The One

by John Marrs

  ‘How did your meeting at the Soho Hotel go?’ he asked as he walked over. His knowledge of her whereabouts took her by surprise but she refused to let it show. ‘You should get a better password for your cloud account. I always know where you are and where you’ve really been when you’ve been telling me you’re at work.’

  ‘Likewise, you shouldn’t have left your account open on my iPad.’

  ‘You think that was by accident? There are no accidents, Ellie. Only carefully constructed plans.’

  ‘Do you want to get to your point, Matthew?’ she asked calmly.

  ‘Ahh, it’s the first time you’ve called me that. I think I like it, Ells. Do you know why I picked the name Timothy, by the way? It’s biblical, apparently. It means “honouring God”. And that’s who you think you are, isn’t it? Some God-like figure who should be honoured?’

  Ellie raised her eyebrows and he paused for a reaction before continuing.

  ‘Discovering your little gene, telling people who they should be spending the rest of their lives with … it certainly appears that you have a God complex.’

  ‘This kind of accusation is nothing new.’ Ellie sighed dramatically. ‘So let’s not waste any more time. What do you want from me? There has to be a point to all this and money is the obvious motive. You’re probably expecting me to pay you off or you’ll threaten to sell your story to the papers.’

  Matthew took another sip of his drink. ‘Nope. I’m not the kiss-and-tell type. Try again.’

  ‘I have no idea what “type” you are.’

  ‘No you don’t, so let me tell you. I, my darling bride-to-be, am the type of person who is about to change your life in a way you never dreamed possible.’ He gave her a grin and held his glass aloft, like he was offering her a toast.

  ‘And how will you do that?’

  ‘We’ll get to that in good time. But first I have to say, I wish I’d been there to see the look on your face when you recognised my mum in that photograph.’

  ‘I don’t actually remember her very well,’ Ellie lied. ‘She was only a junior member of staff. Quite insignificant and nondescript, if I’m being honest.’

  ‘She was one of the first to take your test, wasn’t she? I’d have thought that would’ve made her a little more memorable, especially as she didn’t know she’d taken it.’

  Ellie shot him a glance. She knew exactly what he was referring to.

  ‘I see you’re not jumping in to correct me,’ he continued.

  ‘There were some people whose DNA I … borrowed … to build up the database in the early days,’ she conceded.

  ‘Some? One of your old colleagues told me you were nicknamed “Oscar the Grouch” because you spent so much time ferreting around the bins looking for used plastic cups and forks. By all accounts you’d be sneaking them out and swiping their DNA to add to your collection without their permission.’

  Inside, Ellie seethed. She’d been assured that those in her inner circle had been paid generously to remain silent about those murkier early days. ‘And?’ she asked. ‘Hardly the crime of the century, is it?’

  ‘Not only is it illegal, but it’s also unethical.’

  Ellie laughed. ‘You are about to give me a lecture on ethics? Come on now, Matthew, you can do better than that.’

  ‘OK, shall we discuss how later, once you had a bit of money behind you, you hired a team to bribe government employees into allowing you access to records from the National DNA Database? Or how they paid off staff in clinics, hospitals and mortuaries for samples?’

  ‘I can’t be held responsible for the methods of a third party.’

  ‘You took the DNA of the dead, the dying, sick people and criminals to bolster up your numbers in order to get more financial backing and expand your business. I found the details of known paedophiles, sex offenders and killers buried deep in your files, some of whom you actually found Matches for. And when I trawled a little deeper, you had the DNA of the severely mentally handicapped and even dead children on your database. Dead children, Ellie! How the fuck can you justify that?’

  ‘Show me one successful global company that hasn’t blurred the lines in its early days to get a foot on the ladder.’

  Ellie looked away, refusing to feel shame for what she’d turned a blind eye to. ‘The end justified the means,’ she replied. ‘My discovery changed the world, so what harm did it do?’

  ‘Do you recall what the results of my mum’s Match Your DNA were?’

  ‘Of course not – it was very early on, so I can only presume that she had no confirmed Match back then.’

