A Thousand Small Explosions (19 page)

CHAPTER 57

CHRISTOPHER

‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning.’

              Amy sounded frustrated when Christopher finally answered her call. He glanced at his phone and saw he’d missed eleven calls from her that day. He slipped the plastic mask from his face so he wouldn’t sound muffled; his skin felt clammy and was greasy to the touch.

‘Sorry, I fell asleep at my desk,’ he replied. He had fallen asleep but it was actually on the sofa belonging to Number Fifteen. Dazed, he wiped the sleep from his eyes and looked around her sunlit room and then at his watch. 10.47am it read, and his heart sank.

He’d never been careless enough to drift off at a murder scene before, but juggling the two aspects of his life – Amy and his thirty killings plan – had left him physically exhausted. He was relying on a diet of protein bars, energy drinks and coffee to keep him awake and functioning but they left him feeling restless and with frequent stomach cramps.

              Christopher’s double life was taking a mental toll too. He had so much to hide from Amy yet so much about his work that he longed to share. It left him divided and there’d even been moments when he’d contemplated disclosing what he’d been doing, trying to convince himself that because she truly loved him, she might understand. But in the end, he couldn’t trust that he had read her correctly and that she would forgive him. And she was hastily becoming too integral a part of his life to risk dispensing with.

              ‘They’ve found a thirteenth body,’ Amy whispered down the phone. ‘The papers don’t know and I’m not supposed to tell anyone but you will never guess who it is.’

              “The waitress who served us at the restaurant last week,” he wanted to say. “That pretty girl with the nose ring. I was going to kill her anyway, but I like to think I killed her for us as something to share. Now you have blood on your hands too.”

              ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said and rose to his feet to stretch his spine and stiff neck.

              ‘It was the waitress from the restaurant we went to last week, do you remember?’

              ‘No, I don’t think so.’

              ‘Pretty girl with dark hair and a nose ring.’

              ‘Ahh yes, I do now. Shit, what happened to her?’

              ‘Same as all the others, she was strangled and laid out in her kitchen. He tore the ring out too, the sick bastard.’

              Christopher made his way into the kitchen and glared at Number Fifteen who was lying in the same position he’d left her on the floor. After seven hours of death her face had sunken, her skin was grey and for a reason he couldn’t explain she had already begun to attract flies. He checked his pocket to make sure he had taken two photographs of her and to his relief, he had. A picture of how she looked at that moment would ruin the aesthetic of his album.

              ‘Poor girl,’ Christopher replied to Amy and flicked through his backpack to make sure he had packed everything he’d brought with him. He removed a lint roller and began to manoeuvre it across every inch of the sofa where he’d slept.

              ‘I recognised her as soon as I saw the photograph which at least sped up the identification process.’

              ‘And are you okay?’

              ‘I think so, it just brought the investigation a little closer to home.’

              “You have no idea just how close to home you are already,” thought Christopher.

CHAPTER 58

BETHANY

‘Not bad eh?’ Dan asked, standing back and admiring their work. ‘Not how I imagined my kid’s wedding reception to be, but then nothing’s how I imagined it to be any more.’

He looked to Bethany like he was hoping she could say something that would make everything okay. Instead, the best that she could offer was an arm around his shoulder in a silent show of solidarity.

She had spent much of the previous day assisting Susan and Dan and their farmhands in erecting a white tarpaulin above a grassy stretch of the garden to prevent the weight of the sun from pressing down upon them. They’d unfolded wooden tables and chairs, placed pink and white posies in jam-jars and arranged them in clumps on linen table covers, and plugged speakers into a sound system to play music. And the next morning - a little over a month since she had arrived so unexpectedly at their farm - Bethany was preparing to become Mrs. Kevin Williamson.

The venue Kevin had chosen for the ceremony was the old breezeblock church in the village nearest to the farm. It was unlike any other house of worship Bethany had ever visited, and without the wooden crucifix planted in the ground by the road or a signpost reading Baptist Church, most passers by would assume it to be a dilapidated storage building. Inside was an altar made from an old porch door on bricks, the seating consisted of white-faded patio chairs and the one and only window had been decorated with coloured tissue paper so as to resemble stained glass. But as derelict as it appeared, there was a certain quirky, sanguine charm to it, Bethany thought. Nothing about her life in the last few weeks had been ordinary, so why should the venue of her wedding be any different?

