A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  Lester French, a firearms expert in the Forensic Pathologist’s Office at the Yard, stood up from his collection of microscopes and cameras and dropped a bullet into Jake’s outstretched palm.

  ‘That’s what killed Mayhew,’ he said. ‘That, and five others like it. Your killer’s no fool, I’ll tell you that much. There’s quite a lot of stopping power in that little beauty.’

  ‘And this is the same kind of bullet that killed all the others?’

  French nodded firmly.

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘The cartridges themselves are masterpieces of precision engineering,’ he said with real admiration. ‘A machined brass cartridge case with a self-contained high pressure air reservoir. A simple and effective valve system.’ He picked up a small gas cylinder from the laboratory’s work bench. ‘You charge your cartridges up with this.’

  ‘Are you saying that this killer has been manufacturing his own ammunition?’ Jake asked uncertainly, confused by the expert’s enthusiasm for his special field.

  ‘No, no. As I said, it involves precision engineering. This particular shell is made by a Birmingham gunsmith. You buy the cartridges from any gun shop. But you stick whatever bullet you like on the end of it. To that extent, your man has been manufacturing his own. And it’s pretty heavy stuff too. Hollow-nosed, conical-conoidal, pointed and streamlined.’

  ‘But it is a gas-gun,’ Jake said, in search of further elucidation. ‘Is that like an air-gun?’

  ‘In the firing of the weapon, yes. But with regard to what comes out of the barrel, no.’ He lifted the piece of misshapen metal from Jake’s palm and held it up to the light. ‘I mean, a conventional air-pellet bears no more resemblance to this than a bloody pea. Whatever you hit with this, stays hit.’

  ‘What does the gun look like?’ said Stanley.

  French led them through a door at the back of the laboratory to a small firing range. On a trestle table lay what looked like a long-barrelled .44 calibre revolver. He picked the weapon up and handed it to Jake. ‘That’s the sort of thing,’ he said.

  ‘It looks like a normal gun,’ she said.

  French pursed his lips. ‘It does everything that a normal gun is supposed to do.’ He nodded in the direction of one of the targets. ‘Try it. It’s loaded.’

  Jake thumbed back the hammer. It felt lighter than a conventional revolver.

  ‘That’s it,’ said French. ‘Now push the safety off and you’re ready to fire.’

  She levelled the barrel at the target, aimed and then squeezed the trigger. The gun hardly moved in her fist as it fired, with no more sound than a hand slapping a desk top.

  ‘Smooth, eh?’

  French led them down to the target.

  ‘This plywood’s two centimetres thick, so it ought to give you a pretty good idea of what a good-sized gas-gun will do to a man.’

  Jake’s bullet had hit the human-shaped target in the centre of the groin.

  ‘Nice shot,’ said French. He pulled a pen from his top pocket and probed the hole. ‘Clean through. Impressive, eh?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ murmured Stanley.

  ‘You can even buy a silencer for this weapon if you still think it’s too noisy. But the most remarkable thing about it is that no firearms certificate is required. Anyone over the age of seventeen can walk into a shop and buy one today, no questions asked.’

  Jake shook her head. ‘How come?’

  French shrugged. ‘With all the legislative attention focused on conventional firearms, nobody noticed that air-guns were becoming more and more sophisticated. Mind you, you’d have to pay over five hundred dollars for a piece like the one you’re holding, Chief Inspector. Twice that for a rifle.’

  ‘You mean to say that there are rifles like this too?’ said Stanley.

  ‘Oh yes. Some of them with laser-guided nightsights if it’s a bit of poaching you fancy. And, with mercury or glycerine exploding bullets, a gas-rifle would be just the thing for your amateur Lee Harvey Oswald.’

  ‘Presumably the rifles are even more powerful,’ Jake observed.

