Each morning of the long, tense days that followed the jury view, one of Brendan’s solicitors would call him at the assisted-living facility to remind him it was time to leave for court. He had rarely been to Melbourne as an adult, but his lawyers had shown him on a map the simple tram route into the city. They would meet him at the tram stop or the Legal Aid offices, and escort him through the columns and arches of the Supreme Court.

Shannon Dellamarta had drawn a picture of the courtroom so Brendan could visualise where he and the jury and the public – some of whom had lost family members in the fires – would be sitting. She added the raised bench opposite him for the judge, who in his wig and gown Brendan believed looked like Father Christmas.

Dellamarta and Gaby Pulczynski, as the instructing solicitors, sat across from the barristers, facing the room, and keeping a weather eye on Brendan. During his committal hearing he had occasionally fallen asleep. When Brendan entered the dock, one of them would hand him a notebook and coloured pens with which he’d set to work drawing, obsessively alternating between red and blue. The police felt this was a ploy to make him appear harmless, but the defence hoped that if Brendan was occupied he’d be less likely to doze, or fool around.

The lawyers were also worried about his tendency to openly yawn. It hardly mattered that the combination of his medication and his short attention span was the cause, yawning looked like brazen indifference to the proceedings, and the disaster at the centre of them. And Brendan was bored. Believing his lawyers were too, he took to feigning sleep and waking as if startled. They firmly told him this hamming had to stop.

On the fifth day of the trial, Kaz Sokaluk appeared as a witness. Kaz was a reserved man who tried to live a quiet life. He had been conceived while his Polish mother was interned in a German labour camp, and he had never gone back to Europe, nor ventured, in the past forty years, far from the Valley. It was therefore a considerable effort of will to climb the small wooden steps to the grandly carved witness stand and wait there, belittled by the opulence of the high-ceilinged room, conscious of every tremble in his hands or voice.

The trial travelled back in the imperfect time machine of personal recollections. ‘If I could take you to 7 February 2009, the Saturday,’ prosecutor Ray Elston said. ‘Did you have a regular routine with Brendan on Saturday morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘And this one, you went into Morwell with him in the morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘And ended up going to Kentucky Fried for lunch?’

‘That’s correct.’ Kaz had seen Elston at various legal proceedings over the past few years and the prosecutor had always been respectful.

‘Dropped into Autobarn?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Supercheap Auto, just to have a look around?’

‘Yes.’

The court heard that father and son then went to the TAB to lay a few bets. Then on to Big W, and the hardware chain Bunnings to check for bargains, before stopping for lunch. During the week, Kaz explained, he would visit Brendan’s house and check that it was clean, making sure also that his son had enough food and money. He told the court how Brendan supplemented his pension with the paper round and by collecting scrap metal and doing odd jobs, cutting firewood, mowing lawns. Then, on weekends, they had this regular outing.

But in the heat on Black Saturday, Brendan’s car ‘was losing power. It was jerking, backfiring. It just wasn’t running right.’ As they sputtered back to Churchill they passed a fire engine attending a grass fire near Energy Brix, which produced coal briquettes. They ‘stopped to have a look, same as everybody else’. Brendan dropped his father home and said he was driving up towards the hills to see his friend and ex-neighbour Dave. He needed to pick up a chisel set he’d loaned him. Brendan’s house didn’t have air conditioning and he ‘reckoned it was cooler up there. He’s often been up there when it was hot because it’s up in amongst the trees and that.’ Kaz told him not to go, that he’d tune the car up the next day, after the cool change.

Lou Sokaluk wasn’t in the gallery watching her husband give evidence. The two of them shared a train ticket and alternated their days in court to defray the expense and distress. It felt to Lou, the lawyers believed, as if everyone were sitting in judgement of her and Kaz too – and the whole town seemed to have been bussed in to give evidence. She’d had to accept there was much about her son she hadn’t known: that he had no real friend was perhaps the most painful of these revelations. Dave, for instance, later told the court he hadn’t been expecting Brendan’s visit, that he’d understood the chisels to be a gift of sorts, made two years earlier, by someone he really just tolerated.

Jane Dixon, cross-examining Kaz, spoke gently. ‘Generally, how did Brendan perform at school from the very beginning?’

‘Oh, pretty poorly.’

‘And it was you and your wife’s belief that it was some sort of birth-related brain issue?’

‘Yes,’ Kaz answered, ‘yes.’

‘And it is only recently that you’ve become aware that your son has been diagnosed with autism?’

‘That’s correct.’

