The Tribute

by John Byron

  ‘What else do you grow?’

  ‘We have basil, coriander, chives, rosemary, oregano. Garlic. Mark downstairs has a beehive up there, too.’

  ‘I never knew you had the green thumb,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Oh, I don’t,’ said Jo. ‘I’m more your red thumb. Jade next door keeps it going, really. I just help out now and then.’

  ‘Well, I am surprised,’ said Murphy. The women looked at him. ‘I’d have thought Jade would rather use the terrace to work on her all-over tan.’

  Jo rolled her eyes. Her neighbour was a rising film and television actress, and Murphy was a bit fixated. ‘No, Jade and I go across to the Ladies’ Baths when we want to get our gear off.’

  ‘Oh god, don’t torture me,’ groaned Murphy. ‘I wish I could get inside that place, just once.’

  ‘No men allowed,’ said Sylvia, ‘and they’re militant about it. Cop or no cop.’

  ‘Yeah, what are they going to do?’

  ‘Cut your balls off, if you’re lucky,’ said Jo. ‘And that’s just the nuns.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Murphy, screwing his nose up. ‘The nuns aren’t starkers, surely?’

  ‘You have no idea, brother mine, and you never will.’ Jo smiled enigmatically at him. ‘Now: to tea or not to tea? That is the question.’

  ‘God, no,’ said Murphy. ‘How can you drink that crap? Tastes like weeds.’

  ‘You’re thinking of chamomile.’

  ‘No, that tastes like cat’s piss.’

  ‘Anything instead?’ Jo asked Murphy while she crushed leaves of fresh peppermint into the teapot.

  ‘You don’t have a decent Scotch, by any chance?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t even have a lousy Scotch. I can offer you gin?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just finish off the wine.’ He emptied the rest of the shiraz into his glass.

  ‘Hey, Dave,’ said Sylvia, straightening in her chair, ‘tell Jo what you told me.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘This afternoon. About the crime scene. She could help, remember?’

  ‘Nah, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘It can’t hurt to float it.’

  Murphy looked sideways at his wife. ‘Last time you got the shits with me for talking about it.’

  ‘Last time you were being gratuitous.’

  ‘Yeah, and?’

  ‘And now there’s a point to the discussion.’

  He looked across at Jo. ‘Want to hear about a homicide?’

  The news hadn’t reported much detail, so she was curious, up to a point. Still, the whole business was beyond ghastly, and she wasn’t sure she needed that in her life. ‘What do you mean, I could help?’

  ‘Well, I don’t reckon you can,’ said Murphy. ‘That’s just her theory.’

  ‘Come on, Dave,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘It’s homicide, Sylvia. It’s a bloody long way from all this.’ He waved to indicate Jo’s paintings adorning the walls. She’d found modest commercial success painting candid scenes – most real, some imagined – of film actors in costume during downtime on location. Her living room bore two examples: Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer in earnest conference inside the Bradbury Building; and Cate Blanchett and Miranda Otto drinking Coopers in Middle Earth garb. She’d given her brother and Sylvia a canvas each from her first solo show: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach playing cards over a bottle of whiskey lived in Murphy’s study, while Sylvia had hung Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon pissing themselves laughing with Harvey Keitel in their bedroom.

  Sylvia turned to Jo. ‘Don’t worry. It’s a bit graphic, but you’ll be fine.’

  Murphy looked at his sister. ‘I shouldn’t even be talking about it, of course.’

  ‘I won’t rush off to the newspapers.’ Jo started to stack the dishwasher.

  ‘Okay. So you know my killer struck again?’

  Jo nodded. ‘A woman this time.’

  ‘Yeah. Corporate lawyer from North Curl Curl.’

  ‘Was she …’ Jo gestured vaguely at her own body, looking for the words.

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said Murphy.

  ‘Tell her about the muscles,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Forensics tell us that last time he just ripped in and took everything right down to the bone,’ said Murphy. ‘Discarded pretty much all the soft tissue. Not a lot of finesse to it.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Jo weakly. Maybe this discussion wasn’t such a good idea.

