The Tribute

by John Byron

  ‘Oh jeeze, Spud, there’s no need …’

  ‘You’re right, mate; there is no need. Because we understand each other, don’t we?’

  Adams nodded weakly.

  ‘Look, Tom,’ continued Murphy, his tone placatory now. ‘Nothing else is working, all right? He’s leaving nothing behind. He’s buying his snuff drugs at the chemist, we think – untraceable. Nobody who knows him has a clue. He goes in and out without anyone seeing him. He talks his way in and buys heaps of time. He’s selecting his victims for minimum risk. He’s a fucken wraith, mate. If we don’t try something different, he’s gunna keep killing people. If I can just find the link between the vics, we’ll nail him. To do that, I need data. I need all the data. And I need your help.’

  Adams nodded again. ‘All right.’

  ‘Look, I won’t take the piss, but stop giving me shit, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Spud. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know this makes you nervous. I know your bosses get toey about the rules. Mine too. But you have to hold your nerve. I’ll find what I’m after then I’ll disappear, and it will be like I was never here.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘All right.’ Murphy turned back to his desk. ‘Now fuck off, I’ve got work to do.’

  Monday 7 January – afternoon

  Sylvia walked slowly home from work, daunted by the scale of her task. Getting out would be difficult and dangerous. The news was full of what happened to women when they left, or tried to leave. Every week a woman murdered; every day an abuser charged, tried, sentenced. All those dead and beaten and broken women.

  Every single day.

  And she saw at the hospital what the stats didn’t capture: the abuse beneath the radar. Domestic violence accounted for as many emergency department attendances as alcohol and drugs combined. God help the women living with all three. It was like there was a war on.

  Not that Murphy was going to kill her … but then, who knew what he’d do in his rage? He’d never fully lost it with her, although he’d come close, one terrible night three years ago. Since then he’d worked out subtler ways to keep her in her place, methods of control and coercion, adding physical intimidation and the odd not-quite accident as required. But in his current mood, with the right trigger, she couldn’t rule anything out.

  And nothing was beyond him financially and legally – he wouldn’t hesitate to send her to the wall. She knew he would never let her go on civil terms. She remembered what he’d said when she’d threatened to leave that one time he’d struck her: ‘Where are you going to go, Sylvia? I’m a cop, you can’t fucken hide from me. There is nowhere I won’t find you, I promise you. Nowhere.’

  She had learned the lesson of that episode: there would be no talking this time. She had to prepare for escape, make detailed plans then move decisively when the time came, before he had the chance to undermine her. And it had to be soon, before she began to show. She needed patience, stealth and cunning; she needed expert advice.

  And she needed Jo, once she had her plan worked out. She knew her sister-in-law would back her, but it was a huge step to come between siblings in such a definitive way, and she wasn’t going to go there until everything was ready.

  ‘Hello, Sylvia, how are you?’ Sylvia snapped out of her reverie to find her elderly neighbour watering the banksias along their shared nature strip.

  ‘I’m all right, thanks, Clare. How about you?’ She put on a smile she hoped was casual but that probably looked brave.

  ‘I’m well, thank you,’ said Clare, turning her full attention on Sylvia. ‘Care for a cup of tea?’ Sylvia’s neighbour was as tactful as she was astute.

  ‘I’d love to but I need to make a few calls right now. Maybe later?’

  ‘Any time that suits you. Today, tomorrow, whenever you like.’

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been over much lately.’ The woman only lived next door, and she had been so good to Sylvia since they moved in.

  But Clare wasn’t having any of it. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, waving her hand. ‘I like my own company, you don’t have to worry about me. Just come when you can; you’re always welcome.’

  ‘Thanks, Clare,’ said Sylvia, unlocking her screen door.

  ‘And, Sylvia: my door is always open to you, any time you need it. Day or night.’ Clare engaged Sylvia’s eyes. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  Sylvia flushed. She looked down as tears welled, nodded and turned her key in the front door. ‘Thank you,’ she croaked as she pushed inside.

