It had taken hours. Typing up the Norwegian newspaper clippings into Google Translate required a substantial cutting and pasting of Advanced Symbols for the extra vowels, å, ø, and æ, and for every little circle I missed out above the letter ‘a’ or line scored through ‘o’ I ended up with a wonky translation. In the end, though, I got the gist.

The woman in the newspaper cuttings with whom Maren was so obsessed was Ingrid Olsen, a postgraduate marine biology student at the University of Tromsø. On the evening of 23 October, 1983, she had been walking home after a night out with friends when she was dragged into an alley, raped, and murdered by a single blow to the head. She was twenty-two years old. Having prided itself on its excellent university, its extremely low crime rating and reputation as ‘the Paris of the Arctic’, the city of Tromsø was left in shock. Her killer was Anders Dahl, a twenty-year-old bartender from Bodø. The attack was random, and Anders was not known to have had any kind of relationship with Ingrid prior to the attack. He was jailed for life.

In other words, all my work was for nothing. There was nothing in the tragic story of Ingrid Olsen to shed any light whatsoever on the diary, or on Aurelia’s death. Other than the fact that they looked like twins.

‘Maren?’ I knocked on her bedroom door.

‘Yes?’

I walked in to find her by the window, looking down at whatever was outside.

‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

‘I’m not really sure,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on the scene at the building site. ‘There’s been a lot of shouting about something or other, but I can’t quite see what it is.’ She turned to me then, as though seeing me for the first time. ‘Shouldn’t you be with Gaia?’

‘Derry’s with her just now, reading her a story. Coco’s asleep. So I’ve only got a few minutes, but I wanted to ask you something, if that’s all right.’

She detected the nervousness in my voice. I was nervous. I was gearing up to tell her about the diary and ask if she had planted it in my room for me to read. Either way, we needed to do something. I wasn’t sure what, but I knew that even if I managed to summon up the courage to call the police, I was going to have a stronger case if Maren spoke to them. She was Norwegian. And she was the housekeeper. She was bound to have seen something. Isn’t that what she had told me previously? That as a housekeeper she saw things she’d prefer not to have seen?