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John Marrs is a freelance journalist based in London, England, who has spent the last twenty years interviewing celebrities from the world of television, film and music for national newspapers and magazines. He has written for publications including the Guardian’s Guide and Guardian Online, Total Film, Huffington Post, Empire, Q, GT, the Independent, S Magazine and Company.

This is John’s third novel, following his self-published successes: The Wronged Sons and Welcome to Wherever You Are. Follow him on Twitter @johnmarrs1 or on Instagram at johnmarrs.author.

Praise for John Marrs:

‘A fantastic read if you enjoy an unpredictable story with twists and turns’ ***** OK! magazine

‘Looking for a thrilling read? Then look no further’ TV Life magazine, Daily Star Sunday

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Del Rey, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Del Rey is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

John Marrs has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Likewise, Match Your DNA is a fictional business and bears no affiliation to any other company.

First self-published in 2016 as A Thousand Small Explosions
This edition published by Del Rey in 2017

‘To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.’ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Chapter 1

MANDY

The shirtless man had cropped, light-brown hair, and posed on a beach with his legs spread apart with the top half of his wetsuit rolled down to his waist. His eyes were the clearest shade of blue. His huge grin contained two perfectly aligned rows of white teeth, and she could almost taste the salt water dripping from his chest and onto the surfboard lying by his feet.

‘Oh my Lord,’ she whispered to herself, and let out a long breath she didn’t realise she’d been holding. She felt her fingertips tingle and her face flush, and wondered how on earth her body would react to him in person if that’s how it responded to just one photograph.

The coffee in her polystyrene cup was cold but she still finished it. She took a screengrab of the photograph and added it to a newly created folder on her desktop entitled ‘Richard Taylor’. She scanned the office to check if anyone was watching what she was up to in her booth, but no one was paying her any attention.

Mandy scrolled down the screen to look at the other photographs in his Facebook album ‘Around the World’. He was certainly well travelled, she noticed, and he had been to places she’d only ever seen on TV or in films. In many pictures he was in bars, trails and temples, posing by landmarks, enjoying golden beaches and choppy waters. He was rarely on his own. She liked that he seemed the gregarious type.

Curious, she looked back further into his timeline, from when he first joined social media as a sixth former and through his three years at university. She even found him attractive as a gawky teenager.

After an hour and a half of gawping at nearly the entirety of the handsome stranger’s history, Mandy made her way to his Twitter feed to see what he felt the need to share with the world. But all he ranted about was Arsenal’s rise and fall in the Premier League, occasionally broken up by retweets of animals falling over or running into stationary objects.

Their interests appeared to differ greatly, and she questioned exactly why they had been Matched and what they might have in common. Then she reminded herself she no longer needed the mindset required for using dating websites and apps; Match Your DNA was based on biology, chemicals and science – none of which she could get her head around. But she trusted it with all her heart, like millions and millions of others did.

Mandy moved on to Richard’s LinkedIn profile, which revealed that since graduating from Worcester University two years earlier, he’d worked as a personal trainer in a town approximately forty miles from hers. No wonder his body appeared so solid, she thought, and she imagined how it might feel on top of hers.

She hadn’t set foot in a gym since her induction a year ago, when her sisters insisted she should stop lamenting her failed marriage and start concentrating on her recovery. They’d whisked her away to a nearby hotel day-spa where she’d been massaged, plucked, waxed, hot-stoned, tanned and massaged again until any thought of her ex had been pummelled out of every back and shoulder knot and each clogged pore of her skin. The gym membership had followed along with a promise that she would keep up with the workout schedule they’d set up for her. Motivating herself to work out regularly had yet to become part of her weekly routine, but she paid for the membership regardless.

She began to imagine what her children with Richard might look like, and if they’d inherit their father’s blue eyes or be brown like hers; whether they’d be dark haired and olive skinned like her or fair and pale like him. She found herself smiling.

‘Jesus!’ she yelled. The voice had made her jump. ‘You scared me to death.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have been looking at porn at work then.’ Olivia grinned, and offered her a sweet from a bag of Haribo. Mandy declined with a shake of her head.

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Keep an eye out for Charlie though, he’s after some sales figures from you.’

Mandy rolled her eyes, then looked at the clock in the corner of her screen. She realised that if she didn’t start doing some work soon she’d end up taking it home with her. She clicked on the little red ‘x’ in the corner and cursed her Hotmail account for assuming the Match Your DNA confirmation email was spam. It had sat in her junk folder for the last six weeks until, by chance, she had discovered it earlier that afternoon.

