The Arson Squad had set up an office in the Morwell police station. This new grey modernist building, larger than might be expected for the region’s population, was just off the main street. The chimney towers of Hazelwood were visible from the windows, as they were from nearly everywhere in the coal town. In the old days, the power station’s bell rang at 7.30 am, then at 4.30 pm, and the men trudged to and from work. Most of those jobs were gone now. These days the station sat in the midst of a flaring crisis at the best of times, and, after the fire, it was surrounded by an alien landscape. Even when the brand-new toilets were flushed, the water was black. Local officers who were drilled in the day-in, day-out crimes of family violence and abuse now met with the newly homeless and the relatives of the missing, anguish not yet settled on their faces.

It’s basic policing theory that if you follow a chain and it yields no answers you return to the start. Four days after the fire had begun, on Wednesday 11 February, Detective Adam Henry decided to revisit the area of the blaze’s origin, half hoping some pointer might be lying there unnoticed. The day before, he had taken a police helicopter over the Valley and seen where the fire had travelled. It was a form of vertigo having the ground come up to meet him, for the day before that, on the Monday, along with the forensic team, he’d visited the places people died. He saw close up the torturous things the fire had done. Now he wanted to look again around the plantation.

Paul Bertoncello accompanied him, and in the unmarked Land Cruiser they drove back towards Churchill, passing a blur of gas turbines, coal-handling buildings, electricity wires and towers. Closer to the township, a sign pointed to the campus of Monash University; there were a few shops and a supermarket. Not a lot to see, only the uniform houses, coated grey from ash and the lingering smoke.

At the plantation they met Ross Pridgeon, the DSE fire investigator. Henry led them behind the crime scene tape, amongst the scorched eucalypts. The chimney reek was inescapable. The men walked around in the blackness, taking in the two marked areas of ignition. The bright little flags like bunting, pinned in the soot.

It was the first time Bertoncello had left the Morwell station, other than to sleep, in nearly seventy-two hours. While Henry had driven straight to this area last Sunday, Bertoncello had been directed to get an incident room ready for the operation at the station. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the devastation. Soon it would be known as Black Saturday: four hundred separate fires had burned in Victoria, giving off the equivalent of 80 000 kilowatts of heat, or 500 atomic bombs. Bertoncello quickly began to learn every acronym of emergency management terminology. Contacting the local ICC (Incident Control Centre), he met the EMT (Emergency Management Team) and a dozen other sets of initials, and tried to work out who was doing what so that the Arson Squad could concentrate solely on the criminal investigation.

Now he walked among the charred trees, looking at the burnt ground, trying to think, just think. There was only one road in and one road out. The first and obvious line of inquiry was to locate witnesses, to doorknock in the area. Those living nearby might have information about unfamiliar people or cars being around on Saturday, or perhaps the first firefighting crew had seen something. Bertoncello was already plotting out the next move.

He was a tall, slim man in his early thirties; his perfect baldness accentuated his facial features and rightly gave him a cerebral cast. In his spare time, Bertoncello chose to do jigsaws, Sudoku, and other logic puzzles. Sometimes he might stare at one for two or three days – a problem as inexplicable as this scorched scene – and not write a thing down, then at some point it would click. He’d piece together the right bits. It would all make sense. He was prevented now, though, from seeing the vast complexity of the damage by the surrounding hills: the topography compart-mentalised the view of the destruction.

Adam Henry had sat beside the crime scene photographer as the helicopter flew over this patch of ground. Hovered above the areas of origin, Henry saw the two deepening V-shapes where the fires had started, and then ash to the horizon. Oddly sensuous shapes unfurled underneath him as they flew low over gullies and crevices and rises, revealing houses that were fire-flattened, dead wildlife and farm animals, the shells of tractors and farm equipment, burnt fences, and surviving livestock wandering the debris-stricken roads, eating any vestiges of green.

The detective directed the photographer to each rectangle of burnt land that needed documenting. This was a version of omnipresence, seeing the death scenes he had investigated twenty-four hours earlier, but with no godlike power to intervene.

From the air, some houses looked to have been peeled. A roof skinned off one revealed a blueprint of ash. The spaces in which a family had slept, ate, washed were demarcated in black and white. From one angle, the rooms may have been the chambers of the heart. It was a mental exercise to see all this horror and not keep asking, almost as a tic: Why? Who?