  ‘This time he took the skin off carefully, then stripped the muscles back, one layer at a time. They reckon it would have taken him all weekend. Made a big pile of muscles on her couch. Not muscle groups: individual muscles, right down to the tiny ones.’ He waggled his fingers to illustrate. ‘Then, when he reached the bottom layer, he just stopped. That’s how we found her.’

  Jo let the kitchen counter hold her up. Her blood had drained away somewhere; she wanted to sit down, but didn’t trust herself to move. She’d found the story about the man in Glebe distressing – who hadn’t? – but she hadn’t really visualised it. This was even worse. She looked up to find the others watching her. ‘Sorry, it’s just a bit vivid.’

  Sylvia smiled kindly while Murphy smirked. Jo moved to the kettle, which had boiled while Murphy had described the scene. ‘God, that poor woman,’ she said. She poured hot water over the peppermint leaves in the pot, then just held the kettle for a moment while the image sunk in. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking at Sylvia. ‘I get it. You mean the Fabrica.’

  Sylvia sat back and crossed her arms. ‘I thought so.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Murphy.

  ‘Like I told you,’ said Sylvia, ‘your description reminds me of Jo’s lecture.’

  ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem,’ explained Jo. ‘It means “Of the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Volumes”. It’s a book by Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, published in Switzerland in the mid-sixteenth century. It’s considered the foundation document of modern western anatomy.’

  ‘This was the fella who influenced your painter?’ Murphy asked.

  ‘No, other way around. Holbein came first.’

  ‘Okay. And?’

  ‘The Fabrica was scientifically revolutionary, but it’s also a pivotal moment in western art. It transformed depictions of the body.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s fascinating, but I don’t see how a medieval anatomist is going to help me catch my psycho killer.’

  ‘Renaissance, not medieval.’

  ‘Same diff.’

  ‘Tell him about the muscle men,’ Sylvia urged Jo.

  ‘One of the most striking features of the Fabrica is the engravings of whole bodies progressively dissected in certain ways. Each one forms the basis for a set of detailed dissections that follows. The scenes you describe sound like those plates.’

  ‘No, he’s not making an installation, and he’s not doing anatomy,’ said Murphy dismissively. ‘This is butchery, not sculpture.’

  ‘But doesn’t your forensic expert think it’s a dissection?’ Sylvia pressed.

  ‘Yeah, but he would; that’s his frame of reference. He knows about victims’ bodies. I know about killers’ minds.’

  ‘But even the way you describe it sounds just like the book.’

  ‘I’m telling you, Sylvia, this is murder, plain and simple.’

  ‘But if you saw the images, Dave, you’d —’

  ‘Jesus, Sylvia!’ Murphy let the pause hang then continued, cold and pitiless. ‘At Glebe he just tore away all the flesh, stripping it off the bones and pushing it into a big wet heap on the floor. All the organs, too. Fucken blood everywhere. Then he cut out a few bones using a circular saw so he could get at them properly and work on them in good light. Almost a whole arm, the top of the skull and half the neck. He did not leave us a neatly arranged display, I can tell you.’ Both women were ashen, but he went on. ‘This time, okay, he did leave us a body on the table in the middle of the room, but the skin was piled up in a he
ap on the coffee table and the muscle he’d cut away was just thrown in strips onto the lounge. He drained the body this time but —’

  ‘All right!’ interrupted Sylvia. ‘You’ve made your point.’ She looked up at Jo, who was staring out through her balcony doors, over the treetops to the sea beyond. ‘Jo? You okay?’

  Jo snapped out of her reverie. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I just … this cutting all the muscles away, a bit at a time. It really does sound like a demonstration dissection. That’s what the plates of the Fabrica are.’ She poured the tea and brought the two cups to the table.

  Murphy sighed. ‘He is not doing this for our benefit, sis.’

  ‘Not yours, maybe. Are you sure he’s alone?’

  ‘Forensics say there’s only one cutter. If anyone else is there, they’re just standing around.’

  ‘Or observing. Learning.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in Homicide, Jo, but that’s over the top. He’s not giving private tutorials.’

