And that’s why I got such a shock when he died, and his lawyer rang to tell me that he’d never basically trusted me enough to tell me the truth about anything.

Snow

Chapter Fourteen

When Snow Delaney refers to her dad’s lawyer, she’s talking about a man called Doug Grenfell, who has his own little practice in Deer Park.

I remember calling him after Snow got arrested and telling him what I was after: ‘I’m doing an investigation into the disappearance of Snow Delaney’s sister, and I was hoping you’d be able to help me.’

He asked if I’d come down to his office. It meant another trip to Melbourne, but it was one I was happy to make.

Doug Grenfell and Sons is on the fourth floor of a building above a Video Ezy store. I got the train there from the city, and couldn’t help noticing that the whole town had been taken over by what Snow’s mum would have called New Australians. I walked past a falafel kitchen, and past a Vietnamese bakery, and past a $2 shop with Chinese writing all over the windows.

There was no lift up to Doug Grenfell and Sons, so I had to traipse up two sets of stairs, avoiding where I could holding on to the blue banister, which had bits of chewing gum stuck underneath. Grenfell doesn’t have a secretary so it was a matter of waiting in one of the vinyl chairs until he got off the phone and came out.

We shook hands and he said, ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that somebody has agreed to take a look at this.’ He took a seat behind the Formica desk, and I could hardly see him there, with what looked like three months’ worth of work in manila folders towering all around him. For all his disorganisation he was a nice bloke – a good bloke – something you don’t see all that much with lawyers. He asked me if I wanted a coffee and I said yes, and it was Nescafé, from a polystyrene cup, just how I like it.

‘So do you think Snow had anything to do with it?’

That was the first thing he said in relation to Agnes being missing, and I had to answer honestly and say, ‘I think so but I can’t prove it.’

‘It’s just too much of a coincidence,’ he said, ‘that Agnes was at Snow’s house, and now she’s missing. But when I called the police to tell them that, they said Agnes had left the house in a perfectly good state of health, and there was no reason to think that she ever spoke to Snow again.’

I said, ‘But you don’t believe it.’

‘You bet I don’t.’

I asked him to tell me exactly when and how Snow found out that she had a sister called Agnes, and he sketched the basics for me, saying, ‘It gives me no pleasure to tell this story. I knew Jim Olarenshaw for more than twenty years. He was a friend of my father’s. I knew his wife, and I knew Snow. She was younger than me – ten years younger – but I knew that Jim was devoted to her when she was a little girl.