No one spoke of such a condition in the 1970s; the Sokaluks had never heard of it when Brendan was a kid. He’d done badly at school then, before the Monash position, had a series of jobs, one at a rose farm near the Hazelwood pondage, and others with landscapers.

‘[H]ow did those jobs go on the whole?’ Dixon now asked.

‘Not very well.’

‘Would he last very long?’

‘No. They, you know, they just got rid of him.’

Dixon asked Kaz to have a look at some photographs of Brendan’s house taken by the police, and a document camera blew them up so the court could see them.

‘Lounge room,’ Kaz said of the first photograph.

On a coffee table in the pink and green room, a television guide lies next to the remote control, ready for the cartoons Brendan liked to watch. The room isn’t dirty; Kaz has kept the floors swept, the surfaces clean, but almost every object looks forlorn, including the yellowed pillows and duvet on the old couch where his son had lain to take in his scheduled television.

‘Next one?’

‘That’s still part of the lounge room, but it goes into the hallway.’

There are touches here of Lou, a print of bright parrots on the wall.

‘Yes?’ prompted Dixon, showing another photo.

‘That’s the bathroom and toilet.’

The walls here are the colour of fairy floss. The toilet has a fluffy pink toilet seat cover and a matching foot mat, dirtied over the years by Brendan’s boots. A can of air freshener is perched nearby.

‘Yes?’ asks Dixon, showing the next photo.

‘That was the, like a dining room beside the kitchen,’ Kaz said.

A small, cluttered space with another television and guide. Amongst the clutter is a bottle Brendan has marked Brocky’s Money Box.

‘Yes?’

‘And that was the kitchen.’

There’s a single glass waiting by the sink. One plate in the dish rack, alongside a knife and fork.

A photo of the outside of Brendan’s modest brick house was blown up on the screen. Despite its utter lack of adornment, the house isn’t that different to the others in the street, but now it’s the saddest. Kaz had thought they had him settled there, this different child of his, who he misses. He thought this house would make Brendan safe.

‘Thank you?’ The barrister urged him along.

Kaz had been Brendan’s keeper, but although he’d done his best he hadn’t managed to keep his son out of trouble.

‘That’s the house in Sheoke Grove . . . as it was on the day of 12 February 2009 when he was arrested?’

‘Yes, yes.’

Those in the sealed splendour of the ornate courtroom all now saw the carport full of auto parts, and a trailer containing whatever rubbish Brendan had last hauled back – some plastic chairs, a broken clothes rack. They saw various images of the inside of his shed. Handlebars, bumper-bars, electrical cords, cookware, all piled together and looking as if they’d melded into a single mutant thing. The DSM-5 lists ‘a strong preoccupation with unusual objects’ as a characteristic of autism.

‘It was a mess,’ Kaz admitted of the hoard, ‘all the bits and pieces he had.’

The closest Brendan got to other people, it seemed, was handling their cast-offs: the mattresses on which they’d once lain, the whitegoods that had washed the baby clothes, plastic tricycles and bikes from Santa, now dumped. All tokens of the connections that eluded him. Temple Grandin memorably described herself as akin to ‘an anthropologist on Mars’, piecing together the rules and customs of the society into which she was born. And if you want to decode human mores, why not analyse their leavings? Brendan dealt with the scraps of other people’s lives, the stuff that once helped hold things together. Maybe, by finding use in the useless, value in the insignificant, he was rehabilitating objects that were totems of himself.

Kaz stared at the junk.

‘As far as you were concerned,’ Dixon asked, ‘it was just [a] Saturday morning like any other Saturday morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did Brendan’s life pretty much run by routines?’

‘That’s correct.’

Everyone in the courtroom was no doubt wishing those days had held, that the two of them had kept going with this life of discount car shops, and long lay-bys, losing on the horses, and KFC, and that Brendan had just stayed home that Saturday as his father had told him to, rather than venturing out into the heat, into the woods.

Over the next few days in court, there was a strange re-enactment of what followed after Brendan left Kaz. A slow-building tumult of faces and voices and fragments of the story. There was the store manager of the petrol station where Brendan had bought the packet of cigarettes at 1.16 pm. They’d chatted a little. The manager lived with Brendan’s brother’s ex-wife. Then came a procession of locals from around the Valley, who fifteen minutes afterwards had suddenly noticed two plumes of smoke rising on the horizon.

Members of the Churchill fire brigade had been waiting on a day ‘too hot to go out and do anything . . . the hottest [they’d] ever seen it’. One volunteer told the court they’d rushed towards the hills, following this ‘smoke still whitish grey . . . starting to lift quite well into the sky . . . up in the clear sky above all the trees’. At the plantation raged two parallel fires: ‘we seen both sides of the road were ablaze’ with a ‘high north, hot wind . . . forcing the fires deeper into the bush’. The radiant heat was already so extreme, one volunteer said, ‘I could have cooked an egg on my face, I reckon.’

