The afternoon of Friday 13 February, Selena McCrickard sat in a windowless office trying to concentrate. There was nothing on the walls and only a day’s worth of legal briefs on her desk. Morwell Legal Aid was having staffing problems, and as she had family nearby she’d volunteered to spend a few weeks helping with the court lists. Just passing through, she’d found herself at the centre of a disaster zone.

Driving around the Valley over the years, she’d seen signs nailed to tree trunks: ARSONISTS DIE! Now many of those roads were sealed off as the fire kept burning, and no one knew when or where it would next spread. Images of ash, and victim photographs that you might see after a terrorist attack, filled every TV screen and newspaper. Arriving at work, she’d felt an eerie friction on the streets and wondered if the threat in those painted capital letters was now a real one.

The office manager came to her door. ‘The police say they’ve arrested the arsonist.’

McCrickard, long blond hair around a striking face, looked back at her, not adding two and two.

‘Come on. You’re the barrister.’

It took less than ten minutes to walk to the police station, and McCrickard, a fit woman in her mid-thirties, usually went directly up the main street of Morehell, as she called the town with begrudging affection. She passed the FOR LEASE notices pasted on shopfronts, interspersed with charities and services for victims of crime, and then, closer to the court, lawyers’ offices. Even as she moved she held herself straight, tensed, as if balancing on something.

In her spare time, the barrister was a surfer. The day of the fires, she’d tried to escape the ungodly heat down on the coast at Fairhaven, 125 kilometres the other side of Melbourne. In the water she found herself strangely buoyant. There seemed to be more salt than usual. She could taste it. She imagined she could see it. And when she emerged, her wetsuit was covered in a white crystalline lacework and McCrickard felt uneasy about the coming week. Later she’d remember this, because then there was no time to surf. And now, hearing of her new brief, she had the same feeling as when readying her nerves for a big wave. She’d hear its noise, feel the start of the rush – but just before that, and it would only be for a split second, there was the stillness you sensed before a storm hit.

This arson case wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she’d volunteered to help out. McCrickard had just settled a gruelling local sex crime: incest, really young victims, the father pleading guilty. She was hoping for work that was less emotionally demanding. If she hesitated as a wave curled towards her, though, things always ended badly.

At the police station, she buzzed for access to the cells. No press were waiting here, but they were already outside the adjacent courthouse. She felt the hostility in the air. Inside the station, there were glances ending in head shakes; clenched, disapproving mouths.

The local police now regarded her with a new level of disdain. Some of them were still washing soot from their eyes and skin and hair. They’d spent the past six days standing at roadblocks, comforting the newly homeless. They’d guarded taped-off properties where the dead were sometimes their neighbours. And now here she was in her sleek business suit to protect the man they held responsible.

The police already had McCrickard’s new client at the entrance to an underground tunnel that led to the courthouse, ready to put him in the dock. While he was being brought back to speak to her, she didn’t need to sign in the way she usually did. The Arson Squad detectives wanted this handled quickly, and she was ushered straight through to an interview room.

She’d sat in this small, cold space before, talking through a glass partition to clients in various states of extremis; they’d be coming down off something, or panicking, or profoundly sad. Occasionally it was someone she’d come to know well. Perhaps this would be their final conversation before the Big House, the last hurrah, and the acoustics were such that if, behind them in the cells, another prisoner was wailing or banging, every noise was amplified and she could barely hear what her client had to say.

The man facing her had never been here before.

Sitting on the other side of the glass in his shabby green clothes, Brendan Sokaluk didn’t exactly seem scared. He had a receding hairline partially disguised by its clipped style. Weight blurred his features – a doughy face narrowing to a soft chin and neck – but she could tell he wasn’t young. Late thirties or early forties, perhaps, and wearing an expression she’d encountered many times before. Bewilderment: pure, lost-in-the-wildwoods confusion.

McCrickard took one look at him and thought, Fuck, this guy is a kid.

Through the tiny holes in the partition, they started talking; his speech was stilted and staccato, his gaze elsewhere. Over and over he repeated, ‘I want to go home. I want to see my dog.’ He seemed unable to grasp the fact that he was not going to be allowed to just leave and catch the bus back to Sheoke Grove. ‘Who is looking after Brocky?’ he kept asking.