‘Mandy Taylor, wife of Richard Taylor; pleased to meet you,’ she whispered. She noticed she was absent-mindedly twiddling an invisible ring around her wedding finger.

Chapter 2

CHRISTOPHER

Christopher shuffled from side to side until he reached a comfortable position in the armchair.

He placed his elbows at ninety-degree angles on the chair’s arms and inhaled deeply to take in the scent of its leathery covering. She hadn’t scrimped on quality, he thought, confident from both its smell and soft touch that it hadn’t been purchased from a run-of-the-mill high-street retailer.

While she remained in the adjacent kitchen, Christopher glanced around her apartment. She lived on the ground floor of an immaculately restored Victorian building that, according to a stained-glass mural above the front door, had once been used as a convent. He admired her taste in pottery ornaments, which were arranged on shelves built into the walls surrounding the open fireplace’s chimney breast. But her choice of literature left a lot to be desired. He turned his nose up at the paperback works of James Patterson, Jackie Collins and J.K. Rowling.

Elsewhere in the room, a suede-covered square tray was placed centrally on a chunky coffee table that held two remote controls. Four matching place mats had been perfectly laid around it. Her use of symmetry put him at ease.

Christopher ran his tongue across his teeth and it hovered over a sliver of pistachio nut that had become trapped between his lateral incisor and canine. When it failed to dislodge, he used his fingernail, but it still wouldn’t move so he made a mental note to inspect her bathroom cabinet for dental floss before he left. Very little irritated him more than a piece of trapped food. He’d once walked out on a date mid-meal because she had a stray piece of kale in her teeth.

A vibrating from his trouser pocket tickled his groin; not an entirely unpleasant experience. As a rule, Christopher was quite fastidious when it came to turning his phone off at appropriate times and he loathed people who didn’t extend him the same courtesy. But today he’d made an exception.

He removed the phone and read the message on the screen; it was an email from Match Your DNA. He recalled sending them a mouth swab on a whim some months earlier but had yet to receive a registered Match. Until now. Would he like to pay to receive their contact details, the message asked. Would I? he thought. Would I really? He put the phone away and pondered what his Match might look like, before deciding it was inappropriate to be thinking about a second woman while he was still in the company of the first.

He rose to his feet and returned to the kitchen to find her where he’d left her minutes earlier, lying on her back on the cold, slate floor, the garrotte still embedded in her neck. She was no longer bleeding, the final few drops having pooled around the collar of her blouse.

He took a digital Polaroid camera from his jacket and used it to take two identical photographs of her face before waiting patiently for them to develop. He placed both photos in an A5 hard-backed envelope and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.

Then Christopher scooped his kit into his backpack and left, waiting until he had exited the darkness of the garden before removing his plastic overshoes, mask and balaclava.

Chapter 3

JADE

‘Evening, beautiful girl, how are you?’ it read. She liked how Kevin always began his messages with the same phrase.

‘I’m good thanks,’ she replied before adding a yellow smiley-faced emoji. ‘I’m knackered, though.’

‘Sorry I didn’t text you earlier. It’s been a busy day. I didn’t piss you off, did I?’

‘Yeah, you did a bit but you know what a grumpy cow I can be. What have you been doing?’

A picture appeared on her screen of a wooden barn and a tractor under a bright, blazing sun. Inside the barn, she could just about make out cattle behind metal bars and milking equipment attached to their udders.

‘I’ve been repairing the cowshed roof. Not that we’re expecting rain yet but we might as well do it now. How about you?’

‘I’m in bed in my pyjamas and looking at the weird hotels on the Lonely Planet website you told me about.’ Jade moved her laptop on to the floor and looked up at her pinboard of places she wanted to visit.

‘Amazing, aren’t they? We need to travel the world and see them together one day.’

‘It kind of makes me wish I’d taken a year out after uni and gone backpacking with my mates.’

‘That’s a daft bloody question – money doesn’t grow on trees where I’m from.’ If only it did, she thought. Her mum and dad weren’t loaded and she had to fund her studies. She had a student loan the size of the Tyne to pay off while her housemates from uni had all left to live their dream and travel America. The constant Facebook updates made her seethe, seeing their photos of them all having fun without her.

‘I hate to cut this short babe, but Dad wants me to help with the cattle feed. Text me later?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Jade replied, irked that their time had been cut short after she’d waited all night to speak to him.

‘Yeah, whatever,’ she replied, and put the phone down. A moment later she picked it up and typed again. ‘Love you too. Xxx’

Jade climbed out from under her thick duvet and placed her phone on its charging mat on the bedside table. She glanced into the full-length mirror, which had photographs of her absent friends who were off travelling taped to the frame, and vowed to reduce the dark rings around her blue eyes by sleeping for longer and drinking more water. She made a mental note to get her red, curly locks trimmed at the weekend and to treat herself to a spray tan. She always felt better when her pale skin had a dash of colour.