The residents of Glendonald Road heard a volunteer on this truck calling, ‘Get the fuck out, quick!’ A woman glanced behind her and realised that ‘the whole hillside was just ablaze and there was just flames shooting above the highest trees . . . an unbelievable sight . . . the tallest trees, it was way above them’. Rushing to evacuate, many people noticed a light-blue car parked askew. Then Natalie Turner and her boyfriend, having heard helicopters and seen ‘the flame height above the canopy of trees’, picked up Brendan, who seemed ‘a bit sketchy or a bit simple’, and drove him home.

There was a firefighter who later in the afternoon saw Brendan back in the fire zone walking his dog. He and his crew soon became entrapped and had to fight for their lives outside the house of Geoffrey Wright, who himself told the court of the radiant heat forcing him to release his family’s pet horse. (‘It hated my guts, I hated its guts, but I didn’t want nothing to happen to the horse because I didn’t want my family getting upset.’) At the firestorm’s climax, the crew came to the door, burst in and collapsed. ‘I’ve been affected by this fire immensely,’ one of them said in evidence, ‘and I will never [volunteer] again, never.’

There was the helicopter pilot who had water-bombed the fire, before the pyrocumulus cloud became too dangerous to navigate. And Peter Townsend, who had worked with Brendan at Monash, thinking this would be his last day: ‘The fire wouldn’t go out. It was up in the trees, and it was burning and it wouldn’t die. It wouldn’t die.’ The Fergusons, Townsend’s neighbours, told the court they were trying to save their house, and their lives, when suddenly they found Brendan in their midst with his dog, seeming ‘very calm . . . or very vague’.

These witnesses evoked the sound and the heat and the raw terror of the fire. They were country people with few airs and with blunt turns of phrase. Many were clearly still amazed they’d survived, and some of them had not entirely recovered. Their neighbourhood was different now. Doors weren’t quite as open, people were more conscious of strangers. Some days it could feel like the fire was not completely out.

On the eleventh day of the trial, Faye Last, who organised the distribution of the local newspaper, the Latrobe Valley Express, gave evidence. She had known Brendan since he was a small boy in the early days of Churchill. After he left Monash she gave him a delivery job, and he was a good worker. He carried his stack of newspapers in a converted pram, perching Brocky on top, before updating to a furniture removalist’s trolley.

On the Tuesday after the fire, Brendan arrived on a pushbike, with the dog in a backpack, and told Faye about his car being destroyed. He’d come to collect his pay. He wanted to buy shampoo to bathe Brocky; the poor creature, after all, had been in the middle of the fire zone with him.

‘What if the fire had come close?’ she’d asked, regarding the dog.

‘Well, it can run,’ Brendan answered.

Faye’s son, Jacob, had been on that first Churchill fire truck warning people along Glendonald Road to evacuate. Brendan now complained to Faye that if these volunteers had just towed his car 500 metres down the road, it would have been saved.

Faye told him the firefighters probably had more to worry about at that moment than his car.

Brendan then said he’d seen a suspicious DSE worker up near the plantation in a white ute. He told Faye he had ‘first dibs’ on whoever had lit the fire because he’d lost his car, and reckoned he didn’t have enough insurance to get a decent one to replace it. ‘I don’t want a girl’s car’, he said. He also told her, ‘I got second dibs on them for losing my watering hole,’ meaning where he caught crays. ‘And third dibs for polluting the air I breathe.’

Brendan took his pay, and with the little dog still strapped on his back, rode off.

Charles Szulc had lived in Churchill next door to Brendan for a few years. On the Sunday morning after the fire, he heard a knock on his door, and answering it found his neighbour, still smelling of smoke. Brendan told him his car had broken down on Glendonald Road and was now incinerated.

‘I was up there,’ Brendan said, ‘helping fight a fire.’

The next day, Szulc told the court, he was washing ash off his car when he saw Brendan and called him over. ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ he said, ‘because that’s where the fire started.’

Brendan took this the wrong way. According to Szulc, ‘he thought I was having a bit of a go at him because he sort of went back and he says, “Oh, look, someone’s already accused me of lighting the fire” . . . some old bloke . . . in grief because he lost his house or something . . . Then Brendan said, “If you saw what I saw,” and I said, “Well, what did you see?” and you know, he stopped, you know, and he says, “No, I can’t tell.” I said, “What did you see?”’

