Out the train’s window, the views were sepia-toned. Smoke gave the unspooling landscape an old-fashioned brown hue, the filter of a dream sequence, although Detective Senior Sergeant Adam Shoesmith had barely slept in the past three days. As officer in charge of the Arson Squad, he’d coordinated the response to all the Black Saturday fires deemed suspicious.

At first, units of detectives, forensic scientists and crime scene experts were deployed to different regions: the standard response. But the devastation was on a scale that could be envisaged only by those of his colleagues with training in counter-terrorism. Blazes, believed to have been ignited by failing powerlines and arson, had burnt 450 000 hectares. Around the state there were areas that still couldn’t be reached, and in areas that could, corpses were everywhere. The army and the state emergency services were finding the bodies of those who had sought shelter to no avail by the sides of roads, and under bits of tin that were formerly houses.

Detective Shoesmith had opted to ride the train to Morwell that Wednesday because he didn’t want to drain resources unnecessarily. He had just sent teams of officers to various locations, accompanying the Disaster Victim Identification units. They’d need dozens of cars to drive to the families of the dead, and gather ante-mortem evidence, such as toothbrushes for DNA.

It would take weeks to establish that altogether 173 people had been killed. Eleven of the dead were in the Latrobe Valley, where Shoesmith was now travelling to take over the supervision of Operation Winston.

Other passengers stared out the train’s windows at the scorched ground with what looked like numb incredulity. People had understood that this could happen, but had never really believed it would. In some ways it was a shock to feel such shock.

Australia had always been a burning continent. Shoesmith, a clean-cut history buff in his late thirties, knew that. In the area through which he was travelling, the once lush Gondwanan landscape had given way over millennia to the hard-leafed eucalypts, sclerophylls dependent upon burning for propagation. A perfect loop of fire creating more fire, a dynamic that later intensified after the arrival of the first Australians.

Aborigines used fire for illumination, for signalling, for creating tracks for travel, for inducing green growth for the animals they hunted, for pursuing animals fleeing a blaze’s flank, for harvesting such food as sweet tuberous yam roots, and for preventing larger conflagrations, which they could not control. Fire was used in ceremonies and there were ceremonies about fire. Flames, and their endless complex interplay with the season and flora and wind, were inseparable from daily life and culture.

Later, Aborigines harried European explorers with fire, and tried to burn out the white settlers who followed. One theory has it that the 1851 Black Thursday blaze, which scorched 5 million hectares, a quarter of the state, was a form of indigenous warfare. Later again, a glass bottle, put in the right place on a hot day, was said to have been used against a farmer who wouldn’t let an Aboriginal man onto a traditional burial site.

Itinerant white shearers and swagmen would also threaten stingy pastoralists with fire, and disputes between settlers often contained the threat and frequently the deed. Postcolonial history is full of stories about flames being used less out of madness than revenge.

Europeans saw the advantages of ignition but lacked the indigenous understanding of it. Fire made ‘wild’, ‘primeval’ forest into productive farmland. The hills around the Latrobe Valley were dominated by mountain ash, towering eucalypts sixty to ninety metres high, the hollows of which were large enough to be used for church services, and, ironically, as dwellings by those who’d lost their homes in bushfires. These forests were cleared by man-made infernos. Working up the hillside, settlers scarfed the bigger trees that pushed their way through the dense understorey, and at the hilltop felled the giants, which in turn felled everything below. Thus the logs were set. Then, on the most ferociously fire-friendly day, when a hot wind blew from the north, these pioneers set a match to the lot. It was like an atomic bomb, or the end of days. And when it was over they stood knee-deep in ash. In some places they saw the sky for the first time, and discovered they had neighbours.

Detective Shoesmith had grown up in Officer, on the other side of these now treeless hills, back towards Melbourne. In those days it was still a country town rather than an outer suburb, and the netballers married the footballers and life had an easy symmetry. He had planned to study archaeology, but his application for a police cadetship succeeded a few weeks before the offer of a university place, and so now he watched the History Channel obsessively in the evenings and spent his days investigating the artefacts and biofacts of crime.

