A Thousand Small Explosions Read online

  Barely an hour of their waking days passed without one sending the other a message. She willed meetings to move faster when she felt the vibration of her phone in her pocket just so that she could read what he had to say next. She’d already cast aside her pay-as-you-go phone number and given him her private contact details and while there’d been no instant physical attraction to Tim when they’d met face-to-face at a pub days earlier, there was definitely something about his presence that she found appealing.

  Tim had been self-deprecating about his choice of a career as a systems analyst – “dull as shite” is the expression he’d used – while Ellie was more ambiguous about hers. She’d informed him she worked for a large company in the City, but when he inquired specifically what the firm did, she was deliberately vague, informing him it had something to do with economics and leaving it at that. She knew if their friendship was to continue or flourish into something more, she couldn’t lie to him forever. But for the time being, she enjoyed pretending to be a regular person and hoped he’d not ruin it by looking her up online.

  It’d been an age since Ellie had shown any interest in a man after a conveyor belt of disappointments. Her last few dates were only interested in using her as a networking opportunity or as someone to pitch potential business investments to. Others, be they on dates one, two, three or four, inevitably found a way to bring up the subject of her wealth.

  It was an instant turn-off when she realised their own insecurities had left them in fear of being emasculated by her and it turned out many men believed an independent, rich and attractive woman was a triple threat and that she would need controlling.

  Back in her twenties, Ellie believed she could fall head over heels for someone even if she hadn’t been Matched with them. After all, it’d been happening for thousands of years before the gene had been detected. But as time marched on and she passed the threshold of her thirties, she’d lost faith that she could ever find common ground with somebody who was not genetically linked to her. She’d experienced sparks on dates but they’d always fizzled out.

  However, even when she took the test and found a man who piqued her interest, she found herself wondering what his angle was and now she was trying to find fault, becoming almost disappointed when there was nothing about Tim to find fault over.

  ‘I’m going to be working in London on Friday, do you fancy joining me for dinner before I get the last train home?’ Tim texted.

  ‘Yes, that’d be lovely,’ she replied and felt a rush of warmth inside.

  While she had yet to feel that immediate love that ninety-two per cent of Matches reported experiencing within the first forty-eight hours of meeting, Ellie still felt that Tim was something special.

  But whether he was special enough to reveal her secret to, she had yet to decide.

  CHAPTER 26

  AMANDA

  The front door to the modest detached house Richard had once called home opened as soon as Amanda set foot on the driveway.

  His sister Emma stood in the porch with a beaming smile across her face, a very different version of the woman Amanda had crossed paths with a week earlier at her brother’s memorial service.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Emma ushered, and Amanda nervously followed her through a hallway and into an open-plan kitchen, where a woman she recognised from the church was perched on a stool by a breakfast bar, drinking from a mug. There wasn’t much resemblance between the siblings, or the mother and son for that matter. But Amanda also looked very different from her sisters, she conceded.

  Behind the frames of her glasses were the eyes of a grieving mother still coming to terms with the loss of her child. Amanda held her hand out to shake Richard’s mother’s, but instead, she was grabbed by the shoulders and held in a tight embrace. ‘Thank you so much,’ his mother whispered in her ear.

  ‘Okay Mum, you can let go of her now,’ Emma interrupted after a few moments. ‘Amanda, this is our mum Jenny,’ she continued.

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ said Amanda.

  ‘And you,’ Jenny replied and looked her son’s Match up and down. ‘Richard would have loved you!’ Amanda felt herself blush.

  Emma boiled a kettle and dropped tea bags into cups as Amanda glanced around the kitchen and dining room at family photographs covering the top of a sideboard. Pinned to a cork notice board was an order of service she recognised from Richard’s memorial, next to his medal for completing the London Marathon. She could feel Jenny’s eyes absorbing her but it didn’t make her uncomfortable.

