He turned and walked towards one of the walls – I assumed he intended me to follow, so I did. This was a side of Tom I hadn’t seen – he was as excited as a kid let loose in Santa’s workshop on Christmas morning.

‘Look,’ he said, nodding at a cross-section in the wall. I looked inside. It was filled with plastic bottles.

‘Great,’ I said, and he beamed.

‘A tonne of plastic bottles serving to insulate the house,’ he said proudly. ‘That’s one less tonne in the oceans, in the rivers, in our food. Imagine if every house was built this way. Hotels, office blocks.’ He clicked his tongue against his teeth, shook his head. I did the same.

‘Look at this,’ Tom said, and I turned to see him pointing at the back wall of the living room. It was the actual cliff. Not dark wallpaper, as I’d thought, but solid granite, all the layers of sediment shown clearly. He and Clive had spent all night sealing the walls of the house to the granite.

Upstairs he led us through the bedrooms, all of which had light provided by sun pipes and energy-optimized windows. The front two bedrooms had views of the fjord, as did the rooms on the third level. The roof wasn’t going to be a roof at all, he said, but would be covered in solar panels, a rainwater recycling system, energy wells, and a garden.

‘We did it,’ Tom said to Clive, high-fiving him. Then he pulled out a hankie and started to cry.

   38   

SHE WAS MINE

Now

When we went back to Granhus I told Gaia to practise her spellings in the playroom. I placed Coco in her playpen with a wooden glockenspiel. Then I headed to my bedroom, locked the door, and fell to my knees.

Aurelia’s Nest was completed. I wasn’t needed any more. I stuffed a pair of socks into my mouth to muffle the sounds that came flooding out without any bidding. I leaned forward to allow my tears to drip on to the rug, where they pooled for a moment before sinking into the white faux-fur.

I was so incredibly selfish, I knew it. It was good that Tom had achieved what he came here to do, even if he was a murderer. It was good for his daughters. At the very least, they would have somewhere to live that would be ghost-free. But I would soon be back in England, and even though my salary had been accumulating in my bank account – enough for a rental deposit – I was once again untethered.