Maybe you’re thinking, ‘But how can they let Snow take the house, when Mrs Bannerman was found under it?’ But answer me this: who’s going to stop me? It’s not like I’m charged with anything to do with Mrs Bannerman going missing, and if they had something on me, they would have charged me by now.

Same goes for Agnes, by the way. Don’t think they wouldn’t charge me if they had something on me. Big problem for them, then, that they don’t.

Snow

Chapter Twenty-six

It isn’t always easy as a journo to get people to talk to you, and I’ll admit that I’ve been pretty lucky this past year, in that most of the people I’ve wanted to interview about Snow have been willing to sit down with me.

Beth Bannerman’s niece, Rebecca Bannerman, was no exception. I called her one Sunday afternoon about six months ago, and explained where I was at: Snow had been writing to me from prison, and I’d been writing back. Snow was trying to convince me that she had nothing to do with her sister going missing.

Rebecca said she’d be more than happy to help in any way she could, and when I pulled into the street opposite her house she was already standing at the door. She’s forty-eight, a mother of three, and slim as a twig. She had black leggings on; flat, black shoes that were more like slippers, and a black polo-neck jumper. And there was a black labradoodle with curls all over its forehead standing beside her at the front door. Her fingers were working the curls on his forehead. She didn’t look nervous about a reporter coming to visit. She looked as keen as I was to get something done.

‘I suppose you already know this, but my Aunt Beth was always a little strange,’ she said, pretty much as soon as we’d settled down into the chairs on her back porch. ‘I wouldn’t have met her more than once or twice, because she was at war with my father, her brother, over something.’

I asked Rebecca if she knew what the feud was about. She said, ‘No, but it was long-standing, and it was all on Beth’s side. I always thought it was a shame because Dad would basically say, she doesn’t want a bar of me, and I can’t figure out why. I quizzed him a few times, and that was the only answer I got, although of course I’d also heard around the traps that Aunt Beth was an “eccentric”, which I took to mean she was a bit mad.’

Rebecca’s home is on Sydney’s north shore and she doesn’t often visit Bondi, so years went by without her seeing her aunt’s house.

‘Some time in the 1970s, Dad became aware that a young man – it was Mark Delaney, although we didn’t know his name at the time – had been living with Beth for some years, and that was a bit of a concern.