As the last police car reversed out of the drive, Jimmy waved frantically at the gendarme in the passenger seat, who raised his hand enigmatically in return.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ said Nick.
‘I’m glad they’ve gone,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been horrible.’
‘Yes, but it’s a bit of an anti-climax now, isn’t it?’ said Lizzie.
Hannah turned to stare at her.
I just mean, we’ve had all this excitement and now it feels flat. Although excitement isn’t the right word, because I don’t for one moment mean that someone dying is exciting.’
‘Actually, it is,’ said Suzy. ‘I’ve never had such a brilliant start to a holiday.’
They drifted back into the house, discussing what to do with what was left of the afternoon. The first priority was food.
‘We need something to drink, too,’ said Marcus. ‘I can’t believe you buggers finished all that wine. I’ll go to the supermarket – there’s one in the village we passed when we came off the motorway, the one with the memorial in the square. Anyone else want to come?’
Hannah did. She wanted to wander down the aisles of a French supermarket and inhale the smell of freshly baked bread and ripe fruit, pick up exotic-looking packets of fresh pasta that would soften the second it was plunged into boiling water. She wanted to choose between great slabs of pale-yellow cheese, and stand in front of a delicatessen counter and use her barely adequate French to order slices of fresh ham that would be wrapped in greaseproof paper.
But she didn’t want to sit in the car with Marcus – even for a journey that would last less than ten minutes. She couldn’t bear to see his smug expression as he negotiated the foreign traffic with ease, and watch the gold wedding band glitter on his hand as it rested casually on the gearstick.
‘Why don’t you go?’ she said to Nick. ‘Lizzie and I can get everything unpacked and sort out where we’ll all be sleeping.’
They made a list of essentials and the two men went through the front door.
‘New car, Marcus?’ Hannah heard Nick ask.
‘Had it a while,’ he replied. ‘Lovely ride, plus all the gadgets – parking camera, eight gears for low carbon emissions, 15.5 inch infotainment screen, 4D sound system, massaging seats. Great to drive, but too big for us really.’
As he opened the passenger door, Nick said something that Hannah didn’t catch, and Marcus barked with laughter.
With the drama of the afternoon over, the girls were back outside on the lawn. Alice had changed into a swimsuit and was reading a book, while Suzy had plugged herself into some AirPods; Hannah hoped they hadn’t run out of conversation already. Born within a year of each other, the girls had got on well as small children, but the dynamics of their relationship had changed recently. Suzy had hurtled into her teens with wild abandon, keen to try every illicit activity she came across, and getting away with most of it, since she was following in the messy footsteps of an older brother who’d kicked down all the boundaries his parents tried to establish along the way.
Alice clearly longed to do the same, but couldn’t bring herself to be so reckless, and as a result resented not just her adventurous cousin, but also her parents. Hannah understood how she felt, but nowadays she could never seem to say or do the right thing.
‘I’m sure a lot of what Suzy tells you is just for show,’ she’d said, when they were driving home after Jean’s funeral. Having spent an afternoon hearing about Suzy’s social life, Alice was sitting in the back of the car, arms folded across her chest, anger radiating from every pore. ‘She says she has all these boys buzzing around her, and goes out all the time. But I’m sure she doesn’t really.’
Alice just glared at her. ‘You have no idea,’ she said. ‘She has a much better life than I do. She has had two boyfriends, and she goes to parties every weekend. Aunty Lizzie buys her new clothes all the time and lets her wear as much make-up as she wants when she goes out.’
‘Well bully for Aunty Lizzie. I’m sorry you have such a horrible mother who holds you back. I just want you to make the right choices in life, and…’
But Alice had picked up her mobile and was scrolling through something. The conversation was over.
Now, watching the two of them lying on the grass – physically close, but in every other way so far apart – Hannah’s heart ached for her pale, stocky daughter, whose black all-in-one costume looked ridiculously childish beside the diminutive yellow bikini.
‘Your shoulders are burning, Alice,’ she called out. ‘Do you want some suntan lotion?’
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘I don’t care.’
Lizzie had heaved three large suitcases up the stairs. They were all bright purple, with hard outer shells and wheels. It was just as well they hadn’t needed to take a taxi from the airport, they couldn’t have fitted even one of them into the boot of the Fiat.
‘So, which room do you want?’ she was asking. ‘I think it’s only fair that you have the first choice, since you did all the hard work and found the house. This one at the front has an en suite, but the double at the back has views over the fields. I think the girls are already settled in the one with the red carpet, and there’s a little room at the end for Jimmy.’
‘I’m not worried either,’ said Hannah, hauling her own shabby black case up onto the landing.
‘I think Marcus might prefer the one with the en suite,’ Lizzie continued. ‘Just because he likes his privacy, and it’s not much fun sharing a bathroom with teenage girls! But I really don’t mind either way, and those views from the back window are lovely.’
Hannah pushed her case into the front room. ‘I guess we’ll take the en suite,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ said Lizzie, hemmed in by hard-shell purple. ‘Whatever you want.’
