Next came the matter that had already been raised by Joe Potter at the press conference outside Delaney House: how twenty children came to be removed from the house, despite the Department having placed only nineteen children in Snow’s care.

One of the two detectives said, ‘We’re a bit confused, how is it that there were twenty children in Delaney House?’

Snow said, ‘I already told police at the house. Why do I have to keep explaining everything? One of them is Mark’s. I’m not going to deny that. One of the little boys, he comes from Mark.’

The first detective says, ‘And that little boy, what’s his name?’

Snow said, ‘Mark calls him Angus.’

The detective said, ‘I take it you’re not the mum?’

‘No way.’

‘Would you mind telling us who the mother is? We’re going to want to contact her, obviously.’

Snow said, ‘You’re not going to have to look far. You’ll have the mum in your custody already.’

Of course I’ve got the benefit of hindsight, but reading the transcript it took me about a second to work out what she meant: Mark had fathered the child with one of the children she was supposed to be taking care of, in Delaney House. But the detective who was asking the questions didn’t seem to be able to get his head around it.

He said, ‘Your husband had a child with one of the children?’

Snow said, ‘He’s not my husband, and it wasn’t his fault. He was raped.’

The detective said, ‘Excuse me?’

Snow said, ‘He was raped by one of those girls. Most of them are nymphomaniacs. Talk to anyone who works with them, the ones with mental problems in particular, they can’t stop themselves. You have to pull them off each other, they go at it like rabbits.’

I know enough about policing to know a few of the old techniques, one of which is to maintain one’s cool, to try to make the person in the hot seat feel what they’re saying is totally reasonable when it’s actually reprehensible.

The detective said, ‘That must have been hard for Mark, having girls around, flirting all the time.’

You can’t pick up tone from an interview transcript, but my guess would be that Snow answered pretty enthusiastically. She said, ‘I’m not blind to Mark’s faults. He has a problem with the pokies. I wish he’d give the smokes way. But the idea that he was interested in any of the children we got from the Department, I can tell you now, no way. He was raped! This girl, she’s an absolute monster, always taking her underpants off in public, always waving her tail around, and she threw herself at him. I saw it happen. He pulled away as soon as he heard me, ran out of the room with his pants around his ankles, stumbling and falling toward the hall. I thought, how could he? And I followed him down to the bedroom, saying, ‘What are you playing at, Mark?’ But he explained to me, she was basically leading him on. Because they were like that. It’s part of the reason I stopped taking ones that could walk and talk.