A Thousand Small Explosions (34 page)

CHAPTER 101

AMANDA

‘We don’t think it’s first time she’s taken a child that wasn’t hers. Neither Richard nor Emma’s DNA results match each other’s or Jenny’s. They are all unrelated.’

‘Could she have adopted them?’

‘We’ve checked European and American databases and so far we can’t confirm that. Now we’re looking into cold cases of children reported missing around the time Richard and Emma were born.’

‘Jesus.’

Amanda shook her head in disbelief and her heart sank at the thought of what might have happened had she not identified the Lake District holiday cottage in Richard’s photographs. She clutched her son a little closer to her chest, wondering how the biological parents of Richard and Emma must have felt being unaware of the whereabouts of their babies.

‘What’s going to happen to Emma?’ she asked Lorraine, her police Family Liaison Officer who sat opposite her. It was the first time they’d been face to face since Amanda’s baby had been rescued from Jenny a week earlier.

‘She’s been charged with kidnapping a minor but as she has no previous convictions, she’s been released on bail pending further inquiries. But don’t worry, she has an injunction preventing her from going anywhere near you or your home. And then after the inquest is opened and adjourned, Jenny’s funeral will be held a week on Tuesday at the county crematorium.’

Amanda found it difficult to erase the image of the moment she saw her child for the first time. He was wrapped in a towel, held loosely by Jenny who had slipped unconscious from the volume of blood coming from the diagonal cuts to her wrists. By her side lay a pair of nail scissors that she’d hacked at her forearms with, and in doing so, she’d also covered her grandson in blood.

Everything else in that juncture slipped into slow motion as Lorraine held Amanda back, her flailing arms reaching to grab her child. He was scooped up instead by a paramedic, whisked to the safety of the landing and placed upon the floor, his towel removed and his tiny body checked for any signs of injury. Only when it was confirmed there were no injuries was Amanda permitted to hold him for the first time.

She fell to her knees when he was placed into her arms. She smelled his head and didn’t care that her first whiff of him contained the aroma of Jenny’s blood. She ran her fingers across his soft chest and chubby arms then held him close to her body so that he could feel her heartbeat against his skin.

She didn’t notice the paramedics rush to Jenny’s aid or watch as they wrapped her wounds with bandages and then carried her into the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask covering her mouth. Every voice that spoke to Amanda was muffled because all she could hear was the delicate sound of her baby breathing.

‘There’s something else I need to tell you,’ continued Lorraine, ‘something that we found in Jenny’s attic.’

‘This can’t get any worse, can it?’

‘I’m afraid it can. Right at the back, hidden away from everything else was a suitcase containing two foetal skeletons. More tests are being done to narrow down how long they might have been up there for, but it appears they’re probably more than twenty years old. It looks like they might have been stillborn.’

Amanda’s motherly instinct and experience of miscarriage meant she couldn’t help but feel sympathy towards Jenny for the torment she must have suffered all those years ago. It didn’t exonerate her subsequent behaviour, but it went some way to explaining it.

Amanda embraced Lorraine and thanked her for all she had done. She picked up her son and made her way to see Richard. She spent a moment composing herself, then slowly opened the door to find Richard lying in the bed where she’d first greeted him six weeks earlier.

‘Hi Richard,’ she began gently and took a chair by his side. ‘I’ve brought somebody to see you again. This is your son, Thomas. I named him after my late dad, I hope you don’t mind. I know you’ve met him before when your mum brought him but this is the first time it’s been all three of us together.’

Amanda gazed at father and son in turn, and admitted to herself that Jenny was right when she’d observed there was a palpable resemblance between the two. They shared the same colouring and positioning of dimples in their cheeks.

The strong smell of disinfectant in the room made Amanda’s nose tingle and she sneezed twice. She rose and placed Thomas on the bed inside the safety railing next to Richard’s forearm, which lay poker straight by his side. She fumbled around in her pocket for a tissue to blow her nose but couldn’t find one, so she pulled at a boxed tissue on a table by a chair.

But when she turned around to pick up her son, something was different. Richard’s arm was no longer by his side. Instead, his palm was face up and his baby son’s hand was pressed firmly inside it.

Amanda took a sharp intake of breath and then a step backwards, disbelieving what she was witnessing as Richard’s fingers slowly and purposefully entwined his son’s.

CHAPTER 102

AMY

Amy couldn’t bring herself to look at the blank, motionless face of the man she’d loved and whose life she’d ended.

Slumped in the chair she had tied him to, his head tilted backwards and tears were still visible in the corners of his bloodshot eyes. She desperately wanted to bring back to life the Christopher she had adored, but even if she could raise the dead, he’d bring with him the compulsions that she loathed.

For the sake of every other woman and herself, it had to be this way and it had to be Amy who’d set his tortured soul free. “Hold it together,” she told herself and clenched her fists into tight balls so as not to give in to sorrow. Her body still shivering, she clambered back to her feet and sifted through Christopher’s backpack, using his equipment to clean up any trace of her presence in the home of the terrified woman she’d left tied up in the bedroom, oblivious as to what had just happened under her roof.

Amy harked back to just a few days earlier when, after discovering the love of her life was a likely serial killer, she’d put on a brave face in front of him while silently beginning the grieving process for what she was about to lose. And just as Christopher had planned to kill his final victim, after much soul-searching and internal deliberation, Amy had planned to kill him.

Amy followed his car one night as he drove to a quiet residential street in Islington and she watched from a safe distance as he patrolled the road on foot, making mental notes of the position of street lights, access to the rear of a ground-floor flat and a probable escape route. She placed her hands over her mouth to stop her sobs from being overheard outside her vehicle.

