I fell asleep when I got home, and then I woke up at, I don’t know, nine o’clock, and I was hungry and groggy from whatever they give you, and my mother was in the lounge room watching Homicide or something like that, and Mr Cooper was standing at the ironing board, ironing my Catholic College uniform. Seeing me at the doorway in a long T-shirt, with mascara streaked down my face, you’d think my mother might have said, ‘Oh, come on, let’s get you something to eat,’ or something nice, but all she said was, ‘Go to bed, Snow. You’ve got school tomorrow.’

I ran back into the bedroom and pulled the stuffed animals over me so I could hide underneath them, but my mother stormed after me, saying, ‘Don’t you tantrum around the place, Snow. What you’ve done is terrible,’ and then she was going on about how I better not tell anyone because ‘if word gets out, you’ll have a reputation worse than the one you’ve already got’.

So that was that, and the weird thing about all of it was that I’d forgotten most of it, wiped it from my brain basically, until they brought it all up at the trial. I’m guessing you were in court that day, but anyway, it was around the time, maybe just before the judge was making his big speech about what a terrible person I am, at that bit where they let all the experts in to try to convince him not to lock me up and throw away the key. One of the psychologists said, that ‘episode’ – he meant the abortion – set me up for the trouble I got into in my life.

I thought at the time, ‘Well that’s kind of social worker talk,’ but now that I’ve had some time to think about it I don’t actually disagree with him, Jack. Because it was like that psychologist said: I was feeling, how did this happen? He said he loved me and who will love me now?

The psychologist said, ‘Oh, it’s no surprise that Snow then went looking for that affection anywhere she could find it.’ And I have to tell you, it was nice to hear something like that in the court, because up until that point it had basically been every witness was there to say what an evil person I am. Finally, there was somebody who could see that, whatever I was supposed to have done, it wasn’t my fault.

Snow

Chapter Six

The first thing police will do in a missing person’s case is try to trace the person’s movements in the twenty-four or forty-eight hours before they disappeared.

In the case of Agnes Moore’s disappearance, that meant talking to staff at the Sir Stanford, and it meant talking to Snow.

From what I understand, police knocked on her door in Bondi something like a week after the dust storm, which sounds like a desperately long time but remember there was at least a day during which Agnes was supposed to be on the plane, then some time during which enquiries were being made with airlines and then with the hotel, plus the routine time that goes by, while the police wait to see if somebody who has disappeared might just show up.