It wasn’t an original from back in the 1970s because the paper required for each print was too easy for the police to trace. His camera’s paper was widely available and the camera itself was digital, boasting up-to-date features such as coloured filters. Each Number on his list had used a profile picture that had also been Instagrammed, and as he closed the door to his house, adjusted the straps on his backpack and walked briskly along the quiet street, Christopher knew he wanted his Numbers to look their very best, even in death.
Chapter 8
JADE
Jade looked on amused as the hotel spa’s beauty therapists, Shawna and Lucy, opened their plastic Aldi bags to take out their miserable-looking lunches.
The contents of Shawna’s bag consisted of half-a-dozen thinly sliced celery sticks wrapped in cling film and a pot of low-calorie piri-piri hummus, while Lucy tucked into a gluten-free seeded roll and a chicken Cup a Soup, which was still steaming from a blast in the canteen microwave.
Jade took out her Tupperware lunch box from her handbag. She’d packed a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch, a small packet of Maltesers, a doorstop-chunky ham and pickle sandwich and a can of Pepsi. She had no desire to replicate the diets of her thirty-something workmates. Bugger the bikini, she thought, as she took a bite of the sandwich.
‘So how are things going with that guy you were seeing from the club?’ Shawna asked Lucy, and licked a drop of hummus that’d fallen onto one of her false fingernails.
‘He’s being bloody idiot.’ Lucy sniffed. ‘He told me he was taking me out to dinner last night – which turned out to be at Nando’s – then spent the rest of the night staring at the skanky lass working the till. I mean, who does that when you’re on a date? It’s so disrespectful.’
‘Seriously? He is such a player.’
‘I know. He’s coming round mine tonight, though; I said I’d cook. What about you? What about that lad with the tattoos from Tinder?’
‘You mean Denzel? He says he really likes me but then I don’t hear from him in, like, four days. What’s up with that?’
Jade shook her head and took another bite from her sandwich. ‘Terrible. I don’t know how you put up with it. I’m so glad I don’t have to go through that anymore,’ she said between mouthfuls. It was conversations like this that reminded her of how lucky she was to have found Kevin on Match Your DNA, but she was annoyed that he couldn’t live any closer than half the world away in Australia. Before she’d received the email confirming her Match, she’d been in the same position as her workmates, only she liked to think she was more discerning with her men. In reality, she had dated just as many losers, or ‘stopgaps’ as Cosmopolitan branded them.
‘Yeah, you’ve got it easy,’ Lucy said. ‘You’ve found your lad.’
‘But it’s not like he’s on my doorstep, is it?’ Jade replied. ‘I can’t just pop round for dinner and a snog, can I? At least you’re actually interacting with these boys, even if they treat you like shite.’
‘That’s just how men are, though, isn’t it?’ said Shawna. ‘If you’re not one of the millions on that register who’ve been Matched already, then you’ve got to make do with what you can get until Mr Right turns up. If he turns up.’
‘Until then we’re gonna have to put up with a lot of shitbags,’ added Lucy.
‘No, girls, you’re wrong there.’ Jade delighted in telling them what they should do. ‘If us lasses all got our heads together, re-wrote the girl code and agreed to stop letting ourselves be treated like crap, then boys would have no choice but to up their game. Until then, they’re just going to keep carrying on because we let them.’
‘What I don’t get is what’s stopping you from going over to Australia and living happily ever after with Kevin?’ Shawna said. ‘If science reckons he’s the one for you, then what are you doing wasting your life here?’
‘I can’t just drop everything and go.’ Jade shook her head firmly. ‘Do you know how much flights to Australia cost? I’ve only just finished paying off one of my credit cards. Plus I’ve got my flat, my career, my family to think about …’
‘Your flat’s rented, you don’t have a career, you have a job you hate – I know that because we all hate this place – and you see your family once in a blue moon. So when it comes down to it, you don’t have any excuse.’
‘It’s not like you’re taking a bloody huge leap of faith either, is it?’ Lucy continued. ‘You were, literally, made for each other. Tell me what you like about him.’
Jade laughed. There was nothing she disliked about Kevin. Well, except his postcode. ‘He’s funny, he makes me feel good about myself, he’s kind, he has a gorgeous smile …’
‘Have you been sending each other sexy selfies?’
‘Of course not.’ Jade was adamant. ‘I’m not a slag.’ In reality, she’d tried once, but Kevin didn’t seem keen.
