But then I remembered that Meg hadn’t yet tried to contact me to see how I was doing. I had no voicemails or missed calls or messages from her. Nobody cared to see how I was, so even if I stated the trouble I was in, it was unlikely they’d do anything about it.

I pulled up my laptop and did some searching online. I typed ‘Tom Faraday Architect Murder’ into the search bar. Fifty-three thousand links to Tom’s architecture practice appeared. There were articles about buildings he’d designed, an alumni webpage set up by Glasgow School of Art, and some photographs of him and Clive at black-tie events, grinning and holding a glass award. A Facebook memorial page had been sent up for Aurelia. Photographs showed her at various stages of her life – as a child, wearing brown cord dungarees, her hair in pigtails. School photographs through her teens, travel photographs in San Francisco, Egypt, Peru, image after image of her with Tom and the girls.

It was striking how different he looked – twenty pounds heavier, his hair had less grey in it, and he looked so much happier. I scrolled through ten Google pages and came across some news reports about her death.

TRAGIC SUICIDE OF MUM IN NORWAY

ARCHITECT’S WIFE FOUND DEAD IN FJORD

I skimmed news reports and the comments on the memorial page, but there was nothing to suggest Tom was implicated in her death. The prevailing narrative was very much that she had suffered on and off with mental illness and had finally lost ‘her battle’. Buried amongst Google Images were a couple of snapshots posted on social media of Tom at the funeral. I had to zoom in to check it was him. He looked absolutely crushed.

I glanced back at the diary. It lay open on my bed, the contents screaming out in blue biro. He slammed my face into a wall … I’m still bleeding …

I couldn’t believe it. This man, who looked every bit the doting husband and devastated widower, had done these sickening things. He had strangled, kicked, and punched his wife, and he had done so straight after Coco’s birth, by the sound of it. I looked at the images of her and Tom together and tried hard to see the fault lines. The woman on the pages was terrified. She was confiding in her diary because she had nowhere else to turn. And yet the woman in the photographs was happy, confident, loved.

It just didn’t add up.