As he stepped onto the platform of Morwell station, his head was pounding with fatigue and the worry of what he’d find here.

Two Aboriginal men approached him for a cigarette. He told them he didn’t smoke and they instead asked a passing white skinhead with a giant collared dog.

‘Fuck off!’ the skinhead replied, and a fight broke out.

Shoesmith, who’d cut his teeth in major crime and spent years knocking over meth labs, telephoned the police station, asking to be rescued.

The station was just over the road. Shoesmith was soon briefed by the most senior officer on the case, Inspector Ken Ashworth, before taking control of the operation. Shortly he was overseeing the work of dozens of investigators. His was the directing role, but he reported to Ashworth who himself reported back to Crime Command, the team that effectively ran the Victoria Police response to Black Saturday.

The Brendan Sokaluk line of inquiry sounded promising, but Shoesmith had long ago learnt to resist the urge to drop everything and chase down the sexiest lead. And realistically, Sokaluk’s car could only be traced to the fire’s point of origin half an hour after its ignition. The man could have been just another pyrophile out for a drive, one of the many people who’d turned up to see the fire take off. Later, the investigators noticed that a high number of local households possessed scanners, possibly, they theorised, to keep abreast of emergency services dealing with their neighbours’ dramas, although the devices also alerted people quickly to dangerous blazes.

Meanwhile, the list of suspects was multiplying, some candidates more bizarre than others. One person had rung with the name of a young local logger, who the previous year had taken his seventeen-year-old girlfriend on a picnic, then staged their abduction. Face hidden in a balaclava, he cut off her clothes and bound and gagged her, before reappearing as himself to ‘save’ her. The two of them walked naked in circles through the bush for a week to evade their non-existent captors. (In ‘brown face’, with a fake Indian passport, this blond man then fled to Delhi, only to be sent straight back by unimpressed custom officials.) Both were members of Morwell’s Apostolic Church, which – not for nothing – preaches the utter depravity of human nature.

In the afternoon, while Adam Henry took Shoesmith and Ashworth out to the crime scenes, Bertoncello did some work to see where Brendan Sokaluk’s path led.

This ‘person of interest’ had no criminal record, but it turned out that in the past he’d been the subject of intelligence reports. Bertoncello pulled them up. Two years earlier someone from the CFA had notified police that when Sokaluk tried to join up as a volunteer his demeanour was strange. Another report suggested that fires had been previously lit on Glendonald Road using teepee-style configurations of leaves and twigs. On one such occasion, Sokaluk’s blue car was seen driving past the next day: had he been checking out his handiwork?

An investigator was sent to speak to Peter Townsend, whom Brendan had told the Fergusons he was visiting. Townsend, in his early fifties, was a no-nonsense farmer still living in the Victorian cottage where he’d been born. Here, in the rolling green hills of arcadian Gippsland, he tended an orchard with forty different varieties of heritage apples: an idyll that showed again the sharp edges of parallel lives. The cottage, with its symmetrical facade and stained-glass sidelights, looked drawn from a picture book, albeit one with minimal colour. All the house’s weatherboards were dark with smoke damage. The orchard, near a creek bed, still stood while the hills around were blackened. Townsend had thought more than once that Saturday that he would die too, and he seemed to the investigator half stunned at his own survival.

Townsend had a crucifix by the kitchen sink and a portrait of his younger self in military uniform over the fireplace. His dark-brown moustache was unchanged from those days, and he had the upright, boxy walk of an ex-soldier, or perhaps it was the stiff gait of an apple farmer. He was not surprised to see the police.

The fire had started less than a kilometre from his cottage. Townsend had walked outside and seen flames twice as high as the tallest gum trees on the hills, west of his house. He and his wife had sprinted to reach their car, and as they were evacuating he recognised Brendan Sokaluk’s Holden in the chaos. It was parked at a strange angle. What was Brendan doing out, he wondered, on a 47-degree day? Townsend had his suspicions.

