by John Byron
‘I know, schatje,’ he said, brushing hair from her eyes.
‘How?’ God, had they been that obvious?
‘You’ve been a little distracted lately.’
‘Oh.’ She was relieved he didn’t seem to know it was Amy. This didn’t feel like the time for that detail. ‘It’s only new. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but we … it’s nice.’
‘I’m glad for you, Jo.’ He hugged her reassuringly. ‘You don’t owe me any explanations.’
‘I know, I just want to be up front with you. I still like being with you, Thijs.’
‘Me too, mijn liefste. It’s okay.’
She stopped and kissed him, then they stood at the Man O’War Steps watching the colourful throng of yachts and ferries crossing the blue harbour. Jacarandas and Illawarra flame trees and late-blooming wattle refracted the full spectrum of colour among the infinite shades of green. The Palm Beach seaplane banked into its final approach on Rose Bay, wings wavering and correcting as it disappeared behind Shark Island. Anchoring the entire vista was the golden, solid, vigilant sandstone of Fort Denison, its solitary date palm leaning away from the Martello tower, as though trying to escape.
Wednesday 7 November – afternoon
‘Where are you, Mack?’ boomed Murphy from the front door of the Roseville house. ‘What aesthetic delights do you have for us today?’
A muffled greeting came from halfway down the hall as Janssen, Chartier and Jo followed him in, stepping over a wide swathe of rusty red that ran across the hall, reminding Jo of the signature painting style of Kazuo Shiraga. She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse, but it was something to anchor her.
She followed the trail and paused at the master bedroom door, closing her eyes and picturing for a moment Vesalius’s frontispiece, to get into character. Inside, she found the police gathered around a bed, like relatives in a hospital room. She blanched at the carnage before her, but focused hard on the technicalities.
The arms and legs were entirely intact, albeit bloodied, the head and thorax untouched apart from an excavation of the throat from jaw to sternum. But the abdomen had been plundered, the muscle and skin pulled up and out like the jagged remnants of a contained blast. The deep concavity was anchored up the middle by the vertebral column, framed by the corrugations of the lower ribs and a pelvis stripped nearly to the bone.
Jo grasped the reference immediately. In its utter unsentimentality, in its compelling, relentless brutality, the tableau was straight out of the Fabrica. They were looking at a sculptural interpretation of the Vesalius woodcuts, as though rendered in flesh by HR Giger. This was not the remains of a dissection; it was an anatomical demonstration in itself.
This was new.
With a vast effort of will, Jo pulled away from the gothic scene to find everyone watching, waiting for her to either speak or faint. ‘Volume Five,’ she croaked.
‘Yes,’ said Mack gently. ‘The organs of nutrition and generation.’
‘Made a right fucken mess of him, anyhow,’ said Murphy, giving his sister’s sensibilities no quarter. ‘Who was he?’
‘Brendan James Evans, mining index analyst. A quant.’
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Murphy chided. ‘You didn’t even know him.’
Mack ignored him. ‘Early thirties, good shape, lived alone. Took a few days off to go to the Melbourne Cup, then failed to show up at the office this morning. Someone came around and hopped the fence, saw the results of a scuffle out the back and rang Chatswood station.’
‘Definitely our killer?’ asked Janssen.
‘Yep. Fresh punctures in the left median cubital, blood in the bath and the dragline across the hall. And the anatomy lesson, of course.’ Mack leaned in to point. ‘He’s opened the neck to access the oesophagus. He’s left off through the thorax to save time – it’s all the same anyway, and spreading ribs is hard work. So the main action is below the diaphragm. He’s resected the organs one by one and examined them on the kitchen bench.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ said Murphy.
They filed out the back and clustered around the kitchen island like students at a cooking school. Its timber surface was covered in a miscellany of organs, blood seeping into the grain. One sink was full of intestines, all blood and shit and seeping fluids. The other was empty of organs but smeared with streaks of blood and flecks of gore. The whole mess smelled terrible. Jo retched once, sharply, turning her head and breathing in deeply through her mouth. She looked outside at a large jacaranda tree in full profusion by the back fence. In a few weeks, the lawn would be a carpet of indigo. Janssen passed around a small jar of menthol salve for everyone to smear on their upper lips. It helped.