For all the science, Adam Henry knew that arson was a crime of which the Arson Squad – like everyone else – knew very little. In the mid-nineteenth century, pyromania was considered to be ‘a morbid propensity to incendiarism, where the mind, though otherwise sound is borne on by an invisible power to the commission of this crime that is now generally recognized as a distinct form of insanity’.

Over the 75-year history of the mental health bible, the DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the classification of pyromania has fallen in and out of fashion and different editions’ pages. Today, of the multitude of people who deliberately light fires, only a scarce few are considered to have an all-consuming ‘fascination in, curiosity about and attraction to fire’ teamed with ‘pleasure and relief when setting fires’. The behaviour is now believed to be better accounted for by the DSM’s section on disruptive impulse control and conduct disorders. An individual’s tilt towards the antisocial and a mad lack of restraint.

Through the years, various agencies have tried to establish criteria for profiling fire-setters. But most international studies focus on the deliberate ignition of houses, cars and buildings, rather than wildfire arson, a form of fire-lighting that, although not unique to Australia, is a national specialty. Of vegetation fires in this country, 37 per cent are deemed suspicious, and 13 per cent maliciously lit (whereas 35 per cent are considered accidental, 5 per cent due to natural causes, and another 5 per cent due to reignition or spot fires. The rest are shelved under ‘other causes’.)

Adam Henry knew the basic hypotheses of the FBI and various other profiling systems, and was conscious some were fairly complicated. One prominent model used this equation to explain the behaviour: FIRE-SETTING = G1 + G2 + E, WHERE [E = C + CF + D1 + D2 +D3 + F1 + F2 + F3 + REX + RIN].

What the sum tended to find was that fire-setters were more often than not male; they were commonly unemployed, or had a complicated work history; they were likely to have disadvantaged social backgrounds, often with a family history of pathology, addiction and physical abuse; and many exhibited poor social or interpersonal skills. It was a plausible profile, but hardly different from that of many non-firesetting criminals. In other words, close to useless.

The Arson Squad was aware that there were more deliberately lit fires near the urban–rural fringe – places where high youth unemployment, child abuse and neglect, intergenerational welfare dependency and poor public transport met the margins of the bush, the eucalypts. And that pretty much described most of the towns in the Latrobe Valley.

Living back in Morwell, you were three times more likely than the state average to experience long-term unemployment (22 per cent of kids lived in jobless families). The rate of kids in out-of-home care was the highest in Victoria, as was the rate of crimes committed with children present. You were 2.6 times more likely to be a victim of domestic violence, and the rate of substantiated child abuse was three times the average. All these statistics that hid as much as they revealed.

Three days after Henry’s helicopter ride, local detectives would arrest a man they found dirty, with matted hair, on eighty-three incest offences. DNA testing proved he’d fathered four children with his daughter.

The area over which Henry had flown was full of what appeared to have been relatively peaceful bush blocks. That’s what it was like here: God’s own country alongside that of the beleaguered. As the helicopter turned, the trees became charred diagonals, and with each undulation the hills held up their damage for inspection.

Henry had grown up in the country himself. He knew you could feel a stirring, alone out in the bush. With no witnesses to your good deeds or your bad, the isolation gave you licence. Along a lonely bush road, what was to stop a person dropping a lit match, or leaning out the car window with a barbecue lighter? Henry looked upon the blackness beneath him and thought the arsonist could have been anyone.

From the air, the detective had noticed something strange about the pattern of the burnt land near where the fires had been lit. Although the blaze had initially stretched south-east from the eucalypt plantation, in the helicopter he realised there were also extensive scorched areas to the north of the ignition sites, behind those pristine radiata pines. He’d wondered if there could have been a third deliberately lit fire, whether the arsonist, after setting the first two, had kept going.

Now he, Bertoncello and Pridgeon were testing the theory. They drove along an access track through the pine plantation and parked near a dry creek bed. From here they walked towards the area that Henry had observed. Smoke was still rising from these trees, both standing and fallen. The undergrowth of scrub, wiregrass and blackberry was blackened or devoid of natural colour; leaves were crisp and brittle to the touch. The men started searching again for signs of the head fire, seeing if they could figure out the path the arsonist had taken.

