For my part, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Maren had said about Mother Nature warning Tom. He should have taken the hint. But he didn’t, and Aurelia died. I wasn’t ordinarily the sort of person who goes in for curses and folklore, but given that I’d recently seen someone floating in the air with holes for eyes before vanishing without a trace, the boundaries of my disbelief were being somewhat permeated. It seemed that here, in this house, anything was possible.

Tom came home the next day. He looked like a desert prophet, his clothes still covered in bloodstains, his hair dirty and his breath foul.

‘You should go to bed,’ I heard Maren tell him, but he shook his head.

‘It’s almost Christmas,’ he said, as if this explained why he couldn’t go to bed.

He knocked on the door of my bedroom a while later, still bloodstained and filthy, and asked if he could have a word. I eyed the spot where I’d hidden the diary – beneath a loose floorboard – and said of course. The girls were asleep by this point and I’d been chipping away at my novel. Alexa was still being held hostage in the house in the woods, but had discovered an ingenious way of digging an escape route without anyone noticing.

‘I’m taking the girls away for Christmas,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘Oslo. Then a ferry to the Arctic Circle. Would you like to come?’

I nodded. I was thinking that I would need to come more than anything else, given how incapable he looked right then of looking after two small children. And there was the small matter of the contents of the diary, and the fact that I needed to protect the girls.

‘Great,’ he said. A flicker of a smile. ‘We leave in two days.’

The girls were excited, or at least Gaia was, and as ever Coco copied Gaia’s excitement, clapping her hands and shouting ‘Slo! Slo! Ya-ya!’