Brendan Sokaluk’s dark-brown brick bungalow had been made in the same severe mould as others in the street, but while his neighbours had clipped their hedges into careful spheres and hung nylon lace in the windows, Brendan had not tried to soften the stark edges. Summer had killed off everything but an orange tree in a dusty bed. It was the only sign of life as Detective Senior Sergeant Adam Shoesmith knocked on the front door. The drab curtains were drawn. Not a sound came from inside. Henry and Bertoncello stood beside him in the late afternoon sun. The policeman knocked again. Silence.

Bertoncello walked down the side. In the backyard, amidst the empty garden beds and the rusting Hills hoist, lay the junk. Every square foot was stacked with it – wire, piping, flyscreens, components of old office chairs. The detective was used to visiting run-down addresses – disorder was the recurring theme of most houses he called on – but this was different. This was a private junkyard.

Bertoncello tried the back door. Again there was no answer, and it flashed through his mind that they may have arrived too late. If Sokaluk had been tipped off about a police visit – or even if he hadn’t, but had lit the fire and been overcome by the horror – he might have taken his own life.

Now the other two men joined Bertoncello in the backyard. None of them knew much about their suspect. Fearing for his safety, they were moving faster than they’d have chosen, and they stood taking in the scene. An incinerator constructed from a 44-gallon drum sat in the centre behind a rickety wall of odd bricks and timber. Here, and in the front yard, patches of the ground were burnt. Perhaps Brendan Sokaluk couldn’t help himself.

Bertoncello found more junk inside a shed-cum-workshop. A pyramid of it in the middle, like a shrine to the seemingly useless: old machinery parts, cords, rusting bumper bars, bits of televisions and whitegoods, bike and car wheels, an aging air-conditioning unit, car doors stripped of their metal handles. This hoard was layered on top of wheelie bins crammed with other abandoned objects. All that was missing was their collector.

On the fly, the detectives made a new plan. They had an officer back at the Morwell station call Sokaluk’s mobile phone and pose as a consultant from his car insurer, claiming she needed him to sign some documents and asking if he was home. No, he was on his paper round, not far away in Maple Crescent.

In the unmarked police car, the detectives wound back through the circular streets, a perfect blue sky and transmission towers overhead. The power workers who’d bought here had aged, but despite the rusting letter boxes and peeling eaves, all obeyed a standardised neatness. The eye-shaped petals on the curtains kept the neighbours in check.

In Maple Crescent, a pudgy man was pushing a removalist’s trolley stacked high with newspapers. A terrier was tethered so close to the side it was half walking, half being dragged along. The dog’s owner had a peculiar gait, an awkward kind of bounce to his step. Wearing a sweatshirt, shorts and long socks, all a shade of faded green, and black velcro sneakers, Sokaluk looked like an overgrown kid in his school uniform. A little bored and in a hurry.

Adam Henry swerved onto the nature strip, cutting him off. When the detectives got out and were closer they could see their paperboy had aged since his driver’s licence photograph had been taken. He wore his greying hair in a buzz cut, shorn close to the skull. There were fine lines under his eyes.

Henry showed his police identification. He asked the suspect his name and date of birth – ‘Brendan Sokaluk’, ‘11 of ten, 69’ – and told him he was under arrest for arson.

Brendan didn’t tremble like most people in that situation did. Bertoncello took hold of his arms, handcuffing him, and there was no quaver. Nor did his face reveal fear. As he was read his rights, he was almost blasé. The headline repeating on the pile of newspapers read RAZED. Pictures of the fire’s damage wrapped around the front and back pages. Whichever way Brendan had folded the paper into letterboxes, there would have been views of a black and white world, police crime tape blowing in the breeze.

His denial was matter-of-fact: ‘I didn’t light any fires,’ he said, and his speech was slurred, rather in the way of a deaf person. ‘But I’ll put my hand up, like at Monash.’

The detectives didn’t stop to ask what he meant. They bundled him into the car and left the trolley of newspapers on the street, undelivered.

Back at Sheoke Grove, Sokaluk was served with a search warrant while still in the car. Then Henry and Bertoncello waited there with him, making small talk. Usually this was a soothing kind of patter to calm the accused person down, but Brendan wasn’t overly interested in being soothed. The detectives sat there conscious that Shoesmith was now entering this man’s front door, coordinating with the other officers who’d arrived to video the property before the forensic team swept through.

It was dark inside the house with the curtains drawn, although light came through the gaps where they had half fallen down. When Shoesmith’s eyes had adjusted, he saw that the layout was compact. The front door opened onto a small vestibule with an adjacent living room. Someone, at some point, had tried to brighten the place up by painting the walls mint green, and the architraves and woodwork a gaudy, high-gloss pink.

A narrow hallway led to three bedrooms. One of these was furnished with old gym equipment: a running machine, a stair-climbing machine, a bench press with some weights. But workouts had apparently been abandoned: the equipment was covered in bags of clutter, including an old pack of Celebrity Slim, a seven-day meal replacement plan.

In Brendan’s green bedroom, an iron bar rested against the wall near the bed, as though for protection against intruders. Three old double mattresses were piled atop the metal frame of a single bed. The sheets were faded, stained. An oversize teddy bear sat in the wardrobe amongst the camouflage-print clothes.

Another room, with what looked like salvaged office furniture, had blush-pink walls, a wardrobe the shade of a ballet slipper. On the desk sat a computer surrounded by losing TattsLotto tickets, the registration of the now burnt car, a business card from Connolly’s towing firm, a computer magazine, and a drink coaster with a bare-breasted blonde posing on a beach, captioned The Heat is On!

