There were some old desks and plastic meeting chairs set up on the stage at the front of the room and Crofty, as we call him, helped Ruby into one of the chairs.

I flipped my notebook open and started to take a few notes, including how Ruby looked – which was exactly as you might expect for somebody whose mum was missing: wrung out, pale, stressed out of her mind. Her hands were shaking a bit, and she was wearing one of those Lady Jayne velvet headbands to keep her dark hair off her face. She’s only little, so it was hard to see her face behind the forest of microphones. Ruby’s from England and she obviously hadn’t anticipated the weather: it was 38 degrees in Sydney that day but she had on a tartan-patterned skirt with a pin at the side, pantyhose, and a maroon turtleneck. She must have been sweating, and near delirious with jetlag, but she was doing her best to hold it together.

Crofty sat down beside her and he did his usual spiel. ‘Hello, everyone, I’m Detective Senior Sergeant Croft of the Rose Bay local area command.’ And then he said, ‘This is Ruby Moore. Ruby has flown out from London to be with us today. Ruby’s mother, Agnes Moore, was visiting Sydney in September and was due to fly out on 23rd September, which was the day of the dust storm. But she didn’t fly out.’

There isn’t going to be anyone in Sydney on the morning of 23 September – I’m talking about the year 2009 – who won’t remember the dust storm: the whole city woke up to find the sky glowing pink. And when I say the sky, I actually mean the whole city was glowing pink: sky, ground, buildings, even the sand on the beach. I remember looking out my window shortly after five-thirty, which is when I set my alarm to go off, and thinking, ‘Whoa!’ And then, ‘Right, so this is how the world ends.’ Because that was how it looked, like the sky was on fire. But then I put on the Today show, and Lisa Wilkinson was saying, ‘Don’t panic, we haven’t been hit by an asteroid or anything like that, it’s just a dust storm,’ and they were showing pictures of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach and everything, bathed in this pink colour.

Detective Croft said, ‘Of course, Ruby and her family are really hoping that people will remember exactly what they were doing that day because that was the day her mum went missing. Then he looked at Ruby and asked if she wanted to say anything. Ruby launched straight into her spiel in her upper-class accent. ‘Thank you all so much for coming. Detective Croft is quite right: I am hoping that everyone will remember what they were doing on the day of the dust storm because Mum was due to fly out of Sydney that day but she was never seen at the airport, and we don’t know what happened to her.