  ‘And what about my dad?’

  ‘Your dad? I didn’t even know he existed until two hours ago.’

  ‘My dad was also one of your early test subjects. He was working for the government when you stole his details. Then when you made the test available to the public, a woman got in touch with him after discovering she was his Match. At a time when my parents should have been thinking ahead to their retirement, he was packing his bags to move to Scotland with a complete stranger.’

  ‘Matthew, I am not responsible for—’

  ‘I’m not interested in hearing you toe the corporate line or your usual bullshit about how you’re not to blame for destroying people’s lives. I’m here to tell you how I’m about to destroy yours. Now, do you mind if I help myself to another drink?’

  Chapter 81

  MANDY

  Mandy was relieved to find Pat’s house empty when she returned from visiting Richard at the nursing home.

  She needed space to formulate a plan before she was ready to confront Pat and Chloe about why they’d lied about Richard’s death. But first she needed to get out of Pat’s house. She made her way upstairs to her bedroom – his bedroom – and fought the urge to cry again. She was concerned about the effect her afternoon of stress might be having on her baby.

  What had begun as an ordinary day with so much to look forward to had taken more twists and turns than a James Patterson novel. She was exhausted, and couldn’t wait to return to the safety of her own home and its familiar surroundings. Once there, she’d lock the doors, slip into a deep, soapy bath and begin to come to terms with everything she had learned. And then, in a couple of days when the dust had settled, she’d visit her mum and sisters in the hope of making amends. It had been the best part of a year since she’d seen them properly and she needed her real family now more than she could’ve ever imagined.

  She grabbed her clothes from around the room, and threw them into two suitcases. Everything baby related she left where Pat had hung it, alongside bags of toys, nappies and a stroller. She could buy these things for herself, later.

  The sound of the front door opening gave her a queasy feeling and she quickly slammed the lids of her cases and zipped them up.

  ‘Hiya! Are you upstairs, Mandy?’ yelled Chloe. ‘We’ve brought fish and chips from the takeaway as Mum couldn’t be bothered to cook …’

  Her voice trailed off as Mandy appeared on the landing lugging her cases behind her. ‘Is everything OK?’ asked Pat.

  ‘I’m going home for a few days,’ Mandy replied. ‘I just need a bit of time to myself.’

  Pat and Chloe looked at each other, a baffled look crossing their faces. ‘Has something happened? Is it the baby? Is he OK?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘Yes, the baby’s fine.’

  ‘Then why are you leaving? I thought you were happy here?’

  Mandy paused and stared at the two strangers below her, realising she didn’t really know them at all. They had lied to her from the day she’d first met them, and she resented them for every mistruth they’d sold her and every fake promise they’d made.

  ‘I know about Richard,’ Mandy said slowly but firmly.

  ‘What do you know?’ Pat asked.

  ‘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 ow
n. But that’s not even the half of it, is it?’

  ‘Whatever she’s told you, she’s lying,’ said Pat immediately. ‘Michelle is a bitter little tart, angry because Richard didn’t want her anymore.’

  ‘So you didn’t beg her to have Richard’s baby and then harass her when she said no?’ Mandy fixed her glare on Pat.

  ‘No, of course we didn’t, darling. Before he died, Richard told me he never loved her.’

  ‘“Before he died”! Pat, stop it. I know the truth. I just spent the afternoon with him in his nursing home.’

  Pat held her hand to her mouth in surprise and Chloe looked away.

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

  ‘We didn’t mean to,’ Chloe interrupted, her voice trembling. ‘When you turned up at the remembrance service, we assumed you knew he was alive. Then when you came to the house, we realised you thought he was dead and …’ She glanced at Pat. ‘Mum thought it best not to upset you any further. I wanted to tell you the truth but then it all went too far.’ Again, she exchanged an uneasy look with Pat.

  ‘You even showed me where you had sprinkled his ashes, Pat. What kind of mother would do that? When her son is still alive?’

  Even Chloe looked surprised at this. ‘Mum?’ she said quietly, but Pat ignored her.