When Sokaluk was taken out of the police car he was led up the driveway to the back door, as he’d requested, so his neighbours wouldn’t see. It was cramped inside the house with the small crew of officers. Bertoncello removed Brendan’s handcuffs and asked for his mobile phone.

Shoesmith had set up the camera tripod for a video interview, just by the front door’s pink frame. Above them, light bulbs without shades were stuck into the ceiling sockets.

The interview was a formality before the police executed their search warrant. Shoesmith had conducted these conversations countless times, but not usually for such high stakes. He was trying to keep the mood calm – his own and the suspect’s – collegiate even, as if they were just standing around having a friendly chat.

All he wanted to do was to keep this arrest as quiet as possible and get Sokaluk safely out of town. Arson had never been so publicly discussed as a factor in major bushfires, and Black Saturday’s were the worst in living memory. The people of the Valley, full of grief and rage, agreed with the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who’d appeared on television a few nights earlier. ‘What do you say about anyone like that?’ he asked, shaking his head in disgust. ‘There’s no words to describe it . . . other than it’s mass murder.’

The detective pressed RECORD.

Shoesmith: ‘Alright, it’s Detective Senior Sergeant Adam Shoemith of the Arson Squad . . . Ah, we’re currently at the address of number 11 Sheoke Grove in Churchill. It’s Thursday the 12th of February, 2009. The time is now, Brendan, do you agree the time is now twenty-two minutes past 5 pm?’

Sokaluk: ‘I suppose so.’

Shoesmith shows Sokaluk his watch.

Sokaluk: ‘Close.’

Shoesmith: ‘Um, to my right is the occupier and owner of these premises, Brendan Sokaluk. Brendan, can you state your name, age and date of birth?’

Sokaluk: ‘Got (inaudible). Brendan. Age, um, thirty something or other. What’s the other bit?’

The detective is thrown. This man’s reactions seem slower, more disjointed than they were when the camera was turned off. Brendan asks him suddenly who the ‘bad man’ is, pointing to one of the police officers who is waiting outside.

Shoesmith: There’s no bad man . . . Can you remember what you were doing at the time when we first approached you?’

Sokaluk: ‘How many takes are you going to take of this?’

Shoesmith: ‘Sorry?’

Sokaluk: ‘How many takes?’

The detective tries to get things back on track by reminding Sokaluk he was doing his paper round before they escorted him home.

Shoesmith: ‘And you had your small dog with you?’

Sokaluk: ‘My doggie.’

Shoesmith: ‘Yes, is that right?’

Sokaluk: ‘Yeah, my dog.’

Shoesmith: ‘The policemen informed you that you’re not obliged to say or do anything, but anything you say or do may be given in evidence. Do you remember that?’

Sokaluk: ‘Not really, didn’t take much notice.’

Shoesmith: ‘Okay, do you remember that they told you what the offence was that you were under arrest for?’

Sokaluk: ‘I’ll say yes, but I don’t remember.’

Shoesmith: ‘Do you agree that that was in relation to the Churchill fires on Saturday, and the offence of arson causing death?’

Sokaluk: ‘Probably.’

Shoesmith: ‘Does this all sound familiar or you’re not sure?’

Sokaluk: ‘Ah, I don’t really comprehend things too much.’

Shoesmith: ‘Well, do you agree that these things that I’ve stated to you happened? I mean, it’s only happened in the last sort of half an hour.’

Sokaluk: ‘I’ll say yes, just to make you happy.’

They suspended the interview. It had lasted barely six minutes. There was stunned silence. Only moments earlier the detectives believed they’d been holding a relatively normal conversation with Brendan. On camera, he appeared to have difficulty understanding basic questions and his speech was suddenly harder to decipher. It was standard to be lied to as a detective, and Shoesmith had witnessed various ruses by suspects to gain advantage, but never this: this man seemed to be taking on the role of village idiot, twitching and incomprehensible. The detective felt he was watching a bad actor. If the crime hadn’t been so serious, he thought later, he’d have burst out laughing.

At the moment of Sokaluk’s arrest, teams of detectives had been dispatched to take witness statements. Shoesmith wanted to give people as little time as possible to confer and potentially adopt each other’s stories. The detective interviewing Sokaluk’s father now sent back word that the suspect apparently had an acquired brain injury. There was no information about how it had been acquired, and at this stage Shoesmith was inclined to think that, behind the acting, the accused was not so different to a lot of the guys from this part of Gippsland the police chased around. He decided to get Brendan back to the station and wait for a specialist to come and assess him.

A small woman with bobbed dark hair had swept into the driveway and was giving Inspector Ashworth a piece of her mind. It was Brendan’s mother, who had arrived to check that her son was alright, and now watched him being led in handcuffs to the car.

‘Don’t bash Mum!’ he called to the police officers waiting to search the premises, as they stared back straight-faced.

During the ten-minute car ride, Sokaluk seemed to again act relatively normally. Perhaps he had some cognitive issue, but they could at least understand what he was saying, and it veered towards the cocky.

‘Two hands on the wheel for beginners,’ he said to the officer carefully driving. ‘Are you nervous, mate?’

At the station, he was placed in an interview room with Paul Bertoncello, who acted as if the two of them just happened to be there and it could all be a misunderstanding. This was the warm-up for the actual interview and for the next hour, the detective tried to establish some rapport with the man under arrest.