All the investigators had been briefed not to appear too interested when Sokaluk’s name came up. The detectives didn’t yet know his network of relationships, and didn’t want one of these witnesses to call and tell him the police were inquiring after him. But Brendan was the only person Townsend wanted to talk about.

The two men had indeed been colleagues at Monash University. When Townsend joined the gardening staff, he’d noticed morale was low. He was warned by other workers to watch out for Brendan. Some of the gardeners seemed scared of him. A young apprentice soon resigned because she couldn’t handle working alongside the man. Brendan threatened his colleagues and if they complained, they reckoned, their car keys would go missing, or they’d find the aerials snapped off their cars. Brendan was cunning, they said. He knew where the surveillance cameras were and was never caught.

‘Got to be careful of Brendan there,’ a gardener warned Townsend in the brew shack, the lunch room. ‘He sends nasty texts, don’t you, Brendan? Don’t want to upset him.’

Brendan, sitting there, gave a little tee-hee-hee laugh, as if proud of his reputation.

Townsend told the investigator that he’d looked over at him and said casually, ‘Well, Brendan, if you do that – or anyone else does that to me – your head goes straight through that door there, see, and that will be the end of that.’

And that was the end of that. Everything was fine. The matter was laughed off, including by Brendan. Townsend had never personally had any problem with him. Except that he was always paired with the man, because it seemed he could actually handle him.

When, a few years ago, Brendan finally left the university, he considered Townsend a friend and would visit unannounced. It made Townsend’s wife uncomfortable the way Sokaluk skulked around never looking her in the eye, but Townsend hoped he was helping the poor sod out, making a bit of a difference. He had to be in the right mood, though. Brendan talked a ‘heap of rot half the time’, tall stories – part fantasy, part brag – spinning off in never-ending, meaningless asides. He was like a teenager trying to impress. Townsend would three-quarters listen, answering, ‘Oh yes. Really?’

Once, Brendan came around looking for work. Townsend had an old car on his block, so he said Brendan could cut it up and take it away for scrap, which he did, leaving not one piece on the ground, not a wire or a single bolt. It was all gone. Townsend had to admit that he did a pretty good job of cleaning up the bush around there.

The bush before it was turned to ash . . .

Ten days before the fire, Townsend had seen Sokaluk lumbering his way and tried to duck out of sight behind some sweetcorn he was growing. Brendan found him and they had a chat.

‘Are you still getting married?’ Townsend asked. He’d previously heard mention of a romance, but that had apparently ended some time ago. Townsend gave his visitor a bunch of onions he’d just picked and told him he had work to do. Thankfully, Brendan left.

The day after the fire, Townsend found a message on his answering machine, which he now played to the investigator: ‘Peter, it’s Brendan. I tried to get up, see if you’re alright. My car broke down in Glendonald Road and it’s torched now. I helped one of your farmer mates last night. Tried to get hold of you, but you were busy. I’ll catch up with you later, mate. Hope you’re safe and well.’

Townsend hadn’t been expecting Brendan, and when he saw his car on Black Saturday he recalled the rumours he’d heard about him, rumours of smoke appearing in places Brendan had just been. His car was parked oddly. Then Townsend saw Sokaluk himself. It was some time before 2 pm. He was getting into the car of a woman called Natalie Turner.

The investigator now visited Turner, an artist, who had been lunching with her parents on Glendonald Road when the fire began. She was introducing them to a new boyfriend, Dane Carozzi. Just after their meal, she heard a helicopter overhead, and looked outside at a mushroom cloud of smoke. She and her boyfriend rushed her children into the car and started to leave, but a blue vehicle that had apparently broken down partially blocked the road. A man stood nearby with his dog, looking dazed. Carozzi urged him to join them: the fire was now perilously close.

