I saw hesitation on the Pretty Witch’s face before she spoke. “We waited for him at the station, but he never showed. I phoned him, asked him what the fuck he was playing at. He said he’d changed his mind and wasn’t coming. Because he wouldn’t have a ‘special place’ and his feelings for Tess would be—let me get this right—‘ignored’ and he ‘couldn’t tolerate that.’ ”
Was that why I’d sensed the heavier atmosphere when I’d asked about Simon?
“Emilio Codi said he was obsessed by her …?” I said.
“Yeah, he was,” said the Pretty Witch. “When he had that project going,
I saw Benjamin give the Pretty Witch a warning look, but she took no notice. “For fuck’s sake, he was practically stalking her.”
“With his camera as an excuse?” I asked, remembering the photos of you on his bedroom wall.
“Yeah,” said the Pretty Witch. “He wasn’t man enough to look at her directly, had to do it through a lens. Some of them were really long, like he was a fucking paparazzi.”
“Do you know why she tolerated him?” I asked.
A shy-faced boy who’d been quiet up to now spoke up. “She was kind and I think she felt sorry for him. He didn’t have other friends.”
I turned to the Pretty Witch. “Did the project stop, you seemed to imply …?”
“Yeah, Mrs. Barden, his tutor, told him he had to stop. She knew it was just an excuse to follow Tess around. Told him he’d be expelled if he carried on.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“The beginning of the course year,” said Annette. “So it must have been last September, the first week. Tess was relieved about it.”
But his photographs documented you through all of autumn and winter.
“He was still doing it,” I said. “Did none of you know that?”
“He must have got more subtle about it,” said Benjamin.
“That wouldn’t have been hard,” said the Pretty Witch. “But we didn’t see so much of Tess after she went on that ‘sabbatical.’ ”
I remembered Emilio saying
“Emilio Codi knew it hadn’t stopped,” I said. “And he’s a tutor at the college. So why didn’t he get Simon expelled?”
“Because Simon knew about Emilio Codi’s affair with Tess,” replied the Pretty Witch. “They probably each kept the other one quiet.”
I couldn’t put off my question any longer.
“Do you think either of them could have killed her?”
The group was silent, but I sensed embarrassment and awkwardness more than shock. Even the Pretty Witch didn’t meet my eye.
Finally Benjamin spoke up, to be kind to me I think. “Simon told us that she had postpartum psychosis. And because of the postpartum psychosis she committed suicide. He said that’s what the coroner’s verdict was and that the police are sure about it.”
“We didn’t know whether he was telling the truth,” said the shy-faced boy. “But it was in the local paper too.”
“Simon said you weren’t here at the time,” ventured Annette. “But he said that he saw her and she was …” She trailed off, but I could imagine what Simon had told them about your mental state.
So the press and Simon had convinced them of your suicide. The girl they knew and had described to me would never have killed herself, but you’d been the victim of possession by the modern-day devil of puerperal psychosis, a devil that made a girl with joie de vivre hate life enough to end it. You had been killed by something that has a scientific name rather than a human face.
“Yes. The police do believe she committed suicide,” I said. “Because they think she was suffering from puerperal psychosis. But I am certain that they are wrong.”
I saw compassion on some faces as they looked at me, and its poorer cousin pity on others. And then it was “already past one-thirty” and “classes start in ten minutes” and they were leaving.
I thought that Simon must have manipulated them against me before they’d even met me. He’d no doubt told them about the unstable older sister with her loopy theories, which explained why they had been more embarrassed than shocked when I’d asked them about murder, and their awkwardness toward me. But I didn’t blame them for wanting to believe Simon rather than me, for wanting to choose a non-murderous death for you.
Benjamin and the Pretty Witch were the last to go. They asked me to come to the art show in a week’s time, were touchingly insistent, and I said I would. It would give me another opportunity to question Simon and Emilio.