She slipped back into bed and wondered how different her life might have been had she taken that gap year with her friends. Maybe it would’ve given her the courage to ignore pressure from her parents to return to Sunderland after her three years at Loughborough. As the first member of her family to be offered a place at university, they couldn’t understand why employers weren’t beating down her door with job offers the moment she graduated. And while the credit card bills and loans began to mount, she had little choice but to either declare herself bankrupt at twenty-one or move back into the terraced family home she thought she’d escaped.

She disliked the angry, frustrated person she had become, but didn’t know how to change. She resented her parents for making her return and began to estrange herself from them. By the time she could afford to rent her own flat, they were barely on speaking terms.

She also blamed them for her failure to get onto the travel and tourism career ladder, and for making her spend her working days behind the reception desk of a hotel on the outskirts of town. It was supposed to have been a stopgap job but somewhere along the line it had become the norm. Jade was sick of being so irate with everyone and she yearned to get back to the life she had originally imagined for herself.

The only bright spot in each Groundhog Day was talking to the man she’d been paired with on Match Your DNA. Kevin.

She cracked a smile at the most recent photograph she had of Kevin, which watched over her from its frame on the bookcase. He had almost white-blond hair and eyebrows, a smile that spread from ear to ear and his tanned body was lean but muscular. She couldn’t have made him up if she’d tried.

He’d only sent her a handful of pictures over the seven months they’d been talking, but from the moment they’d first spoken on the phone and Jade had experienced the shiver she’d read about in magazines, she was sure there was no man on earth better suited to her.

Fate could be a bastard, she decided, having placed her Match on the other side of the world in Australia. Maybe one day she might meet him, if she could ever afford it.

Chapter 4

NICK

‘Oh, you guys should totally do it,’ Sumaira urged, a wide grin on her face and a devilish twinkle in her eye.

‘Why? I’ve found my soulmate,’ Sally said, entwining her fingers with Nick’s.

Nick leaned across the dining table and reached for the Prosecco with his other hand. He poured the last few drops into his glass. ‘Anyone want a top up?’ he asked. After a hearty yes from the other three guests, he extricated his hand from his fiancée’s and moved towards the kitchen.

‘But you want to be sure, don’t you?’ Sumaira pushed. ‘I mean you guys are so good together, but you never know who else is out there …’

Nick returned from the kitchen with the bottle – the fifth of the evening – and went to pour Sumaira a glass.

Deepak placed his hand over his wife’s glass. ‘She’s fine, mate. Mrs Loose Lips here has had enough for one night.’

‘Spoilsport,’ Sumaira sniped and pulled a face. She turned back to Sally ‘All I’m saying is that you want to make sure you’ve found the one before you walk down the aisle.’

‘You make it sound so romantic,’ said Deepak and rolled his eyes. ‘But it’s not really up to you to make that decision for them, is it? If they ain’t broke, don’t try and fix them.’

‘The test worked for us, though, didn’t it? I mean, we knew anyway, but it gave us that added bit of security, that we’d always been destined to be with each other.’

‘You don’t need to be in a couple to be smug and sanctimonious, sweetheart.’

Now it was Sumaira’s turn to roll her eyes. She swigged the remainder of the contents of her glass under her husband’s watchful eye.

Nick rested his head on his fiancée’s shoulder and glanced out the window at the glare of cars’ headlights and figures milling about on the pavement outside the pub. They lived in a converted factory apartment and the windows were floor to ceiling – no escape from seeing the busy street outside, and what his life used to look like. Not so long ago, his usual evening would’ve been made up of bar crawls around Birmingham’s hip, up-and-coming areas, before falling asleep on a night bus and waking up many stops from where he lived.

But his priorities had changed almost overnight when he met Sally. Sally was in her early thirties – five years his senior – and he knew from their first conversation about old Hitchcock films that there was something a bit different about her. In their early days together, she’d got a kick from opening his mind to new travel destinations, new foods, new artists and music, and Nick began to see the world from a fresh perspective. When he glanced at her with her impossibly sharp cheekbones, chestnut-brown, pixie-cropped hair and grey eyes, he hoped that some day their children would acquire their mother’s good looks and open-mindedness.

Quite what Nick offered Sally in return he couldn’t be sure, but when he’d proposed to her on their three-year anniversary in a restaurant in Santorini, she’d cried so hard that he couldn’t be sure if she’d accepted or declined.