  ‘Richard wondered what you’d look like,’ Jenny said eventually. ‘When he did the test he wondered who’d been chosen for him and where you’d live. I don’t know if Emma told you, but he loved to travel and I think he’d have gone to the ends of the earth to be with the girl he was Matched with.’

  ‘I’m only about forty miles away in Kettering,’ Amanda smiled, ‘so he wouldn’t have had to have gone far. Do you know why he did the test?’

  ‘For the same reason everybody else does, I think. I know at twenty-five he was young but all he ever wanted to do was settle down and have a family of his own with the right girl. The test wasn’t around when Richard’s father and I met, of course, but we were together for twenty years before Richard senior passed away and I don’t think we argued once. Richard wanted the same kind of relationship; he didn’t want to leave it to chance.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask how you felt when you found out about what had happened to Rich?’ asked Emma and passed a steaming mug to Amanda.

  ‘It sounds silly when I’d never even met him, but I was devastated,’ Amanda admitted. ‘I guess it’s like when people find out they can’t have children … the choice has been taken out of their hands and they mourn the loss of something they never had. I sound ridiculous, don’t I?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Jenny replied and placed her hand over Amanda’s. ‘You have lost exactly the same thing as us, it’s just that we’ve been fortunate to have him with us for his whole life. What you’ve lost, well, it’s just so unfair.’

  Jenny’s words gave Amanda the reassurance she needed that she wasn’t letting her emotions get the better of her. ‘I didn’t think anyone else would understand,’ she said quietly and swallowed hard.

  ‘Would you like to see his bedroom, or would that be a bit strange?’ Emma asked.

  ‘No, I’d love to,’ nodded Amanda and followed her upstairs.

  ‘Rich moved out to go to college, then came home and left again when he went travelling. Mum said that we should have had a revolving door installed for him. And he was back here again until his personal training business took off and while he saved up for a deposit on a flat.’ Emma opened the door ahead of her. ‘Go in and have a look around if you like. I’ll give you some privacy.’

  Richard’s bedroom was tidy and spacious and Amanda made her way towards a wall decorated with hundreds of photographs of his global travels. Australia, Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and even Alaska were all represented. Next to his bed was a wardrobe housing his neatly pressed shirts and trousers. Amanda ran her fingers up and down a chunky knit jumper and drew it to her face but all she could smell was fabric conditioner.

  She went towards an armchair in the corner of the room with a scarf draped over it and inhaled that instead. Suddenly, Amanda’s legs felt like they were about to give way under her as the scent of Richard’s aftershave and his skin hit her. She couldn’t fully describe the sensation, but likened it to sinking into a warm, soapy bath or falling into a strong, reassuring pair of arms.

  Then suddenly, to her surprise, Amanda began to cry. Staring at images of Richard captured on camera and meeting his family was one thing, but actually breathing in his smell was something different altogether and knocked her for six. She steadied herself against a chest of drawers before leaving the room, closing the door behind her and wiping her red-rimmed eyes.

  She knew, there and then, that she was more deeply in love with a dead man than she
could have ever thought possible.

  CHAPTER 26

  CHRISTOPHER

  Christopher opened the sash window to let the smoke seep out from the kitchen and into the air outside and cursed himself for using too much chilli oil in the skillet.

  The fillet steaks were too burned on the outside for his liking so he heated up a microwaveable bag of peppercorn sauce and closed the kitchen door so Amy couldn’t hear the bell ping to inform him it was ready to pour. He’d already encouraged her out of the kitchen, boasting that steak, home-made sweet potato wedges and sauce were his signature dish, one of the many lies he’d used on her. He couldn’t help himself; something within him needed others to be impressed by his actions, his appearance, his work and now his anonymous killings. Tonight, it was his food’s turn to take centre stage.

  His wounded thumb – savagely bitten by Number Nine - still ached under the bandage five days later and Amy had had no reason to doubt him when he told her he’d clumsily trapped it in the bathroom door.

