The Tribute

by John Byron

  ‘And there’s that big sign out the front,’ added Chartier.

  Murphy tried to imagine some sick fuck spending the weekend deconstructing his victim while life went on over the other side of the wall. The neighbours probably heard the circular saw rev up while they were cooking breakfast. He pushed the thought aside.

  ‘Let’s see what your second pass pulls up. With days on the job there has to be some DNA. Bag everything, okay?’

  Mack nodded. ‘Always do.’

  Murphy turned to his detective. ‘Chartier, let’s give the SOCOs some room. Start on the doorknock. Call the squad and get some help over here, and a couple of uniforms too. Keep good track of it, come back for anyone who’s not home.’ She nodded. ‘Ask about the entire weekend: any movement or unfamiliar faces from before this Greg character left on Friday until he came back this morning. I want to talk with him once he’s ready, too. You should be there, since he’s met you. And tell Harris to follow up on that blade thing. I want to know where it came from.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ said Chartier.

  ‘And get Janssen over here, pronto.’ Murphy wanted his deputy on deck, right from the start. He had a bad feeling about this one.

  ‘Righto, boss.’ The detective turned and fairly bolted for the front door. She couldn’t wait to get outside.

  Murphy turned back to his forensic specialist. ‘So, Mack: what else?’

  ‘What do you mean, what else?’

  ‘Come on, mate, I know you. Something’s on your mind.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Mack paused. ‘It’s just, whatever else you pull up, this is not your normal killing.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘No, I mean … it might be a hit or a jealous husband or something, but the extra stuff, it’s not recreational.’

  ‘What are you getting at? Have we seen this bloke before?’

  ‘No. Well, we’ll see what CrimTrac throws up on the MO, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘So what’s your theory?’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Mack lifting the length of forearm from the sink and turning it to show Murphy the elbow. ‘Can you see where the joint capsule has been opened up, and the cartilage cut away?’

  Murphy reluctantly leaned in and tried to concentrate on the anatomy. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s been done very carefully, with a scalpel.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And he’s revealed the joint with extraordinary precision.’

  ‘Mmm …’

  ‘It’s expertly done, actually. Meticulous.’

  ‘Yeah, and?’

  ‘Well, it’s just a feeling, but it’s so … orthodox. Textbook.’

  ‘Jesus, Mack, use your words, will you? Pretend you’re in court.’

  Mack sighed. ‘Sorry, Spud.’ He looked frankly at Murphy over his glasses. ‘Look, I couldn’t place it at first, but I’ve seen this before; this exact thing. But not at a crime scene. And not for ages.’ He held up the arm, contemplating the painstakingly displayed inner joint of the elbow.

  ‘This looks for all the world like a medical school dissection.’

  Monday 30 April – evening

  ‘That was great, Jo!’

  Dr Joanna King had just delivered a public lecture at Sydney University on depictions of the body in art and science. She smiled at her sister-in-law. ‘Thanks for coming, Sylvia.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it. Sorry about Dave, he was held up at work.’

  Jo shrugged: her brother was a homicide detective, so he often went missing. It went with the territory. ‘Was that all right? Not too academic?’

  ‘Not at all, you pitched it perfectly. Everybody loved it.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said an elderly woman who’d approached. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Professor King, but I wanted to thank you for such an engaging lecture.’

  ‘I’m not a professor, but thank you so much.’

  ‘Well, you should be. You’re an interesting thinker and a clear speaker, not like these scrawny old roosters they wheel out. Wouldn’t know an original idea if it bit them on the bum.’

  Sylvia smirked unhelpfully, but Jo just gave a diplomatic smile. ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘Keep at it, dear; your time will come. Those old coots can’t live forever!’ The elderly woman patted Jo’s forearm before making way for a nervy, intense man who’d been hovering at her shoulder, barely suppressing his agitation.

  ‘That was exceedingly interesting, Dr King; thank you.’ He was clutching an art book of the Vesalius woodcuts tightly to his chest. ‘Most informative, and a daring hypothesis, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Jo. ‘I see you’re something of an admirer yourself.’

