The Tribute by John Byron

Author:John Byron [Byron, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press
Published: 2021-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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