  Christopher put the overcooked meat down to sleep deprivation causing him to lack concentration in even the most menial of tasks. Since he’d met Amy, it was proving nigh on impossible for him to grab more than a few hours at a time. She stayed over at his house on alternate nights as it was much closer to her job at the Metropolitan Police’s HQ than her own flat in Bow. And her sexual appetite was almost as insatiable as his, thus keeping them active and sweating into the early hours. The nights he spent alone he was holed up in his office monitoring the whereabouts of the rest of the Numbers on his list.

  Amy was proving to be an added complication in an already complicated life. He’d had girlfriends before but she was truly different because in the three weeks since their first date, he had yet to fantasise about killing her. She was his Match and he hadn’t considered that someone like him - someone who had scored the kind of numbers he had on the test - could possess genuine feelings for anyone. Her presence was throwing him off kilter yet there was a quality about her that made him want to keep her around, at least for the time being.

  Christopher removed the cooked potato wedges from the oven and arranged everything symmetrically on their plates. He added some organic salad and balsamic vinegar into the bowl and carried their dinners to the table in his dining room. Then he hid the empty food packets at the bottom of his pedal bin.

  ‘You’re a dark so and so, aren’t you,’ Amy said. She was standing in front of his bookshelves, her head tilted to one side, reading the titles printed on their spines. Each was colour co-ordinated, and placed in size order. ‘”Inside The Mind Of A Serial Killer,” “The Zodiac Killer,” “Serial Killers Anthology”,’ she read out loud, ‘plus four books on Jack The Ripper and two on Fred and Rosemary West… I’m sensing a theme here, Chris.’

  ‘I like to know what makes people tick,’ he replied matter-of-factly and placed the plates down on the table. He poured two glasses of wine, making sure their levels were identical. ‘Human behaviour interests me. Even if it’s dark.’

  He recalled reading many biographies about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who’d murdered thirteen women back in the 1970s and 1980s right under the nose of his unsuspecting wife. Christopher had wondered how he’d got away with it and what fulfilment he’d gained from taking such a risk. Had he truly loved his wife, or in Sutcliffe’s world of paranoid schizophrenia, had she been the anchor that’d kept him from setting sail into complete insanity?

  Now he was spotting parallels in their lives, all bar the mental illness. He knew one of the many advantages he had over Sutcliffe was that he didn’t need such ballast as he wasn’t insane, far from it, in fact. All the studies and tests proved he was operating well above the average person’s level of intelligence. His killing spree was a challenge, not a compulsion.

  ‘Even your choice of fiction is macabre,’ Amy continued, “Hannibal Rising”, “American Psycho”, “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, Donald Trump’s autobiography…’

  Christopher had read and watched many depictions of psychopaths but he had very, very little in common with them. So many like him had had their images misused, misrepresented, exaggerated and caricatured by novelists and scriptwriters because they were easy targets and audience shockers. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, Hannibal Lecter, Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne or the malformed soul of Cathy Ames in East Of Eden, all had varying degrees of psychopathic traits but none like his.

  Only the eponymous Tom from the novel The Talented Mr Ripley bore any resemblance to him with their shared love of the finer things in life and how they lacked guilt in the manner in which they attained them. But Tom’s machinations resulted in a curious mix of triumph and paranoia while Christopher’s did not.

  Suddenly Amy’s attention was drawn to a white book with no name on the spine. Christopher’s heart raced and he held his breath as her hand pulled it out a couple of inches further. The danger-seeking side of him had deliberately left it there and wanted her to remove the book and open it; but the dominant controlling side knew that it would be game over for her if she did.

  ‘Your dinner is getting cold,’ he said, so Amy left the book where it was and joined him at the table.

  ‘So that’s why you were asking me questions about this serial killer?’

  Christopher nodded as Amy made her way towards the table and sat down.

  ‘Mmm, this smells gorgeous,’ she commented to his approval.

  ‘Why hasn’t he been given a name?’ he asked, cutting into his steak and watching as the watery blood oozed across his plate.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well most serial killers are given a nickname, either by journalists or by the police. The Yorkshire Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, the Angel Of Death … this guy hasn’t been given one.’

