Lying between her swollen, discoloured legs was a small, perfectly formed, lifeless foetus, no bigger than an apple. To begin with, all Christopher could do was stare at it transfixed, wondering if the pressure he’d placed upon himself to reach his goal was causing him to hallucinate. But each time he held his eyes shut and released them again, the foetus remained.
Number Twenty-Seven’s name was Dominika Bosko and he wouldn’t forget it, because she and her baby were the only two Christopher considered victims. He feltcompelled to wrap the foetus in a tea towel and gently move it into the crook of its mother’s arm.
Christopher imagined how he might feel if he were looking at Amy and their child lying before him, cold and lifeless, and with all their potential quashed because of the actions of another. And for the very first time in his adult life, he could feel tears forming in the corner of his eyes. It was too late to stop the first few from splashing mother and child.
It was only when he arrived home and researched it on the Internet that he discovered that her unborn child had been a victim of a rare occurrence named coffin birth. The pressure of abdominal gases inside Dominika had built up as she began to decompose and forced the child from her body.
Christopher spent the rest of the day working his way through every piece of information he had on her, trawling her emails, text messages and social media interactions. Then in four separate emails to friends back home in Syria she revealed she was pregnant. He crosschecked the dates – they’d been sent the weekend he was away in Aldeburgh with Amy.
His relationship with Amy had made him complacent. He’d invested more time in her than keeping up to date with other aspects of the women’s lives; if he’d known of Dominika’s pregnancy, he’d have removed her from his shortlist.
There was only one more left before Christopher’s work was complete, but whether he could stomach it was up for debate.
Chapter 83
JADE
Jade had never felt more heartless as when she stood partially clothed before her mother-in-law, still flushed from having made love to her son, and not the one she married.
The light from Susan’s bedroom illuminated the distress on her face, the shadows accentuating her formidable presence. She glared at both of them in turn, disgusted by what she saw, then turned and walked towards the lounge.
Mark scrambled to find the underwear Jade had stripped from him and thrown across the room. Pulling them on, he grabbed a T-shirt and pushed past her to follow his mother.
‘Mum,’ Jade heard him say, as she reached for the towelling dressing gown that hung from the back of Mark’s door. With her legs wobbling, she went to join him. They’d face this together.
‘How could you both?’ Susan exclaimed, tears already streaming down her face. ‘Kevin is yourbrother, Mark, and yourhusband, Jade. How could you do this to him?! We’ve only just buried him; he’s not even cold in the ground.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mark said desperately. ‘I didn’t mean for you to find us.’
‘Oh no, of course you didn’t, it’s pretty bloody obvious that you wanted to carry on behind everybody’s backs.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that.’
‘And you!’ continued Susan, pointing her finger at Jade. ‘We welcomed you into ourhomeand treated you like a daughter. And this is how you repay us? Sleeping with your brother-in-law the whole time?’
‘It hasn’t been the whole time,’ began Jade. ‘This was the first time.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘Yes, because it’s the truth.’
‘You two don’t know what the bloody truth is. Mark, I thought we raised you better than this.’
‘You did … you have,’ Mark tried to explain.
‘Clearly I didn’t … You’re disgusting!’
‘There was never anything physical between Kevin and me,’ Jade said firmly, hoping to defuse the situation. ‘We didn’t have the chemistry and … I don’t know why.’
Susan’s eyebrows knitted together as she glared at her. ‘Yes, there was, he was your Match! I saw how he behaved around you. He loved you.’
‘And I loved him, but I wasn’tin lovewith him. I know we were Matched but there was no romance there, at least not on my part. I guess that must sometimes happen …’
‘What you mean is that as soon as you found out he was sick, you lost interest.’
‘No, that’s not it, honestly, Susan. If I didn’t care about him I wouldn’t have stayed.’
‘He was besotted with you, Jade. I could see it in his eyes. You were his Match so why didn’t you feel the same way? You weresupposedto feel the same way!’