Szulc seemed unaware that the two of them could have been playing out a plotline from a soap opera, thrust from extras into major roles.

‘I said, “If you know anything tell me,” because I had people I knew, you know, their relatives had died in the fire, and everything like that . . . And eventually, you know, I kept on quizzing him, and he said he saw this DSE ute drive across in front of him or something, and he reckons they started the fire or something . . . And I said, “You’ve got to go straight to the police!” And he said, “No, I’m not going to the police . . . they twist things round.” So, he sort of walked off and I left it at that, and about ten minutes later he came back . . . and he said, “I’ve got to go down and make a police report and I’ll tell them then.” So from that I took it he was going tell them, and then Thursday he got picked up, so I naturally thought he got in touch with them.’

Juries don’t usually feel comfortable glancing over at the accused in the dock, but in this case, Jarrod Williams noticed, they couldn’t resist. Their gaze kept slipping back to the man at the centre of this story who sat drawing intently with coloured pens, or else staring into space, looking entirely vacant. When he picked up a small plastic water cup it was with both hands, and he’d give an audible ahh after taking a sip.

On the trial’s thirteenth day, Ross Pridgeon, the first wildfire investigator on the scene, was called to give evidence. He had also appeared before the royal commission regarding his role in the DSE’s mapping of the Churchill fire, and the lack of public warnings about its speed and direction. He had found this process incredibly stressful, and discovered around the same time that he had cancer.

Led by Elston, Pridgeon now went through his qualifications. He had a degree in forest science, and during his 27-year career at the DSE he’d worked in all aspects of firefighting, fire management, fire modelling – or predictive analysis – and fire investigation.

On the morning of Sunday 8 February, having been given an approximate grid reference for the Churchill fire’s area of origin, Pridgeon drove to Glendonald Road, clearing the police block. The coordinate took him to a blackened site affected by high-density fire. The burn marks around the actual area of origin would have to be lower and more haphazard. Now, from the witness stand, he gave a lesson on fire indicators: by following the signs of leaf freeze, soot levels and scorch patterns, he’d made his way to the area of confusion, the place where the indicators pointed in different directions. He was near the origin. Locating and examining this first scene had taken nearly two and a half hours.

When Pridgeon was subsequently told by a local police officer that there were suspicions of a second deliberately lit fire, a hundred metres away on the other side of Jellef’s Outlet, he hunted for and found another ignition site, following the same procedure.

He told the court that after the Arson Squad’s forensic chemist, George Xydias, arrived at 2.50 pm they’d together looked over each site, searching for any signs that would rule out arson. They encountered the burnt remains of a fair amount of rubbish, but nothing that would self-ignite.

Three times a year HVP, the company that owned the plantation, hired a contractor with an excavator and a tip truck to remove junk – old fridges, furniture, even cars. This public dumping was not much better in the national parks Pridgeon helped manage. He had got into the job through a deep fascination with nature, and it could fill him with quiet fury that people thought of the forests as mere refuse stations. They liked a nice view for a picnic, but entirely missed the point that their own future was intricately connected to the forests’ health. That was what no one seemed to have learnt from Black Saturday. Fire science wasn’t some obscure area of academia, it was intrinsic to our understanding of the country and our safety within it.

If Pridgeon now found that his irritation gave him some energy to assert himself in the courtroom, despite his nerves and precarious health, well, that was useful in the testy exchanges that were to follow. When he was cross-examined, it was immediately combative.

In his report on the Churchill fire, the defence’s wildfire expert, Dr Kevin Tolhurst, had lambasted Pridgeon and Xydias’s investigation.

‘You would regard Tolhurst as a well-respected expert in the field of forest fire science,’ Dixon suggested, after repeatedly questioning Pridgeon’s qualifications, ‘and you are aware that he’s published a great many papers about wildfire and forest fire science?’

‘Yes.’

‘And lectured in the area?’

‘Yes.’

‘And gave evidence on several occasions at the Bushfire Royal Commission?’

‘Yes, I’m aware.’

The judge interjected and reminded Dixon that many people gave evidence at the commission.

Dixon, who had a flinty demeanour in court, continued: ‘You have read [Tolhurst’s] report and you understand that he has raised a significant concern about the absence of any source of ignition being found in this case?’

‘ Yes,’ Pridgeon answered. ‘I have read that.’

‘And he, in a nutshell, puts forward the position that in the absence of finding such a source of ignition, the chances of solving the cause of the fire are reduced?’

‘Not finding a causal agent doesn’t reduce the probability of arson.’

‘He indicates that one of the purposes of wildfire investigation is to try and find the actual point of origin?’