It’s an art, persuading people to speak to you. In subtle and unsubtle ways, detectives try to sway their suspect towards them. Every gesture, every variation in tone, is part of a calculated exchange, a set piece, often with well-worn nuances and moves replicated constantly on police procedurals: the handcuffs clicking on and off to show dominance, providing a special drink or a smoke to build complicity, offering sympathy to imply that in any other situation everyone would be great mates. The detective becomes a kind of confidence man, with the same worldliness and steely patience.

Moment by moment, Bertoncello attempted to advance the relationship, and all the standard techniques fell flat. This man, with no criminal record, inexperienced in the ways of the police, should have been more susceptible to opening up. But Sokaluk had an insouciance that in the circumstances was galling. Perhaps he shared the local mistrust of outsiders.

‘Do you like sport?’ the detective asked. No, he didn’t, at all. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ No, and Bertoncello got the impression he didn’t have a high opinion of his last one. Sokaluk mostly just wanted to know where his dog, Brocky, was, while Bertoncello kept assuring him that the animal was safe.

Back at Sheoke Grove, the detective had scanned the room for personal details. There were a few books on a small set of shelves: Australian Gardening A–Z, Your Gardening Questions Answered, Herbs and Home Landscaping. (Ironic, given the state of the yards.) But Bertoncello had also noticed a complete collection of Star Trek DVDs, and so he now spent as long as he could manage chatting about Starfleet and the Enterprise.

Time didn’t pass easily.

In the incident room, Shoesmith and Henry were being updated on what the investigative teams had discovered. As new witness statements came in, the detectives collated them to establish a timeline for Sokaluk’s movements on the day of the fire. A forensic team had seized his car from Connolly’s and were testing it for evidence. Another team swept through his house, taking out the camouflage clothes and photographing each item. They found matches in the bathroom and a lighter in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe in Brendan’s bedroom: these were photographed too. So was his incinerator and a butane torch in the shed full of junk. His computer was carried out to a police vehicle, and an electronic crimes analyst waited at the station to pull it apart.

Before the interview started, the police wanted the best possible picture of who Sokaluk was and what he’d done before and after the blaze. Ideally, more information would have been gathered prior to the arrest, but Shoesmith was too worried about vigilantes to leave Sokaluk walking the streets with his dog and trolley. And so, in truth, the Arson Squad had next to nothing. Their case was completely circumstantial. Only Sokaluk’s dialling 000 linked him to the start of the fire. And that, like everything else, could easily be explained away by a defence lawyer. Shoesmith could almost hear a barrister dismiss as coincidental Brendan’s driving around the bush at the time of ignition. His sitting on the roof and watching the inferno? Well, they were just the odd habits of a man who was a little unusual.

When Adam Henry felt he had a viable interview plan, he joined Bertoncello and their suspect in the cramped room. He hoped this man had grown comfortable with Bertoncello and would be prepared to talk. Three tapes were inserted into a triple-deck tape recorder, a master and two copies. It was now 6.48 pm.

Henry asked Sokaluk for his full name.

He apparently couldn’t remember his middle one. ‘Starts with J,’ he offered blankly.

The officers were wary. It immediately seemed, once again, that Sokaluk was speaking less clearly and acting more disabled than in the previous few hours when he wasn’t being recorded.

Henry tried repeatedly to read the accused his rights, and then to check if he understood them.

Henry: ‘You don’t have to say or do anything, but anything you say or do may be given in evidence . . . What does that mean?’

Sokaluk: ‘Keep your mouth shut, does it?’

Henry: ‘I don’t know. You tell me what it means?’

Sokaluk: ‘I don’t know what it means ––’

Henry: ‘Alright.’

Sokaluk: ‘Take a guess.’

Henry: ‘I’ll break it down into pieces. You don’t have to say or do anything. What does that mean?’

Sokaluk: ‘Be quiet, does it?’

Henry: ‘But do you have to talk to me?’

Sokaluk: ‘You are a stranger.’

Henry: ‘Do you understand what I mean? Do you have to speak to me during this interview?’

Sokaluk: ‘So, I have to, wouldn’t I?’

The detective tried again to explain Brendan’s right to silence.

Sokaluk: ‘So, I just sit here and be quiet?’

Henry: ‘You can if you want to.’

Sokaluk: ‘Right.’

Henry: ‘Okay, so what does that mean?’

Sokaluk: ‘That youse told me to sit down and be quiet.’

Henry: ‘No, I’m not telling you. It’s up to you what you want to do. Do you have to speak to me during this interview?’

Sokaluk: ‘You said I didn’t have to.’

Henry: ‘No, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But if you want to, you can. Do you understand that?’

Sokaluk: ‘Yeah, I like to talk . . .’

Henry: ‘Okay, alright, now anything that you do say to me, okay? Say or do, can be used in evidence. Do you understand that?’

Sokaluk: ‘What they, like, twist around and use against me?’

The exchange felt ever more ludicrous. Henry believed Sokaluk was deliberately being a smartarse, acting vague, playing up whatever his impairment was to disrupt the interview. After seven minutes, the detectives stopped the tape. Were they imagining it, or did the accused again recover his more capable demeanour once the recording was off?

It was perfectly legal for the Arson Squad to interview Brendan prior to him being medically assessed, but they just weren’t getting anywhere with the soft, friendly approach. Paul Bertoncello decided to tell his superiors, Shoesmith and Ashworth, they had the wrong interview team: the questioning should start again with officers using a less sympathetic register.