  ‘With the right sort of ammunition, a good gas-rifle could drop a decent-sized stag. Of course, some of those weapons are regulated.’ French grinned fiercely. ‘Let’s hope your man hasn’t got hold of one of those. There’s no telling what he’d do. Still, it’s not like he hasn’t been busy already, eh? To shoot a man in the Tate Gallery, in broad daylight. The newspapers are going to love that.’

  Later that afternoon Jake had an appointment with her psychotherapist, Doctor Blackwell. The clinic was a smart, three-storey house in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, and Jake had been seeing Doctor Blackwell for almost a year.

  Blackwell belonged to the Neo-Existential school of psychotherapy. This avoided the more mechanistic aspects of classical Freudian analysis and encouraged the patient to take charge of her own life. The key element in the relationship between existential therapist and patient was the encounter, wherein the patient’s problems were discussed and the therapist tried to direct the patient to the life-enhancing, authentic solutions that were to be discovered through the exercise of free choice. According to Doctor Blackwell the experience derived from these encounters was ultimately transferred to the way in which the patient saw herself and others.

  The receptionist smiled as Jake came into the clinic and stood up from behind the desk.

  ‘You’re to go straight in,’ she said, ‘as soon as you’ve undressed.’ She led the way to the changing cubicles.

  In common with other Neo-Existential therapists, Doctor Blackwell required that her patients should make the encounter in a state of total nudity, to encourage a sense of greater personal openness. Jake entered the cubicle and drew the curtain behind her. She took off her jacket and laid it on the chair for a moment. Next she unzipped her skirt and hooked it on a hanger to which she then added the jacket. While she was unbuttoning her blouse she heard the familiar rustle of Doctor Blackwell’s skirt as she approached the other side of the curtain.

  ‘Just come through when you’re ready, Jake,’ said the doctor.

  It was a small, well-spoken voice that bordered on the edge of being reverent, as if Doctor Blackwell were the Mother Superior of a quiet and very devout order of nuns. The kind of voice that reminded Jake of the headmistress at her own convent school. Perhaps that was one reason why she consulted Doctor Blackwell and not someone else: because she was like someone who had once been kind to her and understanding, and at a time when, thanks to her father, she most needed it.

  ‘All right,’ said Jake, stepping quickly out of her pants and unclipping her brassiere. There was a full-length mirror on the wall of the cubicle and briefly Jake regarded her own naked body with criticism. Her breasts were too big, but apart from that everything still looked about the same as when she left Cambridge. Not bad for a woman of thirty-seven. Some of Jake’s friends who had had families now looked more like her own mother. There was no doubt, it was having children that really aged a woman.

  A red cotton dressing gown that seemed to Jake to be rather masculine was hanging from the clothes peg. Jake put it on, tied the sash and then pulled the curtain back.

  Doctor Blackwell’s room was big and airy with a deep-pile blue carpet that was specially designed to feel relaxing under barefoot. She was sitting at a large grey leather-topped desk that faced the wall and on which was hanging a copy of a painting by Francis Bacon. Behind her shoulder were two arched windows that were each the size of a telephone box. As Jake came into the room she looked up from Jake’s case-notes and smiled sweetly.

  ‘And how have you been?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jake. ‘Well, I mean, about the same really. No different.’

  Doctor Blackwell nodded. She was a largish woman of about fifty with big, farmer’s wife hands and an incongruously doll-like face. Her hair was expensively cut, curving neatly in under each side of her lower jaw, and she wore a short white bouclé dress which showed the tan of her arm
s and seemed only remotely clinical.

  ‘Is it warm enough for you in here?’

  Jake said that it was.

  ‘All right then. Close your eyes and try to relax. That’s it. Breathe in, breathe out. Now when I tell you to, I want you to slip off your gown and at the same time I want you to imagine that you’re throwing off all your inhibitions, that you’re uncovering not just your body, but all your innermost feelings as well.’ She paused for a second. ‘Now take it off.’

