Sisters of Mercy
About the Book
‘A complex, unpredictable novel, in the best kind of way . . . One to make you think’ Sunday Age
Snow Delaney was born a generation and a world away from her sister, Agnes.
Until recently, neither even knew of the other’s existence. They came together only after the reading of their father’s will – when Snow discovered, to her horror, that she was not the sole beneficiary of his large estate.
Now Snow is in prison and Agnes is missing, having disappeared in the eerie red dust that blanketed Sydney on 23 September 2009.
With no other family left, Snow turns to crime journalist Jack Fawcett, protesting her innocence in a series of defiant letters from prison.
Has she been unfairly judged?
Or will Jack’s own research reveal a story even more shocking than the one Snow wants to tell?
‘This clever, well-written book flows smoothly and keeps its secrets well hidden . . . an interesting read’ Sunday Canberra Times
‘Mystery and social commentary are intertwined here in a tightly held, thought-provoking work’ Daily Telegraph
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Reading Group Questions
Extract from No Place Like Home
Chapter One
Also by the Author: Ghost Child
I Came to Say Goodbye
Matilda is Missing
About the Author
Praise for Sisters of Mercy
Copyright Notice
Loved the book?
Sisters of Mercy
CAROLINE OVERINGTON
For Omi and Opi
Chapter One
I’ll be honest and say I got a bit of a shock when I started getting letters from Snow Delaney.
The first of them arrived in April 2011, by which time she was already in prison.
Apparently Snow decided to write to me after her lawyer – or, more accurately, her old lawyer, the one she’s now sacked – gave her copies of some of the articles I’d written about her case.
They must have got up her nose, those articles, because Snow accused me in that first letter of getting ‘key facts’ wrong and of being biased against her.
I wrote back, asking her to tell me where I’d gone wrong, and then Snow replied, and so on and so forth for more than a year.
Some people might be wondering what exactly Snow hoped to gain by writing to me, but I reckon it was pretty obvious: I’m a reporter, and she wanted to convince people that she’s innocent of everything she’s ever been accused of doing.
As to what I was doing making Snow my penfriend, well, I reckon that’s obvious too.
I was trying to coax some kind of confession from her, so I could put the minds of some good people to rest.
I see now that’s not going to happen. I got a letter from the State government a few months back, telling me I was officially banned from writing any more letters to Snow while she’s in prison, and since I haven’t heard from her I take it she’s also banned from writing to me.
I’m annoyed, mostly because I believe that Snow had something to do with the disappearance of her sister, Agnes Moore, and now I’ve lost my chance to trip her up on that point.
At least one of my contacts in the New South Wales police force agrees that Snow knows more than she’s saying. Cops, though, spend too many years watching tricky lawyers get dodgy people off the hook, and for them it’s all about getting enough evidence to prove it in a court of law.
Evidence that’s legally admissible tends not to be as important to reporters. For us, it’s all about what makes sense – and what makes sense, at least to me, is that Snow Delaney needs to stay behind bars.
Mr Jack Fawcett
c/o The Sunday Times
Sydney, NSW, 2000
Dear Mr Fawcett,
You don’t know me, although you seem to think you do.
My name is Snow Delaney. That’s right, I’m the real Snow Delaney – the one who is actually not like the person you write about in your newspaper.
I’ve been reading your articles and I want you to know that you’ve got key facts wrong.
Like most reporters I don’t suppose you care what the facts are, and you’re probably so biased against me it doesn’t even matter what I say, but if you’re ever interested in finding out the truth you should get in touch. I don’t expect to hear from you, though, because no journalist I’ve ever met has been interested in facts, only in sensationalism.
Yours sincerely,
Snow Delaney
Silverwater Prison
Dear Ms Delaney,
Thank you for your letter. I’m sorry that you think I have made mistakes in my articles about you. Please write back to tell me where I’ve gone wrong so I can, if necessary, issue a correction.
Yours sincerely,
Jack Fawcett
Journalist
The Sunday Times
Dear Mr Fawcett,
So, you decided to write back to me! I’m surprised because most of the journalists I’ve written to don’t bother to reply.
You asked me what mistakes you’ve made. Where do you want me to start? For example, you wrote in The Sunday Times that nobody knows how I got the name Snow.
I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous – everyone knows how I got the name Snow.
You seem to think that I know stuff that I actually know nothing about. Like, you said I must have had something to do with my sister Agnes going missing, and that’s complete rubbish. Why should I know anything about what happened to Agnes? I wasn’t even there when she wandered off.
All in all, Jack, you’ve put yourself up like you’re some kind of expert on me, but actually you don’t know me and maybe you even owe me an apology.
Yours sincerely,
Snow Delaney
Silverwater Prison
Dear Ms Delaney,
Thank you for your letter.
