For my part, I know I’m looking for someone or something to find responsible for my own actions, but I can’t escape my part.

Oh yes, Finn could have had a quiet life, a beautiful life. He had a great talent for doing nothing, which he called happiness, but he chose to go alone down the Tunnel, as he calls it here, and I hope I’m not deluding myself when I say he would not regret that now, whatever’s happened to him. For Finn has disappeared and, as I wait for the crash of sledgehammers against the door upstairs, I’m looking for a clue to tell me something, anything that might help me to find him.

There is much, too, about Finn himself in these notebooks which distracts me from my increasingly urgent task. There are details of his internal struggle to understand his motives, a struggle which I never fully understood, and that he never told me, despite the fusion of our love. During all the time I’ve known Finn, he never wanted to bring his own past like an evil spirit into our house. So he wrote it down in the notebooks and buried it with our secret story in this vault, which has hidden many things and many people in its long history.

And there is much in the notebooks about his feelings towards me.

‘There are three distinct spirits in our relationship,’ Finn once said to my grandmother at the dacha in Barvikha. This was back in the freezing winter weeks leading up to the millennium, when perhaps he and I were at our closest, and when trouble seemed far away. ‘There’s Anna, me and the spirit that joins us.’ My grandmother, with her peasant background, was comfortable with the world of spirits. She laughed with mirth and hugged him. Like many people whose lives he touched, Nana loved Finn.