I scanned the story. ‘Oh, there’s more,’ I said. ‘It’s about how the nøkken sometimes turned into an elk. Is that the one?’

Gaia shook her head. ‘I’ve never heard that story before. Mumma never read it to me.’

In hindsight, I could understand why – the story was pretty gross. I scrolled through and found another story about a woman called Grete and her elk, but Gaia seemed preoccupied with the nøkk story.

‘Do you know how the daughter in the story was scared because the nøkk’s eyes looked like holes?’ Gaia said then.

‘Yes?’

She pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘That sounds like the Sad Lady, doesn’t it?’

I thought back to that terrifying encounter in the kitchen with the floating woman with weird teeth. My skin crawled at the thought of it. I avoided the kitchen at night-times, now, and in the day it was so busy and light that you could almost forget that such a terrifying thing had happened. But Gaia had a point.

‘Maybe if we said the Sad Lady’s name, she’d go away,’ Gaia said. I tried to move on to a lighter, less terrifying subject, but she wasn’t having it. ‘What would her name be?’

‘Well, in the story,’ I said, emphasizing that it was, after all, fiction, ‘the nøkk was named Egil, after the lake. So if the fjord had a nøkk, it would be called Hjørund, as that’s the name of the fjord.’ That’s what Clive had told me, when he first drove me here from the airport.

Gaia considered this. ‘So the Sad Lady’s called Hjørund?’

‘If she was real, she’d be called Hjørund …’

‘We both know the Sad Lady’s real,’ Gaia said firmly.

I reached out and took her hand. ‘Well, now you know what to do to make her go away.’

At this, Gaia stared at me for a long time, then took off her glasses and snuggled down into her bed without a single complaint.

Once the girls were both asleep, I headed downstairs to return the iPad to wherever Gaia had filched it from in the living room.

‘Knock knock.’

I looked up to see Clive standing in the doorway. I figured one of the girls had climbed out of bed and I was needed to put her back.

‘You busy?’ Clive asked.

‘Not really,’ I said, swallowing hard. Something was wrong. Clive was usually a jokey kind of guy, by which I mean he was withering and snarky, but right now he just looked kind of constipated. Had he somehow found out who I was?

He asked me to sit down. I did, and he sat next to me. I could see he’d been sweating profusely. Two damp circles at his armpits, his brow moist. His eyes were kind of bloodshot.