It was 6.45am and first light in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, two degrees above zero, minus six with the wind chill. Flowers had woken with a dull headache brought on by too many hours in front of a computer screen and too few hours’ sleep. Negotiating the snowy hairpin bends along the Alpine Way had intensified the headache into a painful throb on the left side of his skull. He reached into his coat pocket for a tab of anti-inflammatory tablets, popped out two and swallowed them dry.

As he neared the wreckage, a uniformed officer straightened up from where he’d been taking photographs of a landing wheel that had rolled some distance away. Bald and heavy-set, he had the kind of bushy moustache blokes his age had grown in the seventies and never shaved off.

‘Sergeant Walt Collins, Khancoban Police,’ the officer said, hitching up his pants by the belt.

Flowers held up his ID. ‘Detective Constable Mitchell Flowers, Sydney Homicide.’

‘Sydney?’

Here we go, thought Flowers, not missing the officer’s unimpressed expression at a wet-behind-the-ears detective with a full head of hair homing in on his turf.

‘That’s right.’

‘I asked for the Queanbeyan boys.’

‘I was in Queanbeyan for a court case,’ Flowers replied, careful not to sound defensive.

It had just gone midnight last night when Inspector Gray had called his mobile and told him to get himself to Khancoban. A plane has crashed on the Snowy Hydro airstrip. Possible sabotage according to early reports. The pilot’s dead.

Sergeant Collins looked past Flowers to the gravel road where a small group of onlookers had gathered outside the locked gate. ‘So, you’re it?’ he asked.

Deal with it, Flowers wanted to say. Instead, he answered calmly, ‘My partner will be here soon.’ How soon that would be Flowers had no idea, so he took out his notepad and pen and asked, ‘So, what happened here?’

Sergeant Collins gave a heavy sigh and gazed at the two blackened vehicles roped off with police tape. ‘The plane came in late last night. The airport manager heard it and raced down here. He did his best but there was nothing he could do. Fire and Rescue put out the blaze.’

Flowers followed the sergeant’s gaze. A fire truck was parked on the other side of the airfield, its two crew members on watch.

‘What state is the body in?’

Sergeant Collins shook his head slowly, his eyes grave. ‘Burned to a crisp.’

Flowers jotted down shorthand in his notebook. Just his luck he was on his own at his first plane crash, and one where foul play was suspected. He shivered inside his heavy-duty police jacket and wondered what Detective Sergeant Ryder would do if he were here. No doubt his more experienced partner had attended multiple plane crashes in the past. He’d done everything else.

Flowers glanced back towards the burnt-out vehicles. ‘Why was the tractor on the runway?’