‘Christ,’ Lucy laughed. ‘There’s enough naked selfies of me floating around cyberspace to break the Internet.’
Jade agreed and gave one of her raucous laughs that everyon
e loved her for.
‘Well, if you don’t do that then you sext, right?’ Shawna interrupted.
‘Sext?’
‘Yeah, send each other filthy text messages or talk dirty down the phone to each other? Tell him what you want to do to him when you see him?’
Jade shook her head.
‘What about sexy time on Skype? Or Facetime?’
‘Kevin doesn’t have either.’ Jade had suggested Skyping a couple of times, but he didn’t have a laptop or a smartphone. If she thought her finances were bad, it was nothing compared to Kevin and his little backwater town. It was one of the many things they had in common.
‘Did you say he lived in Australia or 1950?’ Shawna continued. ‘It’s not like you to let a man fob you off.’
‘I don’t need to see him moving around and gurning like a bloody idiot to know how I feel about him.’
Shawna and Lucy’s eyes met and simultaneously nodded.
‘It’s definitely love then,’ said Shawna. ‘Nothing gets past our Miss Jade Sewell, but if he’s as awesome as you say he is, you need to stop wasting time here and get out there and see him.’
‘Or you’ll end up like us,’ giggled Lucy, although Jade could sense something in her tone that resembled a warning. ‘Seriously, Jade, pet, we’ve got slim pickings to choose from here. Every day, another fit lad gets snapped up by his Match. Me and Shawna are like vultures left picking at the bones of what’s been left behind and, believe us, it isn’t canny. It really isn’t. If I had a chance to be with my Match, I’d be on the next plane out of here, not sitting on the floor eating lunch round the back of a service entrance of a hotel.’
‘Yeah, stop making excuses,’ Shawna added.
‘Girls like us don’t do that sort of thing,’ Jade said, taken aback by Lucy’s directness. ‘I can’t leave everything behind and go, just like that. And like I said, a flight to Australia costs an arm and a leg.’
‘How much do you have left on your credit card?’
‘Well, I just finished paying one off …’
‘What’s your card limit?’
‘A couple of grand, I think.’
‘Then whack your holiday on the plastic. What have you got to lose? You need to grow some balls, bonny lass.’
‘Don’t make me get my balls out and slap you round the face with them. It’s just not me to chase a lad round the world.’
Shawna and Lucy glared at her, both of them with their tattooed eyebrows raised as far as the Botox would allow. ‘It’s not chasing him, hunny. He’s already yours.’
‘I can’t,’ repeated Jade, then paused. ‘Can I?’
Chapter 9
NICK
‘I think we should do it,’ Sally muttered, as she lay on her back staring at the exposed beams holding up the bedroom ceiling, illuminated by the street lamp outside.
‘It usually takes you longer than that, but I’m not complaining,’ Nick replied, and he removed his head from between her legs and surfaced from beneath the duvet. His hand moved towards the bedside cabinet where she kept their toys.
‘Not “it” as in sex,’ Sally said, ‘I think we should do the Match Your DNA test.’
Nick manoeuvred himself back to his side of the bed. ‘Way to kill the moment, babe.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Why now? Before Sumaira and Deepak rocked up for dinner and started talking about it, you were adamant we didn’t need to do it.’
‘Oh, baby, I still am,’ she said, her fingers playing with the hairs on his chest as if to reassure him. ‘But like Sumaira says, it’ll give us a bit of added security, just to know. To really know.’
Bloody Sumaira, thought Nick, but he didn’t complain aloud. ‘Are you sure this isn’t your way of telling me you have pre-wedding jitters?’
‘Of course not, silly.’ Sally pulled his head down to kiss it. ‘But you know what I’m like. It’s OK for you; your parents have been together since the Dark Ages, while my mum’s been married three times and my dad is on his fourth wife. They’re both always searching for something they don’t think they have and I really don’t want to be like them; I want to know that, at least biologically, we stand a chance.’
‘What if it turns out our DNA doesn’t Match?’
‘Then we’ll be mindful that maybe we’ll need to put more effort into our relationship. Like John Lennon said, “All You Need Is Love”.’
‘Yes, but he also said, “I Am The Walrus”, so let’s not hold too much credence to his pearls of wisdom.’
‘So you’ll do it?’ She gave him an imploring look.