  Jake shrugged the gown onto the carpet and stood silently at attention. She felt no sense of shame or embarrassment, only a sense of complete liberation.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ Doctor Blackwell said cheerily. ‘And lie down.’

  In the centre of the room was a black leather couch, and beside it a chair. Jake lay down and stared at the expensive light fitting that helped to heat the room. Then she heard the chair creak as Doctor Blackwell sat down.

  ‘Any more nightmares?’ she asked.

  ‘Not lately.’

  ‘Seeing anyone at the moment?’

  ‘You mean am I sleeping with anyone, don’t you?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘No, I’m not sleeping with anyone.’

  ‘How long has it been since you made love?’

  Jake shook her head and remained silent. Then she said: ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever done that.’

  She heard Doctor Blackwell write something on her notepad.

  ‘And do you still experience feelings of acute hostility to men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me about the most recent one.’

  ‘There was a man in a hotel in Frankfurt. He tried to pick me up and I was rude to him. Later on, when I saw him in the lift, he assaulted me.’

  ‘How did he assault you?’

  ‘He touched my breast.’

  ‘Did you think he meant to rape you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He was just a bit drunk, I think.’

  ‘So what happened then?’

  Jake smiled uncomfortably. ‘What do you think happened? I decked him.’

  ‘And how did that make you feel?’

  ‘For a while I felt just fine about it,’ she said. ‘But later on, I wished I hadn’t. At least I wished I hadn’t hit him quite so hard. Like I said, I wasn’t in any danger. I don’t know why I did it.’

  ‘Ultimately we are what we choose to do.’

  ‘Well that’s why I come here,’ said Jake. ‘To feel better about the choices I do make.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can help you feel better about assaulting someone,’ said Doctor Blackwell. ‘But tell me how you feel in general when you discover that some of the choices you’ve made have been wrong ones. As with this man you hit.’

  Jake sighed. ‘I feel as if my life has no real meaning.’

  ‘What about your father: how do you feel about him these days?’

  ‘I suppose I hate him even more now that he’s dead.’

  ‘Even so, your father was just one man - not every man.’

  ‘A father is every man when you’re a child.’

  ‘If your father hadn’t been the monster you tell me he was, Jake ...’

  She snorted loudly.

  .... Sometimes she thought it might just have been easier to have told Doctor Blackwell that she had been sexually abused by her father, because the reality of what she had experienced was so much more difficult to explain. Incest between father and daughter and the traumatising effect it could have on a girl was so much more tangible, so much easier to understand than what Jake had been through. It didn’t seem quite enough to say that throughout her adolescence Jake had been verbally abused and reviled by her father; that he never missed an opportunity to belittle her in front of other people; that he displayed absolutely no affection for her at all.

  She might have been able to have forgiven her father all of that. What she could never have forgiven was his hatred of her mother.

  Jake’s mother had been a timid, long-suffering sort of woman, apparently able to ignore or to excuse each and every manifestation of her husband’s vile behaviour: his crippling sarcasm; his angers; his sulks; his many infidelities; his lies; and his violence. She never found the courage to leave him. Life may have been unspeakable with him, she had said to Jake, but it would have been unthinkable without him. Until finally the day came when that unspeakable existence had suddenly become unbearable and she had killed herself.

  It had been the seventeen-year-old Jake who found her lying on the floor of the garden shed, with a kitchen knife in her chest. Naturally she had assumed that her mother had been murdered by her father. Perhaps that was how she had meant it to look. But the police had discovered that a vice on her father’s workbench was adjusted to the width of the knife handle. They had concluded that she had fixed the knife in the vice and then deliberately impaled herself upon it, in the manner of a Roman general. For a long time Jake had held the belief that the police had been wrong and that her father had indeed murdered her mother. It was only after she herself joined the police that she was finally able to accept the truth of their conclusion.