‘There’s your struggle.’ Mack gestured towards a felled lamp and several pieces of disarrayed furniture, which a SOCO was dusting for prints.
‘Any security cameras, Ella?’ Murphy asked the SOCO, peering through the broad expanse of glass doors. Anything mounted out there would have a clear view of the kitchen.
‘Doesn’t look like it, detective.’
Mack resumed his lesson. ‘We found most of the viscera here in the sinks. After photography I pulled it all out for inspection, except the guts. They take up too much room and slide all over the place. Almost ended up on the floor.’
‘Mack,’ said Chartier, glancing at Jo.
‘Oh, right. Sorry. But the intestines are all intact: Evans even had an appendix before our boy opened it up. He’s also sectioned the gut in places, but it’s all accounted for.’
Mack turned to the organs on the bench. When Jo finally looked she found a collection of sleek, wet bruises, all slippery and alien, in livid hues of yellow and purple and green and brown. Lars von Trier meets David Cronenberg. She very nearly lost her breakfast.
‘Everything here is gastro-intestinal and reproductive. Removed, cleaned up and dissected on that glass chopping board,’ said Mack, pointing at a large, bloody rectangle set across the gas burners in a bright pool of light from the rangehood.
He turned back to the viscera, indicating each organ. ‘Liver, pancreas, stomach, bladder, right kidney, right adrenal, gall bladder, prostate, left – no, right epididymis, right testis, oesophagus, penis, left kidney with adrenal, left testis with epididymis.’
‘What about these?’ asked Murphy, indicating a collection of slender tubes and small bulbs.
‘Vasa deferentia, ureters, seminal vesicles, Cowper’s glands, urethra, bile duct.’
‘And how long would this all take, Mack?’ asked Janssen. ‘Days, surely?’
‘Definitely. Hence the extra-long weekend.’
‘Anything out of the ordinary?’ asked Murphy, bracing against the benchtop and leaning in carefully to inspect the viscera.
‘Well, there’s early cirrhosis of the liver, and his bile duct’s inflamed.’
‘I mean “anything out of the ordinary” in the being-killed-and-butchered sense.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Mack. He hesitated.
‘No sex-type stuff?’ prompted Chartier.
‘Not at all. I mean, everything’s been cut out and apart, which makes my eyes water, but there’s no funny business.’
‘What, then?’
‘There is one weird little quirk, Spud. He’s taken the spleen out.’
‘Hasn’t he taken everything out?’
‘Yeah he has, but the spleen isn’t here,’ said Mack, waving at the organs before them.
‘Maybe he didn’t have one,’ said Chartier. ‘Don’t people have them removed?’
‘They do. Mostly due to impact rupture.’
‘Does that cause problems?’ asked Janssen.
‘Not really. It has a blood-conditioning function, but you can get by without it.’
‘So maybe he played footy,’ said Murphy. ‘I’ve had my share of hits to the guts. Not a spleen, but I know blokes who’ve had them out.’
‘He might have been a footballer, but Brendan Evans had a spleen all right, up until t
he weekend.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Murphy.
‘I employed the arcane mystic ritual of organ divination, handed down through the ancient occult guild of the forensic arts.’
‘You what?’ asked Chartier.
‘I looked around.’
‘Smart arse,’ replied Murphy, pushing up from the bench. ‘Show me.’
Mack led them back into the hall, across the bloodsmear and into a front room, the police photographer leaving as they filed in. They fanned out around a queen-size bed, where a piece of offal sat delicately on the pillow. It was the red-brown of iron ore, trimmed of intra-abdominal fat, and with the blood vessels severed flush to the surface.
‘So that’s a spleen,’ said Janssen.
‘What’s he done to it?’ asked Chartier.
‘He’s opened it up along the rear of the renal surface, then sliced straight through beneath the hilum, almost to the front edge,’ said Mack, pointing with his pen. ‘Then he’s spread the wings and laid them flat on the pillow.’
‘Like he’s butterflied it,’ said Janssen.
