The Savages (21 page)

‘Food,' declared Vernon, reading it out loud as if that might help bring him clarity. It didn't prove anything, but just then there was something in it that the private investigator pledged to pick apart. ‘Food is the key,' he said with some confidence, and glanced at a shot of Titus once more, ‘or I'll eat my words.'

A cheer broke out from the boys who had gathered on one side of the skateboard ramp. One of their number had just pulled a frontside five-forty turn. It was an impressive trick, but went completely ignored by the girls opposite. Sasha Savage, Maisy and Faria sat across from them with their backs turned, elbows flat on the safety rail and their feet dangling over the drop. They were on lunch break, talking about everything and nothing in particular.

‘You're quiet,' Faria said to Sasha. ‘Everything all right?'

‘I'm good,' Sasha replied. ‘Just hungry.'

Faria offered her a cigarette.

‘It'll kill your appetite,' she said. ‘And then some.'

Sasha smiled but declined the offer.

‘She's waiting for Jack,' said Maisy, and flashed them both a look. ‘It would be rude to eat now if he's planning on sharing his lunchbox with you.'

Everyone giggled at this, including Sasha.

‘Seriously, he's been good like that,' said Faria. ‘Why can't he do the same thing for us two?'

‘Because we eat meat,' Maisy said, as if to remind her. ‘Plus he doesn't fancy us.'

‘How do you know?'

‘When was the last time you saw the inside of his car? Sasha's the only one who gets a ride in there.'

‘Maisy!' Sasha pretended to look scandalised, only for Faria to adopt a charitable expression. Sasha picked up on it straight away. ‘What's wrong?' she asked.

‘Nothing,' Faria replied quickly, but found she couldn't escape Sasha's gaze. ‘Probably nothing, anyway.'

‘What nothing?' asked Sasha.

Faria sighed to herself.

‘My sister saw him at the weekend,' she said. ‘He was up at the university campus. Dropping off some girl.'

Faria stopped there and turned to Sasha as if perhaps she could provide an explanation.

‘Jack was upset with me the last time I saw him,' she said, thinking back to that moment in the house, ‘but he wouldn't do that.'

‘It was his hybrid,' insisted Faria. ‘For sure.'

Sasha held Faria‘s searching gaze for a moment more, and then broke off with a shrug.

‘You don't seem too concerned,' said Maisy.

‘It's probably something to do with his new vegan regime,' said Sasha. ‘Jack is taking things much further with his food than I'm prepared to go, but I'm sure he'll have an explanation. I'll ask when I see him.'

‘Why was he upset with you?' asked Faria.

‘Not me as such,' said Sasha. ‘My brother confessed to a practical joke he'd played on him.'

Both Faria and Maisy sucked the air between their teeth.

‘Did Jack suffer any injuries?' Faria enquired.

‘He'll survive,' said Sasha, and winced to herself at the memory of the knife she'd pulled without thinking.

‘Whatever the case, he's late,' said Maisy, checking the time on her phone. ‘He's usually here for you by now.'

Leaving straight after morning lessons, Jack Greenway's journey from school to the university took twenty minutes. The journey was unplanned, but he felt compelled to catch up with the young woman who had moved into his thoughts. Amanda Dias wasn't hard for him to track down. He found her handing out leaflets at the main entrance to campus.

‘Do you drink milk?' she asked Jack when he trotted up to greet her.

‘Sometimes,' he said hesitantly. ‘I should stop that, too, shouldn't I?'

‘It would be kinder on cattle to drink their blood,' she said. ‘Did you know that in some industrial dairies calves are
forcibly
removed from their mothers so they don't drink from the udder. It might mean a higher volume of milk for the farmers, but how would you like to be taken from the teat?'

‘Me? Oh …' Jack wasn't sure if this was a direct question. He had planned a conversation on the way to campus, but mostly it involved what nice weather they were having. ‘I don't know,' he said hesitantly. ‘Thirsty?'

Amanda thrust a leaflet into his hands.

‘You'll find all the facts here.'

Jack looked down at the leaflet, his focus swimming.

‘Give me a handful,' he said. ‘I'll hand them out at school.'

Finally, Amanda offered him a smile.

