‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner, but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. His online record has been deleted from our files, but I always keep a hard copy too. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera, the picture came out 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 said, 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 stopped herself as Ellie closed the door firmly behind her.
She sat behind her desk and opened the folder apprehensively. She scanned the copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, and compared it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned of her Match. Both worked in the computing field but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, home town, exam qualifications, email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.
Next, she needed to see photographic evidence of the Matthew Ward who’d visited her building some eighteen months earlier. 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 he’d been interviewed but found no one of that name.
She asked Ula to contact the company’s head of buildings security to request footage from the time and date of Matthew’s visit. She paced around her office as she waited, looking out across the London skyline and trying to quell the rising anger inside of her.
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 reception desk and the main corridors, but there was no footage of anyone who resembled Tim or Matthew.
She rewound and fast-forwarded for the best part of an hour, desperate to find something, when 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. 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 file she opened was of the corridor leading to the interview suite. She watched in dismay as, moments before Kat’s time-logged interview with Matthew, the man she knew as Tim appeared dressed in a smart, tailored suit. He was walking confidently along the corridor with a satchel over his shoulder, and 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 71
MANDY
‘He doesn’t get many visitors,’ the young nurse said, as she led Mandy along a corridor.
The nursing home where Richard was being looked after smelled of antiseptic and air freshener. The lino on the floors was clean and unblemished, and reproduction watercolour paintings of historic British landscapes hung on the walls. At the end of the corridor there was a spacious, open-plan, brightly lit day room, where Mandy could spy residents sitting in wheelchairs in various states of consciousness.
‘How long has he been kept here?’ Mandy asked.
‘Around ten months now, I think. His family used to visit quite often at first, but not so much anymore. It’s a pity.’
‘Did they give any reason why they stopped?’
‘No, but you’d be surprised by how many of our patients don’t get any visitors. For some of them, once they’re dropped off at the gate, they don’t see anything of their families again.’
‘Someone told me Richard’s family banned friends from visiting him?’
The nurse nodded. ‘It wasn’t an official order, but we were asked not to encourage it.’
‘Well, thanks for allowing me in.’
‘I’m sure being his Match must give you some rights.’
Mandy assumed it was nerves making her stomach anxious and then she felt a sharp kick from inside. She rubbed her belly to reassure her baby everything would be all right but, secretly, she was terrified by how she would feel when she saw Richard.
‘Right, here we are,’ said the nurse as she opened the door. ‘There’s a chair by his bed, and just speak to him normally, like you would to anyone else.’
Mandy mentally prepared herself before entering, and when she walked in, she waited until the last moment to turn her eyes in the direction of the bed where Richard lay.
He bore little resemblance to the photographs on his bedroom wall or to those in the folder she kept; the handsome, toned, angular man she’d become accustomed to staring at and fantasising about was now a shred of his former self – more skin and bones held together covered with plastic tubes and breathing apparatus.
His arms were sapling thin and there was a rash under his chin where someone had shaved him too closely. His hair was long and clumsily combed into an old-fashioned side parting. His skin was grey and his pyjamas were hanging off him. But despite his appearance and the strained noises that came from his throat as the ventilator pumped oxygen into his frail body, Mandy knew for certain she was completely in love with her Match.
She pulled up an armchair and sat down; the closer their proximity, the faster the rhythm of her heart became. And when – instinctively – she reached to hold his hand, it felt like an electric charge was running through her veins.
‘Hi Richard,’ she began, her voice quivering, unsure what to say. ‘I’m Mandy. You don’t know me but I know a lot about you.’
