Bet Your Life (30 page)

“Coughing a lot.” I put a hand up to my head, not having to pretend it was throbbing. “Sorry, Mum.”

“You can come with us in the ambulance,” Trudy said. She looked past Mum. “Not you, though.”

Dan nodded. “I thought as much. I’ll see you at the hospital, Molly.”

“OK.”

“I won’t be long.”

Mum nodded, trying to smile. Dan pulled her into his arms and held her for a moment, the doors of the ambulance hiding the two of them from everyone but me and Trudy. Trudy, who didn’t know or care that he shouldn’t have been touching her. I glared, outraged, and was ignored. When he let her go, she climbed up the steps and sat on the seat Trudy indicated. She concentrated on putting on her seat belt for so long that my raised eyebrows started to ache.

“What was that?”

“What?” All innocence.

“That. You and Dan.”

“Don’t start.” It was not like Mum to snap. “You don’t know what today has been like for everyone else, Jess, because of you. Dan got me through it, and he saved your life. So don’t even think about having a go at me. If you’re able to talk, you’d better tell me what you were doing here in the first place.”

I backed off, all the way. “Sorry, Mum. I’m just really tired.”

“Let her rest for now.” Trudy, an angel in a green boiler suit. Her crewmate flipped up the steps and she helped him to close the door. “Plenty of time to talk when you’re feeling better, Jess.”

I nodded. Mum gave me the look—the
I-know-I-let-you-get-away-with-a-lot-but-I-
am
-your-mother
look. Then she reached over to hold my hand, and I knew I wasn’t in too much trouble, really. I closed my eyes and gave myself up to the simple enjoyment of being scorched but alive as the ambulance took the road out of Port Sentinel.

21

They kept me in overnight for observation, which is what they do when they can’t really find all that much wrong with you but they don’t think you should go home yet, just in case. I yearned for my own bed, my own room, my own things, but I couldn’t really complain about the narrow, hard hospital bed, or the fact that the room was sweltering, when I was the one who had got myself into hospital in the first place. Mum slept in the chair by my bed, curled up in a ball, and we both woke up every time a nurse came to check on me. Breakfast arrived at six, and even though it was still dark outside, and long before I would usually choose to wake up, I was almost glad it was the end of the night so I could give up on the pretense of getting some rest. From that point on, everyone who came to check on me got the same answer: I was feeling fine. All better. I actually felt like someone had had a barbecue in my throat but it wasn’t bad enough to make me want to stay in hospital. I had to wait to be discharged, though, and no one seemed to be in any hurry about that except me.

I wanted out. I wasn’t ill and I didn’t feel like lying in bed being wan. Lying in bed meant time to think, and I didn’t want to think about what had almost happened to me. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the pool house with no way out, trapped.

When Tilly arrived with Ella and Petra midmorning, I was immensely relieved to see familiar faces, but I was almost more pleased to see they’d brought me some clothes.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said in my new husky voice. I grabbed the bag and disappeared into the bathroom to change out of my horrible hospital gown.

“Feeling better?” Ella asked from outside the door.

“Completely.” Then I ruined it by coughing, but shouting wasn’t the ideal way to test my voice. I was pale and tired but in clothes I didn’t look
ill
.

I came out of the bathroom. “Ta-dah. Oh.”

The “oh” was because Dan had arrived while I was in the bathroom. He was leaning against the windowsill, arms crossed, grinning at something Tilly had said. He reminded me very much of his son, and I blinked, making myself focus on the differences between them.

“You do look more like yourself,” Mum said. She was holding a cup of coffee tenderly, her hands wrapped around it as if she was actually in love with it. We’d both had a tough night; I wasn’t surprised she was feeling emotional about a caffeinated beverage. “Does this mean you’re ready to start answering some questions, young lady?”

I sat on the edge of the bed, Ella beside me with her arm around me, Petra on the other side holding my hand.

“Don’t be mean, Mrs. Tennant. She’s still recovering,” Ella said.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Tilly said. “Either you’re better and you’re in trouble, or you’re ill and you have to stay in hospital. Which is it?”

“Trouble,” I said dolefully. “Get it over with.”