The ceremony was held in front of an intimate congregation, consisting of just Kevin’s immediate family, his last remaining grandparent, two cousins and some of their farmhand staff. And it was as brief as the time it took Bethany to choose a dress from the slim pickings her suitcase held.

As the elderly and affable reverend began reading passages from the well-thumbed pages of a bible, Bethany was sure to maintain eye contact with her husband-to-be at all times, even when she felt his brother Mark’s eyes burrowing into her. As Kevin’s best man, he was there to prop him up at the altar when his arms grew too weak leaning on his crutches. However Kevin was a stubborn soul and refused to remain seated. He couldn’t stop grinning at Bethany but she knew that if she so much as glanced at Mark, she’d have put an end to the whole charade.

Although it was a token gesture, when the reverend asked if there was any reason why the couple shouldn’t marry, a small part of Bethany hoped that Mark might take it as a prompt to profess his undying love for her. But that only happened in the romcoms and soaps she watched and she knew she wasn’t going to get her happy ever after.

Once they’d been declared man and wife, Bethany braced herself before she kissed her husband in front of the man she actually loved.

Bethany had found herself in Australia by following her heart. But in marrying Kevin, she had followed her head – or more specifically, her conscience. She had put someone else’s needs above her own, and for a moment, she allowed herself to feel proud of that selfless act.

However, it didn’t stop a little voice in the back of her mind from telling her she’d married the wrong brother. But there was little she could do about it now.

CHAPTER 59

NICK

The fairy lights pinned around the window gave the bedroom a warm, buttermilk glow but they didn’t help Nick to feel relaxed or to calm down.

Instead, he felt more tightly wound up than he could ever recall. Moments earlier, he’d created an awkward scene by storming away from the dinner party he and Sally were hosting after assassinating the characters of friends Sumaira and Deepak. Now, behind a closed door, he propped himself up against the headboard and stretched his feet out on the bed and took another swig straight from the bottle. He stopped himself from checking his phone to see if Alex had texted, but he couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing.

‘You said “him”.’

Nick was startled by Sally’s sudden appearance. He hadn’t heard her usher their guests out of the flat or enter their bedroom.

‘What?’

‘Downstairs, when you were tearing a strip off our best friends about how they weren’t really Matched, you said, “Nobody in the world exists right at that moment apart from you and him.” You were referring to Alexander, your Match. When you went to that appointment with him, you felt it didn’t you? All that stuff you said about love being like a tsunami knocking you over, that’s what happened when you met him.’

Nick said nothing and couldn’t bring himself to raise his head and look Sally in the eye or lie to her any more than he had of late.

‘I’m a fucking idiot,’ she laughed. ‘Have you seen him again since that first time?’ Again, Nick didn’t reply. ‘Of course you have,’ she continued. ‘All those late nights at work, the weekends where you and your boss were supposed to be planning out new campaigns and strategies, you were with him weren’t you?’

Nick reluctantly nodded.

‘So you
are
gay.’

‘I don’t know what I am or what this is.’

‘But you have feelings for him.’

‘Yes.’

‘And does he have feelings for you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You mean you’re unsure?’

‘We haven’t discussed it.’

‘How come, because you spend all your time together screwing but not talking?’

‘We haven’t done that.’

‘You expect me to believe you?’

‘No, but I’m telling you that nothing has happened physically between us…nothing at all.’

‘But you’d like it to.’

‘I don’t know what I want.’

Nick was telling the truth, because the lines between what he felt about Alex emotionally and physically were starting to blur and there’d been times where he had imagined what it might be like to be intimate with him. He’d even watched a couple of porn clips on his laptop to see how same-sex sex worked, and while he wasn’t repulsed by it, he wasn’t turned on either.

‘It might not be physical between you two, but it is emotional and that’s the equivalent of an affair.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nick muttered and held his head in his hands.

‘How could you do this to me?’ Sally continued and sat on the end of the bed, staring at the exposed brick wall in front of her. ‘You know I grew up in a family where all my parents did was lie to each other about fidelity and you know what honesty means to me. And then you do this.’

‘I didn’t start it,’ Nick interrupted. ‘
You
were the one who wasn’t happy with the way we were. You were the one who kept scratching and scratching until you created a sore and now I’ve picked at the scab and this has happened. You should have left things the way they were.’

‘But I was right not to because we weren’t Matched! We were in love but deep down we both knew there was none of that fireworks stuff between us like you were talking about earlier. We don’t have the “explosions” like you have with him.’