It would be more than two hours before a forensic medical officer arrived from Melbourne to determine whether Sokaluk was fit for the interview process. The senior officers had Brendan transferred to the watch house, where he could be remotely monitored. Being locked up might unsettle him enough to jar him out of the game he seemed to be playing. Bertoncello and Henry were directed to have a break and then continue, but to be firmer.

At 8.30, the two detectives headed out into the dusk looking for some dinner. They’d barely eaten all day. Down the hill, the power station’s lights were glittering for the night shift. The pair walked in the other direction, a few metres up to Commercial Road, Morwell’s main drag. On one side, there was a train track; on the other, the number of vacant shops with for lease signs lent an air of desolation to such life as the street had. The only place open was a Subway, where the men ordered food.

Bertoncello and Henry had known each other only vaguely until now, but for the next three and a half months they would stay in the same motel, work the same long hours, eat the same takeaway. The clock didn’t really matter in these jobs. Living away from their families, with no real reason to leave the makeshift office, they ended up putting in sixteen-hour days. Everyone shoulder to shoulder in the incident room, forty investigators at the peak, dealing with the enforced intimacy and the inevitable clash of moods and personalities.

The past twenty-four hours had been exhilarating, but the frustration with the interview opened up others. Henry’s wife was at home in Melbourne with their newborn, who had arrived early and was only a week out of intensive care. Bertoncello’s wife was caring for their four kids, all aged under ten (and all of whom they’d struggled to name, because each possibility reminded him of some delinquent he’d arrested). Being a detective did not always make for an easy family life: the divorce rate amongst police is double that of the rest of the population.

While they waited for their food, a message came through: Sokaluk urgently wanted to speak to them.

The detectives rushed back, scoffing down their enormous sandwiches in the twilight. They believed they’d twice witnessed the suspect behave differently on tape, so this time Adam Henry would wear a micro-recorder into the cell.

‘What’s up, mate?’ he soon asked.

‘I want to start talking,’ Sokaluk replied.

To ensure that later it didn’t appear Brendan had been tricked into speaking, Henry decided to once more try formally interviewing him. He was brought from the watch house back to the interview room. It was nearly 9 pm.

In the video recording of this interview, Brendan is sitting in a corner by a laminex table. There’s no natural light; a grey stripe winds along the claustrophobic walls. His shoulders are rounded, his belly protrudes from a baggy, stained sweatshirt.

On the other side of the table are the police.

When Brendan is read his rights and asked to explain them, he seems to better understand this time, although only slightly: ‘If I don’t [speak to you] I have to go back [to the cells].’

Henry asks him repeatedly if he wants a lawyer.

‘I don’t know any.’

‘We could make some arrangements, if you want to speak to a lawyer, that’s up to you.’

‘There wouldn’t be any lawyers around at this time of night,’ he slowly answers.

‘We could try.’

‘No, because it would be wasting people’s time.’

Eventually Henry says, ‘Okay now, you said you wanted to talk to us?’

‘Yeah.’ Sokaluk speaks every word in the same dull, flat tone; a shh sound for s and f for th. ‘Want to tell you what happened Saturday, regards to the fire stuff. First, I was smoking in the car when I was driving.’ His sentences run together; only some are completed, and these fragments sound slurred. He explains that to, ‘get to my mate’s place, you can go the bitumen road or the gravel, and the bitumen road is dangerous because of hoons. So, I go the gravel road, and I like to take shortcuts off the gravel, but when it’s rough it just shakes the car. And I was smoking, a bit fell down and so I grab a bit of paper to grab it and flick it out sort of thing, have to squish, flick that and it must’ve ignited. And I went up this track [Jellef’s Outlet], this road there that goes up; top of this was rubbish up there. I went up there and I reckon the car wasn’t working too well and stuff, and had to turn around. And then I noticed there was fire and I panicked, and I called 000 and I just tried to get away as quick as possible, just panicked.’

Here it is: the Arson Squad now have a confession, of sorts.

The undercurrent in the room changes. The detectives hang on every charged word. Large swathes of this strange story are delivered without any eye contact. Very little animates Brendan’s face, but he runs his fingers repeatedly along the top of the table and below it, again, again.

Sokaluk: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep properly after this. I like the bush, just didn’t want it to go up . . . Makes me sad inside.’

Henry: ‘Why is that?’

Sokaluk: ‘Because people died, was my fault and I have to put up with that.’

Henry: ‘How was it your fault?’

Sokaluk: ‘Because I was stupid. I burnt down one thing I loved in my whole life is the forest and my stupid actions stuffed it up. Now I have no place up the forest, going to sit and watch the fish, look at the creeks. Because my life gets hard from the stuff, and stress wise and that, I would go up there and sit, and this would to relax, I found. But now I’ve destroyed all those areas and all those poor people died, so stupid. That’s why I always got into trouble at Monash, because I was stupid all the time, do things, after forget. I didn’t want my, my friends to get hurt. Next day I try to forget about it, try to . . . going to wish it would all go away because I want to be able to have some proper sleep.’

There is no provision for the senior officers to remotely monitor this interview. They can’t hear the pidgin-like sentences Bertoncello and Henry are deciphering. If Shoesmith wants to send them word, he has to slide a note under the door and wait for them to discreetly retrieve it. The detectives have previously decided to let Sokaluk give his account of events and to keep their questioning to a minimum. The more he speaks, the more he might incriminate himself.

