Ben opened up the questions. He said, ‘The house you raided today – Delaney House – is it the same house that the British tourist, Agnes Moore, went missing from?’

It seems like Masonwells hadn’t expected this, at least not as the first question. I imagine he’d expected it would be about all the kids in various states of undress that had just been carted out of an old house in Bondi. He said, ‘Not exactly right, Ben. Agnes Moore visited this house – the house we raided today – before she disappeared last September.’

Ben said, ‘She was here the day she disappeared, wasn’t she?’

Masonwells said, ‘No, the day before, I believe.’

‘And it’s her sister, isn’t it, who runs this place?’

‘That’s right.’

I could see some of the other reporters, recorders and mikes up to Masonwells’s mouth, getting a bit frustrated with Ben’s line of questioning. Clearly they wanted to get on to the topic of the kids who had just been carted out of the house, and couldn’t get where Ben was going.

But Ben, who’s like a dog with a bone, said, ‘Right, so what’s the link between today’s raid and the disappearance of Agnes Moore?’

Masonwells sighed and said, ‘Look, Ben, I can see where you’re going but we’re not commenting on that at this stage. I’m here today to talk about the raid on Delaney House if that’s okay with you.’

A second reporter – he’s out of frame so I’m not sure who it was – said, ‘Why did you raid Delaney House today? And whose children are they that you’ve taken out of there?’

‘Look, this is a complicated investigation,’ Masonwells replied. ‘It’s going to take some time for the details to unravel. Delaney House is obviously a facility for disabled children. It’s a residential facility. The children who live here, they are placed here by the welfare department, and all I can really say is that the police raided Delaney House today on the basis of information we received from a third party.’

A reporter can be heard saying, ‘What third party?’

Masonwells said, ‘No, I’m not going to name the third party. It was a tip-off from the public. What I will say is that in response to various concerns, we have removed a number of children from the house.’

Obviously that person was Lenore Wallace but her name was then being kept out of it.

A fourth reporter piped up: ‘But why have you removed them? Is it a case of child neglect, or child abuse? And how many children are we talking about?’

‘In total, we removed twenty children from the house.’

From this point the questions started coming thick and fast from several directions, and it seems to me that Masonwells was having difficulty making out what was being asked of him. But one question he did answer was: ‘What kind of state were the children in when your officers found them?’

Masonwells said, ‘Well, obviously we expected the children to be disabled, or to have illnesses of some kind. But they . . .’ He paused for a moment, before adding: ‘Actually, I don’t think I want to say more than that at this stage.’