A Thousand Small Explosions (26 page)

CHAPTER 80

ELLIE

An agitated Ellie drummed her fingernails against her glass-topped desk and stared at a painting on the wall ahead of her.

She’d spent £40,000 on the canvas two years earlier, purchased on impulse when she spotted it on an easel in the window of a Knightsbridge gallery. It was a painting of a little girl with huge green eyes, dressed in a blue coat, who stared from the canvas out into the world. Behind her, a group of adults stood with their backs to her, pretending she didn’t exist. The outline of her heart was barely visible from under her top and only if you looked closely might you see it. There was something about the forlorn expression in the girl’s face and in the depth of her eyes that Ellie lost herself in for moments at a time. Almost everyone failed to notice the child’s heart and Ellie had never felt the need to point it out. But Tim had observed it, in fact it had been the first thing he’d observed when he arrived unexpectedly at her office one day with a takeout lunch.

When Ellie stared at the painting now, she thought of Tim and more precisely, why, like the girl, he had chosen to hide something from those around him that he should’ve shared. Ellie had eventually revealed everything about herself to the man she loved, yet he’d not done the same. Because at one point in the life of Tim there had been a male presence who his mother may have even married. And Tim had lied to Ellie about him.

Ellie tried making excuses for him, deciding the mystery man had been abusive to Tim or his mother, and that it wasn’t something Tim was ready to address. Or perhaps he’d been in their lives for such a short space of time that he hadn’t been worth mentioning. Either way, a suspicious Ellie still required an explanation or it’d cast a shadow over their relationship that would surely grow.

The simplest solution was to question Tim face to face but Ellie’s gut instinct was to find the answers herself. Besides, if she’d got it wrong, it’d reflect badly on her that she didn’t trust Tim, especially after she had lied at the very start of their relationship about who she really was.

There was something else that had been gnawing away at Ellie that she’d been trying to ignore for the best part of a month. Now was the time to confront it.

‘Is something wrong?’ Kat asked when Ellie walked into the Head Of Personnel’s office unannounced. Kat noted an apprehensive expression on Ellie’s face.

‘I need your help and I need to keep this between the two of us,’ Ellie began and the two sat down.

‘Of course.’

Ellie inched closer to Kat on the sofa and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve told me before that you pride yourself on never forgetting a face, is that right?’

‘Um yes,’ Kat replied nervously.

‘The night of the Christmas party, you told me you thought you recognised my boyfriend from a job interview here, only he had a different name - Matthew, I think you said?’

Kat nodded.

‘How sure are you?’

‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ Kat said, her voice trembling.

‘I’m not, why?’

‘Because the day after the party, I went back through Matthew’s file and called up his interview notes and his CV. It was just bugging me that I might’ve got him mixed up.’

Ellie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘And what did you find?’

Kat moved quickly across the office, her high heels clicking against the marble floor like tap shoes. She flicked though folders in a filing cabinet, then passed one to Ellie with a white sticker on the front and the typed words ‘Matthew Ward.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera that we always use to take photos of candidates, the picture was blank. I tried with my iPhone but that was blank too. I remember joking with him about it.’

‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

‘Oh God no, of course not.’

‘Thank you,’ Ellie replied, then left Kat’s office and hurried back to her own. Ula glanced up at her from her laptop and was about to ask her a question but judged Ellie’s stern semblance wisely and kept quiet, watching as she closed the door firmly behind her.

Ellie sat behind her desk, then turned off her mobile phone and iPad and opened the folder. She scanned a copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, then cross-referenced it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned the name of the man she’d been Matched with. Both worked in the field of computing but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, exam qualifications, home and email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.

Ellie felt a little more reassured by what she was reading, but her scientific research had taught her never to rest on an initial discovery or take a first answer as gospel. She needed to see photographic evidence that the Matthew Ward who’d visited her building some eighteen months earlier was not the same man as her fiancé.

She logged into the online check-in system where visitors to the company’s reception desk signed in and out electronically. She checked the names of visitors on the day Matthew Ward had been interviewed but found no-one of that name.

So she asked Ula to contact Andrew Webber, the company’s Head of Buildings Security, to request footage from the time and date of Matthew Ward’s visit. She paced around her office as she waited, looking out across the London skyline hoping her feelings of doubt were unfounded; that something inside her was making her jittery about their relationship and that she was actively looking for an excuse to doubt the man she loved.

Once the time-coded security footage arrived in her inbox she played the files in order. Cameras covered the building’s ground floor entrance, lifts, the Match Your DNA reception desk and the main corridors, but there was no footage of anyone who resembled Tim.

She rewound and fast-forwarded for the best part of an hour but saw nothing until suddenly, she spotted an inconsistency in the footage at the reception desk. The time-code at the top of the screen flickered ever so slightly to reveal that a full minute of film had disappeared. Immediately Ellie felt her stomach knot. Someone had accessed and edited the clip she was watching. It was the same for the images taken inside the lifts and the ground floor, they all missed approximately sixty seconds.

The last folder she opened was of the corridor leading to the interview suite. Moments before Kat’s time-logged interview with Matthew, she watched in dismay as the man she knew as Tim appeared on the footage dressed in a smart suit, walking confidently along the corridor with a satchel over his shoulder. As he approached the final camera outside the interview room, he paused and looked directly into it.

She felt her blood run cold when she saw him clearly mouth the words ‘Hello Ellie.’

CHAPTER 81

AMANDA

Amanda was relieved to find Jenny’s house empty when she returned from visiting Richard at the nursing home where his family had kept him hidden away.

She needed breathing space to formulate a plan before confronting Jenny and Emma over why they’d lied about Richard’s death. But first she needed to get out from under their roof. So she made her way upstairs to his bedroom and fought the urge to cry again, concerned about the effect her afternoon of stress might be having on her baby.

What had begun as an ordinary day and with so much to look forward to had fast 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. The journey back would take around forty-five minutes then she’d lock the doors, slip into a deep, soapy bath and begin to come to terms with everything she had learned. In a couple of days when the dust had settled, she’d visit her mother and sisters in the hope of making amends after keeping them at arm’s length for the best part of a year. Amanda needed her real family now more than she could’ve ever imagined.

She yanked clothes from drawers and clothes rails, throwing them into two suitcases. Everything baby related was left where Jenny had hung it, alongside bags of toys, nappies and a stroller.

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

‘Are you upstairs Amanda?’ yelled Emma, ‘We’ve brought some fish and chips from the takeaway as Mum couldn’t be bothered to cook…’

Her voice trailed off as Amanda appeared on the landing lugging her cases behind her. ‘Is everything okay?’ asked Jenny, spotting them first.

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

Jenny and Emma looked at each other, baffled by the suddenness of her decision. ‘Has something happened? Is it the baby?’ Is he okay?’ asked Emma.

‘No, the baby’s fine.’

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

Amanda paused, debating whether to inform them of what she knew or keep quiet until she regained her mental and physical strength. As she scowled at them from the top of the staircase, she realised she didn’t know the two strangers below her 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,’ she said slowly but firmly.

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.