There were many ways that one could take ‘love you incredibly’, but my immediate thought was that it was a figure of speech. There were a couple of photos of Aurelia and Maren, too, back in the house at Hampstead at Gaia’s third birthday party. Aurelia had her arm across Maren’s shoulders. There were also some objects in the box: a bracelet, a large round button, a small ceramic penguin figurine, and a half-used L’Oréal lipstick. I looked down at them in my hand, certain they were Aurelia’s. I remembered Derry telling me about Maren stealing from Aurelia. If Tom found these, he’d hit the roof. Maybe even throw her out.

Was Maren spending all day long up here, smoking cigars and looking through these mementos of Aurelia? I knew she was sad about Aurelia dying but it hadn’t struck me at all that she might still be grieving. Derry’s words came back to me: she was obsessed with Aurelia.

I was about to pack the box back up, but then – right at the bottom – I saw there was a pile of newspaper clippings and below them, some more photographs. My curiosity deepened. The newspaper clippings were in a language I couldn’t read, but which I thought was Norwegian from the handful of nouns I recognized from Gaia’s Norwegian spellings books. They were dated from the 1980s and seemed to be all about some girl named Ingrid who – a chill ran down my spine – looked exactly like Aurelia. Same hair, same small nose, same eyes. Only the mouth and chin gave her away. There was an old Polaroid image there, too, of Ingrid. Ingrid Olsen. She looked like she was in her late teens or early twenties, and she was sitting at a campfire in a pair of jeans and strappy vest top, her head tilted to one side and her long blonde hair sweeping to the side. In another photograph, Aurelia held the same pose. Were they related?

I had no idea why Maren would be spending all day long staring at these images, nor why she had them in the first place. A noise downstairs told me it was time to put the box back underneath the bed, but as I scrambled to get everything back in the same order as I’d found it, I came across a newspaper article that sent chills up my spine: Ingrid had been murdered. I couldn’t read a word of the text, but the pictures said it all: the same image of Ingrid, smiling up in pixelated black and white alongside a man in handcuffs being led from a court. Another image of a detective addressing reporters.

With a sinking feeling in my gut, I put everything back carefully and approached the attic stairs. But to my horror, Maren was standing at the foot of them, staring up at me with a cold, suspicious expression.