‘It has also come to our attention that Mrs Yorke has been involved in and attempted to initiate sexual liaisons with several members of staff managed directly by her,’ Graph added. ‘They have come forward to claim that they were also harassed by her into performing sex acts if they stood any hope of career progression. The fatal accident that followed was as a result of autonomous vehicles being hacked, but that does not affect the facts. Your wife was a sexual predator. And as per Mrs Yorke’s contract, her employment can be terminated immediately or evenretrospectively, after her passing. Our client feels this is their only option.’
Bruno allowed the sofa to swallow him, his thoughts suddenly turning to someone else. ‘What about our son?’ he choked. ‘What will happen to him now?’
Chapter 6
FLICK, LONDON
Flick skimmed through her phone, deleting hundreds of bookmarked websites and news feeds she had visited over the last three years. Most of them were about her Match, Christopher, and his crimes. But a slip of the finger meant that instead of deleting one, she opened it instead in error.
SERIAL KILLER MURDERSPREGNANT WOMAN
The twenty-seventh murder victim of London’s serial killer was pregnant, police have revealed.
Syrian-born Dominika Bosko was five months pregnant with a baby son when she was found dead in her kitchen, garrotted by cheese wire. The body was discovered yesterday by a colleague concerned by her absence from the bookmakers where they both worked.
Detective Sergeant Sean O’Brien said: ‘We can confirm the body of the child was discovered by his mother’s side but we won’t speculate on the cause of his death until a full post-mortem has been carried out.’
Flick closed her eyes. All this time later and the impact of her Match was not lessening. She continued to erase her bookmarks until none remained. Next, she would cut out those she followed on social media who were leading more fulfilling lives than her. Flick’s television and socials were her only window to the outside world. She’d long ceased following online the comings and goings of her brothers, friends, members of her Muay Thai martial arts club and employees at the restaurant she co-owned. It’d become too much for her to read about their perfect lives, perfect families and perfect homes. She’d been robbed of all those things because her DNA had been Matched to that of a psychopath.
She had not been a bitter person until post-Christopher. Her glass had mostly been half-full, and positively overflowing when she’d first learned she had a Match. Now, not only did she hate him for leaving her dreams in tatters, but she also loathed her own cursed body for their biological link. With no one else to punish for the cards she’d been dealt, she took it out on herself with harmful behaviours. Smoking, alcohol and highly saturated convenience foods were her weapons for a slow, torturous suicide.
Now, as Flick culled more former friends she envied on Instagram, an advertisement caught her attention. It was familiar, having appeared to have followed her around other sites she’d surfed that day.Clickbait, she thought.
Clickhereto start your life again.
The notion was enticing. Who hadn’t dreamed of starting afresh? Flick fantasised about it regularly. But if something appeared too good to be true, then it probably was. You couldn’t press a restart button by clicking on a link. Or could you? She paused and then, throwing caution to the wind, she hit the link and was immediately takento a website that she mirrored on her TV screen for a clearer view.
Less than one per cent of the British population can solve this puzzle. Can you?
The screen was taken over by dozens and dozens of three-dimensional graphics, along with brightly coloured random floating letters, numbers and shapes, all of them moving in indiscriminate directions. Flick sat upright to gain a better view, then allowed the television’s sensor to pick up her line of vision so that she could control the screen with her eye movements.
In her head, ordered sequences including letters and numbers or even months of the year had specific appearances and personalities. ‘Your daughter has a type of synaesthesia called Ordinal Linguistic Personification,’ a psychiatrist had told her worried parents when she was nine. He went on to assure them she wasn’t suffering mental health issues when Flick admitted she saw a woman with red hair when she thought of the number nine or that March was represented by an introverted teenager in a beanie hat. ‘Duke Ellington, Marilyn Monroe, Kanye West and Stevie Wonder have all lived with synaesthesia,’ the psychiatrist added.
Now, in under a minute, she’d rearranged everything to form a sphere with various words and patterns across it. She waited, expecting her ‘reward’ to be redirected to a website where she’d be given the hard sell for a product she had no interest in buying. Instead, her screen went blank, then returned to the television channel she’d been half-watching.Is that it? she thought, deflated.
