The Tribute

by John Byron

  Unless.

  And then he’d complimented her on the buoyancy of her tits in the pool on the weekend, but she hadn’t let him near them. Said she was tired and had a headache. His working theory had been that she was just frosting him out.

  Unless.

  Unless unless unless.

  The bitch was fucken pregnant.

  Murphy picked up a dusty old rotary telephone from the adjacent desk and threw it at the wall. It went straight through the plasterboard and wedged into the cavity. He reached for a tubular stacking chair, but then thought better of the racket and quelled his rage. He sat and seethed instead.

  It all fitted together. Sylvia had been so distant lately because she’d been fucking around behind his back. And now that she’d gotten herself knocked up, she was going to take Murphy to the cleaners and piss off with half his fucken assets.

  ‘Not on my fucken watch, sweetheart.’ He was not about to be robbed, or deceived, or abandoned. He was not about to be humiliated.

  At least she hadn’t been at it in his own home. He’d been keeping tabs on her through the spy camera recordings for months now, and there was never anyone else there, apart from his sister every now and then. Even when Sylvia was getting around half-naked it was all very innocent. Clearly she was careful. Cunning. Fucken devious.

  Murphy picked up the whisky and poured, the mug surrounded by his scrawled notes on the trap he was going to set for Porter. He had a nagging sensation, like a sneeze that wouldn’t come: a notion, ancient and new, swimming around beneath the surface. He looked down into the mug and found the design in the peaty depths: the intricate machinery laid out in blueprint, the gears and vectors, the causes and effects.

  Oh, brilliance. Yes. This was the better plan. A modified snare-trap: no permissions required, no explanations necessary. Draw his quarry in, send the prick straight into the hands of the squad. And deal with his other little matter in the process. Murphy drank off the rest of the whisky and stepped it through from start to finish, but he already knew. It was beautiful.

  But did he dare? There was no coming back from something like this. He’d killed people before, but they were bad guys, in everyone’s eyes, and he’d been given medals for those shootings. This could not be more different. It was a launch out into clear space, a sovereign act in defiance of everything around him, a stroke of finality that would cut him off from the realm he was sworn to protect.

  He looked back at Sylvia’s notes. That bitch. Fuck it. He was entitled to protect his property, protect his freedom, protect his rightful place as the man of the house.

  His plan was dicey, to be sure, but he would remain in the shadows, out of sight. And it would solve both his problems at one inspired stroke. There were a good many moving parts to it, and it would require careful curation, but he held all the levers now. He knew he could make it work.

  ‘Oh, Murphy, you absolute cunt,’ he growled, downing the last of the Islay malt. ‘You’re a fucken genius.’ He logged out of the system and sent Adams a text:

  — Elvis has left the building.

  Thank you very much.

  Tuesday 8 January – afternoon

  Sylvia bounced out of her doctor’s office feeling the best she had in days, months, years. She understood she had a long, hard road ahead, but fuck it, from now on she was going to smell the roses whenever they were at hand. And they were at hand today, great bundles of riotously coloured, richly fragrant hybrid tea roses.

  Her baby was growing, her body was in the form of its life for the task ahead, and her gynaecologist could not have been happier, medically speaking.

  But it was specifying a due date that had brought it all home to her. She was due in early September: her child’s birthday would fall in Sylvia’s favourite time of the year, when Sydney was particularly gorgeous. It all made perfect sense.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Jo, as soon as she’d sorted out the Murphy stuff. She knew her sister-in-law would support her through it all. They’d held one another’s hair for much less than this.

  For the first time in weeks, as she walked across a courtyard back to her shift in Emergency, she caught herself humming. She laughed out loud, closed her eyes and held her face up to the sun. It was going to be good. So good.

  Tuesday 8 January – afternoon

  Murphy took the back way to Parramatta to avoid the breathos, tracing the railway line towards a sneaky rat-run he knew that shadowed Victoria Road. He dialled Deputy Commissioner Hughes.