  ‘For all intents and purposes he is dead,’ said Pat. ‘I lost my little boy and I wanted him back. And you, you wanted a child. I’m sorry I lied to you but it’s worked out for all of us, hasn’t it?’

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

  ‘No, we could never replace him,’ snapped Pat.

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

  ‘Oh, poor you. What about your brother? He’s the one who’s all alone up there. You’ve even banned his friends from seeing him.’

  ‘Don’t you dare judge us,’ Pat said, making her way up the stairs towards Mandy. ‘You’re lucky you’ve only seen him the way he is now – that body in bed who needs a ventilator to breathe, a pipe down his throat to feed him and a catheter to piss through. You have no idea how fortunate you are not to have known him back then, because you have nothing to compare him to now. That boy is not my son anymore. That body is not him, so don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing, because you are clueless.’

  ‘Mum, Mandy, please calm down,’ said Chloe, but she was ignored again.

  ‘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? You asked her first.’

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

  ‘What?’ Mandy lost her grip on the suitcase handle and it fell to the floor. ‘You did the test for him?’

  Chloe hesitated. ‘You make it sound worse than it is,’ she said, and lowered her head. ‘Mum was just doing what she thought best. Please, Mandy, just leave your cases there and come downstairs and let’s talk about this. You’re part of our family, just like the baby will be.’

  Mandy shook her head and laughed. ‘You’re wrong. 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.’ Mandy grabbed her suitcases and pulled them towards her and started making her way down the stairs.

  ‘Like hell you are,’ yelled Pat and ran up the last few stairs until she was face to face with her. ‘You aren’t taking my grandchild away from me.’ As she said this she yanked at her arm, which made Mandy lose her balance.

  Mandy fell forwards. She managed to grip the handrail just before her legs gave way, but with the force of her giant body falling, she didn’t catch herself in time to stop her forehead from cracking into the spindles. She felt the warm trickle of blood run down her face. She held herself steady with one hand and with the other Mandy reached to touch her wound. When she realised it was a deep cut, she immediately felt faint.

  ‘I’ll call for an ambulance,’ yelled Chloe, and ran into the lounge for her phone.

  ‘Don’t move, you stupid girl,’ said Pat. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and placed it on Mandy’s injured head. ‘How could you put my grandchild at risk like this?’

  ‘You and your lies did this,’ Mandy wept.

  ‘We could have been happy, just the four of us. You were honestly like another daughter to me, but you shouldn’t have gone sticking your nose into business that didn’t concern you. Whether you like it or not, I am going to be a part of this baby’s life. Nobody – not you or any court in this land – is going to keep me from my grandson.’

  Scared and disorientated, Mandy wanted to get as far away from Pat as possible. She pushed away Pat’s arm, which was supporting her, and once again reached for her suitcase. But as she tried to descend the staircase her legs buckled and she tumbled, cracking her already injured head against the bannisters and spindles, before falling down the remaining steps and landing in a crumpled, unconscious heap, face down on the floor.

  Chapter 82

  CHRISTOPHER

  The odorous molecules of Number Twenty-Nine’s auburn hair charged up Christopher’s nostrils 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 through this 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. 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 – he had counted – for her to finally lose full consciousness and slip to the floor. 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. And in the end, experience and the element of surprise were on his side, and 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. For a moment, in the reflection of the bi-fold doors, he watched the hunter take down his prey in an ill-fated tango, before turning away. He no longer resembled or recognised his old self.

  The squelch emitting from Number Twenty-Nine’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 and the frothy white bubbles pooling in the corners of her mouth.

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

  Twenty-Seven 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-Eight. And it became the one and only time in Christopher’s life that he’d b
een truly shocked and mesmerised by what he saw.

  Lying between her swollen, discoloured legs was a small, perfectly formed, lifeless 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-Seven’s name was Dominika Bosko and he wouldn’t forget it, because she and her baby were the only two Christopher 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 were 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 the child 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 Syria 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; if he’d known of Dominika’s pregnancy, he’d have removed her from his shortlist.