‘That must have been horrible for you.’
‘It wasn’t a great time, no. But it sparked a huge change in Richard. I think something inside him knew his time on earth might be limited and he wanted to make the most of it. And who can blame him? He was right, after all, and he managed to cram more into his years that many other people do in a lifetime.’
‘Certainly a lot more than me,’ said Mandy. Richard’s sense of adventure put her lack of one to shame. She couldn’t help but wonder what sights of the world they might have witnessed together if fate hadn’t intervened.
‘What about you Mandy?’ Pat suddenly asked. ‘Here I am rambling on about Richard and what he was like and I haven’t once asked you how it makes you feel to hear my stories?’
Mandy removed her fingers from around her mug of coffee and glanced at the customers around them lifting potted plants and sizing them up. An elderly couple caught her attention as they sat side by side on a bench holding hands and silently watching brightly coloured fish swimming in a pond. She and Richard would never get the chance to grow old together.
‘When you talk about him, it makes me feel that there’s so much I’ve missed out on,’ she replied. ‘A family man who wanted a family of his own … that’s my idea of a perfect Match. I feel torn – I’m so pleased to have been Matched with him, yet I feel so sad that we weren’t even allowed to meet or be together. They say you can’t miss what you’ve never had, but that’s not true. I miss him so much and I never even knew him.’
Pat placed her hand on Mandy’s. ‘For what it’s worth, I’d have been proud to have had you as my daughter-in-law.’
Mandy looked away and had to bite her lip to stop it from trembling, but it wasn’t enough to stop the many tears cascading down her cheeks.
Chapter 32
CHRISTOPHER
The extra shot Christopher added to his espresso put a pep in his step.
He was still buzzing from the smooth, uncomplicated kill of Number Ten in the early hours of the morning, and wasn’t tired enough to go to bed. There were too many plans to be made which were swirling around his head. So he put on a pair of shorts and a tight sleeveless vest and slipped on his trainers – lacing them up so the loops were identically sized – and left his house for a run. When his thoughts became jumbled, exercise helped to balance his mind.
Christopher relished being the object of attention and he didn’t care from which source it came. His killings were anonymous, so he searched for it from other means instead, such as wearing his best tailor-made Savile Row suit and test-driving cars he had no intention of buying, or making appointments to visit multimillion pound turnkey properties he couldn’t afford. He’d often walk around the gym changing rooms naked for longer than necessary, showing off his toned physique that he was confident other men would envy. And when he ran, he purposely wore no underwear, so passers-by could see his penis in his shorts bouncing from side to side.
His top-of-the-range Nikes pounded along the busy London pavements and took him towards the greenery of Hyde Park. As he ran, he questioned what it was about his condition that made him seek this attention, and with it the challenges and complications. Life would’ve been much simpler if, after he killed, he’d leave their homes and wait for them to be discovered. But, he’d chosen to make things more interesting by taking a risk and returning to the scene of the crime to leave his trademark: a photograph of the next victim and the spray-painted stencil outside.
It was an original spin, he thought, and was sure to capture the interest of the press and public who, when it came to their serial killers, liked a calling card – films and books had raised the level of expectation and he was happy to deliver to his audience. The race would always be on for the police to identify the next girl, in the hope that with each kill, Christopher would become a little more careless and leave a clue. So far, they had nothing to go on.
His aim was always to return to their houses within two to three days to leave the photograph and stencil, and, as luck would have it, so far his victims had yet to be discovered by that point. He looked on his returning to the scene of the crime as a bonus: a chance to take one final look at his handiwork.
Christopher turned the volume up on the MP3 player strapped to his arm and ran to the beat of his Spotify playlist. Adele was the next artist to shuffle on and he wondered why all killers depicted in television dramas only ever listened to angry, shouty, heavy metal music – in the same way that all fictitious black criminals only ever listened to rap. Nobody ever killed or robbed a bank to the sounds of Rihanna or Justin Bieber.
He ran across the road and past a parade of shops, recognising the doorway of one in particular. He never picked his subjects randomly, but based on strict criteria. They were young, single women who were on the dating scene and who lived alone. They occupied older properties with no burglar alarms and front doors with old locks. They all lived a distance from their families and, London being so large and anonymous, they didn’t know their neighbours. It would always take a day or so before a person’s absence was noted by a friend or work colleague, and eventually reported to police.
He looked at the doorway and remembered the Lithuanian girl who lived there – he’d chatted to her online a few times and she’d made his longlist. Then he’d discovered she was advertising for a flatmate. Christopher knew what a thrill he’d get from killing two girls in one night, but the amount of risk involved wasn’t worth taking, so he’d removed her from his list. She’d never know how lucky she was.
Laying the blame for multiple killings at the door of ‘a man with psychopathic tendencies’ was about the only thing the experts in the media had been correct about. His diagnosis wasn’t news to Christopher; off his own bat he had filled in the test questionnaires years earlier to gain a greater understanding of who he was.
‘Psycho’ was a term first given to him during his schooldays following the purposefully over-zealous rugby tackle that broke a boy’s collar bone; the hockey ball hit with such gusto it blinded a girl in one eye; and the pouring of bleach into the school’s pond to see how long it’d take for the newts to rise to the surface belly-up. The nickname didn’t bother him because he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Nevertheless, it seemed to give him a reputation of a boy to be feared, which he enjoyed.
Christopher now realised his parents must have been aware there was something different about their youngest child, as they’d had him tested for both autism and Asperger’s. When the results came back negative, they swept his oddities under the carpet and concentrated on helping him to fit into society as best he could. When he had told them he struggled to feel anything, from sympathy to love, they taught him to mimic acceptable behaviour instead.
As Christopher reached his teenage years, he fixated on how people reacted to circumstances beyond their control and, specifically, to scenarios created by him. Once, he took the neighbours’ toddler from their garden and left him in woodland two miles away, just to see how the child’s parents might react once they noticed he was missing. Frantic, it turned out. He wondered why he couldn’t feel the same sort of terror, or why empathy was a foreign word to him.
It also didn’t come naturally for him to detect fear in a facial expression; he couldn’t identify sarcasm and he didn’t feel guilt, shame or remorse. Even when his parents walked in on him, aged fifteen, screwing another neighbour’s daughter in the conservatory, he had simply turned his head to look at them until they left. He had expected to continue, much to the girl’s horror.