After the crowd subsides, small circles of people remain, chatting animatedly and making wild gestures. I pause the file and do a quick count: there are about sixty people visible on screen, a few of them smoking, some holding flowers to give to the cast. Rosalind is visible about ten minutes after the play ends and disappears about ten minutes later. There’s no indication as to where she went; all we know is that she can’t be identified on the footage from the car park.
The cast start to arrive just before Rosalind disappears. They come from the left of the screen. Maggie Archer, the student who played the Juliet character, appears first. I went to her house today, as we hadn’t been able to contact her by phone, but her mother informed me that she has gone to stay with her aunt in Melbourne for a few days; I called the aunt’s house but there was no answer and no voicemail. On the video, Maggie is greeted with applause and does a little curtsy before joining a small group of blonde women who smother her with cuddles; her mother and sisters, I assume. Rodney Mason appears too, along with some other cast members, and there is more clapping. Kai Bracks and the other backstage crew are there, all dressed in black. I spot Donna Mason standing off to the side talking to Troy Shooter, the PE teacher. He makes his way over to Rosalind, and they embrace briefly and have a short conversation before she disappears from view, and he is sucked back into the excited tangle of people. There is a moment on the tape where Rodney seems to look at Rosalind. I pause the video but it’s impossible to tell if his eyes are fixed on her. Other cast members talk animatedly to their families, most still sporting the elaborate hairstyles of their characters. Kai jumps onto one of the low benches near the canteen and appears to be acting out a scene from the play to the amusement of a small crowd of students, before he grabs one of the boys good-naturedly around the neck and leads him off camera.
Groups of kids kiss their parents goodbye and leave—the majority, we now know, heading to Jamie Klein’s after party. Their adrenalin rush from performing is obvious, mixing with the anticipation of the big party still to come. Everyone we’ve interviewed about Jamie’s party so far has been somewhat vague. It was clearly quite a party. As one year twelve student eloquently put it: ‘I really can’t remember much but it was completely awesome.’ Jamie’s parents weren’t present that night, being in Sydney for the weekend. They’d been led to believe that their daughter was hosting a modest sleepover. Jamie’s furious dad, Brad, is now ensuring that his sheepish daughter gives us whatever information she can about her unsupervised celebration.
On my screen the remaining theatregoers slowly drift away and when the timestamp clicks over to 10.47 pm there is no one left. I click back to the last few seconds of Rosalind and pause on the image of her mid-step. According to Anna, she was killed anytime from 11 pm onwards.
‘What happened next?’ I whisper to my laptop.
Yawning, I stretch my neck, turning it one way and then another. My hair is heavy with the day’s grime and I am aware of the slow thump of a headache.
I called the school receptionist earlier today and asked her to pull the data for all tickets sold online for the play’s opening night. Felix and I are working our way through a master list of those who attended that evening, but with just under three hundred tickets sold in total, and over half of those purchased at the school office and paid for in cash, any audit is unlikely to help us get a clear view of all attendees. Plus, the school doesn’t have an electronic system, so there’s no way of knowing whether people who purchased a ticket actually attended the play that night. There are still so many gaps. And the reality is, the person who attacked Rose may not have gone to the play or have any connection to the school anyway. It is beyond frustrating that there were so many people at the play last Friday night but no one saw anything.
Karly hasn’t been able to turn up anything on the flowers I received. Because of the play, the three florists in Smithson all reported a spike in sales on Friday and there were five weddings on the weekend, two of which had placed large orders of long-stemmed red roses. Over half the florists’ sales are cash transactions and we don’t know when the flowers were purchased. We’ve sent the card off for analysis but unless the author is a known offender any prints or DNA are not going to get us very far.
Snapping my computer shut, I get up and go check on Ben. He looks like he’s fallen asleep midway through a conversation: mouth wide open, one arm flung high above his head and the other out to the side. He is perfect. I brush my fingers across his forehead and wipe away the tiny beads of sweat, tracing his lips.
Massaging my neck, I grab another beer from the fridge and stand in the cool air as I twist the top off and take a swig. Scott watches me from the kitchen table where he is doing emails and probably reading up about the cricket. A bowl of Weet-Bix sits next to an empty beer bottle on the table beside him.
He sees me looking at it and shrugs sheepishly. ‘Got hungry.’ He stretches his arms into the air. ‘So how’s it going?’
‘Okay. We’re not really getting anywhere.’
‘Is this on the dead teacher case?’
‘Yep. It’s pretty much all we’re working on at the moment. Everyone’s pretty spooked. We really need a solve.’
‘Well, you can only do what you can, I guess.’ Scott says this as if I’m trying to work out why the paper wasn’t delivered. He looks back at his laptop. The light skims the contours of his face and I think how tired he looks. Scott is so content for life to happen around him. He feels no urgency, is in no rush to pull his way through things or force his way into them. Unlike me, who races through life so quickly I get whiplash. I often think that when you haven’t been touched by death you have no need to feel alive, no desperation to keep breathing. Scott greets every day with the relaxed attitude of someone who assumes there are thousands more of its kind to come.
I shut the fridge door and the heat instantly regroups around my body. ‘We kind of have to do whatever it takes,’ I say stiffly. ‘There is a murderer out there.’
His eyes meet mine. ‘I get it, Gem. But this is not your fault. All I mean is that you’ll do your best but you’re not magic.’
‘I’m not saying I’m magic. I’m saying this is pretty fucking important.’
‘Seeing it’s almost Christmas I just hope that you’ll be able to spend some time with Ben. That’s important too.’
I drink the beer so I don’t have to speak. His gaze holds steady on mine, challenging.
‘I’ve got more work to do,’ I say and spin on my heel, returning to my search for clues hidden in the grainy footage from Rosalind’s opening night.
Chapter Twenty-four
Thursday, 17 December, 12.56 pm
I can tell Jonesy is nervous. He pulls at his tie and adjusts his ill-fitting jacket. A thin stream of sweat trickles from his temple, journeying along craggy skin and arriving at his chin. He’s shaved, and the result is an array of fresh red welts that look like they will burst into song at any moment.
‘Right.’ He beckons Felix and me close. ‘This won’t take long. Get ’em in and get ’em out is the plan.’