‘If you two are the best example of what being Matched is about, I’m quite happy for Sal and I to remain just how we are,’ teased Nick, and slipped his glasses down his nose to rub his tired eyes. He reached for his e-cigarette and took several puffs. ‘We’ve been together for almost four years now, and now she’s promised to love, honour and obey me, I’m a hundred per cent sure we’re made for each other.’

‘Hold on, “obey”?’ Sumaira interrupted, raising an eyebrow. ‘You should be so lucky.’

‘You obey me,’ added Deepak confidently. ‘Everyone knows I wear the trousers in our relationship.’

‘What if we’re not, though?’ Sally asked suddenly. ‘What if we’re not made for each other?’

Until then, Nick had listened with apparent amusement as Sumaira attempted to talk them into Match Your DNA testing. It hadn’t been the first time she’d raised the subject in the two years they’d known each other, and Nick was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Sally’s friend could be both belligerent and persuasive at the same time. But Nick was surprised to hear Sally say this. She’d always been very anti-Match-Your-DNA, as was he. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.

‘You know that I love you with all my heart and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but … what if we aren’t actually soulmates?’

‘Oh, nowhere, don’t worry, I’m not having second thoughts or anything.’ She gave him a reassuring pat on the arm. ‘It’s just that I was wondering are we happy to just think we’re right for each other or do we want to know for sure?’

‘Babe, you’re drunk.’ Nick dismissed her and scratched at his stubble. ‘I’m perfectly happy knowing what I know and I don’t need some test telling me that.’

‘I read something online that said Match Your DNA is going to break up around 3 million marriages. But within a generation, divorce will barely be a thing any more,’ Sumaira said.

‘That’s because marriage won’t be “a thing” either,’ Deepak retorted. ‘It’ll become an outdated institution, you mark my words. You won’t need to prove anything to anyone because everyone will be partnered with who they’re destined to be with.’

‘You’re really not helping me here,’ Nick said, and dug his fork into the crumbly remains of Sally’s raspberry cheesecake.

‘Sorry, mate, you’re right. Let’s have a toast. To the certainty of chance.’

‘To the certainty of chance,’ the others replied and clinked their glasses against Nick’s.

Chapter 5

ELLIE

Ellie swiped the screen of her tablet and begrudged the extensive list of tasks she needed to complete before her working day was over.

Her assistant, Ula, was ferociously efficient and updated and prioritised the list five times daily, even though Ellie never asked her to. Instead of finding this useful, Ellie often felt animosity for both the tablet and Ula for their constant reminders of her failing in reaching the bottom of the list. Sometimes she felt the urge to shove the device down Ula’s throat.

Ellie had hoped that by now, being her own boss, she’d have hired enough reliable staff to whom she could delegate a large proportion of her workload. But as time marched on, she gradually began to accept the label of ‘bloody control freak’ that an ex-boyfriend had once thrown at her.

Ellie glanced at the clock. It was 10.10pm, and she realised she’d already missed the celebratory drinks for her chairman of operations, who’d recently welcomed his son into the world. She doubted anyone had believed her promise to attend – she rarely found the time to fraternise – and while she encouraged it among her staff and even subsidised the company’s social club, when it came to her own participation, time had a habit of getting away from her, despite her best intentions.

Ellie let out a long yawn and glanced out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Her ostentatiously unostentatious office was on the seventy-first floor of London’s Shard building, and the panoramic view allowed her to see way beyond the Thames below, out towards the colourful lights illuminating the night sky as far as the eye could see.

She slipped out of her Miu Miu heels and walked barefoot across the thick white rugs, which adorned the floor, towards the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room. She ignored the stock of champagne, wine, whisky and vodka and chose one of a dozen chilled cans of an energy drink instead. She poured it into a glass with a handful of ice cubes and took a sip. The decor of her office was as sparse as her home, she realised. It said nothing about her. But when you didn’t care enough about your own decisions it was far more convenient to pay interior designers to make them for you.

Ellie’s business was her priority, not the thread count of the Egyptian cotton covering her bed, how many David Hockney paintings hung from her picture rails or the number of Swarovski crystals used in her hallway chandelier.

She made her way back to her desk and reluctantly glanced at the next day’s to-do list, which Ula had already compiled. She waited for her driver and head of security Andrei to take her home, where she planned to read her PR department’s suggestions on her upcoming speech to the media about a new update to her app. This update would revolutionise her industry so she had to get it right.