  ‘Dave, these drawings are basically the stills from a series of demonstration lectures. Vesalius did dozens of dissections in front of hundreds of students at a time. The process was dynamic.’

  ‘You’re coming in at the end of it all,’ Sylvia added, picking up the thread. ‘Maybe the Fabrica is what it would look like if you could see it as he went.’

  Murphy shook his head. ‘I’m sorry but you’re both way out of your depth. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ conceded Jo. ‘I’m just saying, if there is a link to the Fabrica you should keep in mind what the book actually is.’

  ‘Well, nobody said there is any link. Just you two.’

  Sylvia gave it one more try. ‘You wouldn’t have a copy here, would you, Jo?’

  ‘No. I have a digital version on my computer at work, and our medical school has a facsimile. I think there’s a second edition in the state library. Macquarie Uni has a flash new translation called the New Fabrica, but you can only view it on-site.’

  ‘How about the slideshow from the lecture?’ Sylvia persisted.

  ‘Oh yeah, hang on a sec.’ Jo padded down the hall towards her studio.

  ‘So you think an art historian is going to bring down our serial killer, do you?’ asked Murphy once his sister was out of earshot.

  ‘Well you don’t have any angles yet,’ observed Sylvia dryly. ‘Maybe you could use a fresh perspective.’

  Murphy could hardly argue with that, so they sat in silence until Jo returned with a leather messenger bag. She riffled through and extracted the printouts of her slides, several loose pieces of notepaper falling out with them. Murphy gathered the notes and handed them back to Jo, and she stuffed them back in the bag.

  ‘Here are the woodcuts Sylvia’s talking about.’ Jo flipped over the pages, showing Murphy a series of ghastly sketches: bodies strung up to gibbets and gallows and scaffolds, held aloft by ropes and pulleys and tackle; others standing unsupported but utterly dismal, stripped of their muscles, which were either completely removed or hanging down in obscene strips. In between were detailed depictions of bones, joints, muscle groups and specific muscles: before, during and after dissection.

  ‘Okay, I can see why you’re excited,’ allowed Murphy. ‘But you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, trust me. This anatomy stuff is all methodical, colour-by-numbers. Homicide’s more random than this: it’s law of the jungle, chaotic, deranged.’ He turned to Sylvia. ‘I’d have thought you’d understand that, working in an emergency department.’

  ‘Working in an emergency department taught me not to prematurely exclude viable explanations,’ she replied.

  Murphy waved that away and turned back to his sister, who had kept her peace. Her brother’s dismissive air had become no more endearing with age, but she wasn’t going to get steamed about it. ‘This sounds like a nice theory, up here in the warm and dry after a rainy day and half a bottle of wine, but this isn’t your art history seminar, Joanna. It’s the real world. It doesn’t work like this.’

  She held his gaze, returning no expression at all. She knew this conversation had hit a wall, and she knew the depth of the resentments that drove Murphy’s stubbornness. There was no point arguing.

  But Sylvia went around again, ignoring the siblings’ stand-off. ‘We’re not literally saying he’s recreating these, Dave. Just that Jo could help get you inside his head a little.’

  ‘Look, enough, okay?’ said Murphy, coming to his feet. ‘End of discussion. Let’s go home.’

  Sylvia looked up at Jo, all exasperated, but her sister-in-law just gave her a tiny shake of the head and a wry smile. Sylvia nodded and stood up herself. Their goodbyes were perfunctory, and Jo went straight to bed after they left, leaving the cleaning up for the morning. Her brother just wore her out sometimes.

  Saturday 16 June – afternoon

  Porter secured a table at the Bathers’ Pavilion overlooking Balmoral Beach, with a view down Middle Harbour through the Heads, and Rocky Point Island off to the right. A light shower had passed and the cloud was clearing, everything wet and glittering in the sunlight. He ordered a pot of tea and gathered the Saturday newspapers.

  He was gratified to find his Tribute on every front page, in the supplements and even the magazines, the press indulging its sensationalist tendencies to the full. To the salacious city desk editor, this story eclipsed even misbehaving footballers and politicians on trial.

