‘But Mark wasn’t born yesterday and when I asked him, “Did you let her in?” he said, “No way.” I said, “Did you tell Aunt Beth she was here?” He said, “I didn’t tell her straightaway,” but then he decided he would tell her, and she decided she would go and visit this niece, and she put on her hat, and she left.’

They said, ‘And you weren’t at home when this happened?’

I said, ‘No, I was in Melbourne because Mum had cancer and she was dying. When I got back I noticed that Mrs Bannerman wasn’t around and I asked Mark about it, and he said, ‘She put on her sunhat, and said she was going to visit her niece.’

One of the cops said, ‘She did all this, despite having dementia?’

I said, ‘People with dementia can have good days and bad days.’

The cop said, ‘And it was after this that Mark started putting a deck on the back of the house, was it?’

I could see what they were getting at – you’d have to be an idiot not to see it – but I said, ‘Don’t you try to frame Mark for this, just because he built that deck. He built that deck because he wanted to do something nice for me because my mum was dying. If you’re saying he did that to cover up old Mrs Bannerman, that’s ridiculous.’

The detective said, ‘You don’t think he’d notice that he was covering over a human body?’

I said, ‘The spot where he built that deck – there was a huge crater there, a big hole from a Japanese sub. That pit was filled with old car parts and machinery and weeds. There could have been anything in there, and who would know?’

The homicide detective said, ‘And you’re trying to suggest that Mrs Bannerman might have fallen into that pit, got tangled up somehow, and Mark didn’t know that he was covering her over?’

I said, ‘You can speculate all you like but I’m telling you now: I was always on at Mark to do something about that pit. You couldn’t open the back door without thinking you might fall into it. He went to a lot of trouble to make that area nice. He sank the pylons, he poured the concrete, he hired the nail gun.’

It all made perfect sense to me, but the cops kept asking leading questions.

The detective said, ‘Mrs Bannerman wasn’t really Mark’s aunt, was she?’

I said, ‘She was as good as an aunt. She had always been his Aunt Beth.’

The police said, ‘But you said that Mrs Bannerman had gone to visit a real niece?’

I said, ‘That’s what Mark told me. The way he explained it, she had a brother but they hadn’t talked to each other for years, and this woman was his daughter. Maybe Beth didn’t want to die without putting things right. Maybe that’s why she wandered off to see her. Old people do strange things like that.’