‘Come in,’ Maren said, waving me towards her table. I noticed a new pile of laundry on her bed, and the house had definitely been cleaned over Christmas, so perhaps she was starting to feel a little better about being here, and around Derry. To my knowledge, they still hadn’t spoken two words to each other, despite living under the same roof.

She sat down in the other chair and clasped her hands together, her face folded in concern. ‘Has something happened, Sophie?’

My throat had suddenly got very tight, and the room was swaying. Behind Maren was something I’d not noticed when I sat in this same chair previously, but now I saw what was definitely a framed photograph of Aurelia. No, I thought. It’s Ingrid. Only the mouth gave her away. Smaller than Aurelia’s. The woman in the newspaper clipping. The woman who’d been murdered. She looked like she was graduating.

Maren was staring at me. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

I had prepared my line of questioning as a mental flowchart. Ask her first about Tom and Aurelia. Did she see or hear anything of concern? If yes, proceed to step two. If no, she’s probably lying and you need to proceed to step three, which is: ask why she blamed Clive for persuading Tom to come out here.

But fear was scrambling it all up and rearranging the steps. ‘Did you rip the pages out of Aurelia’s diary?’ I asked. Wrong question, Laurence Olivier hollered, trilling his ‘r’. That’s step six. You’ve missed five whole steps!

Maren frowned. ‘What diary?’ she said. She’s lying, Olivier said, and I started to panic. Why would she lie? If she planted the diary she obviously wanted me to know something. But perhaps she knew Tom was beating Aurelia. She had to have known. And either she was troubled by it – or she was guarding his secrets.

‘That picture,’ I stammered, and she turned to glance at the photograph of Ingrid. Now she looked troubled. Horrified, even.

‘What about it?’ she snapped.

‘She looks … very like Aurelia.’

She got up slowly from the table and walked to the door. Then she opened it.

‘Please leave my room,’ she said quietly.

I took a deep breath and summoned my nerve. ‘I saw inside the box, Maren. I saw the bracelet. It belonged to Aurelia, didn’t it?’ I fixed my eyes on her, watching as she took this in. She said nothing but I saw a twitch of her hand. ‘What would Tom say if he knew you were stealing again?’

I was prepared to mention that Derry had said Maren was obsessed with Aurelia, but I didn’t want to push it too far. It felt unkind.

‘I always knew you were hiding something, Sophie,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t peg you as someone who went snooping in other people’s business.’