  She leaned her back on the closed front door, almost undone by the kindness and the shame, in equal measure. But she couldn’t afford to give into any of it right now. She calmed down and tuned in to the quiet, cool house, infused with that particular silence of emptiness. She dropped her keys in the mortar and put the kettle on. She found a notepad, pulled out a stool at the kitchen bench and started her laptop.

  The web search was eerily easy: she typed in leaving husband and the Domestic Violence Resource Centre came up first. It depressed her that the algorithm was so on-point. She started writing down the details before realising it was a Victorian service. She found a link to organisations in other states, clicked on NSW and found the Women’s Legal Service. She explored the website while the tea steeped. Once she had a mug in her hand, she picked up her mobile phone, trying to ignore the butterflies in her stomach.

  She called her gynaecologist first. They’d had a cancellation for the following day, so she made an appointment and jotted down the time to put in her calendar later. She drew a breath and dialled the other phone number.

  It was a long wait. A recorded voice urged her to hang up and dial 000 if she or anyone else was in immediate danger; otherwise, the voice apologised for the delay. For once, the apology sounded sincere. Sylvia was on the sofa finishing her second cup of tea by the time she got through. A woman named Hilary apologised and thanked her for holding. Not enough funding to staff the hotline properly, she said. Quelle surprise.

  Hilary asked concise, practical questions and quickly steered the conversation to concrete action. She had clearly heard it all before. Hilary was unfazed by things that Sylvia had never before said aloud, things that felt impossibly momentous. Sylvia confirmed she was ready to leave. Hilary congratulated Sylvia on her resolve and talked about developing a departure plan. ‘A safe path to safety,’ she called it.

  ‘This is the most dangerous moment, Sylvia: right now and what comes next.’ Sylvia’s anxiety escalated – shit was getting real. ‘You need your wits about you and you need bloody good advice,’ Hilary continued. The next step was a face-to-face discussion with a lawyer. When Sylvia said she was pregnant, there was an intake of breath. ‘Righto, you’re going on the priority list.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Pregnancy’s a major risk factor. Does he know?’

  ‘God, no. He’d be livid.’

  ‘Okay, good. Research shows it can escalate the situation. Our advice is that the pregnancy is best kept to yourself for now, while you sort everything else out.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s no bloody way I’m going to tell him.’

  ‘How far along are you?’

  ‘Not long. I’m not showing.’

  ‘Okay. Since you’re a nurse, I don’t suppose you need advice on terminations?’

  ‘No, I’m going to keep her. Him.’ She was pierced by a spike of joy at the simple act of speaking aloud about her child. It made it all so real. She gave in to a visceral surge of love for the being growing inside her body. A rich bronze warmth suffused her, settling in as though it was going to be around for a while. A good, long while.

  ‘All right then, let’s get you sorted,’ Hilary was saying. ‘Now, I know you’re in Randwick but we only do face-to-face in Western Sydney.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Funding, again. This is the least-bad arrangement, given our resources.’

  Where did women from Dubbo go for help? Sylvia wondered. Or Brewarrina? ‘O
kay. Where, exactly?’

  ‘Blacktown, Liverpool and Penrith.’

  ‘Liverpool’s probably best, on the M5.’

  ‘How’s Thursday the seventeenth? Georgie is free at 12.30.’

  ‘There’s nothing sooner?’ It was over a week away. And this was the priority list.

  ‘Not right now. Are we able to contact you if there’s a cancellation?’

  ‘Umm, how would you do that?’

  Hilary knew exactly what she meant. ‘We send a text or an email that looks like it’s from a friend. But only if you think it’s safe.’

  ‘No it’s okay, let’s just make the time and stick with it.’ It was too risky, the way Murphy treated everything like a lead. Occupational hazard.