‘I hope my car doesn’t burn,’ the man had said when they were finally driving away. He repeated this to himself. When they dropped him home, he said it again, before adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘Oh, and I hope nobody gets hurt.’

Turner thought the man said he’d just visited Peter Townsend, although Carozzi thought he told them he was going to see Peter. At any rate, his car had broken down past the Townsend’s house, facing away from it. The couple dropped him home.

Natalie Turner calculated she’d left her parents’ place around 1.45 pm, placing Sokaluk a little closer again to the time of the fire’s start. Turner’s trigger for leaving was the sound of helicopters overhead. Paul Bertoncello asked a colleague to look through the CFA data to find out what time fire and police helicopters had been operating nearby.

This was all coming together very quickly, almost too quickly, Bertoncello thought. It had seemed likely the investigators would be in for a long haul, with hundreds of names thrown up, and months spent scouring each blind alley, analysing every red herring. That was how it normally worked. Surely the very first person they were narrowing in on couldn’t be the one? Bertoncello tried to dampen down an instinct saying, It’s him. It can’t be this easy, he told himself, something’s not right. He was looking now for the catch, the evidence to eliminate Sokaluk. Each attempt to find it seemed to lock the suspect in further. It’s him.

Bertoncello looked over his colleague’s shoulder as he scrolled through emergency services records. He felt a shiver of recognition. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

It was the call-line identification data, which listed callers to 000 reporting the fire. Each telephone number included the address at which the account was registered. The address paired with the second caller was 11 Sheoke Grove. It appeared Sokaluk had rung emergency services at 1.32 pm, informing them of the blaze. He must have been right there. Right at the start.

The detectives found a driver’s licence photograph of a man with wavy brown hair wearing Coke-bottle glasses. Gawky, a cold sore or scab on his lip.

Brendan Sokaluk had grown up only a few kilometres from where the fire began. He was thirty-nine years old. He was single. He was unemployed and on a disability pension.

For eighteen years he had worked as a groundsman at the local Monash University campus, but two years earlier he’d taken stress leave and hadn’t returned. Now he supplemented his pension by delivering the local newspaper, for five cents per copy, and collecting scrap metal. He could often be seen driving the back roads of the Latrobe Valley, scavenging the tips and unofficial dumping grounds for trash he’d haul back to Sheoke Grove.

Later, the police heard about Brendan’s odd behaviour from his neighbours. He lived in an estate of modest houses, built in bulk in the 1970s and ’80s for power industry workers. One woman, when she moved next door to him, had been warned to keep her distance because he was ‘different’. He would stand staring in at her garden, then duck down and hide, not wanting to be seen himself. A few times she found him looking in with a camera. She was with her young child and told him to get lost. Another, older neighbour would be in her living room and glance up, sometimes when she had company, to see him at his fence, silently watching. She already had venetian blinds, but she hung curtains as well.

The woman with the child would hear Brendan banging away in his shed, pulling apart some bit of junk he’d collected. He’d be listening to narrated episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder. The former with their stern morality tales, the latter about high-spirited teamwork. For a while she assumed she could also overhear him talking to a child – his speech was loud, with the detailed rolling commentary she might give her son. It was his dog, she realised. He’d bought the animal when he had a girlfriend living with him, a sweet-faced, guileless woman who seemed to be gone now.

Brendan, it turned out, also liked to go online and chat to people. On his Myspace page, he claimed: ‘I’m a young happy male who wants to meet a young loven female to marrid . . . I don,t read books because they put me to sleep. My heroe is mother earth without her we would all be dead.’ On another social media site, myYearbook, he’d posted that he was ‘looken for a young wife to shear my wealf with her’. But on the Wednesday four days before the fire, he had logged on and, in the third person, described his mood as ‘dirty’, because ‘no one love him’.

In the past few months, the neighbours had noticed he was lighting more fires in his yard and the fires were getting bigger. They smelt toxic – he was burning the plastic off electrical cords to salvage the copper wiring to sell. People close by had to shut their doors and windows against the choking smoke, which could be so thick, one neighbour claimed, she could barely see her own hand held out in front of her.

