Ruby slipped straight off the David Jones stool onto her feet and we both put our napkins down. I quickly paid the bill saying, ‘Don’t worry, Rupert can afford it.’ We jumped in a cab and, on the way there, Ruby said, ‘Do you think this is a good idea? She might think we’re stalking her.’ And I said, ‘It’s the kind of thing I do all the time, so don’t worry.’

The minute I saw the house, I recognised it. Most people in Bondi will know which one it is: it’s the massive one that stands halfway along Bat Street, on the low side of the street, near the south end of Bondi Beach, the one that is painted bright pink, like fairy floss. The one that’s got all the pink turrets sticking up. It’s old and broken down, like the kind of place that must have had a story behind it – even before it became notorious as the house that Snow Delaney lived in.

The first thing that struck me, once Ruby and I had got out of our cab, was how hard it was going to be to get through the front gate. The house sits well back, and there’s an old cyclone fence around it. Paterson’s curse had grown wild over it – twice as high as the fence itself, and thick – so it was impossible to see through it.

There was a gate with one of those cheap white plastic intercoms, but you couldn’t even tell if it worked. I buzzed and nothing happened. I tried to see whether there was a way around the back but there wasn’t, so I took hold of some of the thick weed trunks and used them as a kind of climbing frame to pop my head up over the fence. The garden was full of those huge cobwebs the size of bed sheets that hang between the trees in Bondi, with those big spiders with fat backs and the St Andrew’s Cross bouncing in the middle of them.

I called out, ‘Yoo-hoo, anyone home?’ And you know how sometimes you get a sense that somebody is there but they don’t come out, like maybe you think you’ve seen a curtain move but you wouldn’t swear by it? It was a bit like that at Snow’s place.

I debated for a minute whether to hurdle the fence and knock on the door, and knowing what I now know I should have done, but there didn’t seem any urgency then.

I let my feet fall back down to the footpath and dusted myself off and said, ‘Well, if she’s home, she’s not answering.’ Ruby looked disappointed but not surprised and we were about to head back to the bus stop when a cheery-looking bloke across the road, who’d been painting his front fence, straightened himself up and said, ‘Can I help you folks?’

I said that I was from The Sunday Times and he didn’t seem surprised to hear it, saying, ‘We had some other media people here a few weeks back . . . Do you mind telling me what’s going on?’