She smiled sadly. ‘I had met Aurelia briefly, about seven years ago, back in London. She found out I was Norwegian and was over the moon. Her father’s people were from Norway and she had fond memories of the place. A while afterwards I found out she needed a housekeeper, I applied for the job. She hired me immediately.’ She smiled at the memory of it. ‘Sometimes these things … they just find you. You don’t find them – they find you.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’ I asked, thinking about the windowpanes furred with mould and the grime around the toilet.

She sighed. ‘I used to love it. I always wanted a big family home, full of kids and noise and life. But … it didn’t work out. And when I was cleaning Aurelia’s home in Hampstead I felt I was helping create that. Keeping order. But now … not so much.’

‘Derry said you were an artist,’ I said. ‘I was wondering why you gave up painting to become a housekeeper.’

My mouth had rattled off again, asking questions my brain would otherwise have prohibited.

Maren pulled her lips into a tight grimace and stared at the road, which was a good thing as she was driving along a particular narrow stretch of road beside a sheer drop. ‘What else did Derry tell you?’ she said in a low voice.

I struggled to think. ‘She told me about the seven chakras. And I got some good feedback on my novel. I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing in third person …’

‘Not that,’ Maren snapped. ‘Why would she tell you I was an artist? And how did she know this information?’

I shrugged. ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

She hit the accelerator and overtook a lorry on a bend. ‘What does she do, huh? Mix paints? Choose wallpapers?’ She gave a loud scoff. ‘Let her wash her own socks.’

‘It sounds like you were very talented,’ I observed. ‘And yet you gave it all up to …’ I tried to say ‘clean the house’, but couldn’t, so went for ‘iron the tablecloths’.

‘Sometimes life turns on a dime,’ she said under her breath.

She sounded very sad when she said that, and when I asked what happened – albeit in a tiny voice – she didn’t answer, but I noticed her knuckles whiten on the steering wheel as she gripped it.

‘You said that Tom was manipulated into coming back to Norway,’ I said after a few minutes of awkward silence. ‘Who manipulated him?’

She threw me a look of horror. ‘I told you that?’

I felt a bit confused. ‘Yes. That night, in your room … And then you showed me the scale model of the first house …’

‘You promise you won’t say a word?’

‘I promise.’