  ‘Good afternoon, detective,’ she said. ‘I was just about to call you. Do you have a breakthrough for me?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, no – but I do have an idea. I’d like to consult the Operation Scintilla team.’

  Scintilla was the Victorian Police operation that had nailed the country’s last serial killer four years earlier. Variously described as ‘inspired’, ‘unorthodox’, ‘problematic’, ‘unethical’ and ‘borderline illegal’, it had nevertheless apprehended the culprit, tried him cleanly and put him away for life. Hughes had been Scintilla’s supervising brass: she’d been recruited north of the Murray River on the strength of its achievement.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be asking Superintendent Manning?’

  ‘I wanted to seek your advice before formalising a request, ma’am. Since you know the case and the people.’ She had to know he was blowing smoke up her arse, but he was confident she’d see the angle. Murphy didn’t much like the deputy commissioner, and the feeling was clearly mutual – she thought he was a cowboy, he thought she was a bull dyke – but he respected her pragmatism. She wanted results, and they both knew he could deliver them.

  ‘Is this another piece of premier-friendly innovative design thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘It is if you want it to be. But I also think it will help for real.’

  ‘All right, do it. I’ll tell the commissioner. Do you know Josh Kelly?’ Kelly had led the Scintilla investigation, and was now head of Victorian Homicide.

  ‘I do, we’ve been on courses together.’

  ‘Okay. Tell Manning I’ve approved it. Make your arrangements.’

  ‘Thank you. And there’s something else, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It might be time to escalate our use of the media.’

  ‘Through the media unit?’

  ‘I was thinking more informally.’

  ‘Ah. You want to activate that scheme of the attorney-general’s.’

  ‘Kind of. Only, strictly in-house.’

  ‘So you’re not wanting to involve those press secretaries?’

  ‘Fuck, no! Ma’am.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. But it’s still a risky play, detective.’

  ‘True, but so’s waiting for him to strike again. “Doing nothing,” as they call it on the news.’

  He gave her time to silently weigh the public relations consequences of each option. They were damned either way, of course. ‘All right. But nobody speaks to the press apart from you. I want no repeats of the fingerprint debacle.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘We need to close this one out, Murphy.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you.’ He hung up before his voice betrayed him. As if he needed schooling on that point.

  He phoned his superintendent to give him the substance. Manning understood why Murphy had gone over his head, but it was better to tell it direct.

  He still had a few calls to make, so he turned off the main road and drove through Balmain to the London Hotel. It was a good place to think, and nobody would ever look for him here.

  Murphy took a schooner of Old onto the pub balcony and regarded the Harbour Bridge while blowing the froth off. His mind turned back to the last time he’d sat there, with Sylvia at his side – he had a photo of that afternoon somewhere on his phone, actually, Sylvia laughing with the bridge in the background. He pulled up the picture and a twinge of anticipatory regret ran through him. What he was planning was pretty fucken full-on – maybe he was going too far
. Could he protect his interests another way: shut her down but let her live on?

  But then he imagined her at other pubs, with other men, laughing and flirting with all and sundry, going home with whichever prick had inseminated her, and his bile rose and he cursed, then hardened his heart and focused his attention on the job at hand.

  He extracted Porter’s shift roster, then opened the calendar app on his phone to compare. He pondered for a moment, then opened his Fort banking app and cross-referenced with a few recent credit-card transactions. Ten minutes later he had a preferred date and a rough time of day and no more beer. He texted Kelly, the Victorian Homicide chief, asking for a quick chat, and was just back from the bar with another schooner and a packet of salt-and-vinegar chips when Kelly rang. Murphy pitched his request for a technical briefing on Scintilla, in Melbourne. Kelly was enthusiastic: there’d be some reflected glory when Murphy made his collar, and a nice reportable in the meantime. Early the following week would work. Murphy locked it in.