“What happened?” Mum said.

“I’m not totally sure.” I had to be careful, knowing that Dan was listening. I felt fine, but I wasn’t as alert as I might have been, and I didn’t want to give anything away that I shouldn’t about Lily and the others. There was no sense in getting them into trouble. “I went to see Harry because I’d heard he might know something about what happened to Seb Dawson, and I wanted to ask him about it.”

“What did he say?”

“That it was an accident.” That was one of the things he’d said, anyway.

“Are you sure about that?” Dan asked.

“I’m not sure he was telling the truth, but I remember him saying it.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

“He tried to kill you,” Mum said.

“I think he just wanted me out of the way. He couldn’t have known the fire would take hold as it did.”

“Except that it seems pretty clear he used an accelerant to spread the flames from the bonfire to the pool house,” Dan said.

I considered that and felt sick. Petra squeezed my hand, her face pale.

Dan went on, “The fire investigator is absolutely certain the fire in the house was deliberate. The house was fitted with a sprinkler system and fire alarms that should have triggered an automatic call-out of the local fire station, but the sensors were all switched off. The house is a shell. Everything in it was completely destroyed. Everything burned. The investigator is working on the assumption that whoever set the fire used petrol to get it started, probably in the living room.”

Harry had decided to destroy the evidence that he’d injured Seb. He’d decided to kill me so I couldn’t share his secret. “The fire … was he trying to kill himself?”

“We think it was an accident. We found the remains of a suitcase in the hall, near his body. It looks as if he was leaving but was overcome by the smoke before he could get out.”

Which was better than burning to death, I thought. “I wonder where he was going to go. He hated flying.”

“I wonder why he felt he had to go.” Dan’s eyes were on me.

“Guilt, maybe, about Seb.”

“Oh, that’s the good news.” Ella squeezed my arm. “We heard yesterday morning. Seb’s awake.”

“Awake is one thing. How is he?”

“He’s doing well,” Dan said. “The doctors say he’s likely to make a good recovery. It’s too soon to tell how he might be affected in the long term but he seems to be lucid. I’ll be having a word with him later.”

“Did Harry know he was awake?”

“Would that matter?”

“It would if he thought Seb was going to tell everyone Harry had injured him. Assuming Seb remembers why it happened.”

“And why was that?” Dan asked.

“Harry had been drugging girls at his parties for—for fun.”

“Fun?” Dan repeated.

“Fun,” I said, and glanced at Petra, very briefly.

He got the hint. “I’ll have to talk to you about that again.”

“I don’t know any details, like who, or when. I don’t think the victims would know it had happened. He was pretty clever.”

Mum and Tilly were both frowning. I reckoned I was about ten seconds from someone working out that he’d drugged me too, and asking the kind of questions I specifically wanted to avoid asking myself.

“What are you going to tell Harry’s parents?” I asked Dan. “They’ll be devastated.”

“I don’t want to say anything until I have some evidence of what he did.”

“It was his secret,” I said. “Maybe it should die with him.”

His eyebrows went up. “I didn’t think you were a fan of hiding the truth, Jess.”

I took the hit. I deserved it. “What good would it do if people knew what he’d done? Or suspected it? They’d have to live with the possibility he’d done something to them. Better not to even know anything like that happened. He’s been punished, after all.”

I saw Dan work it out and I held his gaze, warning him not to say anything in front of Mum and the others. You can say a lot with a look, when you have to.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Dan asked.

“Sitting on the sofa drinking orange juice.”

“What time?”

“Just after twelve.”

“And when did you wake up?”

“Around nine.”

“In the pool house.”

“Locked in the sauna,” I said.

“Properly locked in.”

“Yes. No key.”

“Did you try the door?”

“A couple of times.”
Believe it or not
.

“How did you get out?”

“I kicked the door until it broke.”

Mum made some exclamation and I turned to check she was all right. Tilly was kneeling beside her chair, her head leaning against Mum’s shoulder.

“It was fine, Mum. I just aimed for the wood near the lock. That’s where it’s most likely to give, because the lock is stronger than the wood so when you kick it the wood gives way. The doorframe goes or the door does. Either way, you get out.”