  ‘Oh yes, he was the greatest mind of his time.’

  Jo’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s quite a claim.’ Copernicus, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Erasmus and Galileo all overlapped with Vesalius.

  ‘Oh I’m not belittling his contemporaries; they were Titans. But the Master’s legacy is far more profound than the historians generally allow, for mine. Present company excepted, of course.’

  ‘You may have a point,’ said Jo, not missing the enthusiast’s title for his hero.

  The man leaned in, glancing aside at the others waiting. ‘I should be grateful if we were to discuss this in further depth. At your convenience, of course.’

  This time it was Sylvia who raised her eyebrows, but Jo felt confident this was only the innocent if socially inept advance of a slightly obsessed hobbyist. All the same, this wasn’t her first rodeo.

  ‘Why don’t you give me your phone number? Perhaps we can arrange a coffee.’

  ‘I’d be very grateful,’ he said, pulling out a notepad and inscribing a heavily-underlined VESALIUS followed by his name and number. ‘It’s always refreshing to find a like mind, don’t you think?’ He tore out the page and handed it to her.

  Jo looked at the sheet. ‘I look forward to it, Mr Porter.’

  He laughed. ‘Stephen, please.’ A woman at his elbow cleared her throat and gave him a nudge. ‘Well, I must be off. I look forward to hearing from you, Dr King. Goodnight.’

  Jo smiled faintly at the odd man as he wheeled away, then turned to the next in line. She chatted briefly with a few more loiterers before Sylvia leaned in and said to the others, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but we have to go now.’ Jo smiled her regret and bundled her papers into a seasoned leather messenger bag. They made their escape, strolling through the mild autumn evening towards Sylvia’s car on City Road.

  ‘Good crowd,’ said Sylvia. ‘You even brought out the trainspotters.’

  ‘He was a bit strange, wasn’t he?’

  ‘You’re not going to call him, are you?’

  ‘Not likely. I’m sure he’s harmless enough, but you never can tell.’

  ‘Well you certainly struck a chord, anyway. The punters loved it.’

  ‘I hope I got the balance right. It wasn’t too artsy?’

  ‘Not at all; from a nurse’s point of view you hit the mark,’ Sylvia assured her as they got in the car. ‘Stop angsting about it, Professor.’

  Jo stuck her tongue out, then laughed.

  They drove to Sylvia’s place in Randwick and went through to the big, open living room at the back of the house. Sylvia dumped her keys in a gigantic mortar bowl that Jo had given them as a housewarming present. Its heavy marble pestle lived by the front door, in a drawer of the hall table. Her husband said he liked to have a weapon in every room.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Actually, I could use a drink.’ Jo slumped into the sofa with a sigh.

  ‘Now we’re talking. What’ll it be?’

  ‘Do you have any of that Spanish black sherry?’

  ‘Always.’ Sylvia found a bottle of Pedro Ximénez and a couple of sherry glasses. ‘So did you end up calling that bloke from last week?’ she asked Jo while she poured. They’d been to see The Audreys and met a couple of nice fellas who’d shared their table during the set break
. One of them had given Jo his phone number, at Sylvia’s covert suggestion.

  ‘No, he wasn’t my type.’ She was still wary of intimacy with men since her breakup the year before. And with women, for that matter. Humans generally. It didn’t leave a lot of options. Maybe she needed a pet.

  ‘What do you mean? He was lovely!’ said Sylvia, handing Jo her sherry. ‘You had heaps in common.’

  ‘It all just feels so pointless, Sylv.’ Jo shrugged and looked into her glass. ‘I mean, how do you even reach people?’

  ‘But you have to try, Jo. Otherwise how would anyone connect?’

  ‘Yeah, but it just takes so much energy. Then most of the time it all comes to nothing anyway. Sometimes I wonder how anyone can be bothered, you know what I mean?’

  Sylvia was shaking her head at Jo’s bleak assessment when the front door opened, way up the hallway.

  ‘Ahoy, me hearties, anyone aboard?’ came the cry.

  The women looked at each other, parking the conversation for another time. ‘You’re just in time for a drink,’ Sylvia called back.