Pridgeon wrote in his notebook: ‘can’t be too many ignition points as fire behaviour would be extreme. ie, need to be out of area quickly’. Saturday had been a day of such heightened alert, the arsonist must have known that plantation workers would be doing patrols, and that the CFA would soon be coming. Also, on the edge of the eucalypt forest there would have been an overwhelming scent of the trees’ oil in the air. If, in that explosive atmosphere, the odour was petrol you would run. Perhaps that was part of the thrill, but with the fire itself so dangerous, lighting multiple blazes could have left the firebug entrapped.

Standing amidst the burnt pine trees, Bertoncello had noticed a farmhouse on the top of a hill to the east. The house appeared undamaged, as if it had landed on a black planet. While Henry and Pridgeon kept searching for signs of a flanking or head fire, he decided to visit the house’s owners. He wanted to ask whether they’d been home around 1.30 pm on Saturday and if the area under suspicion had blazed then, or if the fire had doubled back here with the 6 pm wind change.

Walking up the steep hill, he became aware of a different kind of smell. Not burnt timber, but something acrid. The odour of incinerated building materials. He’d smelled it before as a young constable, turning up to house fires, and he’d done a lot more of that in his six months with the Arson Squad.

The previous week, Bertonello had been working in Morwell, assisting Taskforce Ignis with the investigation of the recent Delburn arson – the series of eight deliberately lit fires, three of which had joined up and burnt out of control. That had become a massive fire: until Saturday, the state’s worst in years. A $100 000 reward, big money around here, was being offered for information leading to an arrest. The Taskforce Ignis detectives had established that a suspected arsonist was in the vicinity of six of the Delburn fires. They knew this man wasn’t responsible for the Churchill blaze because he’d been under surveillance on Saturday. That was one suspect ruled out, but at the Morwell police station the phone had been ringing constantly with locals calling in their tips on other possible candidates.

Victoria Police had no centralised database containing known or suspected fire-setters. Regional police kept their own spread-sheets on locals they were worried about, but this information was often ad hoc, disjointed. As part of the Delburn case, Bertoncello had been sifting through the names of more than thirty people believed to have previously lit fires throughout the Valley.

In the following week, he was to come upon a small item in the newspapers about a woman on the list. Gippsland firefighters had converged on Morwell to protest the three-year jail sentence given to Rosemary Harris, who, two summers earlier, in nearby Driffield, was caught lighting fires with her son in the bush. The firefighters – some still waking in the night, crying, after Black Saturday – believed she deserved longer. At the time of the fires, she was twenty-nine and the boy was fifteen. Her other six children had been waiting in the car. At the sentencing, she was pregnant with her eighth child, and the rest had all been removed from her care.

Bertoncello reached the top of the steep hill and approached the farmhouse: weatherboard, raised on stumps. Just a few doors up the road, the Gibson brothers had died defending their parents’ house. Bertoncello assumed that in a community like this the residents knew their neighbours, and would be in shock. It was just before 11 am when he knocked on the door.

Liam Ferguson, a student in his early twenties, answered. He was still adjusting to the landscape he now saw when opening the door. Every window also had a new view.

He told Bertoncello that he had been at home – home as it was once known – on Saturday around 1.30 pm, with his parents and sisters. Suddenly they had heard the helicopters water-bombing the fire barely a kilometre away. His mother and sisters evacuated. Liam; his father, Tony; his brother-in-law, Peter Moretti; and Peter’s father, Ray, had stayed and worked through the blistering afternoon, wetting the house down, filling containers with water and blocking up drainpipes, in case the fire came their way. And it did: the 6 pm wind change brought the fire right to the house. The men had done enough to save the building, but everything else was burned black.

So it was the wind change. There was no third deliberately lit blaze. Bertoncello thanked Liam and started to retreat, but the young man had more to say.

He had been meaning to come down to the police station, he admitted, because that evening, alongside the terror of the fire, something strange had occurred.

It happened around the time the wind turned. At about 6.20 pm the forceful northerly that had gusted all afternoon suddenly stopped and the sky was still, silent. Liam, who was defending an area of the property by himself, waited. Minutes seemed to pass. A wall of new wind, ‘very, very strong and very, very loud’, came pushing from the south, steering the fire directly towards the farm. Smoke blocked the sun. Embers flew into the dark. Liam had stood with a puny garden hose in hand as spot fires ignited all around him.