Two things seemed clear to McCrickard: first, Brendan hadn’t a clue about what was going on; second, there was no way she wanted him taken over to the courthouse for the filing hearing – ‘kick off’, his official entry into the justice system. She didn’t even stop to explain the nuances of the Legal Aid application he had to sign, as she usually would: she did not have the time it would take him to comprehend it. She needed Brendan’s signature and to then get back to the detectives and negotiate his non-appearance, with them and with the court. News of the arrest was still breaking. More media would be on the way to join those already in wait.

In the simplest terms, she tried to explain to Brendan that there was no chance of him getting bail, and right now it wasn’t safe for him at home. How much he understood she couldn’t tell. Probably bugger all, she estimated.

Outside the interview room, she went to find the detective in charge, Adam Shoesmith. He was already waiting at the courthouse. McCrickard left the station and walked around the corner.

The Magistrate’s Court was another new concrete construction, opposite the town’s rose garden. The juxtaposition amused her. Everytown’s carefully pruned statement of order and civilisation was largely ignored by those who milled outside the building. Her clients commonly settled in to deal with their day’s various legal matters accompanied by a passing parade of supporters and hangers-on, as were those seeking rulings against them. Here, in these ad hoc social gatherings, young kids pushed toy cars around defendants’ feet, and all the clichés of the Latrobe Valley were on full display.

Some of McCrickard’s colleagues at the bar rolled their eyes when they were given a brief in the Valley. For clients accused of rape this was the easiest place to get an acquittal. Selena could almost see the jury thinking, You got us into court for this? Often her clients were the fourth generation of – and she hated using the sanitised putdown – the ‘welfare class’. It was normal for them not to go to school or work, as normal as the drug and alcohol problems, as Dad bashing Mum, as these inevitable days in the courthouse foyer where a shimmer of tension hovered like a heat haze, everyone braced for the next fight to break out.

The jokes about the region irritated her; the stigma of banjo country, of people being backward hillbillies living off the government. It was demeaning, the way it is when someone is rude about your family. An oversimplification of complex, interweaving factors. As a local you might be able to laugh at the trashiness, the easiest of targets – and the broader community certainly did – but McCrickard didn’t extend the privilege to outsiders.

Today, however, the courthouse was different. There were no kids strapped into strollers as if for a visit to the zoo. Today the atmosphere was laced with hate. The waiting press and onlookers could have passed for the first sign-ups to a lynch mob.

Inside, past the security screening, a narrow corridor led to court number one. It was full of reporters, who went silent and did not move to let her pass. Vicious bitches packed with make-up, she thought. They were right in her face – and the looks they gave her! It was as though she’d lit the fire.

Brendan was waiting in the dock. The press stood around eyeing this prize monster, who sat expressionless, staring straight ahead.

McCrickard started negotiating his non-appearance with Adam Shoesmith. The detective agreed they had to get Brendan out of town as fast as possible. He’d been the one to ring Legal Aid and ask for the duty lawyer to come and represent the accused at the hearing. It was up to the court to give permission for him to stay away. But there was nothing to be gained by having this guy on show. The hearing was merely procedural, and a chance for the defence to request service of the hand-up brief – the document that would include Brendan’s record of interview and the prosecution’s witness statements.

When Brendan had been removed, and his matter was finally called, McCrickard tried to apply for a suppression order. She was on her feet arguing the case as a series of faxes were placed in front of her. News agencies from across the country wanted this, wanted that, wanted her to stop and wait for them and would slap down an injunction if she didn’t. Working with this level of raw aggression was a test of nerves.

The magistrate declared a suppression order unnecessary. ‘We don’t need to mention any names, because this is just a filing hearing, so we’re just talking about dates.’

He set about adjourning the matter to a date and court in Melbourne.

‘Thank you, Ms McCrickard, you’re excused.’

In the crush of the courtroom, there were two other people supporting Brendan. Kaz Sokaluk, a reticent man in his late fifties, was already somewhat hidden under a long ponytail, beard and glasses. He had another son with him, and they looked equally overwhelmed. Kaz was not used to attention of any kind, but just now his house was under siege from the media and the phone would not stop ringing. His wife was too distressed to come out. Neither of them could believe their son capable of the things he’d been accused of doing. Brendan had been picked on all his life, for being slow and unusual, and his arrest felt no different.

McCrickard sought to reassure them both but there was no point talking seriously with dictaphones shoved right in their faces.

‘I’ll have to call you later,’ she told the pair. ‘Just get out of here. There’s way too much heat on. Go home and I’ll speak to you soon, alright?’

