Chapter 53 Rosie – Day 11
‘What do you mean? What have you been doing?’ Rosie demands.
Theo’s phone rings from the kitchen counter. The sound goes through her. The screen lights up as it buzzes across the surface. Richard’s name appears. Theo doesn’t make any move to pick it up.
‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter,’ he says.
‘But—’
It rings again. Why isn’t he silencing it? He gulps his wine and mutters something but doesn’t answer the call. She’s never seen him like this. It scares her.
‘People will be wondering where we are, Theo.’ She can hear the panic in her voice. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve gone running, that’s true. But it’s not in preparation for a marathon.
’ He takes a deep, shaky breath. ‘I’ve run every day to try to find the missing schoolgirl.
It’s ridiculous. I didn’t want to tell you as you’d think I was crazy.
I do it whenever I come here, I try to search for her.
It’s stupid but I feel that I owe it to her. ’ He stops abruptly.
‘What do you mean you “owe it to her”?’
He doesn’t say a word.
‘Theo?’ She steps to the side. There’s a prism of cornflower blue light illuminated by the porch light that’s reflected on the wall.
A sickening sensation swirls at the base of her stomach.
The light has picked up the different shades of blue and what looks like a tiny boat.
The stained-glass window. The Polaroid. Dani laughing with her back against a white stone wall, head tilted upwards, pink flowers dangling over her like a crown.
She can’t breathe. It’s like someone is wrapping their hands around her throat. No. This can’t be right. There’s a clicking noise coming from somewhere. It takes her a second to realise it’s the sound of her bracelets as she wrings her clammy hands.
Dani was here.
The reason she’s found no trace of her at Villa Speranza is because she was never in the Frasers’ house. She was here. The Fraser boys’ summer hideout. She’s been searching the wrong place all along. Suddenly everything shifts.
Theo steps in front of her. She hadn’t realised before now how broad his shoulders are, how imposing he can be.
‘When were you going to tell me why you’re really here?’ he asks. His voice low.
It’s as if the air is sucked from the room.
‘Has Fenna said something to you?’ she croaks.
He frowns. ‘Fenna? No, Fenna hasn’t told me anything.
It was Richard. He worked out where he knew you from.
On their yacht, Evelyn insisted she had met you before.
She was right. Richard showed me the photos from Mum’s event, the one at the gallery, that he’d taken on his phone, and there you are. You’re in the background . . .’
Rosie’s breath gets trapped in her lungs. That’s why Richard was being off with her when she arrived tonight.
‘. . . It had to be a mistake. You weren’t at Mum’s event. You had the whole Tinder date disaster and we met after. But you lied, didn’t you? I told myself there must be a reason you never admitted to being at her party, but other things haven’t added up.’
‘Theo, look. I—’
He speaks over her. ‘Like, why did you take such an interest in my mum’s holiday home? All those questions you were asking Gerry when we first arrived. The eagerness to go through old photo albums. I should have realised you had an ulterior motive.’
Saliva rushes to Rosie’s mouth.
‘Are you going to tell me who you really are?’ Theo pushes.
Tears fill her eyes. She forces herself to act calm despite her racing heart. ‘Let’s go back to the house and I’ll explain . . .’
His phone rings again.
‘Theo—’
He slowly pulls something from his trouser pocket and places it on the counter next to the empty bottle of wine. A piece of glossy paper.
The Polaroid.
She glances up at him. The incessant ringing stops. There’s a moment of eerie silence.
‘Why did you have this on you tonight?’ His voice wavers.
‘I found it in your mum’s things. Theo, she knows what happened to Danielle.’ She stops suddenly as something he said earlier zooms to the front of her mind. ‘What did you mean when you said you owed it to her to search for her?’ she croaks.
‘Forget about that. Who the hell are you?’ His voice rises.
‘You know who I am. The only thing I haven’t told you is that my dad was the school teacher on the foreign exchange trip. The one that people believe killed Dani. I know he didn’t.’ She takes a shaky breath. ‘But I think your mum did.’
Your dad?! What? . . . Wait.
‘No. She didn’t.’ The emotion vanishes from his voice.
In an instant her adoring fiancé is replaced with a stranger.
‘You weren’t here, you don’t know . . .’ She swallows and picks up the Polaroid. ‘This was taken on the night Dani disappeared.’
There’s a pause.
‘I know. I took the photo.’
A shiver tears through her as if an icy hand has gripped the back of her neck. ‘Please, Theo. You’re scaring me . . .’ Her heartbeat quickens.
His phone buzzes again. He snatches it and thrusts it in his pocket. She can still hear the muffled vibrating.
The texts on Dani’s phone. You made me do it. You gave me no choice. Sorry—
‘You need to tell me what you know, Theo.’ Her heart hammers in her chest. ‘Did you kill Danielle Dixon?’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper.
His eyes widen. ‘No. She was alive when I last saw her.’
She grips onto the breakfast bar and remembers to breathe. ‘You told me you were away . . . The football camp in Croatia.’
‘I lied.’
‘What? But the certificate . . .’
‘Forged. I needed it to look like I was still there when she went missing. No one could know I’d come back early.