  With few facts to report on, though, the outlandish speculations of criminologists and psychiatrists featured prominently. Porter’s pleasurable frisson slid gradually into irritation, until he reached a latter-day Freud pontificating on the killer’s issues with his mother.

  ‘My mother?’ Porter muttered. ‘You don’t want to hear about my mother.’ He threw the newspaper down, poured another cup of tea from the pot and gazed at the slice of ocean horizon between the imposing sandstone cliffs.

  No, he had to resist the seductions of publicity. He could not lapse into a flirtation with his coverage, letting it fold back into reality by influencing his behaviour. That way lay disaster. Not only would that see him caught, but it would also completely betray his purpose.

  His investigations were private acts, entirely. Contrary to popular opinion, he was not trying to show ‘them’ anything: there was no ‘them’. This was between himself and Vesalius; the exercise was his humble Tribute to the greatest dissections the world had ever seen. That they would have a public dimension was both unavoidable and entirely irrelevant. The Volumes were complete in themselves, with an internal economy of their own. There was no performance. The care he had taken in this last Volume to avoid accusations of sexual molestation was the limit of his consideration for reception. To afford the publicity any thought would be to corrupt his entire Tribute.

  He felt somewhat depleted, but that was probably fortuitous: private emotion was as treacherous as public attention. He was no more motivated by gratification than by notoriety. He must be careful to recognise his elation for what it was – a biochemical response to extreme stimulation – and neither condemn nor cherish it. Savour it a little in the acknowledgment, then return to the rational plane on which he chose to operate.

  He read a little more in the paper about this Murphy, the homicide detective in charge of the investigation. A highly decorated policeman and a deft media performer, he seemed to have journalists and the politicians alike in awe of him. He’d achieved a formidable arrest rate throughout his career – Bradmanesque, according to one breathless report – culminating in his current streak as the most successful homicide detective in NSW Police history. Porter had every intention of spoiling that record. He would need to conduct some detailed research on this adversary.

  He returned the newspapers to the front table and settled his bill, then strolled out onto the beach, the sky above now completely clear, although the light wind was still quite cool. He turned his collar up against the breeze and his mind to the business of candidate selection, w
hich needed to be resolved once and for all.

  Laura Newman had nearly rejected him, and it was important to understand why. Presumably she had feared he was a sexual predator, a possibility that had simply not occurred to him, since perversion had no place in his Project. She had been right to be suspicious, of course, if his deductions were correct, but entirely wrong about why.

  He’d done everything possible to present as unthreatening. He’d dressed to conceal his strength; he’d worn boring clothes and plain glasses; he’d stood well back; he’d projected an air of diffidence and awkwardness. He was, in fact, diffident and awkward. There really wasn’t much more he could have done to put her at ease.

  He wandered out onto Rocky Point Island and up the steps. He had the small outcrop to himself. He walked its length and found a seat looking along Middle Harbour, the Pacific Ocean beyond. The ubiquitous sailboats were performing their mysterious ballet out on the harbour, their sails still glittering with the residue of the rain shower. Some of them seemed to be racing one another, but for the most part it looked like an exercise in chaos theory.

  Porter sighed deeply as he accepted the unavoidable truth: gender was a problem. The female’s suspicion had been founded on a misreading of the precise threat he represented, while his own confidence had been founded on an ignorance of women’s expectations of men. It didn’t matter that the female response made no sense to him: that response was a material fact, and he had to revise his method accordingly.

  So he would concentrate on males henceforth, males in merely moderate physical condition, excepting the specific requirement of a female candidate for Volume V.

  He stood and turned his back to the harbour, walking briskly across the little concrete bridge to his car. The parameters had been revised; there was new work to do.

  Tuesday 19 June – afternoon

  Murphy and Janssen drove out of the basement carpark, heading for the morgue on Parramatta Road. The light rain was in that annoying intermediate range where the only windscreen wiper options are squeaky or blurred. Murphy’s phone rang as they turned into Cleveland Street. It was their boss.