As soon as she threw the case onto the bed, Hannah knew she’d made the wrong choice. This room had seen better days: a strip of wallpaper was peeling down from the ceiling at the far end and the carpet was worn bare in places. The windows overlooked the drive, and a handful of tall trees on the other side of the lane blocked out any view that may have been panning out behind them. The en suite was dark and smelt vaguely of sewage, and there was a huge spider’s web between the basin and the back wall. Madame Gerard wasn’t just unobservant, she was also an appalling cleaner.
Hannah looked through the open door across the landing, and saw the view over the fields from the back bedroom, where Lizzie’s cases now stood. It was spectacular.
She had packed in a rush and, as she started to pull out clothing, she could already see she hadn’t brought the right things. There were plenty of knickers – pointless because she’d be spending most of the time in a swimsuit – and an extra pair of jeans together with two long-sleeved jumpers – why had she thought she’d need those during August in the South of France? She threw everything into a drawer in the old wardrobe leaning against one wall; it was so grand it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the cavernous bedchamber of a chateau, but in this modest room it took up nearly as much space as the bed.
Hannah wandered down the hall into the room with the red carpet, where the girls had unpacked their things. Her children had shared one suitcase, jamming their clothes into it in a last-minute frenzy. As Alice unpacked, she had pulled Jimmy’s clothes out as well, leaving them strewn across the floor. Hannah knelt down and extracted his T-shirts and shorts from amongst the bras and sundresses that had fallen onto the bed and the carpet.
Suzy had unpacked her toiletries, and the dressing table Alice had coveted was now covered in bottles, tubs, tubes and canisters, many of them designer brands that cost more than Hannah would ever consider spending on herself. She squeezed some expensive cream onto her palm and rubbed it in, smelling it as she did so. Nice. She picked up a bottle of tinted moisturiser and dabbed a little onto her arm, watching as it turned her skin a subtle shade of bronze.
‘Everything okay in here?’
She jumped guiltily, put down the moisturiser and grabbed the pile of Jimmy’s clothes from the stool in front of the dressing table. ‘Yes, fine. How on earth does your daughter find time to use all that stuff? There are more bottles there than on the beauty counter in Boots.’
Lizzie laughed. ‘I know, it’s crazy isn’t it.’
In the small bedroom at the far end of the house, Hannah folded Jimmy’s clothes and put them away in a drawer, opening the window and letting the warm air flood into the room. As she turned away, she heard a splash. For a second she couldn’t work out what it was, then realised it must have come from the pool.
‘Jimmy? What the…’ She raced down the stairs as Lizzie emerged from her bedroom.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I think Jimmy has fallen into the water!’
Running out from the kitchen she realised the girls were no longer on the lawn, and as she came through the gap in the hedge she ran straight into Suzy, who was standing looking into the pool.
‘Where is he? Jimmy, are you okay?’
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find: the image of the body was still fresh in her head, the outstretched limbs with water lapping over them. Except that this time, instead of a fully clothed man, she’d been picturing a seven-year-old boy floating face down: his bright blue shorts darkened by the weight of the water, his blond hair drifting out from his head…
‘Hello, Mummy! Look, I can do a tumble turn!’ He dived down, his feet launched towards the sky, legs kicking frenetically as he swam underwater to the side of the pool, where he rolled wildly from side to side for several seconds, before his head emerged again, mouth wide, gasping for breath. ‘That wasn’t right, it was better last time. But I can nearly do it. Watch again!’
Hannah was suddenly weak with relief, her legs like jelly as she moved across to a plastic chair and collapsed onto it. She thought she might cry, and took deep breaths, aware the others would think she was mad. ‘Jimmy, what on earth are you doing?’
‘Tumble turns.’
‘No, I mean what are you doing in the pool?’
He looked confused. ‘Tumble turns?’
‘Sweetheart, an hour ago there was a dead body in this pool! Get out immediately. We don’t know how long that man was floating in there – at the very least it’s going to be filthy because he had all his clothes on.’
‘He could have had some awful disease as well,’ said Suzy.
Lizzie nodded. ‘She’s right, we haven’t been told a cause of death yet. There might have been something wrong with him, something that was killing him – even before he fell into the pool.’
‘So, the water could be poisonous,’ continued Suzy. ‘His body was riddled with disease, and as he lay in the pool all the micro-organisms would have been leaching out and spreading. We did something in biology about contamination from disease.’
Hannah glared at her. ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad.’
‘Well, you never can tell with micro-organisms,’ she continued. ‘There would have been pus and phlegm – and bile.’
‘Probably bits of skin as well,’ added Alice. Hannah noticed that she was smiling, for the first time since they’d arrived at the house.
‘Yes, definitely skin cells.’ Suzy nodded. ‘And saliva for sure. Lots of sweat. Maybe even some blood if he had any cuts or bruises?’
‘And poo!’ yelled Jimmy from the shallow end, where he’d been doggy-paddling in circles while they were talking. ‘This pool is probably full of poo!’