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‘Thanks for meeting us, Sergeant King,’ said Josh. ‘I didn’t get a chance to speak to you at the fire, but Tom Krauss speaks highly of you. I’ve lived away for the last decade and a half. Old Reg Grady was in charge of the Hanrahan Police Station when I left.’

‘Call me Meg. Old Reg still pops in to the police station from time to time and brings a batch of biscuits he’s made himself. He likes to talk war stories about the good old days when no-one had mobile phones and the tracks up past Crackenback were so bad in winter he had to go on horseback.’

‘He was a good guy.’

‘He was a drunk for the last ten years he was in office and used to pat the office staff on the backside according to Kev Jones. He wouldn’t last a day on my watch.’

‘Good on you,’ said Hannah.

Josh crossed his ankles under the picnic bench in the park where he and Hannah and the sergeant had arranged to meet. He was beginning to understand why Tom had suggested he call Meg King. She might look like a sweet-as-sugar tuckshop mum, but she had the flat-eyed stare of a street cop.

‘We want to talk about the fire,’ he said. ‘Lorraine told us it was no accident.’

‘Have you seen the fire brigade’s preliminary report?’

‘Yeah, Lorraine rang us this morning. She said it was too soon for definitive results, but she could give me the gist of what they discovered last night. Deliberately lit, but no accelerant. Some weird pyrotechnic device was found in the ground floor.’

‘Yep. First I’ve seen like that. Your garden variety arsonists want a light show, but they also want destruction. Your fire was different.’

‘There’s plenty of destruction in the front room.’

‘Yes, the reception area behind the plate glass windows was ground zero all right. Smashed glass, lit device chucked in, and the pyrotechnic device thrown in with it. So the flooring and furniture caught alight, window treatments, doors, skirting, paperwork—enough to cause you a lot of heartache, but not enough to destroy the building. The pyrotechnic device made the blaze look far worse than it was—like a firework in a contained space.’

‘It’s nuts, all of it.’

Meg opened the file she had in front of her. ‘That’s not the most nuts thing.’

‘It’s not?’

‘I spoke to the dispatchers at emergency after I read your statement. You said Graeme Sharpe, the café manager from The Billy Button Café, put in the first call to triple zero.’

‘That’s right. He had a sense something was up; we arrived just after the blaze started.’

She nodded. ‘Thing is, Josh, he wasn’t the first to call it in.’

He scratched his head. ‘Crap. The arsonist?’

‘We think so.’

‘Because he—’

‘Or she.’

He grinned, for what felt like the first time in days. He wished Poppy had been by his side to hear the sergeant correct him. Equality for all, arsonists included. ‘Thank you, Meg. Because she or he wanted to make sure the building wasn’t destroyed in the fire?’

‘Bingo. Which brings me neatly to the other nuts thing.’

He raised his eyebrows at Hannah, who shrugged.

‘Why,’ said Sergeant King, ‘have I been the lucky recipient of a Crime Stoppers call, suggesting that the owner of the Cody and Cody Vet Clinic might have burned their own building down?’

‘What?’

‘Something to do with’—Meg’s eyes dropped to a printed page in her folder—‘sour grapes because of a refused building permit.’

‘No freaking way,’ he said.

Hannah was shaking her head. ‘That bloody council. What is up with them?’