The court staff managed to sneak the Sokaluks out of the building.

The barrister saw her client again briefly. He was sitting still behind the glass of another small interview room, just off the underground tunnel, unmoved by the drama surrounding him. He didn’t seem to recognise her. Once more she had the feeling that she was dealing with a child.

McCrickard was well aware of the long history of intellectually disabled people admitting to crimes they’d never committed. Brendan waiving his right to a lawyer during the police interview was typical of someone unable to grasp the gravity of their legal situation, or the consequences of a confession. People with an intellectual disability were more vulnerable to all the tactics of ingratiation and threat that police commonly used. They were more likely to confess, wanting to give the right answer to please authority figures, especially those who appeared friendly. Even more so if the interview had been lengthy and they’d been provided with no assistance – or only a barely trained independent third person. The man in front of her may have thought the police were right about circumstances he didn’t entirely recall, particularly if the accusation dovetailed with a general sense of shame. Thrilled and terrified by the detectives’ attention, Brendan may have claimed responsibility for the fire in a misguided attempt to big-note himself.

Reintroducing herself, she was blunt. ‘Really, Brendan, the game plan today is to get you out of here. We’ve got to get you out of Morwell.’

She had a gift for talking to people from behind glass, building some rapport quickly. ‘I know you don’t understand now,’ she told him, ‘but you’re going to have to trust me. I’m going to look after you, but you have to trust me, alright?’ McCrickard had a smoker’s stripped vocal register that gave her words a raw authority. ‘I don’t want you to talk to anyone.’ She repeated herself slowly, stressing each syllable. ‘Don’t talk to anyone, anymore.’

Brendan was led away and the barrister walked back from the tunnel to the court’s foyer. The din! As though something long-buried underground had emerged, hissing. The plate-glass windows had morphed into a wall of waiting eyes. There’s no fucking way I’m going out there, she thought. The press had multiplied, their lenses and microphones all emblems of hate. The usual atmosphere of the place, the everyday hopelessness combined with tension that seemed to have a scent, was overpowered by loathing.

The court staff tried various ways to smuggle her out of the building. Just as they resorted to walking her through the tunnel back to the police station, the media dissipated. They’d got wind that Brendan was being loaded into a prison van. As the mob raced over to get pictures, McCrickard made her escape.

Behind the reporters, Hazelwood’s eight chimney towers went on making their cloud forest: life as it was known.

The next day, the front page of The Age showed a man hanging off the van, pounding on the reinforced windows. The court had printed Sokaluk’s name on their daily list, and the media had connected the dots: arson causing death, and knowingly possessing child pornography. Hate sites devoted to ‘naming and shaming’ the accused were now all over the internet. Soon a website titled ‘KillBrendanSokaluk’ appeared, along with a ‘Brendan Sokaluk Must Burn In Hell’ Facebook page, and another group purportedly offering ten thousand dollars to anyone who killed him. The mainstream newspapers published some of the posts:

‘Let me hurt him, burn him, put a bullet and a knife in every orifice of his body.’

‘He should be thrown into his creation and left to burn.’

‘Tie the bastard to a post and put a ring of fire around him . . . let the fire make its way to him and make him suffer like the other 100’s of people had to endure.’

Selena McCrickard read these offerings with increasing dismay. She knew virtually nothing about her client, and was now encountering the most lurid, distorted version of him.

Some of the coverage was like a pastiche of small-town gossip. In the Herald Sun’s tabloid exposé, ‘Australia’s Most Hated’, it was reported:

Sokaluk was an enigma in a town where he grew up [but now] ‘Everywhere you go people are talking about it, even at the shops,’ one resident said . . . One neighbour, who asked not to be named, said Sokaluk played bingo [but] never mingled.

Residents had become angry over the past year as Sokaluk’s collection of car parts and refrigerators grew and littered his driveway . . . ‘[A]ll the other houses around here are pretty nice looking, but that one made the street look untidy,’ one neighbour said.

In another Herald Sun article, titled ‘Secret Life of Arson Accused’, she read: ‘Accused arsonist Brendan Sokaluk lists candlelight, thunderstorms and skinny dipping as turn-ons on his social networking website . . . A loner who went to a special school, he tried to become a CFA volunteer for years but was always knocked back . . . One [of his social media posts] written on November 26 said: “We are compelled to do what is forbidden.”’ Surely, McCrickard thought, this was the tag line of a DVD, rather than a sentence the man she’d met had composed.