’ He runs his hands through his hair. It sticks out in wild clumps.
‘I got kicked out for smoking weed so I decided to surprise Mum and come here. I happened to meet Danielle at the bus stop when I arrived. I thought she was cute, we got chatting, and we arranged to meet here later that night.’
Rosie’s head spins. She pictures her dad’s notes, the contact in Dani’s phone: ‘Fraser?’. Theo Fraser . . . Frantic thoughts zip over one another. How has she got this so wrong?
‘We came and hung out on the deck.’ He nods to the patio doors leading from the kitchen. ‘The night wasn’t meant to end like it did. I wasn’t expecting her to turn up with class A drugs. She told me she’d done coke loads of times before. I was trying to show off so I acted like I had too. I lied.’
‘You took drugs? Here?’
‘It soon became clear that it wasn’t coke, or if it was it had been cut with something else. Poison. She started spinning out, not making any sense. Her eyes were fucking massive. Her nose started to bleed. It wouldn’t stop. Like, it kept gushing out. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
The blood-stained denim jacket.
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. She ran off. Honestly, so much of the night is a blur.
I woke up alone in the bedroom the next morning.
’ He nods his head to the square corridor with the closed doors.
‘I had the mother of all comedowns and convinced myself that it was some horrible, drug-fuelled trip. The next thing I hear she’s missing. The nightmare was real.’
She doesn’t know whether to believe him. He looks distraught but he’s managed to keep this a secret for fifteen years, a voice reminds her. It feels too neat that he happened to ‘forget’ facts because he was on drugs.
‘I thought she’d turn up, that she was sleeping it off somewhere.
But the days went on. When I heard about her teacher and the rumours that he had something to do with it I convinced myself that was true.
But deep down I’ve always doubted that narrative.
’ He wipes his face. ‘I’ve waited years for someone to realise I was the last person to see her alive.
You have to believe me that I did nothing wrong. I was young, I was stupid.’
Rosie’s mouth has gone dry. ‘What about her things?’
The Polaroid camera and her jacket.
‘I have no idea. I was too spaced out to notice what she’d brought with her.
There was definitely nothing of hers here when I woke up the next morning.
In fact, it looked as if there had been no party at all.
I must have cleaned up before I passed out, worried that someone might find the empty drug bags. ’
‘You can’t have been that spaced out! You were sober enough to text her. “You made me do it. You gave me no choice. Sorry—”’
‘H-h-how do you know that?’
‘My dad confiscated her phone. He made a note of the message as he thought it was suspicious. Thank God he did as the police lost her phone once he handed it over. How did you get them to “lose” the evidence?’
‘What? I didn’t . . .’ He blinks. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’ His eyes fly to the closed door down the corridor. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ She can’t hear anything other than the blood rushing in her ears.
‘Nothing.’ He picks up the Polaroid. Fingers trembling. ‘Danielle asked me to take this. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw you drop it tonight. Where did you find it?’
‘It was in your mum’s things.’
‘Mum?’ he says, slowly as if coming to a realisation. His eyes widen. ‘Mum had this? No. That’s not right . . .’
‘Don’t pretend you two aren’t in on this together.’
She stumbles backwards. Her gut orders her to leave. He’s not telling her the whole truth, she’s sure of it. Him and his mum know what happened to Dani.
‘I swear.’ Tears streak down his pale cheeks. ‘Mum has no idea I was here. No one does.’
‘Clearly that’s not the case.’ She shivers at the memory of the creepy paintings in the basement. Dani was her secret muse.
She can’t work out what he’s saying. It’s like he’s arguing with himself. ‘Impossible . . . who cleaned the blood . . .’
Blood.
He pulls open a drawer and with a shaking hand takes out a long, slender lighter. His breathing speeds up. ‘I never knew how it all went away . . .’
‘No! You can’t burn it.’ Rosie yells.
Flames lick the glossy paper in seconds.
He steps to the sink and throws the rest in, leaving a trail of black smoke as it chars away to nothing.
She needs to get out of here. If he’s willing to burn evidence and protect his mum, what other lengths will he go to, to keep their secret? Why did he really bring her down here?
She turns and her legs hit a bookcase. The contents wobble and a photo frame drops to the floor. Something skitters to her bare feet. It’s a white box.
‘Please, Rosie, sit down . . . We need to talk. You’ve lied to me and I’ve lied to you. Come on, we can fix this. Start again . . .’
His words are drowned out by the roar of panic in her skull.
She bends down. It’s another box of Carla’s medication.
Rosie gasps. Theo went for a run that morning and came back with bloodied knees and mud on his shorts, panting and out of breath.
Those scratches she saw on his back. His torn t-shirt.
He told her he fell into a spiky bush, that he wasn’t concentrating and tumbled. That was the day Carla disappeared.
‘Where’s Carla?’ she asks, her voice wavering.
‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You know where Carla is . . .’
‘No I don’t. Can you stop a second? I need time to think!’
There’s a sound from behind one of the closed doors. A thump-thump-thump.
He suddenly turns to pull open a kitchen drawer, revealing a row of knives; the sharp silver edges glint under the spotlights. This is her chance. She throws her glass of wine over his back and prepares to escape.