It is clearer to them that Brendan is not quite right. His speech is childish, with words missing, syllables mispronounced, and it is all delivered in the same expressionless manner. They also figure, though, that he owns his own house, he’s apparently paid the bills, and can use a computer. He’d been canny enough to realise, in the cells, that his name hadn’t been pulled out of a hat. He then presumably calculated how much they knew about him – which isn’t much – and, in giving his story he is now the one leading the interview. When, very occasionally, he darts a look in the detectives’ direction, it’s to appraise them. His eyes move as if behind a mask.

At 9.14 pm, they stop talking. A forensic medical officer has arrived from Melbourne to assess Brendan. She takes his medical history and determines that he is fit to be questioned on the condition an independent third person is present. The interview recommences at 11.09 pm, and in the video recording, a craggy-looking justice of the peace sits next to Brendan. This man has no specific training for the role, although he has spent time with some intellectually disabled people at the church he attends.

Henry, conscious that the accused may have such a disability, reminds him again of his rights so that later there will be no legal contest.

Brendan’s hands are clasped in front of him.

Henry: ‘What’s your full name?’

Sokaluk: ‘Brendan J. Sokaluk.’

Henry: ‘What does the J stand for?’

Sokaluk: ‘Can’t remember.’

Henry: ‘Okay. Is it fair to say it would be James?’

Sokaluk: ‘Could be.’

When Henry says, ‘I intend to interview you in relation to the offences of arson causing death and intentionally causing a bushfire,’ Brendan doesn’t react at all. He doesn’t meet their eyes. After the caution is explained again, he yawns.

Henry repeats that he has a right to a lawyer and Brendan looks up briefly, then looks away, strenuously yawning. He says for the second time that he doesn’t know any lawyers.

Henry asks if he knows what lawyers do.

Sokaluk: ‘Goes to court . . . defends people.’

Henry: ‘What type of people?’

Sokaluk: ‘Bad people.’

Henry: ‘Not necessarily bad people, people that have been charged.’ He offers to get a phone book and help find one.

Sokaluk: ‘No, it’s too hard.’

The independent third person looks as blank as the accused. Sometimes, in the station, there were jokes about these individuals needing an independent fourth person. This one doesn’t suggest they open the book at ‘L’ and ring around.

‘This is your choice,’ Henry says.

‘Keep going,’ Sokaluk replies.

The detectives ask Sokaluk to take them through his movements last Saturday. He tells them that it had started like all his Saturdays did: ‘went out and shopped with my Dad and stuff’.

His father, Kaz, short for Kazimer, had told the investigators who interviewed him that this was their regular routine. They drove to Morwell, where they visited the TAB to lay some bets, then drove to Traralgon, where, both being passionate about cars, they went to Autobarn and Supercheap Auto. (Police would later locate the surveillance videos, which showed two stocky men, father and son, doing their morning rounds. Kaz, bearded, with a tattoo stretching up his arm, was an ex-mine worker, having been pensioned off with a bad back twenty-five years earlier.) On their return, they stopped at KFC for an early lunch, then at the Mid Valley Shopping Centre, a mall outside Morwell, where Kaz paid twenty dollars off his lay-by of DVDs.

All this time, Kaz had told the investigators, ‘Brendan’s car was running a bit rough, the fuel was evaporating and it was trying to stall. In the heat, it was sounding like a tractor . . . really chugging.’ As they returned to Churchill, they saw a small crowd in a paddock watching a grassfire. ‘People are like that, aren’t they?’ Kaz said. ‘Got to rubberneck.’ They stopped to rubberneck too: the Morwell fire brigade was on its way, and this was a form of public theatre.

Afterwards, as Brendan dropped his father home, he mentioned he planned to drive into the hills. Kaz knew Peter Townsend lived that way, and also an ex-neighbour, Dave. It was now forty-four degrees and the car had no airconditioning. Kaz told him not to travel further in the heat, and offered to tune the car up when the temperature dropped.

Instead – it slowly emerges, these facts coming from the accused in a blur of random detail – Brendan drove to his house a few streets away and changed into sturdier boots. He then headed around the corner to the petrol station on Acacia Way, where he bought a packet of Pall Mall Slims Green – ‘Pally Wally’, as he called them.

While he was driving, he now tells the detectives, he must have taken a cigarette out of the packet with his mouth, and then lit it with a cigarette lighter. The one in the car didn’t work.

He drove towards ‘my mate’s place’, along Glendonald Road, travelling at a ‘dawdle’ because ‘we’ – he and his dog, Brocky – ‘wanted to spot the wildlife’, and search for rubbish. He’d stuck to the dirt service track rather than the gravel road, because further up it was bitumen, and ‘people roar down there real fast and they get airborne’.

The track’s uneven surface made the car unsteady, he claims. ‘The vibration rocks the car about, and stuff, and so I was smoking and I had a burnt bit [of the cigarette] fell off onto the floor.’ He used a serviette, ‘fast food paper’, to pick the ember up. ‘I squished it out sort of thing and when I threw the paper on the road it ignited. I didn’t know. It was too late. I panicked . . . I called triple 0 and started telling them there was a fire on that road. I did a bad thing and I’m scared shit, shit-scared.’

For arsonists who thrill to the drama of the emergency response, it is not unusual to call in the fire they’ve lit. Later, police speculated that Sokaluk may have hidden on a track in the overgrown plantation and waited to watch the firefighters arrive at the scene.

