Detective Superintendent Lawrence Thornton was photographed in another longer article. We urge the arsonist to come forward. This might be scary. But community anger means we simply can’t guarantee his safety until he’s in custody.

The bush burned for nearly a week. Mornings with magpies warbling and evenings listening to the shrill buzz of cicadas belonged to a different world, one drowned in a tidal wave of smoke. Everything was out of order. Maybe Hiroshima was like this, afterwards. I tried to see the Caleb a future jury would find in evidence and legal briefs, but I shared the house with a ghost. Investigators came and went, testing Damper Creek and the ground at the end of my yard, leaving the area strewn with as much blue-and-white tape as a Blue Light disco. Life had changed. I made a few phone calls to the Education Department, delving through their excruciating guidelines and paperwork, trying to find the place and means to get the school running again.

Then, one morning, I woke to the scent of smoke-tinted rain. The weather had finally changed, and would be working with the firefighters now instead of against them. And yet the strange smell suited my feeling that, though I was home, my home was lost. It was time to do some research, see what I could find out myself. Again, I sat in my car, charging my smartphone.

I remembered waiting with Caleb, years ago. The two of us in my Commodore outside his AFL club before practice. I said, I spy with my little eye something beginning with B, and watched his little face in the rear-view mirror.

‘Boy?’ he guessed. ‘Ball? Bad Mummy!’

Now alone in my car, when my phone powered on, I googled arson. I read about historical arsonists. I read about petrol bombs and pyromania. I read that once arsonists committed a crime, they couldn’t stop. It was a hit, like cocaine, an addictive success, like Marco’s early archaeological triumph that inspired him to commit his life to his career, like a vocation. I read about people who set fires for insurance claims, about firebugs whose obsession was sexual. I read about revenge arson. No motivation matched what I knew of Caleb.

But if not him, then who? So many people, even some of my former students, were surely more likely than Caleb to be attracted by fire? Kids with all sorts of personality and developmental issues. I thought of John Zynda who had visited Caleb in hospital and then been rude to me. I thought of the homeless man who used to sleep in the park beside Brunton petrol station. I’d given him coffee once, and, another time, an old umbrella when it wouldn’t stop raining. I’d seen him trying to light a cigarette with hands that could barely hold a bottle. Wasn’t he a more likely arsonist than Caleb?