‘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.’
25
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.