Through the haze, he saw a silhouette walking from the driveway. At first, with relief, he thought it was his father. ‘We need help!’ Liam screamed, but the wind’s howling meant he could barely hear himself. The figure continued towards him, past the flames of the spot fires, morphing into a stranger: a man in his late thirties with a stocky build and a pudgy, boyish face. He was dressed in camouflage-print clothing – T-shirt, shorts, hat – and heavy workboots. He was carrying a dog.

Liam assumed the man was trying to escape the fire, only to find more of it. But at that moment, his hose ran out of water pressure. He needed to find shelter quickly and sprinted through the blinding smoke, not realising the stranger was following him until they’d both made it safely inside the house. This man stood quite calmly in the living room, cradling the small, tan-coloured terrier as if it were a baby, its soft stomach in the air.

As the fire roared next to them he told Liam, in a voice very slow and distinctive, that his car had just broken down nearby. Right then Liam was too panicked to care. He threw the man a phone and ordered him to call 000, while he went to search for his father. Surrounded by flames, it was hard to see, or breathe, or imagine survival.

Ray Moretti later told police that he had run back to the house to seek shelter just after Liam left. A fireball was rolling towards them and he felt increasingly desperate. On the back verandah he found someone he did not know holding a dog. ‘I basically said, “Get the fuck inside!’” Ray slammed the door behind them, jamming it on the hose he carried. When it seemed the fire front had passed and it was safe enough to leave, they ventured back out. The pump was working now, and Ray directed the man to help feed him the hose. They needed to stop it getting caught in rose bushes. The stranger tied up his dog and did as Ray told him.

His name was Brendan, he said. His car had stopped just down the road. He couldn’t afford a new car and was worried the insurers would only pay five hundred dollars if it burned.

Ray thought this Brendan had ‘a dull look’. He seemed vague and was silent unless spoken to. But down and up the hill, through the garden’s rose bushes, he followed Ray as embers rained upon them, keeping the hose untangled to put out spot fires – in truth, he was of great assistance.

When finally Liam found his father, and there was a moment to exchange more than a few words about anything other than the fire, he told him about their visitor. It was odd, freakish even, to turn up in the middle of a firestorm, and Tony went to check the stranger out.

Tony subsequently told police that he’d walked through the house calling, ‘Hello, is there anyone there?’ Outside, down from the verandah, stood Brendan. He said he was a friend of their neighbour, Peter Townsend; they’d once been gardeners together at the local university. Tony Ferguson was pleased to have another set of hands helping to defend the property, but even in this surreal moment – his house still standing in a newly scorched world – his guest’s presence was incongruous.

The house was over the back of a rise, so Brendan had had to walk up a random gravel road while helicopters water-bombed around him; there was burnt bush on one side, flames coming up behind him and potentially up in front too. He had passed the CFA firefighters, who felt it was too dangerous to approach the property.

‘Shit, you’re game!’ Tony exclaimed when Brendan told him his story. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ The route had been practically suicidal, and later Ferguson wondered if that had been on the man’s mind, the very reason he’d walked in.

Around 1 am, after a five hour ember-storm, a CFA fire truck finally ventured up the drive. Tony Ferguson asked the crew if they’d give Brendan a lift home. This man in his camouflage gear made him uneasy. ‘We had enough to deal with,’ he told police, ‘and we had to count on everyone who was with us, so I felt uncomfortable.’

Liam Ferguson now handed Detective Bertoncello a plastic bag containing a camouflage-print canvas hat. Brendan had used it as a water bowl for his dog, then left it behind.

By this point Adam Henry and Ross Pridgeon had arrived at the farmhouse by car. They learnt there hadn’t been a third ignition point, and Bertoncello gave Liam his card.

Pridgeon peeled off and the detectives went to check the crime scene at the Gibson property up the road. Surrounded by a forest of tall black sticks, they found the rubble where the house had been. The chimney still standing, an affront.

Bertoncello’s phone rang. It was Liam Ferguson. He’d remembered something else. On Saturday, a sky-blue sedan had been parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendonald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly. Liam’s mother had noticed it too when she’d evacuated the area around 2 pm. After the wind change, the car had been incinerated. It was towed away the next day.

The detectives left the Gibson property to meet Liam down the road, where he thought the car had been located. A few burnt metal scraps lay nearby on the blackened ground. If these were from the car of the Fergusons’ visitor, it had evidently broken down four hours before he’d come calling on them. He could therefore be placed near the area of the fire’s origin within a half-hour of it starting.