The story was picked up internationally. Online and in the UK, The Guardian reported: ‘The man charged over his role in Australia’s deadly bushfires was a loner’ – being isolated, she noticed, was itself nearly a crime – ‘obsessed with fire and was bitter about an ex-girlfriend.’

A photo of Brendan’s ex-girlfriend, Alexandra, a pretty peroxide-blonde wearing a bright yellow CFA uniform and angel wings, had exploded over the internet. It was her profile picture on the internet forum Myspace, where, newspapers reported, she claimed that as a child she had been severely burned and spent a year recuperating on a burns ward. She also wrote of her dog, named Miss Pyro.

Her image was paired with an unsmiling self-portrait of Brendan. Wearing a black beanie, he’d photographed himself in his dark bathroom, sunlight from a narrow window reflecting in the mirror like a white blaze.

The couple had evidently had an unhappy break-up. Newspapers quoted Brendan’s Myspace profile: ‘My interest are to enjoy life to the fallest and not with Alexandra because she roots behind your back and lies a lot. I’d like to meet my sole mate and not some old hag.’

McCrickard started calling the police, demanding they act to have these images and websites taken down, but even as she argued Brendan’s case she felt it was too late. The lynching party was electronic: how could he not be stigmatised by this media coverage? With his image intercut with those of the fire, would there be twelve people in the state who could sit unbiased in a jury box?

Before long she was also butting heads with Detective Shoesmith about the child pornography charges. In crime parlance, they looked to her like a ‘burger with the lot’, similar, for example, to an armed burglar also being accused of double parking and firearm possession. She felt the Arson Squad had charged Brendan too hastily and caused immeasurable reputational damage. Paedophiles and arsonists were the pariahs of modern Australian life – to be both rendered someone the ultimate outcast.

The barrister knew all the clichés about fire-setters also being sexual perverts. Sex and fire was an old, old fusion. Sigmund Freud had not been required reading in any law school course on fire-setting – and Legal Aid did not go in much for psychoanalysis – but in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud synthesised the idea by writing that fire-lighting was a regressive attempt to master the threats and uncertainties of the natural world: ‘In man’s struggle to gain power over the tyranny of nature, his acquisition of power over fire was most important. It is as if primitive man had had the impulse when he came in contact with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure in respect of it and put it out with a stream of urine . . . Analytic findings testify to the close connection between the ideas of ambition, fire and urethral eroticism.’

A few years later, Freud provided his further thoughts: ‘The warmth radiated by fire evokes the same kind of glow as accompanies the state of sexual excitation, and the form and motion of the flame suggest the phallus in action.’

Eighty years on, fire-lighting was still widely considered to deliver an erotic thrill. Back at the Morwell police station, some local detectives who had been inside a lot of fire-setters’ houses reckoned they’d found uncommon amounts of sexual paraphernalia. And some of McCrickard’s colleagues, criminal barristers who went on to defend Sokaluk, privately also believed in the connection. One had defended a man who would lie down by his car, nearby his blaze, and masturbate; another defended two intellectually disabled men who would head into the bush, light fires and jerk each other off; and yet another defended a man whose calling card was setting fire to women’s shoes. Despite studies that found no proof of any link between sex and arson, in Sokaluk the two were now related.

Adam Shoesmith had never worked in any police department dealing with child pornography. He’d never been exposed to the kind of images the forensics team pulled off Sokaluk’s computer, and for him the material was genuinely shocking. But McCrickard’s point was that these charges could have waited; Brendan wasn’t about to get bail. Arson causing death was essentially a homicide offence, and he also faced a multitude of ancillary indictments relating to the fire. The man was in terrible trouble. In comparison, the child porn charge had complications. There were unresolved legal technicalities regarding whether the images were, as Sokaluk claimed, ‘cookies’ that had popped up when he was looking at adult porn. By the time the case reached committal, these charges, regarded by the prosecutor as necessary but ultimately a distraction, had been carved off along with the other 180 counts of recklessly causing serious injury and damage.

In her most frustrated moments, however, McCrickard couldn’t help feeling that the porn charge had been thrown in to make the police look like heroes and her client as nasty as possible. She knew her perspective was different. She hadn’t been present at the blackened crime scene as it was photographed, and she hadn’t had to knock on doors and tell people what happened to their relatives.