She made her way to the open doors of the Juliet balcony, picking up a cigarette packet from the table. As she scanned the communal gardens below, she flipped open the lid butit was empty. When she returned to the kitchen, there were no packets left in the cupboards either. It was against the law for cigarettes to be dispatched with online grocery deliveries, leaving her little choice but to leave the flat for the first time in weeks and bulk-buy them in their hundreds.
The nearest supermarket was a fifteen-minute walk from her east London apartment, and once outside, it felt like Flick’s first day on earth. Everything was alien to her, from the close proximity to people who brushed past her to the brightly coloured, revolving advertising billboards adorning building walls. The world outside was moving too quickly for her and it made her anxious.
Beds of brightly coloured flowers in a pocket park caught her attention. It was like an oasis in a desert of concrete and asphalt. Once upon a time, London had felt like an exciting, boisterous, vibrant city and a perfect place in which to be young and single. But as she approached her mid-thirties, it became overpriced, overcrowded and designed for a youthful, woke generation. She desired wide open spaces now more than ever.If only I could start my life again, I’d live it by the sea, she thought.A home by an endless ocean.
Flick spied in the centre of the park a line of street-food vendors cooking on mobile pop-up stands. Clad in her typical uniform of shapeless tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt, she felt self-conscious next to the smartly dressed office workers on their lunch breaks. They queued to order freshly cooked, steaming cartons of exotic foods. Flick couldn’t remember a time when she’d eaten a meal that hadn’t required a clear film lid to be pierced first, so she joined a line for Thai food.
‘Can I have the beef with sticky rice, please?’ she asked. The chef poured the contents of two plastic boxes into the pan where they sizzled as they came into contact with the cooking oil. But almost immediately, the noise and smellthey omitted triggered Flick’s imagination. She put her hand over her nose and mouth as the crackling of raw meat and the beef’s aroma conjured up the night of Christopher’s death.
Someone had intercepted him at the home of his planned thirtieth victim. There, they had strangled him with cheese wire, the murder weapon he favoured, before dragging his body into the rear garden, covering him with a duvet and white spirits, and setting him alight. Once he’d been identified by his DNA, teardrops were found on the dead bodies of a baby and his mother which linked Christopher to at least two of the murders. Eventually, there was enough evidence to connect him to eleven more. But it was widely assumed he was guilty of all twenty-nine. However, the person who had turned the tables and killed Christopher remained unknown.
Months later when Flick had taken the test and been informed of her Match, his name hadn’t sunk in even when she’d typed in his email address to contact him. Police had kept his account open in the hope someone they had not questioned and who was unaware of his murder might get in touch. An officer monitoring it responded with a visit to her restaurant, questioning her on the nature of their relationship. Only then did she learn she had been paired with the most prolific serial killer of the last forty years. Unwilling to accept it, Flick paid twice more to be tested but received the same results.
Over the following three years, her need to learn more about him became an obsession. She’d visit his crime scenes or track down his victims’ families and engineer casual meetings with them to learn more about their lost loved one. She’d even lurked outside Christopher’s boarded-up home in West London, trying to find a way of breaking through the metal shutters that blocked every entrance.
Now, as her lunch sizzled and spat, Flick imagined it being Christopher’s flesh as the flames burned his corpse. She couldn’t remain there a moment longer. She pushed past others in the queue and ran to the edge of the park, steadying herself against the railings. She inhaled deeply, searching for cleansing breaths to rid herself of the stench of beef clinging to her lungs.
Back home, she locked and bolted the door behind her, leaned her back against it and slid to the floor. It was only as she went to reach for the cigarettes that she remembered she had not made it as far as the supermarket. She would have to do without as she wouldn’t be leaving the house again today.
Flick held her head in her hands and sobbed as long and hard as she had the day she discovered on the dark web a poster who had access to Polaroid photographs Christopher had taken of his victims and kept as mementos. She’d paid a month’s wages in bitcoins to download them, partly to see how depraved the man was that biology had paired her with and partly to put paid to the doubts creeping into her mind about her own self and what she too might be capable of. Perhaps as well as their DNA, they shared the same latent desires, the same latent tendencies?
When she vomited after seeing the fourth garrotted, bloated victim, she knew for certain she and Christopher were nothing alike. Nature had played a very cruel trick on her. Time might have passed for the rest of the world since that day, but it remained frozen for her. And she was at a loss as to how it was going to get any better.
