A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  ‘No, not mine, this one,’ he said. Looking around the table he added, ‘But for what it’s worth, I agree with the Chief Inspector. This looks to me like the work of the Lipstick Man.’

  ‘I must say, I agree,’ said Dalglish.

  The first detective pulled another face.

  ‘Come off it, George,’ said Dalglish. ‘Look, I know you’re desperate for a lead, but this isn’t it, I’m certain. Your Hammerer’s never once murdered outside of Hackney.’

  The second detective remained resolutely unconvinced.

  ‘Receptionists, typists, cleaners,’ he said moodily. ‘Fact is, they all work in an office. We know that’s the way the Messenger selects his victims. He kills them while he’s making a delivery.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘Look I’d still like Mary Woolnoth as a possible.’

  Dalglish glanced at Jake who shrugged back at him.

  ‘Provided my man gets the first credit for this kill, I’ve no objections,’ she said. ‘And if there are any developments, I’ll be sure to let you know.’

  Dalglish returned to his computer. ‘All right then, we’re agreed,’ he said. ‘That’s number - ?’

  ‘- six,’ said Jake.

  ‘Number six for the Lipstick Man.’

  After the meeting Jake stopped the detective who had supported her claim, to thank him.

  ‘That’s all right, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Detective Inspector Stanley, isn’t it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘but as head of Gynocide, I’m supposed to know all the cases of multiple murders involving females - ’

  Stanley lowered his voice and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Actually, I’m Homicide, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Really I shouldn’t have been there at all, only there was a bit of a mix-up. Somehow we received information that it was a man, not a girl who had been found. I’m looking for a multiple who’s killed seven men. Well, I didn’t want to say anything in case I looked stupid.’

  Jake nodded. That explained why he hadn’t bothered to examine the photographs.

  ‘As it happens,’ Stanley added, ‘I found it quite fascinating. Are these meetings always like this?’

  ‘You mean, do we always squabble about whether a body belongs to this or that investigation? No, not often. Usually, things are a little more clear cut than today.’

  As she spoke, Jake thought of the pictures of Mary Woolnoth and of what the pathologist’s scalpel had done to her. You couldn’t get more clear cut than that, she reflected. For a moment something started to rise in her throat. No murder was ever quite as brutal as what took place on the autopsy slab. A clear cut, from chin to pelvis, the skeleton and the organs hauled out of the flesh, like a suitcase ransacked by customs at the airport. She choked back her emotions with another question.

  ‘A multiple who preys on men. That’s quite unusual, isn’t it?’

  Detective Inspector Stanley agreed that it was.

  ‘I presume that this would be the Lombroso Killer that we’re referring to?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought Detective Chief Superintendent Challis was in charge of that investigation.’

  ‘He is,’ said Stanley. ‘It was him who sent me along to this meeting. Just to check that it wasn’t one of ours.’

  ‘What’s his M.O.?’

  ‘Who, the Lombroso Killer? Oh, nothing particularly unusual. He always shoots them in the back of the head. Six times. Mafia-style. Why do you ask?’

  Jake shook her head. ‘No reason. Just curious I suppose.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Well I must be going. I have a plane to catch. Not to mention my own multiple.’

  I always shoot them in the head, and it’s not just because I want to make sure of the job. I think it’s because the head, theirs and mine, is where all the trouble started: theirs and mine.

  I don’t think they can feel very much. Of course it’s hard for me to say, only they rarely make a sound. That much I can be sure of because the gun is so quiet. Six bullets in six seconds, with no more report than a short fit of coughing. Actually, that’s not precisely true since there is also the distinctive sharp crack of the successful head shot, which is very different from the sound of a bullet piercing an ear. I imagine that this is the sort of thing you would just not notice if you were using a conventional gun, which makes a lot more noise.

  While working I tend to concentrate my fire at the back of the head. If you know anything about the brain and its topography you will be aware that cortical vents are so widely dispersed that, short of using something like a steam-roller, no brain injury can destroy them entirely. There is however a great deal of medical evidence to show that people survive frontal brain damage more often than any damage to the rear of the brain. Witness the number of boxers who die, not from a hard blow to the forehead, but when they hit the backs of their heads on the canvas. Believe me it’s true, I’ve read a lot about it, as you might perhaps expect under the circumstances. Seen something of it too.

  The human brain may be compared to a chess board, with the pawns to the forefront and the knights, bishops, rooks, king and queen, the so-called pieces on the eighth rank at the back of the board. Thus it may be said that I more or less ignore the pawns and try to eliminate as many pieces as possible. This strategy seems to work very well. Even so, one of my victims, I believe it may have been the third, survived in a coma for several days before he finally died. There’s no accounting for cerebral asymmetries.

  Most often, I perform these executions at night, or when working hours permit. This follows a short period of surveillance when I establish the victim’s identity and his habits. Possession of a comfortable vehicle with music and microwave minimises any inconvenience that might be occasioned by such an operation.

  You would be surprised how regular are the comings and goings of most people’s lives. And so, usually, it’s only a matter of following my target a distance away from his place of domicile and, at a suitable place, killing him.