Nor did she take the possession of child pornography lightly. Once, reading a judgement in a case involving a man downloading live child-sex shows, she’d found a sentence about the abused children screaming for their mothers. She had reached the bathroom just in time to vomit. One day, years later, her own child called to her after she dropped him at childcare and out of nowhere that line reared up in her mind, and there was no way to explain to a four-year-old why suddenly she felt so undone.

Selena McCrickard was uniquely placed to separate the offence from the offender, the accused from the accusation. As a newborn she had been taken home from the maternity ward to Hayes Prison Farm, a low-security jail outside Hobart where her father worked as the superintendent. She grew up having the run of a farm with beef cattle, dairy cattle, a piggery, chickens and a vegetable garden. The produce fed the prisoners and her family, with the surplus donated to the local community.

For the most part, she was aware of what the different inmates had done. Many of them were open with her about their crimes. Aged five or six, she’d pad around in the school holidays after one prisoner, Shane, a regular who tended the huge lawns and rose beds of the superintendent’s rambling weatherboard house.

‘Shane’s back,’ her father would announce periodically, to her mother’s delight: the mowing would now get done. Shane himself seemed relieved to have a break from the booze and the drugs, and just take it easy in the garden, chatting with this little girl about his latest escapade – getting loaded and stealing a car, say. Often she heard quite detailed descriptions of the destruction these men had wrought in their lives outside, with them confessing, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that.’

The deal was that anyone who was near their house was a low-risk offender, and because security was minimal, for their own safety not many child molesters were sent there. Selena never felt at risk: to her this was just the way it was. Those in for murder, she noticed, often wangled the best jobs because they were, literally, stayers. One man, Paul, who was sentenced to twenty years, had experience milking cows and so the prison dairy had never run better. Paul used to piggyback Selena around, this gentle-seeming man who’d killed his girlfriend. Good and evil were far from categorical concepts, and liable to morph from one moment to the next.

Her childhood trained her for all the people she’d meet later as a Legal Aid barrister. Covering her desk on any given day were cases involving defendants with congenital or acquired brain damage: people with fetal alcohol syndrome, long-term alcoholics or drug users, those who’d been cognitively impaired in accidents, fights, or by various forms of abuse. Selena McCrickard calculated that more than half her clients in the Latrobe Valley courthouse had some form of intellectual disability. And sometimes she remembered Richie, a mentally impaired old man who would be released from Hayes Prison Farm then go and smash some windows to be allowed back in. Thirty years later, a lack of understanding, resources and support meant that people like him were still cast into the criminal justice system, and having no voice they depended on someone standing up for them in court.

In the attitude of some of the police, she recognised the familiar question: How can you sleep at night? Or more politely: How can you defend him? Her unspoken answer was: Well, because I’m a lawyer, not society’s moral guardian. And so, on a Saturday, a little over a week after Brendan’s arrest, she went to visit him in the Melbourne Assessment Prison, a red-brick fortress in the heart of the city. She was led up a set of stairs to an area of the prison she’d never been, and taken to a bland room with a table and chairs.

‘Normally we’d never bring you here,’ a senior warden said, explaining that it was too dangerous to place Sokaluk near any other prisoners. He was in lockdown for his own protection.

Brendan was escorted into the room wearing a prison-issue tracksuit. There was that odd, clumsy gait, and when Selena caught his face there was something in his expression that didn’t look quite right. This was the animal moment when a defence barrister almost unconsciously sizes up a client, wondering how he or she will appear to others in the artificial jungle of the courtroom.

From the warrant and hand-up brief, Selena knew the police didn’t have much evidence on Brendan. But now it struck her again that anyone seeing him near the fire would likely have made all kinds of prejudiced assumptions. She suspected he wasn’t much used to candlelight or skinny-dipping, although nor did he present as ‘bitter’ or ‘an enigma’. What was clear was that this man had ‘issues’, and people like him often did stuff, often unexpected, off-the-wall stuff such as driving around the countryside on a 47-degree day searching for scrap metal. It didn’t mean he’d lit a fire. She knew he’d been an early caller to 000, reporting the blaze, but so what? Plenty of people were calling the fire through. Maybe he’d found himself in the midst of the drama and wanted to be a part of it, then, being the misfit on the scene – as he probably was everywhere – all fingers had pointed his way.

Years earlier, Selena had defended a man accused of lighting fires around the Macedon Ranges in central Victoria – a strapping, handsome, bloke-next-door type who was acquitted. Brendan was at risk of bias in a way the attractive accused man was not.