  He drained his glass and jumped in his car, taking the back streets to Victoria Road. He phoned police ops admin to arrange the flights and a hotel: down to Melbourne early Sunday afternoon, back to Sydney late Wednesday afternoon, staying at the Windsor. He promised to submit the paperwork in the morning.

  Crossing the Anzac Bridge, he hesitated before making the next call. This was the point of no return, and the enormity of his plan pressed down on him. But then he looked to his right towards Glebe, as was his habit, and saw some ranga bitch in the car next to him giving the long-suffering bloke in the driver’s seat a proper serve, and he hit dial.

  Hollier from the Sydney Envoy answered on the second ring. They’d done a lot of favours for one another over the years, too many to keep track of. Murphy offered the journalist an exclusive on the case, with all the juice. The story was an open-cut gold mine, done right, with a book in it and a shot at a Walkley Award. Hollier made the statutory complaint about short notice – always a bit fucken rich coming from a journalist – but his heart wasn’t in it, not with Saturday’s front page in the frame. They arranged to meet late that night at the Hero of Waterloo.

  Murphy decided to avoid the office. He needed to think through his strategy for handling the unit before seeing them, and he had a lot of slander to invent about their killer before meeting the reporter. Plus he was definitely well pissed by now, with a couple of quick schooeys chasing probably half a pint of malt. Not the best look.

  He headed for home. He had some work to do there, anyway, including a major clean-up of the greatest-hits reel on his computer from the backyard spy camera.

  Besides, he could do with some fucken peace and quiet after a big day. According to the calendar on his phone, Sylvia would be at work for hours yet.

  Saturday 12 January – afternoon

  Porter lifted the Saturday newspaper by its edge, as though it were smeared with excrement. Which it was, metaphorically. He moved from the system monitor’s desk to a nearby bench, as much to prevent contamination of his workspace as to utilise the broad flat surface.

  He opened the newspaper to the double spread, a lurid indulgence of distortion, fabrication and titillation. The centrepiece was a précis of each Volume, the bare facts obscured by an embroidery of supposition, misinformation and patent deceit. All manner of insult was heaped upon him, all born of ignorance and steeped in malice. While the byline was Hollier’s, behind each slur stood Detective Senior Sergeant David Murphy.

  Porter sighed at how far this venerable newspaper had fallen. The Envoy of old would never have countenanced this. Hollier had quoted Murphy extensively and relied on him entirely, displaying not a shred of professional scepticism. Porter wondered momentarily where the journalist did his banking.

  Predictably, the dominant theory was of profound sexual deviancy, starting with the usual insinuation of sadistic homoeroticism. Porter was not offended by the suggestion that he was homosexual – he was not, as it happened, but he didn’t care who thought he was. However, he loathed the sly, bigoted conflation of homosexuality and sadism.

  And then there were the lies about the women. Murphy ostentatiously refrained from providing any explicit detail, but he was willing to imply that Porter had wrought the most vile degradations upon Laura Newman. Between these lies and a stunningly hypocritical sermon on misogyny, the picture editor had seen fit to print a pair of gratuitous photographs of Ms Newman playing beach volleyball in an especially economical bikini.

  Amber Darcy’s maturity, by contrast, was established by an unflattering picture taken towards the end of a long, hot day at the races. Any gynaecological interest in a woman of her age and aspect, went Murphy’s insinuation, proved conclusively that Porter was an absolute monster. He found this as insulting to the late Mrs Darcy as to himself.

  Porter understood that his examination of the reproductive and gastrointestinal paraphernalia unavoidably exposed him to salacious innuendo at the hands of the police, the media and the public. The extension of this focus to the other specimens, however, lacked even this glimmer of excuse.

  He particularly resented the accusation of cruelty. He derived no pleasure at all from the small suffering his candidates experienced, notwithstanding how unendurably obnoxious they had each been to him before he had propelled them into immortality. He took great care to minimise their pain – a scruple of which Murphy must have been aware, from the forensics, yet one that he had chosen to ignore or suppress.

