‘I said to Mark, “Don’t you let them do it. Don’t let them corner you.” But it was too late because next thing, nine months on or whatever, I found the same girl crouched over the toilet complaining of a “sore tummy”. I looked in the bowl, and there was a pool of blood in it. I pulled her off the toilet, into the hall, and it was clear to me that this was more than a miscarriage or what-have-you. She was having the baby, there in the toilet.’

The detective, still trying to play cool, says, ‘How is it that you didn’t notice that, Ms Delaney? Before she actually began having the baby, I mean?’

Snow said, ‘She was so fat! All the mentally retarded ones are so fat! They don’t do any exercise. They’ve got no control over their appetite. They’d eat sweets all day if you let them, and sugar right out of the bowl, spoons of Milo, everything. That’s part of why I went on to tube-feeding.’

The second detective said, ‘What did you do, Ms Delaney, when the baby started coming?’

Snow said, ‘I did what I could. I lay the mother down, and helped pull the thing out – not easy with her moaning and groaning and howling and thrashing and saying, “It hurts, it hurts” – and I was saying, “Well, of course it hurts, you stupid little girl. What have you done to yourself?” And I was pretty angry with Mark, too, but he kept saying, “It wasn’t my fault, she jumped me.” And that made sense, because that’s what the mother was like, so I went back to where she was lying on the floor, and there was this infant, and I said to Mark, “What are we going to do?” And what could we do? We would simply have to accommodate one more.’

The detective said, ‘And so Angus became one of the family?’

Snow said, ‘I wouldn’t put it like that. I took him in. What choice did I have?’

The detective said, ‘And the mother is one of the girls that’s still with you?’

Snow said, ‘Of course! But she doesn’t know she’s got a baby. She thinks Angus is a doll.’

The whole transcript is like that, strange and cold, but despite all that she was admitting to, in terms of cutting the tongues and clipping the limbs of the children, Snow seemed to think, right until the last hurdle, that she’d be walking out of that interview room that day, when actually what happened was that she was marched out to the divvy van, taken to court and charged with child abuse.

Chapter Twenty-two

Dear Jack,

You asked me what it was like going into remand at Silverwater, and I don’t mind admitting that I was in a panic about it, but it’s amazing what you can cope with.

Silverwater is the same prison where they’ve got Kath Knight, and if you don’t know her, she’s the lady who stabbed and stripped and skinned her boyfriend, boiled his head in a pot with leeks and potatoes, carved up his flesh for his children to eat, and served it on plates in the dining room.