She turned her eyes back to the road and visibly chewed over whether or not to divulge it. ‘Clive,’ she said quietly, checking the rear mirror to ensure Gaia was busy with her sketchpad. Then: ‘Perhaps “manipulated” is the wrong word. He … persuaded him.’

‘Why do you think Clive would do that?’

‘They’re business partners. It was in Clive’s interests to get Tom to finish the job.’

That didn’t strike me as nefarious as it had originally sounded.

‘You can understand that it looks extremely bad,’ she continued. ‘For Tom, I mean. Not Clive. Everyone thinks it was Tom’s idea. But as I said, housekeepers hear things that others don’t.’ She threw me a smile. ‘How are you feeling these days? No more … dark thoughts? You’re feeling happy, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I said, realizing a few seconds after I replied that it was true. I was feeling happy. I was occasionally fearing for my life, and scared witless by Granhus’ resident elks and floating women, but also happy.

She glanced at my forearms, where the scars still burned beneath the long black sleeves of my jumper.

‘You get therapy for it?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, out here is the best therapy. The views, the smells …’ She took a deep breath as if to inhale the smell of the car’s Peach Melba air freshener. ‘Good for the soul. And now you get to see Ålesund! Beautiful city. Norway’s Venice, did you know?’

I told her I didn’t. ‘Aurelia’s grandparents came from this region. She would visit sometimes as a little girl.’

‘Did Aurelia have any siblings?’ I asked lightly, thinking of the girl in the newspaper clippings. ‘A sister, perhaps?’

Maren frowned. ‘No. She was an only child.’

‘Any cousins, then?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

We reached the brow of a long, steep hill, a spectacular view of the city coming into view. ‘Ålesund!’ Gaia shrieked, making Coco start. I reached back and popped her dummy in her mouth and she quietened. ‘Can we go to the park?’

I told her yes, though in reality I had no idea where the park was, nor whether we could feasibly reach it. Ålesund was a beautiful archipelago of colourful buildings surrounded by twinkling blue fjords and dramatic, white-tipped mountains. I thought of Aurelia coming here to visit her grandparents, perhaps as young as Gaia was. How excited she must have been to be building a home here, now.

So why did she kill herself?