Nick couldn’t say no to those puppy dog eyes. ‘If it makes you happy, then yes, I’ll do it. Now can I go back to doing something else that makes you happy?’
Sally caught a flash of his smile before Nick’s head disappeared back beneath the duvet and between her legs.
Chapter 10
ELLIE
The clock radio hit 3.40am as Ellie finally gave up trying to get to sleep.
With a busy day ahead, she desperately needed to get some rest, but her active brain didn’t seem to get the message. Instead, it raced at the speed of a runaway train with what she needed to accomplish in the next few hours in order to promote her newly revamped app. Under normal circumstances she’d have taken one of the sleeping tablets her private physician had prescribed for her, but she couldn’t risk feeling groggy when she needed to be on point.
Being interviewed by the world’s press was something Ellie had grown to loathe since reluctantly becoming a public figure. A decade earlier, she was another anonymous worker bee, busy behind the scenes. Then the next thing she knew, the world’s media was both praising her and lambasting her in equal measure. It had made her a tough cookie and she fast gained a reputation for being someone who was ruthless in her quest to make her business one of the world’s most successful. They hinted at the unscrupulous methods she may have used to get there, but with no concrete evidence, it was all just rumour. Ellie had paid enough people off to make sure the full story of her early days in business were never truly revealed.
As public appetite for her story grew, the tabloids had sifted through every piece of her private life, examining her past as if she were on trial. They picked apart her former relationships and threw enough cash at her exes that they spilled the beans on what she was like as a person, as a girlfriend and as a lover.
It made Ellie not just wary of the press but of everyone else too, and made dating a near impossibility. And while she acknowledged it was unfair to tar every man with the same brush, each time she met someone new her barriers would go up and she’d attempt to second-guess the motivation behind their interest. Were they only interested in her wealth? Did banging a billionaire make for good bragging rights to their friends? Or was she going to see another kiss-and-tell headline in the Sun on Sunday? Ellie couldn’t remember a time when Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook had been hauled over the coals for their sex lives, yet it seemed to happen to her with an overwhelming frequency.
She rolled onto her side, stretched out her legs and recalled how she had been forced to employ a legal team specifically to fire off warning shots every time she had an inkling the press was up to no good. Then, after half-a-dozen successful libel cases, she became too costly to lie about so they lost interest. Her media team became the go-to guys for all press inquiries, and she turned off her Google alerts, Facebook and Twitter accounts to remove any temptation to discover what people were writing about her. Only when absolutely necessary would she step out publicly as the company’s figurehead.
Ellie gave a frustrated groan at her lack of tiredness, threw her sheets to one side and turned on the bedside lamp. She remembered the email she’d received hours earlier, confirming a DNA Match had been identified. She’d signed up some ten years earlier, when the company was still in its infancy, and as its popularity quickly rose she had assumed it’d just be a matter of time before she found her Match.
But when th
e number of registered users had powered through the 1 billion mark, Ellie had begun to give up hope. Her Match was either in a happy relationship with somebody else, he was living in a developing country with no access to or knowledge of the test, or he was just not interested in knowing.
So Ellie had grown accustomed to spending her life alone and, in recent years, had become too consumed with work to even care. She didn’t need a relationship to make her content; she could do all that for herself. What could a Match add to her life that she wasn’t capable of finding on her own?
Nevertheless, she had to acknowledge that a tiny part of her was interested in who this person was.
‘Sod it,’ she said out loud, and grabbed her phone. She opened her email, paid the £9.99 for her Match’s details and waited. Two minutes later, an automated response landed in her inbox.
‘Name: Timothy Hunt. Age: 38. Occupation: systems analyst. Eyes: hazel. Hair: black. Height: 5ft 9in.’
His description accounted for almost half the men in the Western world, she thought.
‘Ula.’ She began to type an email to her PA. ‘Discover what you can about a Timothy Hunt, a systems analyst from Leighton Buzzard. His email address is copied below. Email me what you find out in the morning. Thanks.’
To her surprise, Ula emailed her back immediately. Does she ever bloody sleep? Ellie wondered. ‘Has he got a job interview with us? I can’t see him on my list,’ Ula asked.
‘Sort of,’ Ellie replied. ‘And make sure you find a photograph of him. Hire outside help if you need it.’
Ellie placed her phone back on her nightstand and climbed back under the duvet. She turned to lie on her other side and stared at the vacant half of her bed, the sheet just as crisp and unwrinkled as when her housekeeper had laid it that morning.