Then, at 5.30am the next morning, a hair stylist and a make-up artist would meet her at her Belgravia home ahead of the pre-recorded television interviews with CNN, BBC News 24, Fox News and Al Jazeera. Afterwards, she would sit down with a journalist from the Economist, pose for some photographs for the Press Association and hopefully be back home no later than 10am. It wasn’t the best way to begin her Saturday, she thought.

Ellie’s publicist had forewarned the news agencies that she was only prepared to discuss her work, with strictly no questions to be asked about her personal life. It was why she’d recently turned down a profile feature with Vogue complete with a shoot with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. The column inches could have been vast and picked up by publications across the globe, but it wasn’t worth the expense of her privacy. That had already suffered enough over the years.

Along with being notoriously aloof about her life outside of work, Ellie also didn’t want to publicly address the level of criticism her business received – she trusted her PR team to deal with any negativity on her behalf. She’d learned from mistakes of the late Steve Jobs concerning the handling of the iPhone 4 antenna issue, and how much damage it had, at the time, caused to the reputation of both the brand and the figurehead.

Her personal mobile phone lit up on her desk. Few people had the privilege of that number or her private email address: in fact, just a dozen of her 4,000 employees worldwide and family members who she barely had time to see. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about her relatives often – she’d thrown enough money at them over the years to compensate for her lack of presence – but it all came down to there not being enough hours in the day and a lack of mutual understanding. Ellie didn’t have children; they did. They didn’t have a multibillion-pound global company to run; Ellie did.

She lifted the phone and recognised the email address on the screen. Curious, she opened it. ‘Match Your DNA Match confirmed’ it revealed. She frowned. Even though she had registered for the site a long time ago, her immediate reaction was still mistrust that one of her staff was playing a joke on her.

‘Ellie Ayling. Your designated Match is Timothy, male, Leighton Buzzard, England. Please see instructions below to discover how to access their complete profile.’

She placed the phone upon the table and closed her eyes. ‘This is the last thing I need,’ she muttered to herself, and switched it off.

Chapter 6

MANDY

The barrage of questions from Mandy’s family came thick and fast. Her three sisters and mother hunched around the dining room table, hungry for information about her Match, Richard. They were equally hungry for the contents of the four boxes of take-out pizza, garlic bread and dips spread out in front of them.

‘No. No. Peterborough. He’s a personal trainer and, no, I don’t know what his voice sounds like,’ Mandy replied.

‘I only have a couple I copied from his Facebook profile.’ In truth, there were at least fifty, but Mandy didn’t want them to know how keen she was.

‘Oh my God, you don’t want to show us them because he sent you a picture of his willy, didn’t he?’ her mother exclaimed.

‘Mum!’ Mandy gasped. ‘I told you, we haven’t spoken yet and I haven’t seen a picture of his willy.’

‘Talking of willies, I’m breaking into the meat feast,’ said Paula, and offered a slice to her sister. Mandy shook her head. It was her firm belief that, while her coupled sisters could afford to rest on their laurels and eat to their hearts and stomachs’ content, she had to be careful what she ate. It didn’t matter that it was a cheat day either; according to Grazia, the difference between a size fourteen and a size sixteen can sometimes be just one mouthful.

Mandy selected the shirtless picture of a surfing Richard and passed her phone around the table for her family to see.

‘Bloody hell, he’s a fit little bugger!’ Paula shrieked. ‘Although he must be about a decade younger than you! You have a toy boy, you’re one of those cougars, aren’t you?’

‘She’s waiting for another picture of his willy to make sure he measures up,’ Karen said, and they all burst into laughter.

‘You lot have filthy minds,’ Mandy said. ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything now.’

For once, she was pleased she had some good news to share with her family when it came to her love life. With three younger sisters who had settled down and married – all of them to their DNA Matches – she was riven by insecurities and she’d begun to feel like she’d been left on the shelf, especially since they’d started having children. Mandy was a thirty-seven-year-old divorcee and she was beginning to feel as if she’d never be anything else. However, since Richard had come into her life – albeit not yet in person – everything was now looking up and all she could think about was how things were about to change for the better.

The confirmation email she’d received from Match Your DNA had informed her that Richard had ticked the box, which meant that, in the event of a Match, his contact details could be sent out. He would also have received a notification informing him of this as well as Mandy’s contact details, yet he hadn’t been in touch. The suspense was killing her. However, Mandy was old-fashioned at heart and believed it the man’s job to do the chasing.

‘Right, this is what you need to do,’ began Kirstin. ‘First off, send him a text. Be proactive and set a date when you’ll meet in person, at a restaurant or something … one of the fancy ones like Carluccio’s or Jamie’s. Then make him wait a few dates before you let him kiss you, let alone anything else.’