Geoffrey Wright, who had been trying to catch his wife’s horse further up Glendonald Road, was confident that while the fire engine was pulled up, warning him and others to evacuate, the sky-blue car drove past on the engine’s other side, before breaking down further along the road. The CFA crew all believed the car had already stopped when they arrived. They remembered seeing Brendan in the disorder, standing in his camouflage-print clothes, staring at the blaze as it approached.

Through the truck’s window, one volunteer called, ‘Get out of here, there’s a fire!’ Then, when Brendan didn’t move, ‘Are you here to help someone?’

He didn’t answer: he just stood cradling his dog, watching the flames.

The police knew that when Natalie Turner and her boyfriend had pulled up he got into the car with them. Brendan had been on the phone to his father during this ride into Churchill. The couple heard him telling Kaz about his car’s breakdown, although not that he’d just reported the fire.

A few hours later – after his neighbours had observed him watching the blaze from his roof – Brendan decided to walk back towards the fire, perhaps to check on his car. His father and he had completely rebuilt the vehicle together, and Kaz had told him not to drive further.

‘My old man was angry,’ Brendan says, ‘because I torched the car, he was very upset. I think he hates me.’

Brendan walked past the university where he’d once worked. Two of his former colleagues happened to be standing outside, listening to what they presumed were houses exploding, when they glanced up and saw him trudging past. He’d assiduously avoided the place since he’d left, and they were surprised to see him.

‘I was a landscape gardener at Monash,’ Brendan explains, ‘and I ended up being their punching bag.’

The accused didn’t acknowledge these men as he went by. He hiked back towards the fire through the paddocks, bypassing the police roadblocks. Later, different volunteer firefighters confirmed seeing a man in the dull, smoke-filled light, walking a dog in the midst of the raging fire. As one volunteer noted: ‘There was truck engines going, there was radios going, there was the quick fill pump going, there was noise . . . it seemed very out of place that someone would be taking a casual stroll with their dog.’

Brendan tells Henry and Bertoncello he went to check on his friend, Peter Townsend, who wasn’t home (a claim that turned out to be untrue, as Townsend had returned to his property to try to save his livestock). Instead, Brendan found himself across the road at the Fergusons’ place, helping them save their house, until Tony Ferguson asked the Hazelwood North fire brigade to give their unexpected guest a lift home. On the way he went with the brigade to the site where they were pumping water. The dam was on a property with a Confederate flag strung up outside, along with a threat to shoot trespassers on sight. The owner, who according to Brendan was ‘a psychopath, real mean and nasty’, ‘getting drunk and . . . popping tablets all the time’, told him he’d shoot whoever had lit this fire. Brendan kept quiet.

A firefighter working near the man’s dam had told police: ‘This guy was just walking around, watching us.’ He said Sokaluk was holding his terrier so its feet wouldn’t touch the burnt ground. Eventually a CFA officer asked a passing car to take him home, where, Brendan says, he ‘couldn’t sleep with what happened. Not happy, I was sad . . . upset over it or something. What a stupid thing I did and I was shit-scared to tell anybody.’

He keeps yawning now. It’s getting close to midnight. There’s static in the long gaps between question and answer. He starts picking at a scab on his neck.

‘Alright, so you’re not an active firefighter, are you?’ Henry asks.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I don’t really like fires,’ replies Brendan, deadpan.

Pressing what he takes to be his advantage, Henry says: ‘You sound like you’ve had a bit of experience with fire before?’

The atmosphere in this grim room quickens.

‘When I was little and that, I was in the fire brigade and that,’ Sokaluk tells him.

‘So, I take it you’re not in it anymore?’

‘No.’

‘Why is that?’

‘There was a bad cop in Churchill and he had me kicked out.’

‘Okay, so you’re quite familiar with fire and firefighting?’

‘Don’t remember it all.’

‘Sounds like you’re pretty handy?’

‘Know how to help people and stuff like that . . . Put it out.’ Sokaluk yawns again and it’s the only time his face seems to change expression. His knuckles run along the edge of the table. His short nails are lined with dirt, there’s grime ingrained on the whorls of his fingertips.

That he has had some association with the CFA interests the detectives. Although statistically it’s uncommon for firefighters to deliberately set fires, it is common for arsonists to be firefighters. Volunteering to battle local blazes offers camaraderie and status. It’s a bonding, adrenaline-filled service, for which politicians and the media turn some of those in the ranks into heroes. And, of course, if there are no fires when the season starts, someone feeling powerless and forgotten might start to itch for the thrill.

‘What about fire behaviour?’ Henry tries.

‘Wouldn’t have a clue,’ replies Sokaluk.

‘How does fire travel?’

‘That one went away too fast.’

‘What are some of the things that make fire travel?’ Henry asks.

‘Stuff that can burn.’

‘Alright,’ Henry says, ‘what else helps fire?’

‘Probably wind.’

‘Is it quite common for fire to travel up hills or down hills?’ The blaze had been lit at the pit of a natural basin, the incline all around accelerating its spread.

‘It goes where it wants to,’ the accused answers pragmatically.

At 12.29 am they have a 25-minute break. During this interval, the detectives are given a copy of a Crime Stoppers report. The digital imprint of his confidential statement had been found on Sokaluk’s seized computer. Two days earlier, he had submitted a form headed What is your information about this crime? The form had various subheadings, also in the form of questions.

