‘I was there for Jim when his wife died, and I saw him resisting Snow’s efforts to put him in a nursing home, telling her flatly that he’d managed for years on his own and could do so again. I was one of the people who used to visit him after his wife died. He’d taken to feeding rosellas that came to sit on the wires of his old Hills hoist in the afternoon, and some afternoons there would be hundreds and hundreds of birds out there. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people thought he was a bit nuts.’

He wasn’t nuts, that’s for certain, but I’ll let Doug Grenfell tell the story.

‘At some point in the late 1980s, or the early 1990s, Jim was given an old computer – not a Commodore but one of the competitors – and the first thing he did was take it apart to see how it worked. Given that he was an electronics engineer – electronics was what he did at the Victoria Railways, and he had that shop, Olarenshaw Electrics – he easily spotted a flaw in its design.

‘There was some problem with the ways the wires or charges interacted with each other – I don’t pretend to understand it – and Jim quickly figured out a way to solve the problem by creating a new circuit that made the motherboard more stable. He sold that invention to the computer company for a significant amount of money. I know because I handled the paperwork.

‘I was a junior solicitor in those days and I remember being pretty impressed that this old guy – Jim would have been in his sixties then, so ancient to me – had pulled off this coup. He asked me to use the money to buy three blocks of land at Ocean Grove, out on the peninsula. And here’s the thing: he never told anyone about it, not his wife, not his daughter, nobody.’

I couldn’t quite see the logic there but Doug Grenfell could.

‘He didn’t trust the bloke that Snow had hooked up with,’ he said, leaning back in the office chair with his own Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hands. ‘That Mark Delaney bloke, he didn’t trust him. And he wasn’t with Ros – that’s Snow’s mum – at that time, so there was no reason to say anything there either.’

It’s not entirely clear whether Snow’s dad ever visited the land in Ocean Grove, although I suppose he must have done. Doug told me he had power and water connected only because the council ordered him to do it. All rates for the property, and other notifications, were sent to the offices of Doug Grenfell and Sons.

‘The land increased in value over time but Jim never showed any interest in liquidating those assets,’ Grenfell explained. ‘Not when he moved back in with Ros while she was being treated for cancer, and not when he was diagnosed with cancer himself, seven years after Ros died. The reason, probably, was that Jim’s cancer was already advanced when it was discovered. The only treatment was palliative, designed to ease him into the grave.