  Discovering her own mother’s suicide left Jake with an abiding horror of suicide. Not to mention a fully focused hatred for her father; and by the time he himself died of a brain tumour some three years afterwards, which at least explained his appalling behaviour, Jake’s hatred for the most important man in her life had become something altogether more generic ...

  ‘... do you think it’s possible you might not have hated men in general?’

  Jake paused for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s possible.’

  ‘And in theory, do you think it’s possible that you might have experienced a satisfactory relationship with a man?’

  ‘That’s a hard question. If you were in my line of work and you saw some of the things that men, and only men, are capable of ... Jesus.’

  She thought of Mary Woolnoth’s dead body, and the abuse lipsticked on it.

  ‘Well in theory, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But look, I’m not here because I think there’s something wrong with my sexual make-up.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you’re here because you think your life has no meaning.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘All the same, your life has no meaning because of your own ontological insecurity, Jake. Because you’re divided against yourself. The division in you manifests itself in these pathological displays of hostility to men. You’re an intelligent woman. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

  Jake sat up and covered her bare breasts with her hands. She sighed deeply and swung her legs off the couch. Doctor Blackwell stood up and walked back to her desk where she sat down again, and made a note on Jake’s file.

  ‘You know, we’ve made real progress today,’ she said with equanimity. ‘This is the first occasion when you’ve admitted that but for your father things might have been different for you.’

  Jake got off the couch, picked the gown off the carpet where she had dropped it, and slipped it on.

  ‘So what does that prove?’ she said.

  ‘Oh I don’t know that it proves anything. Proof is not something that’s accorded particular importance in Neo-Existential therapy. But it’s obviously something that’s of fundamental importance in your life.’

  ‘Of course it is. I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake ...’

  ‘That’s just fine. Only I question its validity as the sole criterion for determining your personal life as well. The violence and hostility are merely reinforcement techniques for what it is that you’re trying to prove to yourself. And what you’re trying to repress. Perhaps when you have accepted the veracity of the choices you do have, proof will seem to be of less importance to you. But you know, before anything improves, I think you have to discover at least one man you can whole-heartedly admire, in the same way that you once admired your father. Maybe then you’ll start to feel authentic again.’

  Jake nodded su
llenly. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘That’s what choice is all about.’

  Jake, who was in her mid-thirties, lived alone in Battersea, close by the Royal Academy of Dancing. She remembered a time when she wanted to be a ballet dancer, only her father had told her she was too tall and for once, he had been right.

  Her flat was on the top floor of an old-style modern building and, from a small concrete terrace which hosted an unlikely profusion of greenery, it commanded a fine view of the river. Jake loved her flat and her garden terrace and if it had a disadvantage it was that it was too close to the Westland Heliport. White-bodied helicopters had a tendency to circle noisily above her terrace, like giant seagulls, especially when she was sun-bathing.

  For a brief period Jake had tried sharing her home with a lodger, a girl called Merion, whose mother was a friend of Jake’s mother. At first she and Merion had got along well enough. Jake had not even minded when Merion started bringing her hairy boyfriend Jono back to the flat, to make noisy love in Jake’s bathtub. She had not even objected that they did not clean it particularly well afterwards. But when, in an unforgivable state of total sobriety, Jono had made a very determined pass at Jake and Jake had responded by punching him out cold, Merion took exception to Jake’s forthright manner and left soon afterwards.

  There followed a period of intense promiscuity in which Jake engaged as much to celebrate the return of her privacy as it was born of any real appetite, and which matched an equally intense, equally protracted and equally unsatisfactory period of promiscuity during her twenties. After that she had a brief and inevitably stormy relationship with an actor who lived in Muswell Hill and who maintained a fashionable hostility to South London and the police, with Jake an occasional and simultaneous exception.

  Since then two years had passed, during which Jake had remained more or less celibate. The more when a man she had been questioning kicked her in the crotch and left her having to take four weeks off work; and the less the previous New Year’s Eve, at a party with an equally callous man who worked for the BBC.