  Murphy bustled into the room, which suddenly seemed to shrink. ‘Christ, I could do with one,’ he said. ‘Landed some new business today.’ He took off his jacket then shrugged off his shoulder holster, depositing it into one of the kitchen drawers, revolver and all. He came into the lounge room and leaned down to kiss his wife.

  ‘Jo’s lecture was brilliant tonight,’ Sylvia told him as he pulled away.

  ‘Oh, great,’ he said, kissing his sister on the cheek. ‘What was it on again?’ He crossed to the sideboard to add his own keys to the mortar and withdraw a beer from the built-in bar-fridge.

  ‘A painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Dostoevsky made a fuss about it.’

  ‘Was he your PhD guy?’ asked Murphy as he flopped into the armchair.

  ‘No, that’s Vermeer. Holbein was Henry VIII’s official painter.’

  ‘So what about this painting?’

  ‘I have a theory about its influence on Andreas Vesalius.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Oh, nobody, only the founder of modern European anatomy.’

  ‘All right, smart-arse. And what was it in aid of?’

  ‘This new arts-meets-science outreach program the uni’s running.’

  ‘It was a big deal to be invited to deliver it,’ Sylvia said pointedly.

  ‘Sorry I missed it,’ said Murphy, ‘but new customers always have priority.’ His expression turned serious. ‘Shit.’ He lunged for the remote and switched the television on. Jo thought he was checking the news regarding his new homicide case. But, no. ‘Forgot about the replay.’ He flicked the channels until he found the rugby league. ‘I missed the Anzac Day game last week. You girls don’t mind, do ya?’

  The women exchanged a look: too bad if we do. Jo finished her sherry and tilted her head towards the front door.

  Sylvia nodded. ‘Walk you home?’ Jo only lived fifteen minutes’ walk away, in Coogee. Well, fifteen minutes there, twenty back: there was a decent hill in between. Sylvia could do with the stretch.

  ‘You can stay, sis.’ Murphy’s eyes were glued to half a dozen shiny white arses, all heaving and flexing, straining against an opposing knot of dark blue.

  ‘Nah, I’ve got a stack of essays to mark.’

  ‘Righto, then, see ya.’ His eyes didn’t leave the screen.

  Jo came around in front of Murphy, deliberately blocking his view, and leaned down to kiss him on the crown of his head. ‘See you, bro.’

  ‘Oh, for …’ Murphy ducked his head to the side to keep the screen in view. ‘Don’t be long, darl,’ he told his wife.

  —

  The Dragons won the scrum but coughed it up immediately in a crunching tackle. A certain amount of chatter went on between the womenfolk in the background, so he turned up the volume. He heard the front door, then silence.

  He leaped up and grabbed another beer from the fridge without taking his eyes off the screen, but the Roosters spun it out the backline fast, culminating in a bold cut-out pass to the winger who barged over the try-line right out wide. ‘Fuck.’ Murphy bolted up the hall and changed into tracky dacks and an old Bintang T-shirt. He made it back for the conversion, an impressive kick from just inside the touch-line. ‘Faark.’ He flopped onto the sofa, took a swig of beer and let out a fruity belch. This was more like it.

  VOLUME I

  THE BONES AND CARTILAGES

  ndreas Vesalius was born in the Holy Roman city of Brussels on 31 December 1514. By his late twenties, he had already attracted widespread acclaim for his teaching and research in human anatomy at the University of Padua. This youthful achievement excited controversy over his disrespect for the established order.

  The problem was not that his approach was ineffective or incorrect. Quite the contrary. To try to change the world may be tolerable, even laudable; to be right while doing so, however, is unforgivable.

  In 1543, Vesalius travelled to Basel to publish his successful lecture series, in a bid to outflank his critics and secure his reputation. The Swiss city was the centre of European publishing and a significant site of Renaissance debate in scientific, humanistic and religious affairs. Calvin, Holbein, Erasmus, Zwingli and Paracelsus were all associated with the city in the decade or two before Vesalius arrived.

  While he was lodged there preparing the Fabrica for publication, Vesalius conducted what would become medical history’s most celebrated public dissection.