  Christopher was genuinely insulted that his efforts had not yet been rewarded with a moniker. It made him question why nine dead women – and hopefully another to add to the list the following night – weren’t enough to be taken seriously.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amy replied, ‘would you like to come up with one yourself?’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit distasteful?’

  ‘Coming from a man with twenty books on his shelves about serial killers? You’re an expert.’

  ‘You need to tell me what you know about him first before I pick a name.’

  ‘Well, this comes from my DI who’s been having meetings with all departments this week just in case anything about the perp sounds familiar. The psychological profiles tell us he’s male, aged between twenty and forty, he prefers to target single women living alone. His MO is always the same, he breaks in through a ground floor door or patio doors by picking the lock – their doors are almost always quite old and security lapse – he kills them in the kitchen then lays their bodies out; arms to their sides and legs straight. Then he gives himself anywhere between two and five days to kill another woman, return to the scene of the last crime and place a photograph of the most recent victim on her predecessor’s chest. He leaves no DNA that we know of, so he is methodical, but while the women targeted are only in the London area, he seems to be taking a scattergun approach to where they live which makes it harder to narrow down where he might strike next.’

  As Amy detailed Christopher’s crimes, he felt the butterflies in his stomach circle in a swarm and take off en masse, making his entire body buzz with excitement. He’d never heard anyone speak in person about his work in such detail before; his only interaction with others on the subject had been via anonymous internet message boards.

  ‘We think he leaves the photographs either to taunt us, or to show he has no plans to stop,’ Amy continued. ‘And he leaves the same spray-painted image on the pavement outside each one of the victims’ homes to identify she’s inside – it looks like a man carrying something on his back.’

  ‘Yes, I saw the picture in the Evening Standard.’

  ‘He’s like a ghost in the way he just vanishes and then pops up
again.’

  ‘The Ghost Killer.’

  Amy shook her head. ‘That’s a rubbish name for him.’

  ‘The Silent Killer.’

  ‘Isn’t that carbon monoxide?’

  ‘The Cheese Wire Strangler.’

  ‘The word “cheese” sounds like you’re trivialising what he does. And how do you know he uses cheese wire?’

  Christopher paused briefly when he realised his error. All the reports he’d read about the murders had stated wire had been used to strangle the victims, but not specifically cheese wire.

  ‘It stands to reason,’ he replied, thinking on his feet. ‘If you’re going to strangle somebody with wire that tough, you’re going to need handles to hold on to otherwise you’ll risk severing your own fingers.’

  ‘We think it’s cheese wire too, and based on the width and depth of penetration and the chemicals left in the victims’ wounds, it’s cleaned regularly between killings.’

  ‘Do you know where the weapon’s from?’

  Amy nodded and ate another mouthful of steak.

  ‘And I bet it’s been available to buy across the country for years, hasn’t it?’ continued Christopher.

  ‘John Lewis and it’s been on the shelves for a decade at least. You’ve done your homework, haven’t you?’

  Christopher nodded. Amy had no idea just how much homework he’d done or how happy she’d just made her Match.

  ‘Well, if you come up with a name for him, you should mention it at work,’ he urged. ‘How often do you get to come up with a nickname for a serial killer?’

  ‘Probably about as often as I spend time with one.’

  CHAPTER 28

  BETHANY

  The man standing before Bethany was most definitely Kevin, but clearly the pictures he’d sent her had been taken some time ago.

  This was not the Kevin she had travelled so far to see. His face was youthful but his eyes had lost the sparkle that’d been captured in his photographs. He was almost completely bald, all bar some soft whips of hair covering his scalp. His arms were sinewy, his tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt had probably once fitted him but now hung loosely like they’d been thrown onto a scarecrow, and his skin was pale and gaunt. In his left hand, he held a portable drip attached to a metal frame with wheels. Bethany took in his appearance from head to toe, both astonished and confused by it.