‘That’s always the aim, yes.’

‘Or source of ignition. And that was an aim that wasn’t able to be met in this case?’

‘Correct,’ Pridgeon replied.

‘And so in a sense the area of origin wasn’t particularly well defined?’

‘I believe it’s quite a good area of origin for that type of fire . . . [T]he combined group of the Arson Squad and myself thoroughly investigated that area, looking for any evidence that was possibly there.’

Dixon started to line Pridgeon up for the defence expert’s greater criticism. ‘You are aware from reading Dr Tolhurst’s report that he identified a separate area of origin that he’s called Churchill Two?’

‘Yes. I’m aware of that.’

But what Pridgeon knew and Jane Dixon was about to discover – disastrously for Brendan Sokaluk’s defence – was that Kevin Tolhurst had made a grave blunder. The defence barristers slowly had it revealed to them that this separate fire the police investigators had supposedly ignored through sheer incompetence was non-existent.

Detectives Bertoncello and Shoesmith had spent hundreds of unpaid hours finishing off the investigation of this case to their satisfaction. They had requested from the prosecutor a copy of Tolhurst’s report and had instantly felt it contained significant errors. By closely examining the photographic evidence taken by the public on Black Saturday, they had proved that Churchill Two was actually the result of a spot fire from the main blaze. It had started to burn in an adjacent valley hours after that main fire had.

Ray Elston, using this evidence in his re-examination of Pridgeon, now showed the jury in excruciating detail that Tolhurst was mistaken.

George Xydias took the stand after Ross Pridgeon. In his late forties, he was a slight man with deep brown eyes and thinning hair. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d been to court during his nearly twenty-five years of working as a chemist with the Arson Squad, but the scientist was an introvert by nature and regardless of how big or small the case was, giving evidence always made him nervous. Xydias had investigated more than a hundred wildfires himself – an increasing number of them lit by serial arsonists – and attended countless others to assist or train less experienced investigators.

Black Saturday had perhaps exhausted him even more than it had Pridgeon. Over an eighteen-month period, Xydias had either initially examined or reviewed the examination of all 173 fatalities. After attending the areas of origin near Churchill, and then the connected crime scenes where people perished, he and his assistant had rushed to Marysville, where the Murrindindi blaze had nearly wiped out the town and killed forty people. One night, a coughing Xydias had tried to sleep in a room full of soot and smoke with the fires still raging 300 metres away. From Marysville he moved to Kinglake, which had the same number of casualties and level of destruction.

Xydias knew more about combustion than he wanted to. In his career he’d seen literally thousands of bodies in all states of devastation by fire. The police psychological services didn’t often reach out to the chemists, but when they did, Xydias wasn’t tempted into counselling. He thought it would be disingenuous to say that his job hadn’t affected him – in fact, far from being inured to death, he couldn’t bear to look inside an open coffin – but he didn’t believe that someone who hadn’t seen what he’d seen could advise him on how to deal with it. His means of coping was to move on from each job quickly. He had to, anyway – there was always another. Each new traumatic scene was likely to remind him of an earlier one. Children and pets got to him the most – those with the least agency, who hadn’t made the choice to stay.

In the courtroom, a projected map showed the intersection of Glendonald Road and Jellef’s Outlet. Elston asked Xydias to indicate the fire’s two areas of origin. The one on the eastern side of the outlet began three to four metres inside the plantation, and Xydias narrowed the total area down to eight square metres. On the western side, four metres into the plantation, he could get the area down to five square metres.

‘Did you make observations as to whether there were any electrical or powerlines in that area?’ Elston asked.

‘No, there was nothing in the area,’ Xydias said.

‘Were there any transmission towers of any kind in that area?’

‘No.’

‘A discarded or improperly extinguished cigarette or cigarette butt – what do you say as to that being the cause of fire in the area?’

‘With a situation like the day that we had – severe heat, wind and the conditions of the terrain,’ Xydias explained, ‘if there was only one point of origin identified, I don’t think we can exclude a cigarette being involved. The problem we have at this particular scene is that there were two distinct and separate areas of burning. They were unexpected in the sense that one could not have come from the other. They had to be distinct.’

‘Did you come to any conclusions about the source of ignition that was required?’

‘I assumed, being deliberate, that it would have been something like a lighted match or a cigarette lighter.’

When Dixon began her cross-examination, she countered, ‘There’s an element of assumption about all of that, isn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ said Xydias.