‘Oh, to hell with that,’ interrupted Paula, who took a long drag from her e-cigarette. ‘The beauty of being Matched with someone is that you don’t have to faff around with all that game playing. You know that you two are perfect for each other, so go and shag each other’s brains out.’

‘Mandy’s not like you, Paula,’ said Karen. ‘She’s always taken things slowly.’

‘And look where that’s got her.’ Paula turned to Mandy and said, ‘No offence. But what I’m saying is that she doesn’t need to be that slow any more. Mum would give her right arm to be a grandmother again, and Karen and I have spent enough on designer vaginas to not want to push another kid out. And Kirstin, yes I know lesbians can have babies too, but you’re too busy playing the field to even think about settling down. Mandy, grandchild number four rests on your shoulders. Just think, by this time next year, you could be married and pregnant.’

All eyes flashed a wary look at Paula, who quickly said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t think.’

Mandy had always longed for a child of her own, and when she had been married to Sean they had had a couple of near misses. She and her childhood sweetheart had married straight out of school, saved hard, bought a house together and had tried to start a family. It had completely shaken her world to lose those babies and this had been part of the reason why the marriage had fallen apart. Sometimes there were times at night when, with only the silence to keep her company in her bedroom, she swore she could hear her biological clock ticking. She had probably less than a decade left to conceive a child naturally and, even then, her body was prone to complications. During the many evenings she’d spent babysitting her nieces and nephew, she’d ached to have the same for herself, someone to love unconditionally. Of course she loved her sisters’ kids, but it wasn’t the same at all. She dreamed of having someone she had helped to create and mould, someone who depended on her, who needed her, who would always seek her out for guidance and who, until her dying day, would call her ‘Mum’.

The thought of becoming a childless spinster was a terrifying prospect, and as the years sped past, Mandy worried that instead of a possibility, it was becoming more and more of a probability.

‘I think you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself,’ Mandy said. ‘I’m going to let him make the first move, and let’s see how we get on from there, OK?’

The others nodded reluctantly and Mandy recalled how, not so long ago, she’d been wary of registering with Match Your DNA. Her marriage had become unsteady because of the miscarriages, but the final nail in the coffin had been when Sean suddenly left her for another woman eleven years her senior. He had taken the test without Mandy’s knowledge and been Matched. He promptly ended their marriage and once their house was sold, he had moved to a country chateau in Bordeaux to be with his French Match. Mandy had been left to pick up the pieces – a tiny starter home and a broken heart.

Match Your DNA was no longer the enemy – time had healed Mandy’s relationship with the thought of it. And now, after three years as a singleton, she was ready to share her life with someone again, this time with someone who’d been made for her, rather than leaving it to chance. What could possibly go wrong?

She hoped her Match was thinking the same thing, although he was taking his time getting in touch. She prayed that he wasn’t already married and that she wasn’t about to break up a happy home, like Régine had done to her, just to get the husband and child that was rightfully hers.

Chapter 7

CHRISTOPHER

Christopher sat at the antique wooden desk in the box room which was situated at the rear of his two-storey apartment.

He turned on both computer screens and his wireless Bluetooth keyboards, and adjusted their positions until they were perfectly parallel to each other. He opened up his emails on the first screen, and on the second he flicked through several programmes before clicking on the Where’s My Mobile Phone? link he’d downloaded some months ago. Twenty-four different phone numbers appeared on his screen, but just two flashed in a bright green colour to indicate their users were on the move. That was about usual for this time of the evening, he reasoned.

It was the penultimate phone number that piqued his curiosity. He opened a map in his toolbar and added a red ring to indicate where the user was. Her phone’s GPS system offered her current location as the street where she lived.

Based on her typical pattern of behaviour, Number Seven would have just finished a shift at the no-frills Soho chicken restaurant where she worked until around 11pm. She would then have caught the number 29 bus home. He predicted she would be settled in her bed within the hour before her second job as an office cleaner began in central London at 6am. It was between those hours that Christopher’s work could begin.

When narrowing down his choices, he had factored in how he would reach them, and he knew fairly well the distance between his and every one of their homes. He’d learned from the error of others like him that there should be no pattern to the location of his marks – keep everything random on the surface but in perfect order underneath. And over time he’d worked out whose property he should drive to, who’d be best served by bike and which locations would be better reached on foot.

Number Seven’s flat was just a twenty-minute walk away from his house. ‘Perfect,’ he muttered, happy with himself.

