I said, ‘Right, and doesn’t that tell you what kind of family they are? She’s been missing seven years and they don’t even know?’

The detectives said, ‘Why would you say nothing for seven years, and then as soon as the seven years was up, report Mrs Bannerman missing?’

I said, ‘I suppose I was thinking, “She’s just a crazy old coot. She’ll turn up.”’

And then, when she did turn up, it was under the deck that Mark built. I felt so sorry for him, Jack. I mean, think about it: it must have broken his heart to know what he’d done, covering her over, and having barbecues on the deck, right on top of her. I was really badly worried about how he’d take it. And I wasn’t wrong because how long did he last in prison after he heard that? And after he heard that cops were thinking of ways to charge him with manslaughter, or maybe even murder, and of charging me with something too? He lasted barely a week, that’s how long he lasted.

It was Barrett who came and told me what he’d done. He said, ‘I have to tell you, Mark’s gone,’ and at first I thought, ‘They’ve let him out!’ But Barrett said, ‘No, no, he’s committed suicide,’ and I just didn’t believe it, I just flat out didn’t believe it. I was saying, no, no, no, and he had to show me the story from the newspaper before I would believe it.

Mark Delaney of the now infamous House of Horrors at Bondi was found dead in his cell last night.

That’s what they wrote, like it was good news. And it wasn’t true. He was not ‘found dead’ in his cell at all. He was still alive when they cut him down, and the police, being malicious, rushed him to hospital so they could get him on a life-support system.

‘They were after the deathbed confession,’ was how Barrett put it to me. ‘They kept him alive for a full day and they had a warrant so they could keep questioning him.’

It made me sick, hearing that. The idea of him lying there, full of tubes, with those cops probing him, saying, ‘If Snow’s got anything to do with this – with Beth, or with Agnes going missing – tell us now, and give the families some closure while you’ve still got a chance.’

I asked Barrett, ‘Is that even legal, keeping somebody alive like that? And whatever they said, you couldn’t use that in court, could you?’ Not that I was worried what Mark said but because cops shouldn’t be allowed to use stuff they get from people they’ve been torturing. Mark never wanted to be put on life support. He hated the idea of being kept alive, a vegetable like the children we’d had at Delaney House, with all that indignity. But they kept him alive – in a coma, but alive – trying to get some sort of confession from him. And what did they get?