I still have nightmares about it. In my dream I’m running as hard as I can, but the driveway to our house grows steeper and steeper, and I’m not getting any nearer to the garden, where I know, even without seeing them, that the paramedics are crouching in the grass, laying a tiny body onto a stretcher. She was wearing a white dress with sequins that caught the sunlight; for a moment I thought she was moving. I expected her to sit up, push the sheet off her face and shout, Boo! But it was only the rocking of the stretcher as the ambulance crew lifted it, which gave the illusion she was still alive. They stood for a moment, their heads bowed, as if we had fast-forwarded to the funeral already.

I’m not sure what prompted Bethany to search the pond, because she’d already seen that the gate was still locked. She told me she’d looked everywhere else, but as she was heading towards the house to phone Amy on the landline, she decided to double-check. She climbed over the fence and that’s when she saw her. Ruby-May was floating face-down in the water. One of her shoes was missing.

Bethany thinks Ruby-May got tangled in the water weed, and that was what held her below the surface. She tried to resuscitate our niece, but she knew it was too late. I think of her sometimes – my sister is strong and muscular, from all those press-ups she does every day – I think of those toned arms pressing down on that small chest. She kept trying. I know she’d never have given up if there had been even the slimmest chance.

In the post-mortem they said Bethany had broken one of Ruby-May’s ribs.

I imagine strands of weed wrapped around Ruby-May’s pudgy little wrists, and how she would smell of the water lilies that had rotted at the bottom of the pond. She must have spotted a newt swimming near the bottom, or wanted to pick some of those purple flowers that grow in the marshy bits round the edge.

No one knows how Ruby-May got into the area around the pond. The gate and the fence, though low enough not to obstruct our mother’s precious view, are too high for her to have climbed over. Dad claims he has no memory of being asked to look after Ruby-May that afternoon. He’d drunk the best part of a bottle of red, Bethany said. It wasn’t just that, though. She says he’d been growing increasingly forgetful, but no one had thought to investigate those memory lapses, or even raise them with him.