Dixon was now in a difficult position, however. The fact that there was no Churchill Two fire quashed the idea that the hills were crawling with arsonists on Black Saturday, and made her attempts to discredit the original fire investigation a riskier tactic. She nevertheless suggested that Xydias had relied too heavily on Pridgeon’s findings, that his qualifications weren’t up to date, that his notes on the case had been too brief, that he hadn’t looked closely enough for an ignition device, and that he’d too hastily discounted Tolhurst’s other significant theory, that the fire on the eastern side of Jellef’s Outlet was actually the result of a spot fire from the fire to the west.

Xydias, who held Tolhurst’s report in low regard, methodically discounted each assertion.

Dixon said, ‘Essentially your position is: Well, I consider there’s two different areas of origin, I therefore think a cigarette as an explanation is unlikely. That’s it in a nutshell isn’t it?’

‘Well, I’m saying two cigarettes at roughly the same time is unlikely, yes.’

In his re-examination, Elston asked at what point in time Xydias would expect this fire to have started creating spot fires.

‘Well, by the time this gets to a stage where it’s large enough to spot, I . . . would say it would be in excess of fifteen, twenty minutes. I can’t see it happening significantly before then.’

Xydias didn’t glance over at Brendan Sokaluk in the dock. He made it a point to never look at the accused. When the scientist walked out of the courtroom, he hoped this would be the last time he had to think about the case. Thinking about it made him remember.

Adam Shoesmith was no longer head of the Arson Squad. After Operation Winston, he’d been moved to the Purana Taskforce to investigate what were known as the gangland killings, a series of crime-world assassinations as different groups vied for control of Melbourne’s illegal spoils. From there he’d been attached to the Australian Federal Police, tracking major international crime syndicates running large-scale drug importation schemes.

Now he climbed the steps to the old-fashioned witness stand, and in this courtroom with such high ceilings felt as though he were perched in a crow’s nest, or, worse, a gibbet – one of the hanging cages he’d seen jutting off the walls of eighteenth-century castles. The room was cold, with terrible acoustics. Shoesmith had poor hearing and needed to concentrate.

‘On Tuesday 10 February 2009,’ said the prosecutor, ‘were you appointed to manage the investigation of what is now known as the Churchill Fire?’

‘Yes.’

‘After briefings, you attended the Morwell Police Complex, is that so?’

‘I did, on 11 February.’

This back-and-forth established the sequence of events that led to Brendan’s arrest on 12 February, and then what looked to be a 1980s-style projection screen was wheeled into the courtroom, and a silent, sixteen-minute video was played. It showed footage of Brendan’s house, images the defence had tried to soften earlier by having Kaz introduce them. Each room looked bleak, shabby. In the bedroom an old mattress was decked in filthy sheets and pillows; a great teddy bear lay on a wardrobe shelf amid crumpled camouflage-print clothes.

Shoesmith’s work had made him a professional cynic and he still wondered if Brendan was as impaired as his lawyers claimed, but watching this footage in court he could see that the house emanated unhappiness.

In the blush-coloured room, by Sokaluk’s computer, was a notepad with Churchill Police and the telephone number written down. Was he planning on calling to report the DSE arsonist, as he’d told his neighbour? At the bottom of the pad, Sokaluk had written his surname and Alexandra’s surname, surrounded with doodled embellishments.

On another piece of paper were jottings arranged as a list. It read like a poem on loneliness:

11-10-69 [Brendan’s birthdate]

green scrape

yes. Alone

wife. Kids

to be happy with you

people who bitch a lot

not yet.

When the video had finished and the court’s lights were raised, Elston said, ‘Now, as you told us, Detective, you went back to the Morwell police complex at about ten past six?’

‘That’s right, yes.’

Shoesmith explained that he’d organised for the forensic doctor to make the two-hour trip from Melbourne to assess Brendan’s mental state. The accused man was lodged in the cells and given dinner. At around 8.40 pm, Shoesmith was told that Brendan had asked to see his colleagues, detectives Henry and Bertoncello.

A transcript of their subsequent interview was given out to the jurors. The judge, taking pity on still vertical Shoesmith in the witness stand, told him he could sit. His best option was a seat close to Brendan in the dock.

Next the police interview started playing on the old projection screen. In the dim light, the Brendan of three years ago, in his olive-green shorts and sweatshirt, was blown up: ‘. . . 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 . . .’

Out of the corner of his eye, Shoesmith could see Brendan drawing something, seemingly uninterested even in this apparition of his younger self: ‘. . . 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.’

This was the first time the jury had heard the drone of Brendan’s voice. Shoesmith had grown used to it. He’d been listening to the man’s prison phone calls on and off for the past few years. He’d heard Brendan discussing with Kaz the price of scrap metal, and asking after Brocky, and slagging off about the police being pigs. All the time, Shoesmith had wondered if, in the midst of those stop-start cadences, Sokaluk would slip and admit to deliberately lighting the fires.

