Caleb had remembered to bring a scarf. He held part of it over his face, stirred by what he saw and not wanting to be. He wasn’t someone who cared about people; he was someone who hurt them. If he’d learned one thing, that was it.

Sadie thrust a microphone at them again. Why wouldn’t she give up? Her work was disgusting, all those pathetic hack jobs that ripped people’s lives into pieces for her readers’… what? Entertainment? For a rush of righteous anger or second-hand grief? A better hunter wouldn’t be hunting wounded prey, like Caleb.

Mum paused again near a familiar homeless beanie-wearer. Before the fire, Mum used to buy coffee for him outside the petrol station. She was that kind of person. Her persistence was annoying, but she deserved a better son than Caleb. The beanie-wearer scowled at the banner-holders. ‘You’ll be all right. You’re good people. I can tell.’

Mum teared up. Maybe she was happy to have at least one supporter.

In their dingy conference room, they huddled around the conference table like gamblers with a new hand of cards. Mum tried to look alert but dark circles around her eyes revealed that she wasn’t sleeping.

He returned alone to the dock. It was like being cast in the wrong show, like seeing Mona Lisa in an Impressionist painting. Nothing made sense. The magistrate and lawyers spoke, their words dancing with each other’s, weaving false meaning into sentences, obscuring the truth in legal jargon. Mum wanted him to tell the truth, but should realise that, in court, truth didn’t matter.

‘Too many lawyers in our lives,’ Mum said to Caleb once. ‘Too much tricksy language wasting our solid, real English.’

‘I’m calling Constable Dave Briggs to the stand,’ Charles Scott said.

Douglas leaped to his feet. ‘Objection! Prejudicial.’

‘The witness hasn’t said anything yet,’ Charles Scott observed.

‘The witness’s burns are an obvious attempt to sway a future jury,’ Douglas said.

The magistrate glared. ‘I’m overruling this objection. Victims can’t be excluded from testifying simply because they are victims.’

Dave Briggs called the day worse than Afghanistan. In Caleb’s mind’s eye ashes and rubble, white, Middle Eastern rubble, were stained blood red with bushfire light. He saw a row of bodies in Afghan dust, each corpse transforming into someone Caleb knew who had died, a row of Christians burning on crucifixes. Penelope’s parents… he blinked that memory away. He’d heard them die, perhaps. That speculative memory was too painful even to own.

Next, Bernie Lippard spoke like he was dictating an official report about seeing Caleb at a roadblock between Anzac Avenue and Main Road.

‘You let him through?’

‘The roadblock was to keep people out of the fire area, not to trap them there.’