The largest bonfire had been lit five weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve. A man at a nearby party saw dangerous-looking flames and went to check them out. Pulling himself up, he spied over the fence a heap of wood and rubbish piled five or six feet high, the blaze a foot or so higher again. Sokaluk was standing right beside it.

The man asked him what he was doing.

‘Burning some stuff,’ came the reply.

The man from the party called out that it was ridiculous to have a fire of that size in such a small space, but Sokaluk didn’t look at him or acknowledge him again in any way. He just stood in the glow of the flames, unmoving.

On the afternoon of Black Saturday, after Natalie Turner had dropped him home, Brendan climbed onto his roof in Sheoke Grove and sat watching the inferno in the hills. His neighbours saw him and noticed that his face was streaked with dirt. He was wearing a camouflage-print outfit and a beanie. One hand shaded his eyes. All around, the sky was dark with smoke. Ash was falling. Tiny cinders burnt the throat on inhaling. Brendan glared down at the neighbours, then went back to watching his mother earth burn.

That night, in the incident room, the police worked until 2 am, finalising the warrants and preparing for an arrest. Dozens of investigators were arriving from Melbourne first thing in the morning and would need to be briefed before targeting different witnesses. Along one wall, the tasks on the whiteboards would soon number in the seven-hundreds, with most finished jobs generating yet more again. Large maps of the Latrobe Valley covered another wall, notated with information on the sequence of the fire’s spread. The maps showed all the contours of the Strzelecki Ranges, the plantation forests and patches of national park still marked green, as if from a bygone era.

To the detectives, nervy with adrenaline, everything now seemed like a sign. On Tuesday night another fire had been lit in a park not far from where Sokaluk lived. Sitting in the incident room, they now half wondered if it was their suspect attempting to throw them off the trail. Did he want to point them in the wrong direction, or were local kids just up to something stupid? After all, what was there to do here on a hot February night with the whole town on edge?

According to the listings in the paper Sokaluk delivered, there was always a group meeting somewhere in the region. Even if you had to drive for miles, there were clubs for music lovers, orchid growers, Scottish dancers, chess players, bereaved parents, amateur astronomers, vintage car buffs, the Coal Valley Male Chorus, stamp collectors, knitters and quilters, those with asbestos-related illnesses, or Down syndrome, or arthritis, or Alzheimer’s. There wasn’t much for young people to do, though. The police patrolling the streets found them empty. At a glance, the only place open was the power station, whose turbine hall in the distance was like a giant light box, the chimney towers above palely gleaming.

Nights here were always like this. A long dark wait until morning, not knowing, sometimes, what you were waiting for. The quality of the silence outside had changed over the years. It hadn’t always had this sharpness to it. Churchill had been grandly conceived as a utopian hamlet, with parks, a cultural centre, a theatre, a department store and hotels. But things hadn’t quite worked out that way. None of those buildings were ever erected, and instead the centre of town was the supermarket car park. After the privatisation of the state’s energy grid, a high percentage of the 4000-strong population were unemployed. The only reminder of the original vision was the cheap-looking cigar rising out of the ground.

Brendan’s house wasn’t far from this monument, and to prepare for his arrest, plainclothes officers had driven and walked past his place to scope it out. Analysts had undertaken habitation checks to confirm that he paid the rates and utility bills.

Here, each street was named for a different tree. Sheoke Grove ran between Grevillea Street and Acacia Way, which connected to Banksia Crescent, Coolabah Drive and Willow Street. The hawthorn, elm, wattle, cedar, hakea, blackwood and manuka were also on the map. They were addresses to conjure, for the power workers, all that blooms and is natural. It was a place for a fresh start. But now the street names listed trees that had recently been torched, and it was hard to resist the symbolism of that mad golden cigar. The flame and the timber just waiting for each other, built into the town’s very design.