  ‘Okay then, 12.30 on the seventeenth.’ Hilary gave her the address and some directions, and told her what documents to bring. ‘We recommend you bring copies if you can, rather than remove the originals.’

  Sylvia was just hanging up when she heard the front door. Fuck, that was close. She ripped off the page of notes she’d made and slipped it into her pocket. She was too agitated to face Murphy now: he’d definitely guess something was up. She closed the laptop, leaped up from the sofa and dashed past him as he came down the hallway, telling him she was going next door for a cup of tea with Clare.

  Tuesday 8 January – morning

  A six-pack, half a bottle of shiraz and a three-finger whisky nightcap ensured Murphy slept through the wild southerly storm that battered Sydney in the early hours, but the peace woke him up around dawn. Everything was quiet out the back, the air scrubbed clean, only sodden leaf litter from next door’s Sydney red gum left behind. He’d have to clean the pool this evening, rake up the leaves out the front, check the spy cameras were still working.

  While the espresso machine warmed up, his eyes fell on a glossy notepad on the coffee table. The early-morning sunlight threw into relief a set of scratchings left over from a page since torn away. Murphy went across and picked it up. The impressions were deep and urgent, messier than Sylvia’s usual neat hand.

  What was she up to now?

  Murphy found a 2B pencil in the bottom drawer and lightly shaded across the sheet. He returned to the machine, drew the espresso shot and sipped it while examining the revealed script. It was two separate notes. The one at the top was an appointment with Sylvia’s gynaecologist:

  Christel / 2.45 – 8 Jan

  But further down the page was a larger block of text:

  DVRC 03 WLS 5550-7010 Hilary

  Livpl Thurs 17 Jan – Georgie 12.30

  18 McArth St ∼ Westfld

  bank stmts / tax 5 yrs/ SUPER

  Comprehension and caffeine kicked in at once. Divorce, then an appointment and a list of financial documents. He fired up the tablet and typed the phone number into the browser.

  The Women’s Fucking Legal Service of New South Fucking Wales.

  His anger rising, Murphy clicked on about. Sure enough, it was a specialist service helping women seek justice relating to domestic violence, discrimination, reproductive rights, fucken blah blah blah typical anti-male feminist victim bullshit. Women helping women fuck over men, at taxpayer expense. And who paid most of the fucken tax in this country? Fucken men did, that’s who. It was outrageous.

  So his wife was going to divorce him and take him to the fucken cleaners. With the help of some fucken dyke lawyer named Georgie. Well, fuck that.

  Murphy felt a surge of rage pass through him like a bolt of electricity, but he very deliberately calmed himself and channelled the anger to his dark place, where it could ferment and grow, gathering force, ready to be directed at its proper target at the right time. He tore off the page of rubbings, along with the next few sheets, and returned the notepad to the coffee table.

  He didn’t know what was next – he would take his time working out the exact shape of an appropriate response – but he was going to beat her to the punch. She was about to get the shock of her fucken life.

  Sylvia had never really liked surprises, but that was bad fucken luck.

  Tuesday 8 January – morning

  Jo put the phone down and let out an almighty whoop. She crossed the office to Chartier, who rose from her chair just in time to receive a crushing bear hug.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We found a New Fabrica!’

  ‘What, how?’

  ‘From the customs list Angelo put together.’ To find the Australian purchasers of the New Fabrica, Nikolaidis had asked the customs service for a report on high-value imports of books between the date of publication and the first murder, where the packages were of low weight or volume. Most had turned out to be high-end art books, but the process had been validated when it identified copies of the New Fabrica that went to public collections. This was the first privately held copy they’d tracked down.

  ‘So is this extra?’ asked Thijs from his desk. ‘Besides the library copies?’

  ‘Yes! It was imported by a Dr Gerard Bromley, of St Ives.’

  ‘Godskolere! Do we have a squad on the way?’

  Jo calmed down a bit. ‘No, he’s not our killer. He’s ninety-two and in a nursing home. Angelo and Cooper just rang from there. Still sharp as a tack, but he doesn’t get around much anymore.’

