Now, it isn’t a secret that the Moore siblings aren’t close. I could go into the ins and outs of it – something to do with Steven’s wife not wanting Ruby to bring a turkey at Christmas or some such thing – but they’d put all that on the back burner for the press conference. I could tell just from looking that they’d been doing it tough. Ruby had lost a fair bit of weight since I’d last seen her back in October, and it was weight she could not afford to lose. So she was sitting there, basically skin and bones, quite a contrast to Steven, who is one of those podgy English blokes who tends to turn beetroot-red in the face when he’s under a bit of pressure.

Ruby was the first to speak, saying, ‘Thank you all for coming,’ which was a bit embarrassing since there were only three of us this time, down from around seven at the first press conference. I took that to mean the other reporters knew perfectly well that Snow wouldn’t be there.

Ruby said, ‘It’s now been more than eleven weeks since we’ve seen our mother and we’re obviously frantic. We’re so close to Christmas and Mum absolutely loves this time of year. It’s inconceivable to us that she wouldn’t be in touch. It’s completely out of character for her to just wander off . . .’ and so on, like that.

Steven spoke next: ‘What we need to know is if anyone saw anything out of the ordinary that day. We know there was a dust storm in Sydney and it kind of threw everything off kilter, but somebody must have seen something . . .’

His wife, Irene, was sitting beside him, not saying much.

Detective Croft handed out new pictures of Agnes, including one where she was helping a grandkid – it turned out to be Ruby’s boy, Rocco – get a train out of its wrapping paper, and another where she was posed beside the Opera House, which had obviously been emailed before she went missing.

I went back to the office and wrote another article, saying the lady who disappeared in the dust storm was still unaccounted for and her grandkids were really going to miss her at Christmas. But I’m not even sure it got printed. I can’t find a clipping in the files and an internet search didn’t turn anything up, which is usually a good sign that it was cut.

I might have walked away from the story at that point – the editor obviously wasn’t that interested, despite sending me down there – but then I found myself with some time on my hands in the slow period after Christmas, and rather than try to scratch a new story out of nothing I got on the blower and asked my contact at Rose Bay if the Moore family was still in town and, if so, whether I could contact them.

Police are sometimes reluctant to give the press access to families in crime stories, but Ruby had insisted upon seeing any reporter who showed interest in her mother’s disappearance, so he gave me a mobile number for her, and I rang to introduce myself and ask if I could come out and talk to her a bit more.