The detectives were practised at looking noncommittal, but they and Liam knew what this was about. Word was already out that the fire had been deliberately lit. Liam’s younger sister had seen two separate fires burning just before she evacuated with their mother. Henry and Bertoncello sensed the shock in the air shifting to fury. They looked at the car scraps and tried not to appear overly interested.

When Liam returned home, the pair began canvassing the Glendonald Road residents. These Hazelwood South bush blocks had offered nature and privacy, but now the men were walking past burnt cubby houses and trampolines, up burnt paths to houses with smoke-blackened walls and windows. They knocked on doors to check if anyone else recalled seeing the blue car.

Few residents were home. The road was still blocked off. Locals couldn’t get in to survey the damage to their properties, or, if they had stayed, out to get food. Those who’d stayed half wondered where they were: all the familiar markers – trees and houses – had been torched. These people were coughing up black gunk and had burnt skin and eyes. Their children, entrusted to friends and relatives, did not want to return (or, later, to stay on hot days). It didn’t feel like home anymore.

Those who answered their doors told the detectives they had noticed the blue car. It was a Holden sedan with magnum alloy wheels, parked at a strange angle, looking abandoned.

Geoffrey Wright, a sheet metal worker at the nearby gas plant, would later tell police that he had been struggling to catch his wife’s horse when he heard the distinctive drone of the blue car’s engine. He had noticed the sound before, when he saw the car driving up and down the street. It had gone past so often that he thought its owner was a neighbour. The drone ceased and Wright realised that the blue car was parked a little way off, as if it had just broken down.

‘I saw the driver running towards his car. He got down on his hands and knees and had a look at something under his vehicle. He was in a hurry. He got up and ran around to the driver’s side and tried to start the car. I felt sorry for the poor bugger. Tell you now, if I wasn’t chasing the horse I was going to offer to give him a tow or a lift. I thought he was a neighbour and he was in a panic trying to get to his family.’

When the wind changed that evening, Wright had still not managed to corral the troublesome horse. Finally, he tried to drag it into the house, but his arms were burning from the radiant heat and he had to let it go. The fire brigade found the animal’s carcass, but with the roads still blocked it would be another week before it could be buried.

Most of the residents had a story like that about a pet or livestock. And so, they told the detectives, they were staggered when the very next day – while trees and fences were still burning all around and the CFA was putting out a fire two doors down – an orange tow truck arrived to take away the blue vehicle’s shell. Out of the truck stepped the driver and the car’s owner, as blithe as could be.

One local got into a fight with the owner. ‘You can’t move this, mate,’ he recalled saying. ‘It’s part of the crime scene. It was here when the fire started.’

‘Don’t start that shit,’ the owner replied. ‘No, it wasn’t. I come down to help a mate with the fires.’

The detectives left Glendonald Road, and at the police barricade stopped to ask the traffic cop which local company used orange tow trucks. It was Connolly’s, back in Morwell.

On Monash Way they passed the thirty-metre golden cigar. And further along, on the strip of land between Churchill and Morwell, an inscrutable network of wires, insulators, transformers. Past the switching yard were more unfathomable complexes surrounded by high fences – all these countless parts assembled in the service of power, heat and light – and beyond, the smokestacks of Hazelwood Power Station, ever-present, standing guard.

They had to get back to the police station. The officer in charge of the Arson Squad, Adam Shoesmith, was about to arrive in Morwell and needed to be briefed. But first they parked beside the corrugated-iron fence of Connolly’s Towing and Panel Beating. Inside the shop, on the concrete floor, car bodies everywhere.

People feel the atmosphere change with the approach of detectives. These two were sunburnt from the morning’s outing, and wore navy arson squad overalls that stank of smoke. A receptionist saw them and hurried to get her boss.

Andy Connolly put down his lunch and came out of his office. Henry and Bertoncello, not wanting to raise suspicions, told him they were trying to account for missing people. They asked if any of his trucks had recovered cars from the fire zone. Connolly said his driver had only picked up one vehicle.

He took the detectives to a sedan that looked to have been built out of rust. There was not a trace of blue paint. No upholstery, no windows, no tyres, just steel rims. It was a burnt-out 1974 HJ Holden sedan and they could barely make out the indented digits of the number plate: SLW 387. Connolly showed them a copy of the towing receipt. It was made out to a man named Brendan Sokaluk of 11 Sheoke Grove, Churchill.