  ‘Still, it could be a worker out there.’

  ‘Or family.’

  ‘Maybe. Apparently he keeps it under lock and key. Nobody even knows he has it. Angelo’s running a background check, though, just in case. Staff and family.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like you think it’s a lead,’ said Amy.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘So why so excited?’

  ‘I’m just stoked we’ve found one. We still have about forty addresses on the NSW list and about a hundred interstate. Any one of them could be it.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Do you need more help?’ asked Thijs.

  ‘Could we call up some uniforms to get through the list? The boys have just been checking for me as they get the chance.’

  ‘No worries, there’s still some spare provision,’ said Thijs. ‘I’ll let Spud know.’

  ‘No that’s okay, I’ll ring him,’ said Jo. ‘I want to ask him a favour anyway.’ She knew her brother would rain on her parade – it was his default reaction – but she’d learned many years ago that he was less of a pain in the arse if he was involved in some way. She only had to give him a job to do and he’d be fine.

  Tuesday 8 January – morning

  Murphy hadn’t thought much of Jo’s fancy customs play, chasing this one edition of a 500-year-old book, because it seemed unlikely to him that anyone planning a killing spree would fill out his importation forms correctly. But he had to admit, his sister had hit the bullseye. Not that she had any idea.

  Their telephone conversation had been pretty typical – her naive academic enthusiasm colliding with his streetwise scepticism – until she’d asked him to check an address on her list. It was a long shot, she’d said: a billing address for a credit card that had paid the rental on a post office box in Hornsby, where one of the expensive book shipments on her list had been sent.

  ‘You’re out west somewhere, aren’t you?’ she’d asked, only vaguely aware of what he was up to and where he was up to it. ‘Could you check on it while you’re out there?’ Then she’d read him a street address in Seven Hills.

  It was the address of the Denison Bank warehouse, the very building he was sitting in at that moment.

  He’d had that sensation of clarity, then, when an idea crystalises in your mind and you realise you already knew it in your gut. It came from months of getting inside the killer’s head, of seeing the world the way he did, of hunting connections. From a thousand half-seen impressions, half-felt hunches and half-grasped strands. From learning what it meant to surveil and be surveilled inside the Denison Bank computer network.

  Murphy didn’t believe in coincidences. Not on this scale, anyway. He was dead certain.

>   His killer worked for Denison Bank.

  —

  The first thing Murphy did was to lock the door and push a set of drawers against it. He felt like an arachnophobe waking up covered in spider webs – he was surrounded by potential serial killers. No way was he going to be next cab off the rank.

  He drank straight from the whisky bottle to calm himself, then grabbed the keyboard to the bank mainframe terminal and lit up the sign-in screen. He picked up his mobile and dialled.

  ‘Adams here.’

  ‘Tom, it’s Spud.’

  ‘Mate, how’s it going? Have you got him?’

  ‘Not yet, getting there.’

  ‘You still at Sevo?’

  ‘Yeah I am. Listen, I need your login, Tom. The spook-level one.’

  ‘Nah, mate, can’t do that.’

  ‘If you let me in now I’ll be gone by the end of today. As in, never coming back.’

  ‘Spud, you got no idea what that login can do. There’s no way.’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything, just look around, like you did the other day.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’m playing a hunch.’

  ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll look into it for you.’

  ‘Come on, Tom, you know that’s not how it works. I have to get in there myself and follow my nose. I won’t make any changes. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.’

  ‘That’s what worries me. You wouldn’t know if you did.’

  ‘I’m not a complete dope. I just need to have a look.’

  But Adams was resolute. ‘No, Spud, I can’t. It’s a sacking offence, A-grade.’

  Murphy sighed. Enough fucking around: time to go nuclear. ‘Yeah, mate, and shooting a fucken suspect in the face for a bag of cash is a fucken sacking offence too. Even in the Armed Robbery Squad.’