You say that everybody knows how you got the name Snow but since I have no idea you’ll have to fill me in.
You are quite right, I do believe that you know more than you are saying about the disappearance of your sister. I’m sorry that you think that’s unfair, but you still haven’t told me precisely where I have gone wrong in my stories so I can start working on my correction.
While you are at it, why don’t you take some time to tell me how you are being treated in Silverwater because I’m also interested in your rehabilitation?
Yours sincerely,
Jack Fawcett
Journalist
The Sunday Times
Dear Jack,
God, you made me laugh just then. You’re interested in my rehabilitation?
Don’t tell me that you’re one of those people who think prison is supposed to rehabilitate people, because if you are you have less of an idea how things work than I thought.
Prison doesn’t rehabilitate. What prison does is teach people how to take drugs and how to be lesbians, and if you think I’m lying you should come here and see it for yourself.
Every single one of the women in here with me is zonked out of their head on Valium or methadone, and the ones who aren’t zonked out are cuddled up doing open-mouthed kissing with each other. The weird thing is most of them weren’t gay before they got here and I know that because they’ve got kids.
Anyway, don’t pretend you’re interested in me when all you’re really interested in is getting a scoop, not that you’re going to be able to get much of a scoop since you’re confused about everything.
You want to know what you got wrong. Well, for example I saw in your article how you drove to my old home town of Deer Park and you went around to all the old neighbours asking about me. You talked to old Mrs Andrewartha who used to live two doors up and she said, ‘Oh, we couldn’t believe it when we heard that Snow was in jail.’
She can’t believe it? I can tell you for free that I can’t believe it, Jack.
She said, ‘Oh, she was such a nice girl and she had that lovely name, Snow, and we always wondered where she got it.’
Do you know what I thought when I read that, Jack? I thought, ‘How can Mrs Andrewartha still be alive? She was already an old bag when I was a girl!’
No, I’m joking, what I actually thought was, ‘How can Mrs Andrewartha not know how I got the name Snow? Because it’s pretty obvious.
My first name is Sally.
My middle name is Narelle.
My surname before I changed it, which old Mrs Andrewartha knows since she lived next door to my mother for forty years, was Olarenshaw.
I don’t see how anyone needs to be told that when your name is Sally Narelle Olarenshaw, your initials are going to be S. . .N. . .O. SNO, Jack?
Snow.
So that’s one mistake you made, but that’s not the only one. You said, ‘Snow had a pretty good time of it when she was a kid, living in a nice house on Station Road with her mum and dad, and going to a good Catholic school,’ or something like that.
You said, ‘It wasn’t like her sister, who had to grow up in the orphanage,’ and boo-hoo.
I’ve got to tell you, Jack, when I read that I thought, ‘So that’s how he thinks things work, is it?’ I had a mum and dad so my life must have been perfect, and Agnes got left in an orphanage so she deserves all the sympathy?
That might be how things work in your world, Jack, but they aren’t how things work in mine, and if you can’t understand that maybe I just shouldn’t write to you any more.
Yours sincerely,
Snow
Chapter Two
If someone had told me in September 2009 that I was about to spend two years investigating a missing person’s case, I wouldn’t have believed it. Missing persons cases aren’t really my bag, and that’s because it’s hard to get stories about missing people in the paper, and that’s because a couple of thousand people go missing every year and 98 per cent of them turn up.
Those who don’t, generally don’t want to be found or will never be found. It’s that last group that you sometimes hear about, but only a handful of those cases are ever interesting enough to capture the public’s imagination, such as when a kid gets taken from their bed, as happens about once every five years.
It was my editor at the Times, Tyrone O’Brien, who asked me to have a look at the case of Snow’s missing sister, Agnes Moore. From memory, his exact words were, ‘I’m sorry to do this to you, Tap –’ my first name is Jack but my colleagues tend to call me Tap, since my last name is Fawcett ‘– but apparently a British tourist, an old lady, went missing in that dust storm we had a few weeks back. The cops want to put out an appeal for anyone who might have seen her, so can I get you to go out to the Rose Bay cop shop?’
I knew O’Brien wouldn’t be asking if he didn’t think the story had potential, so I jumped in a cab and headed out to the Rose Bay cop shop, which isn’t actually such a bad place to visit on a sunny day. It’s right on the water and there’s usually the odd pelican standing around.
The press conference was held in what the cops call the ‘ante-room’ – a little room off the main hallway. I’ve been in it a thousand times. There was a female copper standing by the door handing out press packs, so I took one of those and pulled up a seat in front of the little stage. From memory, I was one of maybe seven reporters there that day. We sat around exchanging a bit of chit-chat, and then a detective from Rose Bay – his name was Garry Croft – came walking in, with Mrs Moore’s daughter, Ruby Moore, not far behind him.
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.