LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Oliver runs to the FAB and enters the undercroft. He finds some old lockers there and yanks one open. Remembering when he’d found Filippa by the fireplace on the day of Richard’s memorial service, he shoves the bloodstained fabric into a forgotten mug in the locker and hopes that it will be overlooked if anyone sees it. After some hesitation, he decides to leave the locker unlocked, just in case he needs to return to the scene.
Oliver immediately acts to protect his friends, even without knowing exactly what he’s protecting them from. The cloth should ring warning bells in Oliver’s head; it seems likely that such a thing is evidence of foul play beyond what he saw on the dock, and since he’s the one who verified Richard’s death, he should be the only one who got bloody from that. But although he connects the cloth to Filippa, he doesn’t consider that one of his friends might have beaten or murdered Richard—it seems like he can’t wrap his head around that possibility.