A Brit woman drowned after leaping into a swimming pool to save her husband when he had a fatal heart attack, police say.
Diana Shamash, 80, was with her partner at their swanky holiday home in the south of France near Montpelier when tragedy struck last week.
David, 82, a property mogul and Oxford graduate, had an apparent cardiac arrest before Diana jumped in fully-clothed to rescue him.
Police in the area said she was then dragged under the water by the weight of her clothes.
Their bodies may have laid undiscovered in the pool for days before they were found by friends arriving for a dinner party on Saturday, cops said.
A detective on the case said: "The house is set well away from any other ones, so nobody would have been able to hear their cries for help.
"But what we do now know is that Mrs Shamash was fully clothed, and wearing her shoes, when she jumped into the pool to save her husband after he suffered a suspected heart attack.
"She undoubtedly found it very difficult to float in these circumstances and sank in the water."
Investigators have piece together a timeline of their final days and ruled out foul play after carrying out post-mortem examinations.
Investigators told the Daily Mail they're following several lines of enquiry, including whether the pool was heated or not as chilly water can prove deadly amid blistering temperatures.
The Shamash's rural home, which the pair would visit three or four times a year, is in an area of France packed with multi-million pound properties and sits near the leafy market town of Gignac.
Mr Shamash, who was the director of property businesses with a reported £5million in assets, also owned a property in Berkshire and a Covent Garden apartment which sits above the Tintin shop.
The couple would visit the villa for three week stints and were planning to return on Monday August 8.
They were planning their next trip abroad at the time of the tragedy.
A close friend at home in South Fawley, Berkshire, called their deaths a "tragedy" as they shared how the couple loved France and tried to spend as much time there as they could.
They added that the pair speak French fluently, even tuning their television at home in Berkshire to the country's channels.
Another friend said the "lovely couple" were "devoted to each other".
The couple spent a large chunk of their wealth on charitable causes, having set up the Covent Garden Group Foundation charity - which aims to reduce poverty across the world but "with an emphasis on South East Asia".
The non-profit also works to treat and prevent blindness.
Their son Anthony, 56, and daughter Nicola, 58, had to fly out to identify the bodies of their beloved parents earlier this week.