‘Huh. Has this Evans guy been on a cooking show or something?’
‘Don’t watch them.’
‘It’ll turn up if he has.’
‘Interesting angle.’
‘Bizarre.’
‘Why would he butterfly the spleen?’ mused Chartier. The cops all shook their heads in bafflement.
‘He didn’t butterfly it,’ said Jo quietly, speaking for the first time since she’d seen the remains across the hall. Everyone looked at her. ‘He vented it.’
‘He vented his spleen,’ said Murphy. ‘Bugger me.’
‘Well, it’s a clue,’ said Chartier. ‘In a way.’
‘Clue.’ Murphy snorted. Jo knew it was a word he never used. He always said it reminded him of little old lady sleuths doddering around quaint but lethal English villages.
‘It means something, though, surely,’ said Chartier.
‘Maybe it’s a critique,’ said Janssen. ‘Perhaps he had a run-in with Evans.’
‘Like a car accident.’
‘Hell of a case of road rage.’
‘Social media?’ Everyone grunted. Certainly a possibility.
Murphy looked up at Janssen. ‘Put Niko on recent interactions. Work, internet, social life. Neighbours. Any misdemeanours or complaints.’
‘There is another angle,’ said Jo. ‘I was thinking about this in the bedroom, too. Maybe the spleen isn’t important in itself, so much as the gesture.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Janssen.
‘The medium is the message. It’s not about what he’s saying, it’s about the fact he’s saying something at all.’
‘Say it again in English, Professor,’ said Murphy.
Mack got it, though. ‘Yeah I agree, Jo, this was done for an audience. Like the nerve demonstration. He’s talking to us, Spud.’
‘The presentation of the corpse was the same,’ continued Jo, tilting her head towards the main bedroom. ‘He didn’t just dissect it and leave. It’s a montage in the style of a plate from the Fabrica.’
‘Yeah, nah,’ said Murphy dismissively. ‘It’s just a leftover body.’
‘No, the first three were leftover bodies,’ said Jo. ‘Then last time he gave us perfect dissections of the brachial and lumbar plexi. This time he’s left us an entire installation. Like he knows we’re onto his Fabrica obsession, and he’s taunting us.’
‘I disagree,’ Murphy insisted. ‘It’s not a fucken diorama.’
‘I understand you disagree, Dave,’ Jo replied gently. ‘But you’re wrong.’
‘You’re reading too much into it, Joanna.’ He waved impatiently at the violated spleen. ‘He was settling a score and amusing himself, that’s all.’
They all looked at one another and then down at the organ sitting atop its crimson tailing, gradually soaking the pillow. It meant something, but what?
Tuesday 13 November – evening
Sylvia was knocking off a few chores before heading out with her European film group. It was more a way to get outside their mundane working lives than an exercise in high culture, and the effort required to get to the cinema only proved its necessity.
She heard the front door just as she hit the start button on the washing machine. She took a deep breath to compose herself. Dave didn’t like her going out with this crew, and lately he’d been finding reasons to stop her. But she played it straight, leaning out of the laundry alcove and calling out a greeting.
The washing machine started to fill, obscuring any reply. She emptied the dryer into the laundry basket and turned around. Murphy was standing not half a metre behind her.
‘Oh shit!’ she gasped, falling back against the machine. ‘You scared the daylights out of me!’ She put her hand over her heart and tried to calm herself. He was standing stock-still, arms by his side, hands clenched, his face a grim mask. She could smell booze on the breath he expelled through flared nostrils.
She needed to get out, but he had her blocked in. She feinted left, and when he moved with her she darted right and around him. She filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink, drinking it slowly with a shaky hand.
He followed her over, both fists out face down.
‘Pick a hand, Sylvia.’
‘What?’
‘Just pick a hand.’
‘Why?’
He exhaled impatiently. ‘Pick. A hand.’
She swallowed. ‘Right.’
He turned his right hand over and opened it. Empty. ‘Wrong.’ He breathed into his curled left fist. ‘What do you think I have here?’
She suddenly couldn’t be bothered with the whole charade. ‘I don’t know, Dave, what do you have there?’ she asked wearily.
It was a mistake.
