‘I thought, “Don’t tell me some poor lady has just gone missing from there and that Snow Delaney doesn’t know anything about it. That woman is strange and that place is warped.” And I got straight on the telephone to Crimestoppers and I told them, “I put my daughter, Polly, in Delaney House for respite once, and I would never, ever do it again. The place is strange. Those people are strange.” And straightaway, the police said, “Do you mind if we come over? We’d like to interview you.”’

According to my contact at Rose Bay, the call from Mrs Wallace was like manna from heaven to detectives.

‘They told me they were dying for an excuse to get inside and have a look around Delaney House,’ Mrs Wallace continued. ‘The trouble was, they had no grounds to ask for a search warrant so they kept saying to me, do you believe your daughter – they meant Polly – do you believe your daughter was badly treated, or neglected at Delaney House?

‘I could tell they really wanted the answer to be yes, because then they could raid the place – they’d have suspicions of child abuse, you see. I said, “Well, the truth is, I don’t know what went on but Polly was very, very strange after she went to Delaney House.”

‘That obviously wasn’t quite enough for them because they said, “So, you suspect that she may have been badly treated while she was there?” And one of the police actually admitted to me, “Because if you do think that, we’d really have to search that place.” So I thought, to hell with it, and I said, “Yes! Yes, I do think that something might have happened to Polly while she was there. Yes, I do.”’

A matter of seconds after Mrs Wallace said those words, two of the plain-clothed police who had been standing with their backs to the wall, watching the interview, strode from her lounge room, phones to their ears. And not forty-eight hours later, a special team of New South Wales police and child protection workers raided Delaney House.

Chapter Nineteen

No journalist likes to admit that they missed the big break in a story but I have to confess that I missed the raid on Delaney House. In my defence I was out of town when it happened, in Victoria, covering an inquest into a different case altogether – so I was left to watch reports of it on the news, feeling gutted that I couldn’t be there.

As soon as I got back to Sydney, I went down to Bat Street in Bondi to see if I could find a neighbour who witnessed the whole thing. I was in luck, because the bloke I’d seen painting his fence, back when I’d first gone out to Delaney House with Ruby to see if we could get Snow to talk to us, had seen the whole thing.

Bill Carson had moved to Bondi forty-two years ago, when Bondi was ‘the kind of place real estate agents were embarrassed to show you around’. His wife, Shirl, grew up in Bondi, ‘back when you couldn’t swim because there were floaters in the water’.