  Porter knew that today’s ‘exclusive’ was only the opening salvo – there would be more when the Sunday paper took its turn. Not to mention all the reaction pieces, on television and radio, and in all the other newspapers. It would run for weeks.

  He was beyond furious.

  He glanced at the clock and remembered several routine tasks he had yet to complete before his twelve-hour dayshift ended. He ran through the task list quickly, confirming that the bank was still operating normally. Everyone’s money was nice and safe. A little less so their longevity, after today’s provocation.

  Sunday 13 January – morning

  Murphy lay doggo until Sylvia left for brunch, then bounded out of bed. Avoiding the back of the house, he showered and dressed in ten minutes. He drove down the hill and parked at Woolies, then found a table up the back of a dodgy milk bar across the road from Industry Beans. Not trusting the coffee, he ordered a pot of strong tea and settled in to watch the table of four women inside the cafe over the road.

  —

  Freya stood as soon as they’d finished the quiz in the Envoy. ‘All right, girls, I’m off to buy Dani’s wedding present.’

  ‘What are you going to get?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I have no idea; they already have everything.’

  ‘Hmm, two lawyers in their early thirties …’ said Jo.

  ‘What about those round wine glasses?’ suggested Katie. ‘You know, with no stems.’

  ‘No, if they don’t already have them it’s because they don’t want them.’

  ‘What about a wine decanter?’

  ‘Does anyone really decant wine?’

  ‘True. Who can wait?’

  ‘A whisky decanter, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Freya sighed. ‘Hence Peter’s of Kensington.’

  ‘Actually, can I come too?’ asked Katie. ‘I need a birthday present for Dad.’

  ‘Don’t buy anything else,’ warned Jo. ‘That place is dangerous. You both have too much crap as it is.’

  ‘It’ll be a ruthless military operation,’ said Freya.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ laughed Katie.

  The two women settled their portions of the bill at the counter, waved their goodbyes and left.

  ‘So, how’s life in the Ice House?’ Jo asked Sylvia after a moment of silence.

  Sylvia still wasn’t ready to tell Jo all about it, not until she’d seen the lawyer. ‘Things are still frosty, but at least it’s calm. He’s been wrapped up in paperwork every night. I’m just keeping
out of his way.’

  ‘Yes, he’s been offsite a lot lately, out in the suburbs. Trawling data, we think. All very mysterious.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’ Sylvia frowned out through the window. ‘Speaking of.’

  Jo turned to see her brother standing in the middle of the street, waiting for a break in the traffic. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  He trotted across the road, smiling widely as he strode in and straight to their table, taking Freya’s chair. The room shrank a little.

  ‘Morning, Sylv.’ He kissed her on the mouth, then gave his sister one on the cheek. ‘How you goin’, Jo?’

  ‘Pretty good, Dave, how about you?’

  ‘Yeah, great. Double ristretto, thanks, darlin’,’ he said to the barista who’d drifted over, before she could even ask him what he wanted.

  ‘And can we have the rest of bill, please, Sorcha?’

  ‘No worries, Sylvia.’

  ‘You’re all over the papers this weekend.’ Jo nodded at the lurid Sunday tabloid front page. ‘Sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Perps make mistakes when they’re angry, you said it yourself.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s crude, but it works.’

  ‘What if he goes ballistic, though?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘He won’t. He’s fucken insane, but he’s not a psychotic berserker on ice. He’s a planner.’

  Jo agreed with that assessment, on balance, but she wouldn’t bet the house on it. ‘When was this cooked up? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nobody knew,’ Murphy told her. ‘Strictly between me and the brass.’

  ‘Still seems dangerous to me.’

  Murphy shrugged: he didn’t care what the women thought. ‘How’d you go in the quiz?’

  ‘Eighteen and a half.’

  ‘How many halves?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Any bonus points?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘So sixteen, really.’ Murphy shook his head as his coffee arrived with the bill. He did not approve of their system of bonuses and half points.