Flames: Ice Summary & Analysis

The detective downs a shot of gin before getting into her car to drive to a new client’s (Levi) house. He seemed like a “weird kid” on the phone, and she doesn’t trust him, but she needs the money and the distraction of a case. Her car’s tires skid on black ice as she drives, so she reluctantly slows down. She arrives at her client’s farm, but it doesn’t seem like much of a farm—it’s just a few fields of thistle—and she wonders how its inhabitant makes money. She parks and knocks on the door. The client invites her in and tries to make small talk, which she doesn’t enjoy.

From what the detective’s new client, Levi, tells her, she can’t understand why it was necessary to meet in person. The story of someone’s strange behavior and disappearance after a death isn’t particularly unusual. Levi tells her that the police didn’t find anything in their investigation, but he gives her the name of the lead detective, Graham Malik, with whom the detective is familiar. When she gets up to leave, she asks for Levi and Charlotte’s father’s address. She has to stare him down before he gives it to her.

Half an hour later, the detective arrives at Levi and Charlotte’s father’s address. His house’s grandeur impresses her, and although the garden is now overgrown, she can tell it was once impressive. She doesn’t look at it for too long—she doesn’t like pretty things. The house is dark, and there aren’t any cars parked. When she knocks on the door, there’s no answer. As she gets in her car to drive away, she notices a blackened patch of grass on the lawn surrounded by lush new grass and feels “a brief twinge.” She gets home after dark, eats a sandwich, and drinks several glasses of gin. The neighbor’s huge cat comes in and sits on her stomach as she falls asleep.

The next morning, the detective wakes up hungover and completes her regular morning routine before heading to the police station. She asks the junior police officer at the desk to let her see Detective Malik, and when the junior officer asks for details, she says she’s Malik’s ex-wife. When she opens the door to Malik’s office, he starts defending himself to his ex-wife before realizing it’s the detective instead. She tears open the bag of croissants she bought on the way there as he explains to her that his ex-wife is taking everything from him in the divorce.

People refer to Malik as the “Last Graham,” partly because he’s one of the youngest people around called Graham, and partly because he’s so slow to solve his cases. In the detective’s opinion, Malik isn’t as bad a police officer as people say he is. She trusts and respects him, and he’s helped her out with several cases. She tells him she’s looking for Charlotte McAllister. Malik says his team thinks she just wants to escape from her life, especially from her brother (Levi), so she may have moved “interstate” to Australia’s mainland—and once she does that, there’s nothing the Tasmania police can do. He says two men in Tunbridge “had a crack at her” and learned she could look after herself. In Malik’s opinion, Charlotte isn’t dead and hasn’t been kidnapped—she’s hiding.

The detective thanks Malik. Just before she leaves, she asks about Levi and Charlotte’s father. Malik says he seemed to appear out of nowhere before marrying Edith, Charlotte’s mother, and nobody thought much of it apart from Malik. He was only a junior police officer back then, though, so he couldn’t investigate the father much. The detective feels a “full-body, skin-shaking twinge,” a feeling she usually gets before a situation becomes dangerous or something bad happens. She dismisses this feeling; looking back, she’ll consider that decision a mistake.

The detective accelerates down the Midlands Highway. An hour later, she reaches Tunbridge, a town whose prettiness upsets her. She waits outside the pub until two men arrive who match the description of the miners in Charlotte’s file. After a few moments, the detective follows them into the pub. People stare at her: a woman with “hard eyes, dark lips and short hair” is an unusual sight in rural Tasmania. She orders a gin and sits down in a booth with a sightline to the two miners. She winks at one of them. Soon, they both come over to sit at her booth.

The detective finds it annoyingly easy to get the miners to talk. When they start talking about their fathers, she’s tempted to give up the case completely, but she persists in flirting with them. Although she’s not conventionally beautiful, she knows she has an “I wonder-if-I-could-handle-her” kind of attraction, which compels these men. She suggests a walk, and soon all three of them are sitting by the river. She asks the miners if they often hang around with women from out of town. When they say they do, she asks if other girls are put off by the two of them working as a team. They tell her there was one girl who “went mental” and burnt the wrist of one of them, though they couldn’t see her using a lighter.

The miners tell the detective that the girl (Charlotte) had wanted to know about Melaleuca and that she’s headed south. The detective, having found her lead, lets the miners touch her body with their hands and mouths before punching one of them in the groin and elbowing the other in his stomach. One of them tries to call her something—she can’t tell if it’s “bitch” or “whore” or something similar—but instead of kicking him while he's down, she walks back to her car, where she sleeps for the night. She reflects on how life used to be: she was someone with a corporate job who socialized and had a life plan, including a fiancé, until that fiancé cheated on her, which led to a heavy gin-drinking habit and a decreased desire to please the people around her.

The detective wakes up freezing. She scrapes the ice off the windows and heads south to Franklin to confirm Charlotte left there for Melaleuca. She passes through the capital, a place she hates for all its memories of the life she led there. When she’s on her way out of the city, she gets a call from Malik. He tells her he’s been looking for more details on Levi and Charlotte’s father and couldn’t find any documentation beyond a driver’s license—no birth certificate or work history. He adds that nobody has seen the father since Charlotte went missing, and when the locals talk about him, they never provide any concrete details. He tells the detective to be wary. The detective feels another full-body twinge.

 An hour later, the detective pulls into Franklin. There’s no airfield, so she heads to the docks and finds a peeling yacht. After she pounds on the cabin door, a sailor emerges. At first, he doesn’t want to tell the detective anything about Charlotte, but she reassures him she’s not a police officer: she’s there to help. He tells her Charlotte doesn’t need any help, but at the detective’s offer of cash, he tells her everything he knows.

The detective drives back to the capital and asks a pilot she knows to fly her to Melaleuca. She helped the pilot escape an abusive relationship a few years ago, so now the pilot owes her this favor. The tiny plane flies over increasingly dense vegetation as the detective tries to work out what to say to Charlotte when she finds her. Just before they reach the landing strip, the detective and the pilot see a huge, smoking, burnt field. Upon landing, the pilot heads into a nearby hut to call the ranger, but the detective walks towards the burning field which stretches for around 20 kilometers.

A man begins to approach the detective. She can’t pin down his appearance: he looks average, but beyond that, none of his features seem constant—his eyes are blue one moment and green the next. She doesn’t notice the twinge in her body. When the man looks at her, she finds herself unable to speak except to eventually ask him who he is. He says, “I think you know.” He (Levi and Charlotte’s father) walks away, only pausing to tell her to stay away from his daughter (Charlotte). The detective doesn’t follow him, instead thinking about how far she is from home. She feels she’s followed the case too far, and the only thing that will make her feel better is a glass of gin.