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hole at his feet. I’m not going down there, he thought. Later they went to a bar, just a corrugated iron shed in the bush, and everyone else there fell silent and just watched until they’d had their drinks and left.
    The investigation continued to struggle for information. Jubelin had not given up, but after eight months he still had no idea who had killed Terry Falconer. He was facing the prospect of failure, and this upset him.
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    Gary Jubelin was born in 1962 in Sydney’s north-west, and went to the local public high school. His adolescence was rocky, and there were times when he broke the law. He got into fights at school and on the sports field because, although tough and not one to back down, he was a quiet person and sometimes people mistook this for weakness. It was a mistake because, after being pushed for a while, he would react strongly. To some degree this continued once he grew up, and even today he confuses some people, which can be a problem but also an advantage.
    Jubelin was friends with an Aboriginal boy named Anthony who’d been adopted by the white family next door. Anthony had a troubled childhood, often being sent back to the orphanage when he was disobedient. One day, at the age of about fourteen, he turned up at Jubelin’s house to say he’d just had a fight with his foster mother and was going on the run. Did Gary want to come? Jubelin declined the offer.
    After leaving school he became an electrician, working mainly on building sites. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he had no idea what that might be until the day he climbed out of a hot roof one lunchtime and saw some cops chasing a bloke through the streets of Ryde. That looked like a better job than the one he was doing, and the next day he applied to join the force.
    Six months later he was a policeman at the age of twenty-three, working at Hornsby in Sydney’s north, and soon knew it was what he wanted: it matched his personality. Like many cops he has a strong feeling for justice, an understated but confident manner, and considerable tenacity. He enjoyed the ordinary uniform work and also the more exciting action as a part-time member of the Tactical Response Group, a job where the physicality attracted him. After a year of this he was tapped on the shoulder and invited to join plain clothes, the training ground for criminal investigation. He jumped at the chance: he had found himself envying the detectives who would turn up to every serious crime the uniforms discovered and take it over just when it got interesting. The following year he married Deborah, whom he’d known since childhood.
    After a few years in plain clothes, Jubelin was promoted to detective and assisted in his first murder investigation. He found it totally fascinating, and decided that one day he would join the homicide detectives. He didn’t share his ambition with any of his colleagues: it would have seemed out of place in one so young. The attraction of homicide, for him as for many others in the job, was not moral; it had little to do with the nature of the crime, except that murder was the worst crime and investigating it was the height of police work. Jubelin was an ambitious man, not in a career sense but in the sense of wanting to push himself to the limits of whatever he was doing. He wanted to play A grade.
    But there was still a long way to go. In his late twenties, he was invited to join the Armed Hold Up Squad at Chatswood. The squad’s members were seen as being tough—they were the cops who got things done by confronting criminals head-on.Their reputation was also linked, rightly or wrongly, to the exploits of corrupt cops such as Roger Rogerson, and accusations of bashing and loading crooks were not uncommon. When Jubelin arrived he was told, ‘We work hard and we play hard,’ and this was certainly true. He realised it would be a tricky learning curve, but knew he had to get major crime