to get the build on track. At nights he feels steamrollered, but secretly he’s enjoying the physical exertion. Takes his mind off things. But Clive—where has he been? On the phone, sending e-mails. It can’t take a solid week to pay an invoice. Has he even visited Dag?
Clive ignores him. “You here to take measurements?” he asks Derry.
“I think I’ll need to rethink my palette,” she laughs, glancing around, hand on her hip. “There’s much more light than I’d anticipated.” She stands by the wooden frame that marks the window, looks up and down. “Is this where the windows are going?”
“That whole wall,” Tom says.
“So it’ll let in a ton of light into the front of the room,” Derry says, heading to the back. “But it’ll still be slightly darker here.”
Tom shakes his head, points up. “We’re putting in sun pipes. Count on it being every bit as light as the front of the space.”
Derry taps on her iPad. “I’m thinking the walls in here will be mostly timber-clad, but at the back I want a sastrugi effect in a milky plaster over the concrete. Kind of a nod to the polar landscape.”
“Sounds good,” Tom says. On the iPad she shows him the palette of colors, textures, and key pieces she’s put together—milky white, biscuity beige, and Arctic meltwater blue. Cottony textures, clean, unobtrusive furniture handmade by Oslo craftsmen, bespoke ceiling lights, and table lamps made of leftovers from the iron girders. He likes that idea. Anything that can be recycled is good.
After an hour Derry returns to Granhus to begin ordering her fabrics and wallpapers. She’s not gone ten minutes when a commotion breaks out on top. Voices shouting. What now? Tom thinks. Probably the bloody moose again.
“I’ll go check it out,” Clive says, stepping onto the hoist. Tom steps out onto the scaffold and cranes his head up, only to duck back under as a stream of something milky pours down. It lands—splat—on the wooden planks of the scaffolding. It’s vomit. One of the workers actually puked over the side of the cliff.
“Clive, mate, send down the hoist!” he screams up, but just then his phone buzzes in his pocket.
“Yes?”
“You might want to come and have a look at this,” Clive says.
30
the murder of ingrid olsen
NOW
It had taken hours. Typing up the Norwegian newspaper clippings into Google Translate required a substantial cutting and pasting of Advanced Symbols for the extra vowels, å, ø, and æ, and for every little circle I missed out above the letter a or line scored through o, I ended up with a wonky translation. In the end, though, I got the gist.
The woman in the newspaper cuttings with whom Maren was so obsessed was Ingrid Olsen, a postgraduate marine biology student at the University of Tromsø. On the evening of October 23, 1983, she had been walking home after a night out with friends when she was dragged into an alley, raped, and murdered by a single blow to the head. She was twenty-two years old. Having prided itself on its excellent university, its extremely low crime rate, and a reputation as “the Paris of the Arctic,” the city of Tromsø was left in shock. Her killer was Anders Dahl, a twenty-year-old bartender from Bodø. The attack was random, and Anders was not known to have had any kind of relationship with Ingrid prior to the attack. He was jailed for life.
In other words, all my work was for nothing. There was nothing in the tragic story of Ingrid Olsen to shed any light whatsoever on the diary or on Aurelia’s death. Other than the fact that they looked like twins.
“Maren?” I knocked on her bedroom door.
“Yes?”
I walked in to find her by the window, looking down at whatever was outside.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the scene at the building site. “There’s been a lot of shouting about something or other, but I can’t quite see what it is.” She turned to me then, as though seeing me for the first time. “Shouldn’t you be with Gaia?”
“Derry’s with her just now, reading her a story. Coco’s asleep. So I’ve only got a few minutes, but I wanted to ask you something, if that’s all right.”
She detected the nervousness in my voice. I was nervous. I was gearing up to tell her about the diary and ask if she had planted it in my room for me to read. Either way, we needed