When the interview resumes, Henry reads them and Sokaluk’s answers aloud:

What is happening? a bad man lighten fires

When is it happening? on saterday

Where is it happening? glendonal road outside Churchill

Why are they doing it? on edge of plan tastion

How are they doing it? can,nt see his back is to me

Is there anything else you believe may be helpful? its a d,s,e [Department of Sustainability and Environment] fire fighter lighten a fire why is he doing this bad thing 1 could of died if the wind chance 1’d tryed to tell the police but they were to byse

Who is committing the crime? I saw a d,s,e fire fighter light a fire on the edge of the road as 1 went pass 1’m sceared that the bad man will get me

There’s a silence after Henry finishes.

‘They said it was anonymous,’ Sokaluk offers. Any contrition appears minimal. His tongue is moving around in his mouth like he’s cleaning something stuck there.

Putting in a false Crime Stopper’s report to cover for having dropped a cigarette is only a summary offence. The detectives are still a distance from proving arson causing death. Henry tries something else: he explains that analysts have taken Sokaluk’s computer from his house and have been examining it. For the first time, the accused appears uneasy; he starts shifting back and forth, rubbing his legs.

Henry: ‘What have you been doing on your computer?’

Sokaluk: ‘I play games and go on internet.’

Henry: ‘Yep, and when you go on the internet, what do you look at?’

Sokaluk: ‘Lots of stuff.’

Henry: ‘Like what?’

Sokaluk: ‘Porn, normal porn sometimes.’

Henry: ‘Normal porn?’

Sokaluk: ‘Yeah . . . Only look at normal stuff.’

Brendan is given another caution.

Henry: ‘Now tell me a little bit more about these porn sites?’

Sokaluk: ‘I don’t know what it’s got to do with the other, the fire.’

Henry: ‘Would it be fair to say that there’s underage people on those sites?’

Sokaluk: ‘Couldn’t say. I don’t remember. It would have been a long time ago that, was it? A bit hard trying to get some of that rubbish off, people tell you these things and you go on and then look at it, like normal ones, and all this other shit pops up.’

He claims this ‘bad stuff’ or ‘naughty shit’, the child pornography, would appear when he was trying to download games, or look at ‘normal’ porn – after all, he says, ‘most people have got pornograph on their computer’.

Henry moves on, asking the accused if he’s looked at anything related to Black Saturday on the internet.

‘It was too depressing,’ Sokaluk says. ‘It made me very upset.’

In his search history, the forensic team have found dozens of photographs of firefighters battling the blaze. One was of a fire engine streaking through flames and smoke; the smoke wasn’t just towering, it was terraced, a whole horrific kingdom drawn in every shade of brown and black. A dense, volatile pyrocumulus cloud, stretching up several kilometres, colonised the sky.

Bertoncello sits silently next to Henry. He is the junior officer. Less fazes him each year, but he’s unnerved now. The term ‘cold-blooded’ keeps coming to mind. He feels Sokaluk is saying what he thinks he ought to say, what he thinks they want to hear, but there is no emotional resonance to the words. He gives an answer that implies remorse in the same register he’s used to ask about dinner.

Bertoncello hadn’t known, when he joined the police service – no one does – the scale of the damage he’d go on to see. One minute he was a teenager watching Police Rescue, where an actor in a helicopter was winching another actor to safety, thinking, That looks a good job; the next he was learning a daily lesson about people’s ability to inflict pain, and the stories they then tell themselves and others.

Who was this man they’d arrested? How smart or dumb or cunning or oblivious he was seemed to change from moment to moment. The detective didn’t claim to know about the diagnostic subtleties of pyromania, let alone sociopathy, although there was something in Brendan’s lack of empathy that brought this word to Bertoncello’s mind.

When he takes over the interview, Bertoncello tries combinations of questions in the hope that they might unlock some explanation of why, as he suspects, the man opposite him deliberately lit an inferno.

Bertoncello: ‘How did it feel fighting that fire?’

Sokaluk: ‘Horrible. It was hot.’

Bertoncello: ‘Was it exciting?’

Sokaluk: ‘No. It’s frightening. It’s scary.’

Bertoncello: ‘Have you tried to fight other fires?’

Sokaluk: ‘No.’

Bertoncello: ‘Have you seen other fires up close?’

Sokaluk: ‘No, I don’t want to see anymore.’

At 1.25 am the detectives are about to suspend the interview. Henry asks one last question. ‘Have you told anyone what you did?’

Sokaluk replies, ‘No, ’cause they, people, would go and firm a lynch thing and chop a person up, so I kept quiet.’

Sokaluk spent the night in the cells, and the next morning, in a video recording of a field interview, his khaki uniform of sweatshirt and shorts is crumpled. He’s standing on Glendonald Road, not far from where his car had broken down, in his black velcro sneakers. His hands are in his pockets, fidgeting. He’s dark around the eyes, and doesn’t meet the gaze of the detectives or the videographer.

Shoesmith, Henry and Bertoncello stand in a line next to him. They look as sombre as undertakers in their white business shirts and striped, police-issue ties. The camera pans around the empty road, still blocked by a police barricade. There’s a strange silence. In the wind, the leaves of unburnt trees whip the air. Suddenly, an approaching fire engine can be heard. Nearby there’s been a flare-up.

‘Oh, great, fire truck,’ Sokaluk mutters, lifting a hand to shield his profile, and turning his back to any volunteers on the engine who might recognise him.

Henry wonders if he’s just noticed a jolt of excitement course through the accused. Had seeing the fire truck somehow stirred him? The interview is suspended and Sokaluk is moved away.

In the video’s next sequence, he and the detectives are standing on the edge of the blackened eucalypt plantation. He’s led them to an area metres from one of the points of origin identified by the fire scientists. This, he claims, is where he threw the paper napkin holding his cigarette ash.