  His canvas was the corpse of Jakob Karrer of Gebweiler, who had attempted the murder of his first wife in order to resolve an inconvenient state of bigamy. The criminal’s head had been detached from his shoulders on 12 May 1543, pour encourager les autres, and the body was donated for the demonstration. The Master continued the dismemberment initiated by the city’s executioner, but with far greater finesse and to a loftier pedagogical purpose.

  After the dissection, the Master separated the bones from the detached flesh and viscera, assembled the skeleton and presented it to the University of Basel, where it is displayed to this day. Should you ever have the opportunity to inspect it, I highly recommend the experience.

  Visually, the first Volume of the Fabrica is an exercise in restraint, depicting only bones, singly or in clusters, with arrays of cartilage here and there among swathes of closely descriptive text. The odd resected joint, cross-sectioned long bone or exposed intracranial surface is about as grisly as it gets.

  Bones, in any case, are the least confronting of human remains. Every day in museums the world over, hordes of schoolchildren troop past cabinets of bones, and trauma does not ensue. Bones are familiar, inert, harmless curiosities.

  At the end of Volume I we find three leaves, each wholly devoted to a complete skeleton posed in demeanours of bleak anguish and existential contemplation. Yet to a modern eye, they appear ridiculous. The right arm slung jauntily across the tomb-spade in the first illustration is almost slapstick; the elegantly crossed ankles in the second plate are more George Clooney than Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; and the cry-baby pose of the third image inspires outright scorn. The Master’s sombre memento mori is rendered farcical by the modern evocation of cartoon dancing skeletons and lurid Halloween costumes. It is a travesty. The massive, appalling vulgarity of society, as Marguerite Duras has it.

  Tuesday 1 May – morning

  Amy Chartier wrapped up her crime scene briefing to the Homicide Squad within the Sydney Police Centre at Surry Hills. She glanced over at Murphy and he nodded. Safe pair of hands, Chartier was. He had to admit she’d grown into the job under his supervision, despite the occasional moment of friction when he’d offended her lesbian feminist sensibilities. It didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eye, although he kept that to himself.

  Chartier switched off the visuals and everyone relaxed palpably: most of her colleagues were hardened veterans, but it was ugly viewing. Even Murphy was relieved to be released from their grisly h
old. He swivelled around on the corner of the desk he was sitting on to face the four other detectives, most of them clustered around the briefing table. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Do we have any leads?’ asked Nguyễn. The former Drug Squad detective had transferred to Homicide about a year ago, and was still playing everything by the book. The question was a gimme, but someone had to ask it.

  ‘Nothing from the doorknock so far,’ said Chartier. ‘Nobody saw anything and nobody even really knew the vic. He lived in Strathfield, worked at home as a day trader. According to his wife he was doing the place up, then they were going to move in.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Nguyễn.

  ‘She’s a bit of a mess, as you’d expect. We’ll need to interview her again, but she told me last night she has no idea who would kill him or why. He was a bit of a prickly character, apparently, but he had no real enemies. Not like this.’

  ‘Does he have any form?’ asked Nikolaidis, the squad’s forensic data specialist. He was sitting in his usual position, atop an ancient battleship-grey filing cabinet, only still in use because it was too heavy to move. ‘Maybe he was into something she didn’t know about.’

  ‘No, he’s clean as far as we can tell,’ replied Chartier. ‘The labourer didn’t notice anything suss, either.’

  ‘What about his mobile phone?’ Murphy asked.

  ‘No call activity all Friday afternoon. It seems to have been switched to voicemail that evening.’

  ‘So it was either pre-arranged or a drop-in,’ he said. Chartier nodded.

  ‘Who’s the chief SOCO?’ Nikolaidis asked.

  ‘Mack’s running the show for Forensic Services,’ said Murphy, to a murmur of approval. ‘He’ll give us a medical briefing once the autopsy results are in.’

  ‘Any DNA?’ asked Harris, the rookie. After three months on the squad he was starting to look the part, Murphy thought, but he still tended to take shelter in technical matters to avoid coming across as clueless. It didn’t always work.