Free Book Bundle (Beyond Evil, Lost Souls, Fallen Idols) by Neil White Page B

food away, even though there’s nothing wrong with it.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s crazy. I mean, we grow food to feed ourselves, but then throw it away because the fruit looks less fresh or the bread too hard. So we are taking it back, so that it does what it is meant to do. Bread, milk, cheese, butter, and jars and tins. Coffee, tea, cereal. It is all fine to be eaten, and so we should take it, because it is the right thing to do. It has been thrown away and so they don’t want it anymore. How can it be wrong?’
    ‘What does the shop say?’
    ‘This shop?’ Gemma said, and pointed. ‘Nothing. There is a bigger one a few miles down the road, and they spray the food blue so that we can’t take it. Where is the morality in that, that it is better to throw it away than allow people to eat?’ Then she grinned. ‘We come at night sometimes, because the security man lets us look without any problems. We know how to make him happy.’
    John felt a bite of jealousy, and his eyes must have given him away, because Gemma said, ‘We get fed, he gets satisfied. What’s the problem? Except that he isn’t working this week, he’s away with his wife, so we have to do it this way.’
    ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ John said, looking towards the large open doors.
    ‘We’ll be fine. If we get caught, we’ll just smile and flirt, and no one really cares.’
    John watched through the gaps in the fence as the two women scurried through the yard and clambered into a large blue skip. They were in there for just a couple of minutes, and then they scrambled back out again and ran across the yard. They threw their bags over the fence and clambered over to join him.
    Gemma showed John the contents of her rucksack, and seemed pleased when he nodded his approval.
    ‘We will eat well today,’ he said.
    Gemma set off walking back, Dawn more slowly again, quiet and still, and so John followed. The sun was on his face and his head was filled with bird whistles and the swish of the grass and Gemma’s giggles. And he felt it again. Happiness. It was the simplicity of it all. It was joyous, with no troubles, no worries, with just the scents of the fields and the pleasure of his companions to fill the day.
    Gemma turned round to him and blew him a kiss. When he returned it, he was smiling, couldn’t stop himself, his heart skipping like a teenager.
    He felt it at that moment. A certainty, a resolve that he had left his old life behind, and it felt good.

Chapter Twelve
    Charlie walked quickly down the stairs from his office, popping a couple of mints into his mouth. He knew who he had seen outside and wanted to catch him up. The sight of the television people had reminded him of how big the Alice Kenyon story had become.
    Billy Privett had been everyone’s favourite hate figure even before Alice Kenyon died. He’d got his money too easily and flaunted it too much. Billy knew that it got his face in the paper and so he played up to it. Once Alice died, face down in Billy’s pool, a horrible end to just another party, the publicity became less fun. It became about the questions he wouldn’t answer. Who had given her the drugs? Who had brutalised her sexually? Who else was there?
    The good times for Billy waned after Alice died. No one knew if Billy had killed her, but everyone guessed that he had stopped the killer from being caught. The press highlighted every new thing he bought, every party he still held, as if he was mocking Alice’s death. Time passed though, and Alice would have been forgotten, except that her father, Ted, wouldn’t let that happen. He learned the lesson pretty quickly that the media can help if you harness it correctly. He became the victim’s champion, and campaigned about the right to silence, about drug laws being too relaxed, about an individual’s responsibility to help.
    Except that by putting himself in the public glare, he became a target for the media. When Ted was caught in a car with a girl