  I am avoiding the use of words like crime, assassination and murder for the obvious reasons. Words can have different significations. Language disguises thought, to the extent that sometimes it is not possible to determine the mental action which inspired it. So for now I will simply say that these are executions. It is true that they are not given the official sanction of law in any socially-contractual sense. All the same, this word ‘execution’ goes a long way to avoiding any tendency to pejorate what is after all my life’s work.

  When I got closer to him I realised that he was a little taller than I had thought. Almost two metres. For the evening he wore yet another change of clothing. But it was more than that somehow. He seemed to embrace so many different fashions during the course of one day that one could have been forgiven for thinking that he had a brother or two. His walk was distinctive, however. Too distinctive to mistake him for someone else. He moved partly on tiptoe which lent him a nefarious air, as if he were hurrying from the scene of some dreadful deed.

  More like hurrying to commit one, I thought at the time. It’s only a matter of time before neuronal connectivity makes itself apparent, for him just as for me. Freedom consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. But neither one of us was truly subordinate to his will. And the fact that all I could wish for is happening now can only be a favour granted by fate, so to speak. If I can alter something, I can alter only the limits of the world.

  By removing him from it.

  He turned into the High Street and for a brief moment I lost sight of him. What would he have seen if, like Tam o’Shanter, he looked back? No, that’s much too prosaic. It’s not that I meant to scare him, or to drag him down to hell. This is something that has to be done without malice. This merely corresponds with logic. Even God cannot do anything that would be contrary to the laws of logic. But one takes a certain pleasure in a logical method, for this endows meaning.

  I caught him up as he tripped off to the ri
ght, down a long cobbled alleyway that led to the pub where normally he would drink several litres of the brew he considered to be palatable. Only this time it led to the moment which would not be an event in his life and which he was never meant to experience.

  The gas-gun felt big and powerful in my hand as I pointed it at the back of his head. I do not understand this weapon’s kinetic properties except to say that they are formidable in something that is freely available over the counter, no licence required. Nothing like the air-gun I owned as a small boy.

  Two of the shots were fired even before his knees had started to buckle. I waited until he hit the ground before emptying the rest of the clip into him at rather closer range. Not much blood, but it was immediately clear to me that the man, whose Lombroso-given identity was Charles Dickens, was dead. Then I holstered my weapon underneath my leather jacket and walked quickly away.

  I never cared all that much for Dickens. The real Dickens that is, the English language’s greatest novelist. Give me Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert any day of the 168-hour week. But mostly I avoid novels altogether and prefer to read about the essence of the world, about the relative unimportance of and yet the possibilities for the individual case, of that which exists between the empirical and the formal, of the clarification of propositions. And there’s not much of that in Charles Dickens.

  There’s not much of anything except the deaths of Little Nell and Nancy and Dora Copperfield, and both Pip’s and Oliver’s mothers. Not very safe being one of Dickens’s women. Not much I can do about that now. But at least now that the other Charles Dickens is dead, perhaps things will be that little bit safer for women everywhere. Of course, they’ll never know this. That’s unfortunate. But what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

  2

  THE THIRD EUROPEAN COMMUNITY SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNIQUES OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, HERBERT MARCUSE CENTRE, FRANKFURT, GREATER GERMAN REICH, 13.00 HOURS, 13 FEBRUARY 2013. SPEAKER: DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR ISADORA JAKOWICZ, M.SC, LONDON. METROPOLITAN POLICE FORCE.

  MEMBER COUNTRY: UK. TITLE OF TEXT: INCREASE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MURDER.

  It is Saturday evening, towards the beginning of the millennium. The wife is in bed. There are no children. You switch on the Nicamvision, settle your spectacles on your nose and select a videodisc. A Chinese takeaway and a few bottles of Japanese lager have put you in just the right mood. Your nicotine-free cigarettes are by your side, the futon cushions are soft beneath you, the central heating is on, and the air is warm and pleasantly de-ionised. In these blissful circumstances what kind of disc is it that you want to watch? Naturally it’s one about a murder. But what kind of murder?

  Sixty years ago, George Orwell described what would be, from an English newspaper’s point of view, ‘the perfect murder’. ‘The murderer,’ he wrote, ‘should be a little man of the professional class. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it with all the utmost cunning and slip up over some tiny unforeseen detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison.’

  Arguing the decline of this, the archetypal English murder, Orwell pointed to the case of Karl Hulten, an American Army deserter who, inspired by the false values of American cinema, wantonly murdered a taxi-driver for the sum of eight pounds sterling — about EC$3.

  That the most-talked about murder of the last years of the Second World War was this, the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, and that it should have been committed by an American, was a cause of some regret to the curiously patriotic Orwell. For him, Hulten’s ‘meaningless’ crime could not begin to compare with the typically English murder which was ‘the product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.’

  Today, however, crimes like Hulten‘s, pitiful, sordid and without much emotion behind them, are relatively commonplace. ‘Good murders’, of the kind that might have entertained the News of the World reader of Orwell’s day, are still committed. But these are of little interest to the public at large in comparison with the apparently motiveless kind of murder that has become the norm.