‘We could have been happy if you’d just left us alone and we hadn’t done that test in the first place.’

‘Then you should never have seen him again,’ she yelled.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to meet someone you are Matched with because you don’t have one!’

Sally was about to reply but her emotions got the better of her. She doubled over as she began to weep. She was the backbone of their relationship and it scared Nick that he had broken her. When he placed his hand on her shoulder, it was her turn to recoil from his touch like he’d done with her earlier.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.’

‘Yes you did,’ she sobbed, ‘and you’re right. I pushed you into this and now I don’t know how to make it stop.’

‘Neither do I,’ Nick replied and closed his eyes.

CHAPTER 60

ELLIE

Ellie hitched up her little black dress, slid down her underwear and began a long-overdue bathroom break in a toilet cubicle.

              Each time she’d attempted to make her way towards the restrooms during her company’s Christmas party, she’d been yanked in all manner of different directions by staff wanting to bend her ear. Ellie understood why though as her attendance at an event was such a rarity that her people wanted to make the most of her.

Until Tim had landed in Ellie’s life, she hadn’t been so much aloof as she had been wary of people. And added to that was an underlying shyness which, when the two were combined, meant that she found it awkward to relax in public. Speeches or lectures were a different matter as she attended those for a purpose. But mingling and small talk afterwards made her self-conscious. However, with Tim’s encouragement, she had come on in leaps and bounds in confronting her shortcomings and despite employees and work friends competing for her attention, she was actually enjoying herself.

She recalled how at last year’s Christmas bash, she had been consumed by work and little else. Business was booming but she had no-one to share the spoils with. And as December 25
th
approached, she had an epiphany when she realised she had inadvertently taken her joyless life out on her employees by signing off on a very impersonal sit-down dinner in the ballroom of a generic hotel. She might have footed the bill but she had also sucked the fun out of Christmas. “I was the Grinch,” she told herself and vowed to make a change.

So this year was different. She gave her company’s social committee permission and a blank cheque to hire London’s historic Old Billingsgate, a former fishmarket hall-turned-events venue. Christmas-themed props including giant toy polar bears, trees, ice sculptures and sleighs were hired to give it a winter wonderland feel which surrounded them as they tucked into a five-course meal. And afterwards, roulette wheels, card tables, slot machines and a swing band kept her employees entertained.

Every so often, Ellie glanced across the room to check on Tim and to make sure he was still in sight and enjoying himself. But she needn’t have worried because each time she saw him he was chatting to someone new. She liked that he was a sociable sort and that she could leave him to his own devices without worrying.

As an early Christmas present, Ellie had sent him to Savile Row to be measured for his first tailor-made suit. And upon its fast-track completion and delivery, he refused to take it off for the rest of the night. She hadn’t minded as she found him sexy in it and she’d have gladly paid for a whole wardrobe of them if it made him happy. But based on past lessons learned, Ellie knew how easy it was for someone with money to smother someone without it.

Her bathroom break over, she flushed the toilet and made her way to the sink to wash her hands.

‘Hi Ellie, what an amazing night!’ began Kat, her Head of Personnel and one of her longest standing employees. Her half-moon eyes were a telltale sign Kat was drunk.

‘It seems to be going well, yes,’ Ellie smiled.

‘I think there might be a few sore heads being dragged around the corridors tomorrow. Including mine.’

‘Well that’s what tonight’s for.’

‘Your new chap seems to be going down well with people.’

‘I feel a bit bad actually, I’ve left him to fend for himself most of the night.’

‘Well, I think he can hold his own. At least that’s what I remember about him.’

‘Do you know him?’ Ellie asked, puzzled.

‘Of course,’ Kat replied, surprised by the question. ‘But I must admit, I don’t remember him making it to the second round of interviews.’

‘I don’t think I follow you.’

‘I interviewed him for a job about a year ago or so; something in computer programming, you know, about the time when Miriam went on maternity leave. He was very affable and relatively experienced but there were better candidates so I didn’t recommend he went any further. That’s how you met, right? At the interview?’

‘I think you must be mixing him up with someone else.’

‘I don’t think so. Matthew is his name?’

‘No, it’s Tim.’

‘Oh okay, well, maybe I’m wrong. Nice guy all the same. Anyway, I hope you two have a lovely Christmas together.’

‘And you,’ Ellie replied with a knitted brow.