The One

by John Marrs

“Mandy Taylor, wife of Richard Taylor, pleased to meet you,” she whispered. She noticed she was absentmindedly twiddling an invisible ring around her wedding finger.

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 garrote still embedded in her neck. She was no longer bleeding, the final few drops having pooled around the collar of her blouse.

“First of all, I’d like to thank you all for coming. And secondly, on behalf of the Taylor family, I’d like to welcome you all to St. Peter and All Saints Church for a special ceremony in memory of our dear friend, Richard.”

“I don’t think I asked you what you did for a living?” “Oh, I thought I’d mentioned it?” Amy took a sip of her drink. “I’m a police officer.”

He took a bread knife from the kitchen counter and stabbed her in both eyes, turning the blade around in identical clockwise motions in each to spoon out any remains and wipe them across her face. She did not deserve to lie on the mortician’s slab like the others, resembling someone who’d died peacefully in their sleep.

He’d seen to it so that whichever poor sap of a relative had to identify her body would only remember her as the bloody patchwork of fragmented bones Christopher had created.

There and then she knew that she was more deeply in love with a dead man than she could have ever thought possible.

“How often do you get to come up with a nickname for a serial killer?” “Probably about as often as I spend time with one.”

But there was just one problem—she knew that on meeting her Match, she wasn’t in love with him.

He identified himself as a primary psychopath, one who had been born with the condition—or gift, as he’d come to think of it—as opposed to being a secondary psychopath and a product of his environment.

“Tim, I am the scientist who discovered the Match Your DNA gene, and a lot of people hate me for it.”

But while Christopher was aware he was making good progress in the project he’d began all those months ago, there was a fly in the ointment. He’d met a woman he liked, and, for the first time in his life, he was falling in love. And that had not been part of the plan.

“No, no, of course it can. What I am saying is that my discovery can help you find that person you are linked to. Should you choose not to be with them, you can still fall in love with someone else. But I found that those who have been Matched often feel something deeper and more complete. The other person is literally their other half.”

It was the first time Christopher had ever permitted his two worlds to collide. The light with the dark, the sun with the shade, his girlfriend with Number Thirteen.

Jade smiled but found it hard to maintain eye contact. Because it was Kevin she was supposed to have fallen in love with, not the man who was escorting him: Mark.

“It’s that feeling you don’t get when you’re around anyone else, like nobody in the world matters when you’re in their company. Like you and them are this one, solitary...thing... And no matter what crap the world throws at you, you can get through it because you have them on your side.”

“You can’t be in love with a man you’ve never met, Mandy. You’re in love with the idea of being in love, and his family have put these silly ideas into your head. You’re not and you never will be part of their family. You’re just their incubator...a rent-a-womb...a surrogate.”

“Death?” Michelle looked confused. “Who told you Rich was dead? He’s still very much alive.”

She came across several childhood photos of a young Tim with a woman, and by the various places and span of time they’d been taken, she assumed it was his mum. That puzzled her—when she’d asked to see a photo of her, Tim had claimed he had none and that they’d been destroyed in a fire.

“Psychopaths won’t often fall in love in the same way normal people do,” Christopher read aloud to himself in his empty office, “but they can still fall in love.”

Tori was like that, Christopher recalled. She’d reluctantly attended a swinger’s club at his insistence, and he watched as, one by one, seven men had sex with her that evening. He’d begged her to do it, informing her it would arouse him and strengthen their relationship. Tori was so young and naive, she’d believed him. Afterwards, in the car outside her house, he’d called her a filthy slag and ended it.

One by one, Christopher made his way through a mental Rolodex of women he could recollect having sexual relationships with, and he’d treated almost all of them in the same demeaning manner. He’d marched through life dominating his affairs and manipulating his partners to carry out whatever new deviancy excited him. But the only person he had not degraded or abused in any way was Amy.

She felt her blood run cold when she saw him clearly mouth the words “Hello, Ellie.”

For all intents and purposes, they were a typical, contented couple—but for one difference: Ellie knew that her relationship with her Match was a sham.

Only, the element of surprise had been taken away from her. As she closed the door to her office, Tim was sitting behind her desk, his feet resting on the top. “Hello, Ells, I think it’s time we talked, isn’t it?” he said, smiling broadly.

“Did you think I’d simply mis-Match you and me? Of course not. I rewrote your whole coding so that, over the space of the last eighteen months, at least two million people on your database were Matched with the wrong person.”