“I don’t want to know where you learned that,” Dan said. “Or why.”

“We did self defense in school in London. The teacher was pretty amazing. He was ex-SAS. He showed us all sorts of things about how to escape if you were kidnapped.”

“I’d have tried to pick the lock,” Ella said.

“I was all out of hairpins. Besides, I’d still be there, probably. Much easier to boot it open.”

“If I’d known you had SAS training I’d have been a lot less worried,” Dan said.

“I still couldn’t have got out of the pool house without your help.”

Mum gave a little sigh, as if she was on the verge of tears but holding them back.

“We had a bad time of it yesterday, Jess,” Tilly said. “No one knew where you were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was just like when Freya went missing. Except with a happier ending.”

Mum reached out and held onto her twin, the two of them looking more alike than ever. Both looked strained, with shadows under their eyes. I felt guilty, and ashamed of myself for having taken the risk of confronting Harry without even thinking I might have been putting myself in danger.

“You need to be more careful,” Dan said. “You should have spoken to me.”

“You had Guy in custody and you didn’t want to hear about anything else,” I pointed out. His face flushed with anger but I wouldn’t back down. I didn’t have to feel bad about that. He hadn’t given me the least encouragement to come and talk to him about what I’d found out, probably because he was so keen to hush up Seb’s less-than-perfect past.

Still, I did owe him one. “Thank you for rescuing me. How did you know where to find me?”

“Luck,” Dan said.

“We were looking for you from early afternoon,” Ella said. “You didn’t show up for lunch and your phone was off and it just wasn’t like you. Hugo called Will to see if you were with him and he said he hadn’t seen you since the night before. He was crazy worried about you.”

“Everyone was concerned.” Dan’s voice was heavy with disapproval.

“We went all over town trying to find you,” Ella said. “No one had seen you since yesterday morning. Those two girls from the party—Claudia and Immy—they helped. So did Ryan. And loads of people from your school.”

“Did they?” Weirdly, I felt like crying.

“We knocked on a lot of doors.”

“I had my men out looking for you too,” Dan said. “It wasn’t just the Famous Five and friends.”

“You didn’t find her, though.” Ella blinked at him, all innocence. “We did. Or rather, Will did.”

Dan rubbed his chin and said nothing. Mentally, I awarded Ella all the points from that encounter.

“How did Will know where to find me?”

“He bumped into Nick,” Mum said. “Yesterday evening. Quite late. Nick said he’d dropped you at Harry’s house.”

Ella took over. “Will just ran as soon as he heard where you were. Hugo and I went back for the car and followed him. By the time we got there we could smell smoke in the air, and Will had gone over the gate. He opened it up for us. The house was already on fire but he couldn’t get inside—”

“Which was fortunate,” his father interjected dryly.

“—so we called the police and fire station. They were there incredibly quickly.”

“And that was when I turned up,” Dan said. “I was not so keen on Will proving he could be a hero.”

“You were quite scary.” Ella was watching Dan as warily as if he was a fully grown lion. She was right. He might look tame but he could turn at any minute.

“When I have to be scary, I can be scary.”

Or when you feel like it
, I added silently.

“Well, you didn’t give Will much of a chance to argue,” Ella said.

“I didn’t see you and Hugo at the house. Or Will,” I said. It had been bothering me, a bit. Not that I had expected him to be the one who rescued me, but if he’d been there it was hard to know he hadn’t even tried to come and see me.

“We were behind the cordon. And Will was…” She trailed off, looking from me to Dan.

“He was in the back of the patrol car,” Dan said. “I locked him in there.”

“Like a prisoner?”

“He wouldn’t do what he was told. He tried to go round the back of the house, down that little alley. It wasn’t safe. The wall was going to go at any minute.”

“That was the way you went,” I said. “Twice. That was how we got out of the garden, wasn’t it?”

“That was different. We didn’t have any choice.”

“You had a choice when you went down there. You didn’t have to go into the garden to check if I was there.”

“On the contrary, I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t.” Dan smiled at me and I felt the warmth of his charm, briefly. “I don’t think any of us could have forgiven ourselves if we’d missed the chance to save you.”