But his attention was diverted from the red circle on one screen to the other, which displayed his dozens of email accounts. The email from Match Your DNA had remained unopened since it appeared in his inbox four nights earlier, when he’d been preoccupied with Number Six. But on seeing it again, he became curious as to the woman his biology had determined was best suited to him. At least he hoped it was a woman – he’d read stories about people being Matched with someone of the same sex or with people decades older than them. He didn’t want to be loved by a queer or a geriatric; in fact, Christopher didn’t really want to be loved by anyone. He’d wasted enough time in brief relationships throughout his thirty-three years to comprehend the amount of effort required to satisfy another person. It wasn’t for him.

Yet for all the drawbacks a potential Match presented, he was still inquisitive as to whom his would be. He glanced out of the window and into the darkness of his garden and allowed himself to imagine how amusing it would be to carry on with his project while pretending to live a normal, pedestrian existence as one half of a couple.

He opened the email. ‘Amy Brookbanks, female, 31, London, England’, it read, along with her email address. He liked the fact that she hadn’t given her mobile number; it showed caution. So many of the girls on his list hadn’t shown that degree of foresight and it had – and would continue to be – their downfall. He decided that when he returned home later that night he would send Amy an email and introduce himself, just to see what she had to say.

As predicted, on his other screen, the location of Number Seven’s telephone number remained stationary. Satisfied, he turned both monitors off, locked up the room and made a beeline for the kitchen cupboard where he kept his packed bag. He put his freshly disinfected cheese wire with the wooden handles in the bag, along with his pay-as-you-go phone with her number taped to the back of it, his gloves and his Polaroid camera.

As Christopher slipped on his gloves and overcoat, he glanced at the camera. It wasn’t an original from back in the 1970s because the paper required for each print was too easy for the police to trace. His camera’s paper was widely available and the camera itself was digital, boasting up-to-date features such as coloured filters. Each Number on his list had used a profile picture that had also been Instagrammed, and as he closed the door to his house, adjusted the straps on his backpack and walked briskly along the quiet street, Christopher knew he wanted his Numbers to look their very best, even in death.

Chapter 8

JADE

Jade looked on amused as the hotel spa’s beauty therapists, Shawna and Lucy, opened their plastic Aldi bags to take out their miserable-looking lunches.

The contents of Shawna’s bag consisted of half-a-dozen thinly sliced celery sticks wrapped in cling film and a pot of low-calorie piri-piri hummus, while Lucy tucked into a gluten-free seeded roll and a chicken Cup a Soup, which was still steaming from a blast in the canteen microwave.

Jade took out her Tupperware lunch box from her handbag. She’d packed a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch, a small packet of Maltesers, a doorstop-chunky ham and pickle sandwich and a can of Pepsi. She had no desire to replicate the diets of her thirty-something workmates. Bugger the bikini, she thought, as she took a bite of the sandwich.

‘So how are things going with that guy you were seeing from the club?’ Shawna asked Lucy, and licked a drop of hummus that’d fallen onto one of her false fingernails.

‘He’s being bloody idiot.’ Lucy sniffed. ‘He told me he was taking me out to dinner last night – which turned out to be at Nando’s – then spent the rest of the night staring at the skanky lass working the till. I mean, who does that when you’re on a date? It’s so disrespectful.’

‘I know. He’s coming round mine tonight, though; I said I’d cook. What about you? What about that lad with the tattoos from Tinder?’

‘You mean Denzel? He says he really likes me but then I don’t hear from him in, like, four days. What’s up with that?’

Jade shook her head and took another bite from her sandwich. ‘Terrible. I don’t know how you put up with it. I’m so glad I don’t have to go through that anymore,’ she said between mouthfuls. It was conversations like this that reminded her of how lucky she was to have found Kevin on Match Your DNA, but she was annoyed that he couldn’t live any closer than half the world away in Australia. Before she’d received the email confirming her Match, she’d been in the same position as her workmates, only she liked to think she was more discerning with her men. In reality, she had dated just as many losers, or ‘stopgaps’ as Cosmopolitan branded them.

‘But it’s not like he’s on my doorstep, is it?’ Jade replied. ‘I can’t just pop round for dinner and a snog, can I? At least you’re actually interacting with these boys, even if they treat you like shite.’

‘That’s just how men are, though, isn’t it?’ said Shawna. ‘If you’re not one of the millions on that register who’ve been Matched already, then you’ve got to make do with what you can get until Mr Right turns up. If he turns up.’

‘Until then we’re gonna have to put up with a lot of shitbags,’ added Lucy.