If she’d followed his timeline of kills correctly, his next strike would be within the next forty-eight hours. And when he cancelled their planned evening together blaming a rushed editorial deadline, she knew exactly where he was going and arrived there before him.

Once inside the property, she watched in horror as he revealed his true nature, a ruthless, efficient psychopath gearing up for the kill. She waited, buried in the shadows inside the girl’s home as he made his way into position and placed his bag by his feet, removed the cheese wire and then a billiard ball which he dropped to gain Number Thirty’s attention. Standing behind Christopher with the taser gun in her hand, she could smell the adrenaline flowing through him in anticipation, and it made her nauseous.

Now with the crime scene cleaned up, Amy searched Christopher’s pockets. All they contained were two phones - his regular mobile and a burner he’d used to check Number Thirty’s location. Neither contained any clue as to their owner’s identity but she took them anyway.

Amy stood in front of Christopher and took a deep breath, then with all her strength dragged him and his chair, inch by inch, through the kitchen, towards the rear door that Christopher had broken through, and out into a courtyard. Then she went back inside and took a duvet from the spare room and covered Christopher in it from head to toe. She dialled 999 from the girl’s landline and left the phone on the kitchen worktop.

She removed two, one-litre bottles of white spirit she’d brought with her in her own kill kit and poured them over his shrouded frame until the duvet absorbed the liquid. Then she stepped away, lit a match and threw it at him. She turned her back and walked away as Christopher caught light - she had no desire to witness the flesh melt from the bones of the man she had loved.

As Amy left a painted stencil mark outside Number Thirty’s home, she knew it could be months before Christopher’s body was positively identified. She drove back to his home and let herself in with the key he’d had cut for her and planned to clean the place from top to bottom over the following week to remove as much of her DNA as possible. Then she would leave his car with the keys in the ignition in a South London crime hot-spot, certain it wouldn’t remain there for long.

There were very few ways Christopher and Amy could be linked once the police discovered who he was. He’d always paid cash so there’d be no credit card trail of where they might have eaten or visited together. His computers were heavily password controlled but she would destroy them with a hammer anyway then dump them just in case. And as they hadn’t met each other’s friends, families or colleagues, there’d be nothing tying them together as a couple – with the exception of their Match Your DNA link. However, no proof would ever be found that they’d taken it a step further than a few introductory text conversations.

In the months to come, Amy’s colleagues would never discover why the last person to die in the baffling, unexplained case was male, why the killer had chosen him or decided to strangle him then set fire to his body. It would be an added twist to the story and she was sure that if Christopher were watching her from somewhere in hell, he’d approve of her self-preservation skills.

Christopher had reached his target, only he’d been the thirtieth kill. He’d also kept the anonymity he so desired and the only thing his story lacked was the nickname he’d been affronted not to have been given. Suddenly, it came to Amy.

“When I go to work tomorrow, I’m going to suggest they call you The Saint Christopher killer,” she said to herself, imagining him watching her and picturing his smile. “Thirty kills and a name… I guess you got your wish in the end, didn’t you?”

CHAPTER 103

NICK

The town was more grand and picturesque than Nick had given it credit for based on his Google Streetmap search.

              The climate was balmy and almost Mediterranean like, thus allowing him to slip on his cargo shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of blue flip flops as he wandered around the well-kept streets that surrounded the town’s Spanish mission-style architecture. He sat on a wooden bus stop bench, taking in the mild December morning and the cars and faces that passed him. The rows of shops were tidy and organised and there appeared to be enough there to satisfy each of the town’s seventy-three thousand inhabitants.

Every now and again, Dylan made a cheery gurgling noise from his seat in the stroller, both amused and excited by the plastic ring of colourful farm animals attached to his wrist that rattled each time he waved his hand. He had coped with the 23-hour flight remarkably well for a four-month old baby, with only the occasional outburst of tears during some particularly troublesome turbulence.

After checking into their B&B, Nick was too animated to give in to sleep so they made their first excursion in foreign climes to the park to explore the winter gardens and to feed the ducks. Then they stopped off for a snack in a café before making their way to their Russell Street destination. Ahead of them and three doors to the right was the building with the man they had flown 12,000 miles to see.

Over the next half hour, the street in Hastings, New Zealand, was becoming busier as the lunchtime trade picked up and the staff left their places of work to grab a snack or meet with friends in cafés. Nick bided his time, trying to remain calm and collected when all he wanted to do was run through the shop door and announce his arrival. 

But moments before the physiotherapist’s door opened, Nick could feel the presence of Alex, like a kaleidoscope of butterflies had, en masse, risen up from the pit of his stomach and taken flight inside his body. Then when he appeared, Nick’s breath was well and truly taken away.

Alex stood still for a moment, checking his mobile phone to see if it was the cause of the vibrations running through his body. Nick noted his wavy hair was shorter than when he’d last seen him almost nine months earlier and he’d shaved off his stubble, revealing a clean-cut, more angular face. Suddenly Alex looked flustered, like he knew something was off kilter but couldn’t pinpoint what it was. But Nick knew what he was feeling because he felt it too.

Then as their eyes locked, Alex took a step backwards when he saw Nick with a pushchair, waiting for him.

‘Hello stranger,’ Nick began, making his way towards him.

Alex was too stunned to reply.

‘Alex, meet Dylan, Dylan, meet Alex.’ Alex finally moved his disbelieving eyes from Nick’s and towards Dylan. He took in the boy’s darker skin and looked at Nick, bewildered.

‘It’s a very, very long story,’ Nick continued, ‘and I have to warn you now, he and I only come as a package. But if you’ll have us, we’re here for keeps.’

Alex tried to cover his mouth with his hands but it was too late to hide his huge, white smile or to stop the tears from falling down his face. And as he gave Nick the firmest, most longed-for hug he’d ever received, Nick took that to mean yes.