We reached the small Brunton Primary School site. This was where I had spent most of my waking hours, Monday to Friday. The two-room timber building was still smouldering. But at least no crime scene tape decorated the walls or fences – no one had died here.

‘Do you want to stop?’ Jack asked. ‘Maybe you can salvage something.’

‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Stay away from anything that might fall,’ Jack told me. His phone rang. ‘I’m off to check next door.’

Following Jack from the ute, finally I slipped the poetry book into my bag. Then I crunched through debris, trudging to the spot where the school entrance once stood.

All this loss! Even the board of hooks where children hung coats and sunhats was bent out of shape and half-burned. Names were printed above the animals that illustrated each hook – Noah, Simon, Ashley, Violet, for Violet Gillan, whose father Michael had been with the police investigating at the hospital last night. Eventually I’d find out which kids had survived.

Carefully, I stepped through the space where there should have been a door. Nothing in here was salvageable. The children’s paintings were burned to ash. It was almost unbearable. I returned to Jack’s ute.

Jack was still on his phone, talking about his mother. He disconnected as I approached. ‘Nothing there?’

‘Nope. The pharmacy?’ That’s where he’d been headed, I thought.

‘I’m just about to check. There’ll be things we need to secure.’

I fell into step beside him.

The side wall of Brunton Pharmacy had caved in, blistered and blackened. What might have been a skylight had melted like ice and resolidified into a misshapen puddle on the ground. Something had prevented the fire from moving further, or perhaps it was nothing. The door fell away in Jack’s hand, crashing into the rubble and debris beyond. He walked through the crooked frame. ‘We could do with extra bandages.’

‘It feels like breaking in.’

‘It isn’t.’

Like other locations we inspected, the pharmacy had areas that were destroyed and areas that survived. The storefront – once displaying make-up, soap, cameras – all of that was smoke and ashes. But the dispensary at the rear still had boxes and bottles leaning sideways on collapsed shelves. The till was ready to register a sale. I thought of stories I’d heard, of the lengths addicts would go to to obtain stolen drugs. Jack’s need to secure the place made sense. I watched him packing the drugs. His hand hovered over a shelf of Tramadol and he glanced up. ‘I’ll get you to sign that you witnessed this.’

‘Maybe you should have someone here with you?’

‘You’re someone.’

‘I mean, someone official.’

‘If people won’t trust the local school principal, who will they trust?’

I raised my eyebrows as he pocketed a box of nicotine patches. ‘So much smoke around. But I’m still gunna need these.’