She slides her eyes to his in defiance. She’s been crying. Her nose is red, her eyes are puffed up. She knows what he’s thinking, what he wants to ask.

‘Why don’t you just come out and say it?’ she says through gritted teeth.

He rolls the words around his mouth, hesitant to say them aloud. How can he suspect his own wife for something so terrible as murder? And yet, something niggles at him. She lied. She lied about where she was that morning. Why would she lie?

‘You had no part in what happened,’ he says, adamantly. Then, less so: ‘Did you?’

Derry thinks back to the morning she came back from a run to find Aurelia climbing down the ladder from the top of the cliff to the small bank of shale at its base. It was barely sunrise, and Derry was astonished to see Aurelia there – in her nightdress, too. She looked punch-drunk, as though she was sleepwalking or hypnotized.

‘Look!’ Aurelia said, looking past Derry to the far side of the water. ‘It’s a migration. Just like my dream.’

Derry looked across the fjord. There was nothing there. Aurelia was shouting about reindeer crossing, but Derry couldn’t see any.

Derry watched, transfixed, as Aurelia swam like a woman possessed, wheeling her arms through the glossy black water. It was freezing cold. Even a seasoned wild-swimmer wouldn’t brave such temperatures.

Derry squinted at Aurelia in the distance. She was drenched and knackered but she looked triumphant, as though she’d accomplished something.

‘I saved it,’ she shouted at Derry, her teeth chattering. ‘I saved it.’

Out in the water, Aurelia saw the herd cross to the other side. She was glad she’d managed to save the little calf that had been struggling in the water, but now that she was alone, the shore seemed tremendously far away. And the water had darkened. It appeared oily, and when she lifted her hand a trace of something remained. She thought of the quality of the dark out here. The water seemed like a liquid dark.

Some twenty feet away Aurelia could make out a figure treading water as she was. She felt a sweep of relief. It was a woman, her head slightly bowed, her hair damp and her arms held by her sides beneath the water. Using the last of her strength Aurelia curved one arm through the water, then another.

‘Help me,’ she said weakly to the woman when she was close enough, but when she looked up her breath caught in her throat and her blood froze.