Just before I was about to serve, Mark wheeled two of the children out to meet her – from memory it was Sonya and Nadia, both in electronic wheelchairs and maybe not looking very cute. I’d combed their hair and restrained their hands so they couldn’t scratch their faces and make them bleed, but obviously it’s still a shock to some people when they see kids like that.

Agnes was very good, saying, ‘Oh, oh, I hadn’t realised!’ And then she was full of praise for what we were doing at Delaney House, and full of questions about how many kids we’d had over the years, and asking how we managed.

I showed her a few little tricks that we did to make life easier for us, and for the kids that came to us, and then Mark took the girls back to their room and I got on with serving the lunch.

The police have asked me a hundred times what we talked about, and I’ll tell you what I told them: she basically bored me with tales of coming to Australia when she was a girl. She went on and on about her own family – that daughter Ruby, the one I call the troublemaker, and her brother, Steven, who sounded dull, and five grandchildren whose names I can’t remember. And the big elephant in the room was my father’s will because she never mentioned that.

She wanted to see some photographs of Mum and Dad, and of me when I was growing up. I had prepared for that and put an album on the table. She was going through all the pictures of my dad when he was a younger man, saying, ‘Oh, isn’t he handsome! Look at that pork-pie hat,’ and so on, all boring.

At some point she got up and went to the loo, and she must have taken a wrong turn off the corridor because she was gone for ages. By the time I found her she was looking all confused, like old ladies look when they’re lost.

I served chopped jelly for dessert – red and green cubes, in bowls – and I was trying to get her to have a cup of tea, so I could sort of bring the lunch to an end, but then she announced that Doug had told her I had Dad’s ashes. That was true – I did – but there was no way I was going to get the little silk bag and put it out on the lunch table.

And then she was going on about Dad, saying, ‘I wish I’d known him.’ I couldn’t help myself, I said, ‘Well, too late for that, I suppose,’ which was meant to be a bit light and funny, but she didn’t seem to get that I was joking.

Pretty soon after that we called her a cab and off she went, and that was the last we saw of her. But then maybe two days later her daughter, that Ruby, rang me saying, ‘Have you seen our mum?’