Again she was unsure if Brendan recognised her. She told him she was here to check that he was okay.

Brendan had a sore back from lying down so much in his cell. He was trying not to make any noise, hoping the other prisoners wouldn’t know he was there.

Selena explained that one of her colleagues at Legal Aid had handled his suppression order – no one was allowed to name him or show his photograph now. On the cell’s tiny television he’d seen the pictures of himself and his ex-girlfriend and his plain brick house. He was worried for his next-door neighbours. What if someone blew up his place and they were injured or killed? Perhaps it would be bombed by the mean man he met late the night of the fires who told him he’d kill whoever was responsible . . .

That was how it was talking to Brendan: little scraps of fantasy, of make-believe; ideas from whatever cartoon he’d just watched seemed to float into the discussion. His attention span was very short, he had to be brought back round to the point: yes, he’d noticed that the footage showing his photograph had suddenly stopped. But Selena seriously doubted how much he comprehended.

In the months to come, it struck the barrister that Brendan’s interest in his legal affairs extended only so far as wanting them to end so he could go home. His conversation revolved around a limited range of topics that interested him. She had a V8 Holden ute, useful for carrying her surfboard, and he liked chatting about the engine, the tyres, how it ran. Otherwise, his areas were children’s television, fast food – he’d suddenly start rhapsodising about KFC – or people being mean to him. Talking with him involved a series of strange, self-absorbed non sequiturs.

This was an ongoing shock: his seeming ineptitude and the fire’s vast destruction. Brendan maintained he hadn’t lit the blaze, although he showed no curiosity about its impact on the community in which he’d grown up. And when they ventured too near this topic, his manner let it be known that it was all a bit too hard for him. The reasons why it was too hard weren’t entirely clear. Sometimes Brendan would shut down, barely seem able to respond.

It is common for people accused of crimes to be overwhelmed, as if by a nightmare. McCrickard had seen clients break down, crying, ‘I’m not guilty! Why am I here!’ Or conversely, ‘Yes, I did it, and I feel like killing myself!’ The level of emotion often reached such extremes she would leave these interviews exhausted. Sometimes it was straight desperation: someone about to hit crack withdrawals claiming they needed bail to care for a sick grandmother. (Last night, when you were robbing the servo, Selena would wonder, who was looking after Granny then?) But it was an understandable human reaction. She could read it. Brendan’s expression and speech, though, were unchanging, his gaze elsewhere.

Selena was not encountering the same person the police were. The Arson Squad detectives had decided his vagueness was an act, a claim the barrister found ridiculous. To them, his apparent lack of remorse verged on sociopathy. But Brendan’s aloofness, his almost mechanical egocentrism, was what made her suspect there was more going on for him than an intellectual disability. Although on the night of his arrest a forensic doctor had found him fit to be interviewed, this was not the same as being fit to stand trial. Selena had major apprehensions about her client’s capacity.

She wanted him to have a psychological assessment. She’d thought this the moment she met him. She thought it again on her first visit with him in the Melbourne Assessment Prison.

She was sitting opposite a man stooped by habit or fear, who seemed impervious to the devastation he may have wrought in the place where he was raised. The only thing he’d wanted his family to bring him in jail was a photo of Brocky. Selena tried to tell him that his pet was alright, that it was being cared for by neighbours, a family with children, but Churchill wasn’t safe for Brendan himself. And all the time she was thinking, Is someone going to try to kill you in here?

Brendan later told his parents and lawyers that other prisoners had twice tried to murder him while he was on remand. He claimed that after he complained about corrupt guards bringing in KFC for select prisoners, they left paperwork relating to his child pornography charges where other inmates could see it, a greater black mark apparently than the arson charge. His parents worried he was too naive to understand when to keep his mouth shut.

Most prisoners McCrickard dealt with either already knew the ropes when they got to jail or quickly learned them, but this guy had no idea. He was watching Thomas the Tank Engine with the sound down low and trying to pass the time doing a puzzle book. His soft, plump body, his wooden movements, his fidgeting made him seem more vulnerable. He looked lost, and she found herself reaching into her wallet and handing him fifty dollars. Now he could at least buy a packet of cigarettes or make a phone call.

He took the money, but all the time kept asking the same question, and she kept answering it the same way: ‘You can’t go home at the moment, Brendan. It’s not safe for you to go home. There are a lot of people who are really, really angry at you. They think you’ve done something very bad. Even if we get you bail, you may never be able to go home.’