I asked if she knew who owned the house or what had gone on there. When she said no I told her a bit about Delaney House, and about Beth Bannerman being found under the deck, and she shuddered and said, ‘That’s not nice! In my country we have a belief in ghosts.’

I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I told her that another lady – the owner’s sister – had also gone missing and hadn’t been found.

She said, ‘Oh no! Maybe the police will come and look for her?’

I told her I didn’t think so. Cops practically lifted Delaney House off its foundations after they found Beth Bannerman’s body, and they moved thirty-two trailers worth of soil.

Mrs Moore isn’t there.

It seems to me that the investigation has basically stalled. That’s as frustrating for me as it is for anyone. I’d love to be able to wrap it all up in a bow for you, and say, yes, they found her! And Ruby’s got some peace of mind. But this is real life, not a TV crime drama, and some disappearances just go unsolved, and all the gut feeling in the world won’t make the police charge Snow Delaney with the murder of either of the women who went missing from that house.

At most, what they have is circumstantial evidence.

They’ve got the fact that Beth Bannerman’s body was found at Delaney House, but that doesn’t tell anyone anything about how she ended up dead.

They’ve got the email Mrs Moore wrote to Ruby after the lunch, where she mentioned wanting to do something ‘for the children’.

To my mind, that should qualify as evidence that Mrs Moore had changed her mind about not making a claim on her father’s estate, particularly when you add the fact that Snow told me in one of her letters that ‘Agnes Bloody Moore’ had some kind of problem with what she saw at Delaney House.

There’s also the fact that Mrs Moore tried to call 999 from her room at the Sir Stanford the night before she went missing. Obviously she was trying to reach police. She wasn’t in a panic. She didn’t call immediately upon returning to the hotel. She dialled only once so maybe, like Lenore Wallace, she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was about Delaney House that bugged her.

Then there’s the call she received, just before she went out. Who knew she was at the hotel, if not Snow Delaney?

I’ve pretty much given up arguing about the case with my mate from Rose Bay, but I remember one particular night, we pulled up bar stools at the Bondi Hotel, and he basically said, ‘I’d love to be able to place a call to Mrs Moore’s family in London, saying, “We’ve charged Snow Delaney with murder.” But it’s not going to happen. We’ve got no body. We’ve got no forensics. We’ve got no nothing.’

I said, ‘You’ve got Snow’s letter to me, saying that “Agnes Bloody Moore” did have a problem with how she was treating those kids.’