  Nowadays, people are routinely murdered, often for no obvious reason. Just over half a century after Orwell’s death, society finds itself subject to a virtual epidemic of recreational murder, which is the work of a breed of killer even more purposeless than the comparatively innocent Karl Hulten. Indeed, were Hulten’s case to occur today, his crimes would rate no more than a couple of paragraphs in the local newspaper. It might seem incomprehensible to us in the year 2013 that the case of the Cleft Chin Murder should have been, as Orwell tells us, ‘the principal cause célèbre of the war years’.

  With all this in mind, one can construct, as Orwell does, what would be, from the modern News of the World reader’s point of view, today’s ‘good murder’. He might refer us to the videodisc he had been watching that Saturday night. The murderer would be a young and maladjusted man living somewhere in the suburbs, surrounded by his unwitting potential victims. Our chosen killer should have gone astray through some fault of his mother, thus firmly attaching the real blame for the murders to a woman. Having decided on murder the killer should not restrict himself to the one homicide, but should dispatch as many victims as possible. The means chosen should be extremely violent and sadistic, preferably with some sexual, ritualistic, or possibly even anthropophagous aspect. Those killed should most often be young attractive women and their deaths should occur while they are undressing, taking a shower, masturbating, or having intercourse. Only with this kind of background, the Hollywood style of background, can a murder have the dramatic and even tragic qualities which will make it memorable in the present day.

  It’s no accident that a significant percentage of the murders committed in modern Europe have an element of this Hollywood atmosphere.

  One of the traditional motifs of the Hollywood murder, and what brings me to the point of my speech, is the male-bonding which frequently occurs between male law-enforcement personnel and their homicidal quarry. Since this conference is taking place here in Frankfurt, in the Herbert Marcuse Centre, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what the Frankfurt School of Social Science and Marcuse himself had to say about this kind of behaviour.

  For Marcuse, the one-dimensional patriarchal society was characterised by examples of what he called ‘the unification of opposites’: a unification which served to deter social change at an intellectual level by enclosing consciousness in a masculine and, therefore, one-dimensional way. The historical domination of law-enforcement agencies by men is merely one aspect of this monolithic and homogeneous view. Until comparatively recently the average murder inquiry placed little or no reliance on the specifically feminine qualities.

  The behaviourists and psychologists tell us that hormones undoubtedly play a major part in organising male and female characteristics in the brain. Whereas, for instance, men tend to think spatially in terms of distances and measurement, women on the other hand tend to think in terms of signs and landmarks. Women are much better than men at focusing on their immediate surroundings, which may actually make them superior to men in the matter of the observation of fine detail. Thus the usefulness of women to any criminal investigation, especially an inquiry where there exists a wealth of forensic detail such as the Hollywood-style murder, should be obvious. Other specifically feminine qualities such as non-violence, emotional capacity and receptivity may also be mentioned as having investigative utility.

  During the early 1990s, computer analysis of the twentieth century’s inquiries into multiple-killings enabled British statistical criminologists to determine that those inquiries which included a woman among their senior personnel had a much higher rate of success in apprehending the culprit than those inquiry teams which di
d not include a female police officer.

  As a result of this study, a Home Office Select Committee made a number of recommendations to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir MacDonald McDuff, which sought to increase the representation of female police officers in all serious crime investigations, but with particular regard to the Hollywood style of gynocide. Five years ago these recommendations were adopted, with the result that a female of at least Detective Sergeant rank must now be included in any investigation where a recreational killer may be responsible, thereby ensuring an improved, more two-dimensional approach to the inquiry.

  The results speak for themselves. During the 1980s, when there existed no such sex-representation guideline and women accounted for less than 2 per cent of the senior personnel investigating the Hollywood-style gynocide, there was an arrest made in only 46 per cent of cases. During the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, where there existed such a gender guideline and women accounted for 44 per cent of senior police personnel in this type of gynocide, an arrest was made in 73 per cent of all cases.

  Of course the last ten years have also seen some substantial improvements in law-enforcement and forensic detection technology which has partly helped to explain this dramatic increase in the performance of British murder inquiries. Not the least of these has been the adoption, throughout the EC, of identity cards with bar-codes and genetic fingerprints. However even when developments such as these are statistically discounted, it seems probable that the British experiment with sex guidelines for police investigations has achieved an overall increase in successful arrests of at least 20 per cent.

  No doubt you are comparing the gender guideline with that figure of only 44 per cent of senior police personnel being women. Perhaps you are saying ‘why not 100 per cent?’ Well the new two-dimensional approach has been hindered by the small numbers of women who are in positions of relative seniority within the force. However, I am pleased to be able to report that all this is now changing with the advent of recruitment drives among British women, new payscales, crèche facilities, and improved career structures. So it is hoped that before very long, a policewoman of the rank of Detective Sergeant or above will be included in every inquiry relating to a Hollywood-style gynocide.