‘It's good to see you,' she said. ‘I enjoy our chats.'

For several days now, Jack had sought out Amanda and treated her to everything from coffee to lunch and supper. Every time they visited a café, bar or restaurant of her choosing. Jack spent much of the time just listening to her views on man's crimes against the natural world. He made all the right noises as she laid out her vision for a vegan society, in which compassion towards animals replaced their suffering. He even kept up the enthusiasm when she talked about how to achieve her dream. Privately, all the stuff about waging war against the worst offenders Jack took with a pinch of salt. It was the force of her convictions he found entrancing, plus the fact that up close Amanda Dias was hot as hell.

‘I couldn't wait until this evening,' he said just then. ‘I needed to see you.'

Amanda handed a leaflet to a passing student. The guy tried to avoid it, but she was insistent.

‘I thought lunchtimes were reserved for your girlfriend,' she said.

‘My girlfriend?' Jack tried to look as baffled as possible. ‘Oh! You mean Sasha? She's not really my girlfriend as such—'

‘Really? You looked like a couple at the lecture.'

‘We're just, y'know …'

‘Friends?'

Jack grinned. After the episode in the Savages' kitchen, he wasn't even sure he could bring himself to speak to Sasha again. Her brother's prank with the tea still made him feel queasy, and the kid would get a kicking for it at a later date, but above all he'd struggled to shake off the memory of that look she had given him. Jack couldn't put his finger on it, and although he would never admit this Sasha had left him feeling a little bit frightened. The knife in her hand hadn't helped, but he felt sure that wasn't meant as a threat. After he'd left, she'd probably gone back to core an apple or something. Maybe chop some celery for that salad she'd been making.

‘I've been helping her to give up meat,' he told Amanda, with some pride in his voice. Then he looked to the pavement and adopted a face as if what he had to say next was difficult. ‘We were good for a while, but … her family.'

He stopped there and twisted a finger against the side of his head. Now he had Amanda's complete attention.

‘So, they didn't like losing a carnivore?'

‘Exactly that, I guess,' said Jack. ‘Her dad in particular had a real problem with it. He's one of those old-school meat eaters. Can't accept that there's a better way of living.'

‘Would you kill him?'

The way she asked him this, in public and out of nowhere, took Jack's breath away. He looked at Amanda, aghast for a moment, before checking he had heard her right.

‘Do you mean … for real?'

‘Absolutely.' Amanda stepped closer so she could murmur in his ear. ‘It would bring me closer to you.'

Jack moved back to find her gaze once more. This fruit loop wasn't joking, he thought to himself. The girl had it all worked out. She batted her eyelids at him, like the wings of a butterfly at rest.

‘I'll do it,' he said, despite having no intention of carrying out such a crime. ‘For you.'

Amanda brushed Jack's cheek with her lips.

‘For the environment,' she said to correct him. ‘For a better world.'

As a hunter, Titus Savage had learned everything from his father. Over the decades, Oleg taught him how to trap his quarry and finish it off both quickly and humanely. From an early age, Titus learned that a noble cannibal showed respect towards a victim. You didn't eat them alive. That kind of thing was the stuff of myth and legend. A modern-day flesh eater carried out careful preparations with a view to serving up a dish to die for.

When it came to the kill, Titus considered himself a natural. As a boy, he'd taken to the pursuit with a perfectionist's eye. It was something he had begun to pass on to his own son. In fact, as the family made plans for Katya's celebratory feast, he intended to stand back and let Ivan do the honours. In a way, Titus decided, it would allow him to close the book on the accidental death of the model in the bathroom.

Firstly, however, Titus had to identify the person they intended for the plate.

‘This man,' he said to Ivan and Sasha at breakfast time that week. ‘Can you describe him to me?'

Sasha thought back to the time he had entered the house disguised as a meter reader from the gas board.

‘Middle-aged,' she said. ‘Tired-looking with quite a heavy-set face.'

‘He reminded me of a bloodhound,' added Ivan. ‘Also he was wearing a hat when I saw him. Not a flat cap. Something funkier. A funky bloodhound.'

Titus looked across at Angelica.

‘Sound familiar?' he asked.

‘Nobody we know,' she said. ‘So how do we find him?'

