Maren poured herself another drink, refilled my glass. ‘Aurelia drowned. In the fjord. Wrote a note, walked out into the night, and jumped off the cliff.’ I gave another gasp. Maren’s eyes turned to the window, where we both knew the cliff sat beyond the trees that shivered in the dark.

‘I knew something was wrong,’ she said, her voice beginning to break. ‘I knew. But of course, you never suspect someone is actually going to kill themselves.Suicide happens to other people. Not the people you love.’

I winced at this. Nobody cared about me. Maybe that’s why I deserved it. But then, this logic didn’t apply to Aurelia – everybody seemed to love her. Even her housekeeper.

‘You must have liked Aurelia very much,’ I said carefully.

She swirled those words around her brain. ‘Aurelia was a wonderful person. I grew protective of her.’

‘Protective?’ I asked, thinking of how snippy Maren was with the girls. I tried to imagine her in a different capacity to the woman I only ever saw wrestling an ancient vacuum cleaner around the rooms, or swearing in Norwegian at the Aga.

‘The problem with being a housekeeper is … you see things. I knew this when I took the job, of course. Family life is often … fractious, and messy. Being in someone else’s home means being in their lives. You don’t just keep the house, you keep the family, with all of its stains and grime. It requires a certain amount of emotional distance. You have to prevent yourself from being drawn in.’ She drained her glass. I savoured the word ‘family’. Family life. ‘I’m afraid I was never good at following rules,’ she continued, blowing a thick cloud of smoke to the side, ‘and even worse at preventing myself from being drawn in. Aurelia was the sort of woman who … what’s the expression? Wore her heart on her shirt?’

‘On her sleeve,’ I said, uselessly tugging at my sleeve.

‘She confided in me near the end. She told me she was hallucinating. Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. It was distressing her very much. She felt she was failing as a mother, as a wife.’