‘No, girls, you’re wrong there.’ Jade delighted in telling them what they should do. ‘If us lasses all got our heads together, re-wrote the girl code and agreed to stop letting ourselves be treated like crap, then boys would have no choice but to up their game. Until then, they’re just going to keep carrying on because we let them.’

‘What I don’t get is what’s stopping you from going over to Australia and living happily ever after with Kevin?’ Shawna said. ‘If science reckons he’s the one for you, then what are you doing wasting your life here?’

‘I can’t just drop everything and go.’ Jade shook her head firmly. ‘Do you know how much flights to Australia cost? I’ve only just finished paying off one of my credit cards. Plus I’ve got my flat, my career, my family to think about …’

‘Your flat’s rented, you don’t have a career, you have a job you hate – I know that because we all hate this place – and you see your family once in a blue moon. So when it comes down to it, you don’t have any excuse.’

‘It’s not like you’re taking a bloody huge leap of faith either, is it?’ Lucy continued. ‘You were, literally, made for each other. Tell me what you like about him.’

Jade laughed. There was nothing she disliked about Kevin. Well, except his postcode. ‘He’s funny, he makes me feel good about myself, he’s kind, he has a gorgeous smile …’

‘Of course not.’ Jade was adamant. ‘I’m not a slag.’ In reality, she’d tried once, but Kevin didn’t seem keen.

‘Christ,’ Lucy laughed. ‘There’s enough naked selfies of me floating around cyberspace to break the Internet.’

‘Yeah, send each other filthy text messages or talk dirty down the phone to each other? Tell him what you want to do to him when you see him?’

‘Kevin doesn’t have either.’ Jade had suggested Skyping a couple of times, but he didn’t have a laptop or a smartphone. If she thought her finances were bad, it was nothing compared to Kevin and his little backwater town. It was one of the many things they had in common.

‘Did you say he lived in Australia or 1950?’ Shawna continued. ‘It’s not like you to let a man fob you off.’

‘I don’t need to see him moving around and gurning like a bloody idiot to know how I feel about him.’

‘It’s definitely love then,’ said Shawna. ‘Nothing gets past our Miss Jade Sewell, but if he’s as awesome as you say he is, you need to stop wasting time here and get out there and see him.’

‘Or you’ll end up like us,’ giggled Lucy, although Jade could sense something in her tone that resembled a warning. ‘Seriously, Jade, pet, we’ve got slim pickings to choose from here. Every day, another fit lad gets snapped up by his Match. Me and Shawna are like vultures left picking at the bones of what’s been left behind and, believe us, it isn’t canny. It really isn’t. If I had a chance to be with my Match, I’d be on the next plane out of here, not sitting on the floor eating lunch round the back of a service entrance of a hotel.’

‘Girls like us don’t do that sort of thing,’ Jade said, taken aback by Lucy’s directness. ‘I can’t leave everything behind and go, just like that. And like I said, a flight to Australia costs an arm and a leg.’

‘Then whack your holiday on the plastic. What have you got to lose? You need to grow some balls, bonny lass.’

‘Don’t make me get my balls out and slap you round the face with them. It’s just not me to chase a lad round the world.’

Shawna and Lucy glared at her, both of them with their tattooed eyebrows raised as far as the Botox would allow. ‘It’s not chasing him, hunny. He’s already yours.’

Chapter 9

NICK

‘I think we should do it,’ Sally muttered, as she lay on her back staring at the exposed beams holding up the bedroom ceiling, illuminated by the street lamp outside.

‘It usually takes you longer than that, but I’m not complaining,’ Nick replied, and he removed his head from between her legs and surfaced from beneath the duvet. His hand moved towards the bedside cabinet where she kept their toys.

‘Not “it” as in sex,’ Sally said, ‘I think we should do the Match Your DNA test.’

Nick manoeuvred himself back to his side of the bed. ‘Way to kill the moment, babe.’

‘Why now? Before Sumaira and Deepak rocked up for dinner and started talking about it, you were adamant we didn’t need to do it.’

‘Oh, baby, I still am,’ she said, her fingers playing with the hairs on his chest as if to reassure him. ‘But like Sumaira says, it’ll give us a bit of added security, just to know. To really know.’

Bloody Sumaira, thought Nick, but he didn’t complain aloud. ‘Are you sure this isn’t your way of telling me you have pre-wedding jitters?’

Contents

About the Author

Praise for John Marrs:

Chapter 1

MANDY

Chapter 2

CHRISTOPHER

Chapter 3

JADE

Chapter 4

NICK

Chapter 5

ELLIE

Chapter 6

MANDY

Chapter 7

CHRISTOPHER

Chapter 8

JADE

Chapter 9

NICK