He smashed his hand down on the counter, along with its contents: her Wylie’s Baths tag and three keys – to Jo’s place and their own – on a Sydney Uni keyring.
‘My swimming keys,’ she said meekly, her heart pounding again.
‘Yeah, your fucken keys. You know where I found them?’
It wasn’t hard to guess. ‘In the front door.’
‘Yes, in the front door. A-gain.’
‘I’m sorry, Dave.’ She needed to calm this down.
‘I’m sorry, too, Sylvia. I’m sorry some random intruder could’ve snuck in here and violated my wife. I’m sorry they could’ve followed up with my sister, a few streets away.’ She opened her mouth to respond. ‘No, I’m not finished. I’m sorry I could have been ambushed in my own home. You know how many crooks I’ve sent away? These are not pleasant people, darlin’. They’d pay good money to watch me die in excruciating pain. Fuck knows what they’d do to you while they waited. You’d just be a juicy piece of fuckmeat to those boys, sweetheart. Then they’d slit your pretty throat.’
‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘Well you’re hardly going to do it on purpose, are you? But why does it happen at all?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s because you don’t pay attention, Sylvia.’ But his voice was losing some of its edge; she sensed he was losing interest. It was probably ‘fuckmeat’ – even by his standards that was over the top. If she remained meek enough this could still peter out.
‘I’m sorry.’ She looked at him with glistening eyes. ‘I’ll try harder.’
He softened, then. ‘Did you go overboard with the laps again?’ She nodded, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘So what should you do?’
‘Remember to check.’
‘That’s right. Just make it routine, like when you take off your cossie.’
She nodded. There was no point reminding him she changed and showered at Jo’s place.
‘Say it for me.’
‘Have I got my keys?’ she intoned.
‘When do you ask yourself?’
‘When I hang my swimsuit up to dry.’
‘See? It’s easy, Sylv.’ Soothing voi
ce, hand stroking her hair. ‘Now, go make us our tea, eh darlin’?’ He poured himself a whisky and left her to it. There’d be no European films for her tonight.
She stared at the Wylie’s Baths tag. It was true she often went into a trance during a long swim, but it wasn’t the laps that had done it today. It was the gins she’d downed at Jo’s place after showering, fortifying herself before coming home to Murphy and his increasingly dark moods. The secret drinking had to stop, from today. Alcohol was not going to help.
One drunk in the house was enough.
Monday 19 November – morning
Jo and Janssen were laughing as they walked onto the unit’s floor on Monday morning. Chartier stood up at her desk with a finger to her lips.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Jo.
She pointed beneath a nearby desk. ‘Nguyễn’s asleep.’
‘Big weekend?’ asked Janssen.
‘She phoned me yesterday afternoon. Said she was onto something with this time-on-premises question.’
‘That’s great,’ Janssen said. ‘What’s it about?’
‘She wouldn’t say until she was sure, but she was here all weekend on it.’
It was a quarter to eight: Nguyễn wasn’t going to get much more sleep. ‘I’m going to make coffee,’ said Jo. ‘Anyone know how she takes it?’
‘Same as me,’ said Chartier. ‘Maybe bring the biscuits.’
By the time Jo returned, Nguyễn was awake and rubbing her eyes.
‘You’re a lifesaver, Jo,’ she said. Strong flat white with one.
‘So what’s the story, Liệu?’ Jo handed Chartier and Janssen their coffees then opened the biscuit tin.
‘I sat up late Friday night watching Rage,’ Nguyễn said, helping herself to an Iced VoVo, ‘but I couldn’t get my mind off how he has all that time, you know?’ They all nodded. ‘I thought he must be seeing into their diaries, but buggered if I could work out how. And I must’ve gone to sleep because next thing I’m waking up to the film clip of “Streets of Your Town”, you know the one with all those rapid little scenes around the city? And I’m still half-asleep, right, so in the dream logic it’s all connected, how he gets around town and can see everything and control everything, and it just comes to me: he’s not just accessing their diaries, he’s changing them somehow. And I realise he must be doing it there, in the house – it’s too dicey to set it up beforehand. So then I thought of their phones —’
