NOEL

Noel leant back on the bonnet of his car and felt far from everything familiar. No family, no cops, no more fucking grubs. The only familiarities were what he dragged out here with him and what he created – and the thing he created here was superb.

He sat with his knees bent and drank from a longneck of beer he’d bought from a drive-through in an outer suburb of Perth. Just some typical bottle-o in a bland suburb no one would think twice about, especially not in relation to a fire in scrubland east of the airport. If he did the right thing – if he stuck to his protocol – then the two actions were unrelated and the bottle shop’s CCTV footage would mean zip. And out here at Statham’s Quarry, where blokes came on Friday nights to drink and do doughies, there were no cameras, and Noel wasn’t stupid enough to film the fire with his phone. Not like the dipshits who got pinched doing this stuff because they’d uploaded it and bragged online. Noel was above them and their narcissism – his was a compulsion he could control. In fact, that sense of control was what sparked his gratification.

From the car, he watched the smoke whirl white and brown, which he guessed had something to do with the grass being consumed. It smelled sweet, and from two hundred metres away the crackle sounded like erratic applause, as if the land was celebrating his choice to burn it all back. Drinking the beer, he thought: If only more than grass could be burned back.

Noel wasn’t a bad guy. Unlike other men he’d worked with, he hardly ever drank hard and never screwed any of the victimised women he came across in the job – the women begging for a hero, which was really anyone who didn’t beat them. Nor was he like the two general duties officers he knew who spent their work hours fucking in the police vehicle. Noel, he told himself, you’re an officer for the Western Australia Police Force, and you’re one of the good guys.

He knew that if he was smart in his actions – if he applied enough thought before, during and after the event – then his chances of being caught were low. The statistics said that arson was one of the least convicted crimes because the evidence was usually burned. He doubted that a forensics team would be sent to a grassfire out in the middle of nowhere, but even if they were – if somehow something went wrong and the fire got out of hand – he had strategies to contain any evidence and prevent discovery.

He never went to the same location twice, although he had hit the Zig Zag a few times, plus Helena Valley. He always mapped out where he would park the car and which route to take out of there, and while he couldn’t help tyre tracks, his tread was common enough. He always walked to the ignition location with bare feet, and only hung around long enough to see the flames take hold and feel the heat across his face. He watched the rest from back at the car.

He didn’t use accelerants either. Accelerants could be traced, and they got on your hands and clothes. He didn’t want Wendy asking why his pants smelled of petrol when she did the washing. But he did use an incendiary device. He came up with the idea for it during a drive out to a spot he’d had his eye on for a while, after some failed attempts to get a good one going elsewhere. Now he followed the same process each time. First he’d collect dried grass and leaves from the area and heap the materials in the middle of a sheet of folded newspaper. He then placed a box of matches on top, and folded the newspaper to make a neat package. The last step was to fix a cigarette to the package with a rubber band. It was simple and crude but the heat it generated almost always burned the box of matches completely, and liquidised the rubber band. He had tested it several times. The device was small enough to fit in his pocket as he walked into the scrub. When he found a good location he would light a cigarette, place it and leave it.

He also liked the feel of the device in his pocket. It had a density, and attached to this was a sense of reliability, of purpose. In his line of work, many actions made little sense, and it was his job to expose cause and effect – that’s what a detective is supposed to detect. Sometimes he thought about his own relationships as a system of cause and effect; life seemed simpler that way, more manageable. Especially with Wendy. He knew that certain conversations were fire-starters in themselves, so he turned his back on those things more and more and chose to be quiet. There were still times when he just couldn’t help himself, when holding back from saying something was harder than spitting it out – sometimes you just had to deal with the effects. He saw this as selective enforcement.

Noel drank from his beer and opened the scanner app on his phone to listen for the call over the radio. There was no need for the fire crews to use sirens out here so he had to take care. If he saw them coming, he knew it would be over for him – and he wasn’t about to hang around and watch those guys do their business. He wasn’t thrillseeking. This wasn’t about endorphins.

He knew what he was doing was a criminal act, but it was minor compared to the brutality he encountered most days. When he thought about his intent, he found it impossible to gain a critical view of himself – offender profiling was part of his job, but the job also taught him that concepts like intent and motive were better left on the television screen. And he hated ‘primetime crime’, where the plot had to be kept so tight that real-life complexities were relinquished. People always wanted things to be neat and explainable because it assuaged their fears, but arresting the grubs out there showed him that if crime wasn’t based on a complicated personal history, then it was all pretty much random acts of chaos.

Still, he could nail down the first time fire truly impressed him. A few years back he was investigating a case involving aggravated burglary and motor vehicle theft, where the car was found alight in the underground car park of a four-storey apartment building. The fire forced the evacuation of the residents, which was when he arrived on scene to see the fire eating up the last of the car’s interior and paintwork and the plastics in the engine bay. The red and yellow of it was brilliant. Such a perfect intensity. Until that moment he’d thought of fire as an angry thing, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was composed. Systematic. Not that he told anyone, but he felt satisfaction in watching it work. He had held back the fire guys as long as he could, but soon they got in there and snuffed it.

The blackened shell left behind was, by comparison, dreadful. He attached a different emotion to this image – something closer to disgrace. This was an emotion he knew well from older days, but carried with him now, like a phantom limb. It was always the undetectable that came to mean the most.

Noel spat into the mouth of his empty beer bottle and was wrapping it in the paper bag when he heard the call come in on the app. Good timing. He got into the car and put the bottle in the passenger footwell. From there it would make its way into a public bin on the way back home, twenty kays away as the crow flew. Easy as.

*

Dianella was a tidy suburb, what with all the Greeks and Jews, and Noel liked his house. It was a good house for a copper’s family because it had a high fence built of rendered brick and the building sat a bit low from the road. Wendy hated it. She said it looked more like a police station than a home. She preferred the neighbour’s place – a weatherboard joint with a row of lavender and a tree swing on the verge. She liked that kind of quaint shit.

When he got in Wendy was making dinner. She said hello, he said hey, and even from that brief contact he knew she was mentally elsewhere. When Wendy got distracted she became more methodical in her actions.

‘You’re a bit late,’ she said.

He made a point by not taking his shoes off. Instead he walked past the kitchen bench, opened the sliding door to the patio and took a cigarette from its packet.

‘Where are the girls?’ he asked.

‘Grace is in her bedroom, Riley’s got guitar lessons.’ She was slicing mushrooms – precisely. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Had a few beers with the boys.’ He lit the ciggie, pulled deep.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Simmo there?’

Simmo had been best man at their wedding, but on the piss he had also proved to be the worst man. Groping Wendy through her bridal dress was one notable act in a series Noel hadn’t kept tally of. And while he had pulled Simmo up for being a wanker, the truth was that Noel didn’t mind too much. Another bloke giving his wife attention made him feel kind of proud. Not that Wendy felt the same way.

‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Behaved himself, though.’

‘Glenda called earlier, and it’s not your father this time.’

He made a sound which was meant to be nonchalance. He’d moved to the west coast to get away from his family, but the phone was a fucker which undid all that. At least his mum didn’t have his mobile number.

‘You’d better call her,’ Wendy said.

He looked at the picture of mouth and throat cancer on his ciggie packet. It was bloody horrible but he’d somehow got used to it. So much so that he didn’t feel he was really having a smoke now if he wasn’t looking at some gory health warning.

Wendy came over to the door with a tea towel. She wiped her hands, then took her mobile from the sideboard. ‘You’d better call her.’

He took the phone.

‘It’s Adrian.’