The court paused the video and Shoesmith returned to the witness stand. He gave evidence that on the night of Brendan’s arrest, the digital imprint of a Crime Stoppers form had been found on his computer. He’d submitted a report claiming that a DSE firefighter had lit the fire.

Shoesmith sat back down again near Brendan. The accused was strangely more life-like enlarged on the screen. In the police interview, he admits: ‘I sent a thing . . . so people wouldn’t blame me and then they wouldn’t hurt me.’

The footage continued with Brendan, the following day, leading the detectives to the intersection of Glendonald Road and Jellef’s Outlet. Standing amongst the trees, which he noted were ‘all charcoal’, pushing his hands in and out of his pockets, he showed Adam Henry where he’d dropped the serviette-wrapped ash. Within minutes, he said, he realised a fire was burning.

‘How big was the fire when you first saw it?’ Henry asked.

Sokaluk’s gaze shifted. ‘It was big.’

‘When you say big, describe it?’

‘Too big for me to put out.’

‘All right, well, size-wise,’ Henry tried, ‘would you compare it to a footy field?’

A beat. ‘No, probably a couple of car sizes . . .’

The blackened gums might as well have morphed into the bars of a cell. Before long, on the screen, Brendan was denying he’d deliberately lit the fires, ‘No!’ . . . No! I had no intention for all this to happen. Now I’ve got to put up with it for the rest of my life and it makes me sad.’

But Shoesmith was only half watching this. He was preparing himself to be cross-examined. He knew Jane Dixon planned to run a line on alternative suspects, and 80 per cent of the work he’d done on this case was to eliminate such a defence. The Arson Squad had spent months checking every other potential suspect. The nomination of some candidates had been ridiculous – people reported by whoever disliked them – others took slightly longer to rule out. Shoesmith readied himself to recall the details of each.

‘In terms of the investigation of this fire,’ the defence barrister started, ‘there were a number of sightings of motorbikes on the day, and around the general time period of the fire, that were reported and investigated by police?’

‘Yes,’ Shoesmith said. Much of the potency had gone from the insinuation of a ‘more mobile arsonist’, now that the defence couldn’t prove other random ignition sites. The detective felt he wasn’t going to be blindsided.

A to-and-fro ensued, Dixon listing sightings of various motorcycles (‘a man apparently in overalls, watching the fire through binoculars or a camera?’; ‘a motorcycle riding around . . . with what appeared to be a jerry can or something strapped to the back?’), and Shoesmith confirming times (‘2.21 pm, fifty minutes after the fire’s start’; ‘4.30 pm . . . with a container, not necessarily a petrol container on the rear of it’).

He could feel the tension building in the courtroom. There were only two days of evidence left, and this trial was nearly over. But he had learnt not to try to divine what a jury was thinking; and who knew whether, when the defence’s well-known fire expert appeared, they’d believe what he had to say.

Shoesmith’s mother had passed away a few months earlier. While she was in palliative care, he’d worked on a submission opposing Brendan’s bail application. Summer was approaching and it was his belief that the accused was a serial firelighter. He’d studied the CFA records from the time Brendan had been a volunteer, and thought he was likely responsible for a number of the blazes at which he’d appeared without any notification. And in more recent years, at the ignition sites of other fires lit around Glendonald Road, remnants of paper serviettes had been found in the debris.

The night the detective’s mother died, he sat with her body until she was taken away. Then in the morning, he appeared at the bail hearing. The lawyers, he felt, had gloated when the ruling went their way. Shoesmith knew it was illogical, but Sokaluk’s conviction was something he now wanted for his mother. (It was easier, too, to get angry about Tolhurst’s claims of a non-existent fire than it was to grieve.) Shoesmith usually tried not to get emotionally involved with victims’ next of kin, but this case had gone on for years and he’d got to know the families. When his mother died he felt, somehow, in his mourning, that he joined their ranks.

As the trial wound to its close, the defence badly needed something to go their way. One of their witnesses, a materials engineer, had theorised about hot embers exiting the long exhaust pipe of Brendan’s 1974 HJ Holden, setting the bush alight. So too could a ‘meteorite’, the judge quipped without the jury present.

Brendan kept drawing. It was doubtful he got the joke.

