The Sister-In-Law(83)
‘She was in the garden,’ I said gently. ‘She always did yoga in the garden.’
‘So how the hell did she end up in the pool? She wouldn’t have gone near the water on her own,’ he added through tears.
‘Perhaps someone else was there?’ Dan said, looking at me. I felt a little uncomfortable.
‘Perhaps she just decided to try out a new move by the pool?’ I suggested. ‘It would look good to have the pool in a photo – on her Instagram?’
‘Or perhaps,’ said Joy, ‘and I hate to say this…. But she was upset about something, and…?’
‘She wouldn’t.’ Jamie shook his head. ‘She’d never do anything stupid.’
I found it hard to imagine too. Ella was angry with me, and disappointed about the TV offer that didn’t exist, but she wasn’t suicidal.
‘She was upset about leaving me, but we’d talked. I said I’d go and see her wherever they ended up filming. I was upset, I said some things I regret, but I didn’t cause this!’ He let go of her head and sat back, his arms outstretched.
‘No one’s saying you did, my darling.’ Joy went to hug him, but he pulled away.
Joy touched her chest, no doubt hurting for her son and hurting because she couldn’t console him. ‘This is all too much, I need to lie down,’ she said, slipping a gold lipstick from the pocket of her kimono and giving her lips a slick of hot pink for the arrival of the carabinieri.
While Jamie and Dan argued about whether they should leave Ella’s body for the police or move her out of the sun, I walked over to the garden to see Bob and the children. I felt it would be good to explain to Violet and at least offer some explanation to Alfie as to why uniformed men would be arriving soon. I told them something very sad had happened and Ella had fallen in the water and gone to heaven.
‘Was she running, Mummy?’ Alfie asked. He’d been warned every day not to run by the pool, and saw this as the cardinal sin.
‘We don’t know, darling, but this is why you must always be sensible around water and not run or be silly.’
‘Was Ella being silly by the pool, Mummy?’ he asked.
‘In a way,’ I said, shaken by what had happened and finding comfort in the simplistic way my kids viewed life and death.
Violet was clearly confused and upset, and then Alfie started on the questions about heaven – ‘What’s it like in heaven, Mummy? Will Ella be able to see Thomas the Tank Engine – is he in heaven?’ and so it went on.
I suggested Bob go and comfort Joy while I played with the children for a bit, for myself as much as them. I wanted them round me, my little cocoon. I gathered them up and we went inside, where I made breakfast last longer than usual so we could stay in the kitchen while the police arrived. But after a while they were restless. Whatever had happened it was the last day of their holiday, they wanted to play out, and as I’d made it clear the pool was out of the question, I suggested they play in the garden again. I was trying so hard to make everything seem normal that when the police arrived, I was laughing with the kids – something Dan was only too quick to point out to me later. ‘I know you didn’t like Ella, but you might have shown some respect,’ he’d said.
‘And we all know how much you liked her,’ I’d spat back.
A detective arrived with the police and announced this looked like ‘omicidio’.
Joy had quickly assured him in her Italian voice, ‘No, dear – no one killed the girl! It must have been suicidio.’ She’d obviously been on Google Translate. He asked how Ella had seemed when we last saw her and if anything had happened that was out of the ordinary, but we couldn’t really offer him anything.
‘I actually think it was an accident,’ I said. ‘She was probably taking a selfie and fell in. She couldn’t swim, you see…’
But, as the detective pointed out, her phone had been found in the garden, and ‘If she’d been taking a selfie, wouldn’t her phone have gone in the water with her?’
Of course it would; stupidly in all the madness I hadn’t thought of that. So what happened?
‘She’d had this offer of work in TV,’ Jamie said dolefully. At this, I felt my heart pounding through my whole body. No one except Ella and I knew the truth about the TV offer. ‘She said it would break her heart not to go… I begged her not to – but this was a huge opportunity.’ He added, ‘I think she was overwhelmed, it messed with her head, she was very fragile.’
‘Yes…’ Joy nodded in agreement. ‘She wasn’t in a good place.’
Each word was like a pin jabbing me, reminding me that if I hadn’t goaded Ella with that fake Instagram message we probably wouldn’t be here now. What an idiot I was. I might as well have pushed her in myself.
‘She only ever sat on the edge of the pool, and the other day she fell in and was so distressed…’ I told the police. ‘But that’s why I don’t think she killed herself. If she wanted to end her life, she’d have found another way. I think it was some horrible accident.’
A little later, the detective asked us all separately about a possible motive, family dynamics and why we thought she might have killed herself. It gave everyone a chance to speak honestly, without other family members present, and I desperately hoped Jamie wouldn’t tell them anything about him and me; it wasn’t relevant to her death. Yes, she wanted Jamie to have recognition for Freddie, but I also knew that wasn’t why she’d drowned. She was far too vain to kill herself, and even though the TV offer wasn’t real, she was moving on, continuing the life she’d led before Jamie, before the Taylors. As I explained to the police, nothing that happened at the villa had any bearing on her death, because none of us really meant anything to her. It had to be an accident – what else could it be?