‘As far as I thought, it was dead and I chucked it out the window, but I didn’t know it was lit up.’

The tree trunks are charred, the canopies the colour of rust.

‘It was green at the time,’ Sokaluk mumbles. ‘Not green anymore. All burnt now.’

‘It was green?’ Henry asks.

‘There’s no more greenery and all the animals are gone.’

The detective tries what seems a neat shift. ‘What are the weather conditions today?’

‘Windy.’

Henry’s tie is flapping over his shoulder; the air’s rattle makes the conversation barely audible. ‘What were the weather conditions like on Saturday?’

Sokaluk seems more competent in this interaction, quicker to respond. ‘Don’t remember it being windy,’ he claims.

‘What way is the wind blowing today?’

‘Towards me.’

He’s not looking at the detectives, he’s gazing around at this new landscape. Standing there, Sokaluk appears curious. He would have seen some of the fire’s damage when he retrieved his burnt-out car, but now, six days later, he actively takes in the ash-covered ground and the singed leaves pointing in the direction of the wind – the fire scene presenting its story.

Henry can’t help trying to read Sokaluk’s face, searching for some dawning sense of the violence that’s been done.

Back at the police station, the detective clarifies the purpose of the field interview, and Sokaluk tries to slide away from his earlier admission.

Henry: ‘You indicated the area where you lit the fire.’

Sokaluk: ‘Well, I think I didn’t really lit the fire.’

Henry: ‘Sorry?’

Sokaluk: ‘I didn’t light the fire.’

Henry: ‘Not, where you threw out the paper?’

Sokaluk, glancing over, as if sizing Henry up: ‘Where I threw the paper out, roughly that area.’ His finger is in his ear; he’s stroking his neck, fidgeting more, moving his tongue in his mouth.

Henry: ‘And that area was a tree plantation?’

Sokaluk: ‘Yes.’

Henry: ‘What sort of trees?’

Sokaluk: ‘Eucalypts.’

Henry: ‘And what was on the other side of the road?’

Sokaluk: ‘Pine trees.’

Henry: ‘So, you only saw one fire?’

Sokaluk: ‘One fire.’

Henry: ‘We’ve got information that there were two fires in that area.’

Sokaluk: ‘Not by me.’

Henry: ‘What can you tell me about that?’

Sokaluk: ‘I only can say that there, where I was and stuff, not, I didn’t light any fires. I think it was accidental.’

Henry: ‘Yeah.’

Sokaluk: ‘Now I’m paying for it.’

In this interview, his internet habits are again raised. Henry asks about the pornography. ‘I’m referring to child stuff,’ he says.

‘I know that,’ Sokaluk answers quickly. He sounds irritated, both with the police and himself.

Suddenly, he belches as if he’s about to vomit. It’s the most intense reaction he has had, and completely involuntary. In that moment, he seems to grasp that the trouble he’s in is real.

Before this, while they were back recording the field interview, the suspect and Henry stood next to each other, both still for a moment, waiting for confirmation that the video was taping.

The detective, with knotted forehead and a biro in his top pocket, looks solemn. Where the camera might have picked up some undisguisable swagger around this arrest, the biggest of the policemen’s careers, there’s instead a sense of anticlimax, and a dawning horror at the pointlessness of this crime. The adrenaline, the urgency surrounding Sokaluk’s arrest, slip away in a wash of futility.

Henry seems to be holding back, trying to suspend judgement. He’d dealt with murderers and rapists – men, usually, who often didn’t seem very different to anyone else when you stripped away the layers. If he felt any prejudice towards them when he was gathering information, then he believed he was the wrong person to do the interview. In the days to follow, he’ll oversee the use of cadaver dogs, and the sieving of crime scene areas for the bones of the dead. He’ll send investigators to take DNA swabs from relatives who are trying not to imagine why they’re needed. But right now, he is standing neutrally by the person who apparently caused this catastrophe, and it’s impossible to tell if Brendan is excited or remorseful, nonplussed or uncomprehending.

Henry had been left raw by babies in cribs near his daughter’s being given the last rites, and now he’s standing on the edge of this crematorium of trees and animals and houses and people. And for years to come, this case will be the one that sticks with him. Every anniversary of the fire, he’ll ask himself, Why?

Next to him, Brendan Sokaluk beholds the wreckage. He’d grown up around here. He’d fished for crays, and picked blackberries, and spent hours scouring this area and beyond like a modern-day ragpicker, an untouchable, for the junk other people left behind.

He knew these hills as well as anyone. An acquaintance from high school later recalled: ‘Brendan could not read or write, but he had a real geographic talent . . . he had maps that he had drawn of Churchill town. The maps contained all the street names and the layout of the streets. It was as if he had copied the map, but he had done it himself. He even had deviations, of what he believed would be a better layout of streets. The talent pertained to the whole Latrobe Valley: back roads, fire access roads through the pine plantations and dirt tracks.’

Now, as he stands by one of these dirt tracks at the start of a blackened map, the damage from this fire stretches before him, over gullies and ridges in all directions. The hills are filled with exactly the kind of scrap metal – ruined farm equipment and endless strips of scorched corrugated-iron roofing – that he likes to collect. By lighting a fire, accidentally or not, he has turned the bush around his home into one vast junkyard.

In the background, the wind gusts in low keening cries. There’s a sudden swell of ash-filled air and Sokaluk reaches up his hand to protect his eyes from the grit.