Another defence witness, Dr Marged Goode, had told the court that in her practice as a psychologist she’d found many people on the autism spectrum preferred not to have to be alongside others day in, day out, adding that ‘given that we are group animals, not being able to relate to those in our group’ is extremely stressful. It was no wonder, she believed, that the children’s television shows Brendan favoured had soothingly repetitive plots, with no nuance or subtext. Thomas the Tank Engine’s co-workers, the other Sodor trains, said only what they meant. They shared no sly, ambiguous asides, and their simplified faces conveyed clear emotional information.

In any given episode of the cartoon, there was usually some unfortunate mix-up and then, within the ten-minute format, a swift resolution and forgiveness.

These days in court, on the other hand, had stretched on and on, with the judge in his Santa suit listening carefully and then ‘blabbering on about stuff’, as Brendan told his lawyers, which he found weird and boring.

In the dock, Brendan was now repeatedly sketching with his red pen, then his blue pen, the DSE ute he claimed to have seen on Black Saturday. This vehicle, emerging over and over in his notebook, seemed to have become more real to him as the facts of the case made the dropped cigarette story less plausible. The defence lawyers saw these pictures and felt dismayed at the ground shifting underneath him.

Dr Kevin Tolhurst was a friendly man with a bushy red beard and glasses. The last witness to appear, he took the stand on the trial’s eighteenth day, and Jane Dixon recited his extraordinarily long and impressive list of fire-related credentials, scientific and academic.

Amongst his achievements, Tolhurst was regarded as a leader in the field of predictive modelling, which sought to map a fire’s behaviour and likely spread. The charges against the man accused of lighting the Delburn fires had been dropped after the scientist convinced the judge at the committal hearing that, despite this suspect being seen in various compromising situations and locations, he was, based on the modelling, innocent.

Here, too, Tolhurst was appearing for the defence. But the judge in this case was less impressed. In discussions without the jury present, Judge Coghlan had previously told Dixon that Tolhurst struck him as ‘barracking’, ‘standing on top of the hill throwing rocks down at the combatants below’. His was ‘the worst kind of report’, Coghlan believed, in taking a side and stalwartly attacking the initial fire investigators, ‘and I have a view about who I think it hurts most . . . I mean is this jury seriously going to accept that Mr Xydias didn’t look for the source of the fire because some smart fellow says, years after the event, he didn’t?’

Giving his evidence, Dr Tolhurst reiterated his belief that a spot fire was responsible for the eastern ignition point found on Glendonald Road. But Tolhurst’s cross-examination was sport for the prosecutor.

‘If the winds have picked it up and it’s running south-east pretty strongly,’ Elston said, ‘it’s a peculiar dynamic, isn’t it, that makes it blow to its left and backwards?’

‘Well, I’ve been to many fires and see it all the time,’ Tolhurst replied. ‘It’s not that peculiar. It happens.’

Unfortunately for Tolhurst, even if this was a dynamic he’d seen before, his gaffe over the mapping of Churchill Two meant his credibility had taken a fair blow.

‘The reason you posited the existence of Churchill Two was to create the situation where there might have been somebody else running around starting fires in there, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, it raised that possibility, yes,’ Tolhurst admitted.

In a further embarrassment for the witness, Elston took out a protractor and now proved that on one of Tolhurst’s maps, north had been deleted and replaced, pointing in a direction that was fifteen to twenty degrees out, skewing the angle of the wind and increasing the likelihood of the second fire being naturally lit.

‘It’s indicative of north,’ Tolhurst said of his map, ‘it’s not meant to be used for surveying or navigation.’

‘Okay, it’s pretty significant when you start talking about directions of winds, fire, as to where the cardinal points of the compass are, isn’t it?’

‘Well, we are only talking about north, south, east and west.’

‘North is north, isn’t it?’ asked Elston. ‘If you are going to go somewhere to the north?’

‘No magnetic north is true north . . .’

‘You are going to tell me you went playing with magnetic north?’

‘No, I was just showing the approximate direction of north,’ Tolhurst quibbled.

Earlier, the prosecution fire experts had both given evidence about the difficulty of actually starting a fire with a dropped cigarette. The cigarette would need to land on, and embed in, very fine types of forest fuel and be attended by just the right airflow, and even then it would still only occasionally produce flames. The iconic ‘cigarette out the car window’ – a classic Australian story of carelessness begetting fire – was highly unlikely to create a bushfire.

Elston wanted to know what Tolhurst thought the chance was of a fire starting in the manner Sokaluk had described: ‘an ember squished in a napkin, flicked out the window’.

‘If it didn’t have any unburnt tobacco going with it, yes, I would say that it’s a very low probability of starting a fire,’ Dr Tolhurst conceded.

All this while, Brendan sat busily conjuring the wheels and body and windows of the white ute, perhaps wishing it to life so he could drive out of there.