There were a few more questions after that, yielding not much more detail, and then Detective Croft said, ‘Okay, guys, that’s probably enough for now. You’ve all got your press packs and you’ve got the number for Crimestoppers . . .’

I went back to my office at The Sunday Times and straightaway put a call in to a contact of mine at the Rose Bay coppers – not Crofty but one of his colleagues, and no, I’m not going to give his name away because I’m a reporter and no reporter would do that to a source. I asked him if he could put me in touch with Snow Delaney. I had in mind getting a few quotes from her, and maybe a picture of the two sisters together if one existed, to jazz the story up a bit. But he put the kibosh on that request immediately, telling me that Snow wanted nothing to do with the media.

‘She’s a bit of an odd one, Tap,’ is how he worded it. ‘You’d think she’d be willing to do whatever she could to help drum up some publicity, but, well, she’s cold like a fish.’

I said, ‘Is she a suspect?’

He said, ‘Nah, from what we can tell Mrs Moore left her house in pretty good nick. Look, we’re keeping an open mind, but to be honest we’re not thinking foul play. More likely the lady has taken a fall in the low visibility . . . But yeah, you’d still reckon the sister might give enough of a stuff to turn up at the press conference.’

I couldn’t publish any of that, obviously, it being what we call ‘off the record’, but I wrote up what I had – sisters raised apart, finally coming together, and now one of them was missing – and the story got a reasonable run the next day. In terms of lighting a media storm, though, it didn’t, and there was no real follow-up, I suppose because there wasn’t much else to say.

It can’t have been more than a week later that I was having a beer with my contact from the Rose Bay coppers. He said, ‘You know we never heard a word about the British lady who went missing in that storm.’

‘What were you hoping to hear?’ I asked.

My mate looked grim. ‘Well, pretty much anything would have been helpful. It’s like she’s walked off the edge of the planet.’ And that’s where things stayed, at least until 23 December, when the editor called me into his office and said, ‘You know the lady who wandered off in the dust storm? The family’s giving another press conference. Why don’t you go along and see what’s up?’

I’d been working on other things, so I said, ‘Has there been a break in the case?’

The editor said, ‘No, I don’t think so, but the cops are saying a couple of other family members will be along this time, maybe the sister. Did you say her name was Snow? Maybe she’ll be there?’ So I went along, but it wasn’t Snow, it was Ruby with her brother, Steven, and his wife, all of them out from England.