Barrett said, ‘They’re doing DNA tests. Like everyone, we’re going to have to wait.’

I said, fine, whatever, and to be honest I was more curious than anything, and maybe a bit creeped out by the idea that there’d been a body in the back yard all the time I’d been living at Delaney House, and for who knows how long. But then three weeks or something went by, and the forensics or whatever they call it came back, and Barrett said, oh, it’s Beth Bannerman.

I was that stunned, Jack, I just said, ‘How can it be Beth Bannerman?’ Because as far as I knew, Beth Bannerman had gone to visit her niece one weekend while I was visiting Mum in Melbourne and I hadn’t seen her since.

‘How could her corpse have been found in the back yard?’ I said to Barrett. ‘Where was she exactly?’

He said, ‘She was under the deck.’

I said, ‘What are you talking about, she was under the deck?’

He said, ‘Under the concrete deck. Police are talking about laying some kind of charge.’

I said, ‘How can they charge me with anything? I didn’t even know that Mrs Bannerman was dead, let alone that she was buried at Delaney House. Has nobody even considered that she might have had an accident? That she was so old, maybe she had a heart attack?’

But Barrett kept saying, ‘She was buried under concrete, Snow . . . under the deck that Mark put down,’ like he was trying to get me to put two and two together and get five.

I said, ‘You’re not trying to tell me that Mark did anything to Mrs Bannerman. He loved his Aunt Beth.’

Barrett said, ‘The police are going to want to interview you.’ So the cops came out to the remand centre and introduced themselves and said, ‘We’d like to ask you some questions about the death of Mrs Bannerman.’

I said, ‘What do you want to know? She was a very old, very crazy lady, and something like eight years ago, she told my Mark that she was going to visit some niece of hers who had showed up at the house. He never seemed worried about it and it wasn’t my business to be worried about it either. Now my lawyer tells me you’ve found a skeleton under the deck and it’s hers, and all I can think is, she must have had a heart attack and fallen in the old pit we had there.’

The police said, ‘Okay, well, when was the last time you saw Mrs Bannerman?’

I said, ‘It was in September 2001, just before I went to Melbourne. It was when my mother was dying.’

The detectives said, ‘And Mrs Bannerman was gone when you got back?’

I said, ‘That’s right.’

They said, ‘Did Mark tell you where she’d gone?’

I said, ‘He told me that some woman had come to the house, claiming to be Beth’s niece. It didn’t take much to figure out what she was after, which was obviously Aunt Beth’s money.