Titus was at the French windows. He turned his back on his family for a moment, half wondering whether he should head upstairs and consult his father. Back in the day, Oleg would leave the house at sundown and work under cover of darkness. In the morning, his wife would find a body laid out on the table, naked, washed and shaved from head to toe. Always the romantic, Oleg would pin a note to the chest of the corpse using the tip of a knife, dedicating the coming feast to her. Nowadays, of course, it simply wasn't necessary to go stalking back alleys for the drunks and the dispossessed. With access to the internet, it was perfectly possible for Titus to source someone of better quality who met their requirements perfectly. In particular, the social networks provided Titus with everything he needed to know about their health, wellbeing and background. He could work out their movements and, of course, assess friendships. Anyone too popular was off the menu. You didn't want their disappearance to spark headlines, campaigns and vigils, just an entry in the missing persons register that would gather dust over time.

‘There's only one thing we know for sure about this guy,' said Ivan, who drew his father's attention once more. ‘He's sexually attracted to me.'

Titus sighed to himself.

‘I suspect that I'm his main person of interest,' he said, before addressing Angelica once more. ‘This is business, I think.'

‘But Ivan may be on to something,' she said. ‘Even if this does have something to do with your work, the fact is he followed our son.'

‘Because he's the weakest link,' suggested Sasha, who promptly received a kick under the table from her brother.

‘At least someone fancies me,' he fumed. ‘When was the last time you saw your boyfriend? Even I've heard it's finished, and nobody speaks to me at school!'

‘Mum,' complained Sasha. ‘Tell him to stick to shifting chess pieces.'

‘Face it,' grinned Ivan. ‘He's over you.'

‘Lacing Jack's tea hardly helped,' she snapped at him.

Ivan sat back in his chair, considering his sister.

‘But if he has dumped you,' he said next with a sly glance at their father, ‘does that mean you'll give up with the sausage dodging?'

‘
Mum!
'

This time, Angelica responded by glaring at her son so fiercely that he visibly shrank in his seat. She had already spoken to Ivan about staying out of Sasha's personal issues, and made it quite clear that there would be consequences if he breathed a word to his father. Angelica glanced across at Titus, who continued to be the only family member who wasn't wise to Sasha's newfound vegetarianism. Much to her relief, he seemed so lost in thought that he clearly hadn't heard a word. It was only when Titus noticed that everyone was looking at him that he blinked back into the room.

‘Our boy can be the bait,' he said after a moment, and then nodded to himself as if he had just road-tested the idea to see how it sounded.

‘What?' All of a sudden, Ivan didn't look so confident.

‘Like a goat tethered to a stake,' suggested Sasha, but their father was on a roll.

‘You don't have to worry,' he assured the boy. ‘When our man comes prowling, we'll be waiting for him. And that's when he'll learn how it feels to be preyed upon.'

Vernon English no longer needed an inside ear in the Savage household. The bug had served him well. Titus had probably destroyed it now, but not before the private investigator had heard enough to know that this was a family with one very strange obsession with food.

Given all the hushed conversations he had heard between Angelica and Sasha, it seemed they lived in fear of Titus finding out that his eldest daughter had turned her back on meat. At times, they made out the man was some kind of dietary dictator. Then there was the coroner's report that Vernon had obtained. It was only a side note, but of major interest to the private investigator, for Lulabelle Hart had been secretly struggling with an acute, long-term eating disorder. Had the model crossed Titus because she didn't conform to his views, and paid the ultimate price? It was a far-out theory, but not one that Vernon English could easily dismiss.

Once again, the private investigator was alone in the van with his thoughts. There was no way now that he could return to the Savage residence. That Titus had bundled out with what looked like a carving knife only strengthened Vernon's suspicions that he was dealing with a dangerous man. Besides, Vernon was off duty at that moment. He'd just finished his weekly supermarket shopping. The bags he'd loaded onto the passenger seat contained a range of microwavable suppers that fuelled his work. He'd gone in with good intentions, but ultimately there was nothing in the fresh produce section that appealed. Leaning across, Titus buckled the bags against the seat for the journey back to the flat. Just then, however, it simply reminded him that he had nothing for company but a bunch of ready meals.