A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Oh Christ,’ breathed Jake. ‘You’re not telling me that this logic bomb, or whatever you call it, has trashed the whole system?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. I tried all my own special software. But by the time I found the right one and stopped the program replicating itself, one particular area of the system was badly damaged.’

  ‘Which particular area of the system?’

  ‘The VMN database.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Not the whole thing. Just a percentage.’

  ‘How big a percentage?’

  Chung shrugged. ‘Hard to say exactly. Maybe 30 to 40 per cent.’

  ‘What am I going to tell Gleitmann?’

  ‘It was bound to go off sooner or later,’ said Chung, with an uncomfortable sort of laugh. ‘The logic bomb was just sitting there, in the root memory, waiting for the trigger. Had it been anyone else who tripped it, the bomb would have trashed the whole disk. Lucky for them that I had the right software with me: a program I wrote myself, as a matter of fact. Sort of a vaccine if you like. It works against about 200 different types of virus.’ He nodded with some satisfaction. ‘Too right, lady. But for me the whole Lombroso Program would be forensic history. Think about that for a minute.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he instructed her. ‘You know the date on which our burglar broke into the system. You know he must work in the public sector. You know he’s a smart boy where computers are concerned: maybe even got a record for other unauthorised system entries. You got his codename. You even got a counsellor who remembers him.’

  ‘Yes, just what was that codename?’

  Chung consulted a sheet of paper. ‘Wittgenstein,’ he said. ‘Ludwig Wittgen-stein.’ He pronounced the surname with the accent on the second syllable and shook his head, grimacing. ‘If they gave me a codename like that I wouldn’t be surprised if I wanted to kill a few people myself.’

  Jake wondered if Chung could be anti-Semitic and looked forward to the possibility of reminding him that she herself was Jewish. Not that it meant all that much to her, but she felt it might be fun to accuse him of racism.

  ‘And what’s wrong with it?’ she asked.

  Chung looked away, trying to hide his grin. He seemed about to say one thing but then apparently changed his mind, laughed and said another: ‘Bit of a bloody mouthful, that’s all.’

  So that was it, she thought. He had never heard of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was embarrassed at his own ignorance. Not that she knew much about him herself, beyond a few basic items of biographical information of the kind that counts as good general knowledge. But she had a feeling that before this case was ended she was going to know a great deal more.

  Is the classification of things into names always truly arbitrary? Or is there not some meaning to how something is named? While a name itself is a primitive sign and cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition, at the same time there are names which, when given, seem to be replete with mystical significance.

  Names have power. The name of Jehovah, considered too sacred even to utter. Or Macbeth, never mentioned by superstitious, luvvy-duvvy theatre folk. At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. The name of the slough was Despond. Keats’s name was writ in water.

  And some are written in blood.

  Names have numerological significance, too. Readers of Tolstoy’s War and Peace will recall that Pierre Bezukhov, under the influence of his brother Freemasons, manages to turn the name of l’empereur Napoleon into numbers, the sum of which equals 666. The name of the Beast, or the number of his name. Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid.

  Never ever tell anyone a baby’s Christian name until after it is christened, or the pixies may hear it and charm the child away. There are names to conjure with. Names that liveth for evermore. And the naming of cats is a difficult matter.

  Some names must be blotted out of the book, and others cannot be cured. My name is Legion, for we are many.

  I am become a name.

  Tell me honestly, do you like your name? Are you not bored with it? As a child didn’t you hanker to be called something else, a name with more of a ring to it - a name with more dash, more spirit? You wondered how ever your dim-witted parents could have been so lacking in imagination as to have named you as they named you. To say nothing of the surname they, or at least one of them, inherited. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. But Philip Larkin (a good name) omits to mention in his poem, the most crucial aspect of that parental act of sabotage which is, of course, your name. It’s not just misery that man hands on to man, but a name. That’s what really fucks you up.

  You wear your name like a hidden shirt. But once it is revealed to someone, it can never again be properly hidden. That person can never then forget that you are wearing it. Having explained to your friends that you are ‘x’ they will for ever after think of you in terms that may simply be expressed as ‘x’. It is a pure sign of you, of who, and why, and what you are and where you come from. The Sign of Four.

  A name means an object. The object is its meaning. I can only speak about names. I cannot put them into words. But to live your whole life with a meaning that is not of your own choosing would seem to me to be quite unbearable.

  ‘My name is for my friends,’ says T.E. in the film Lawrence of Arabia. How right, how very right. Once given out, your name may be used against you. But there is power in the unspoken name, in The Man with No Name. The Outsider. L’Etranger. He rides into town, shoots a few people and then rides away again. Anonymous. The best name of all. If I could have taken my own name, if I did not now have my Lombroso-given name, I would take that name: Anonymous. Think of all the quotations, the poems, the stories that could now be attributed to you.

  In truth, this is more of a tract than a story, more of a journal than a piece of prose. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomme, nomina nuda tenemus.

  7

  WHEN JAKE HAD finished making her report to the Assistant Police Commissioner, Gilmour chewed his finger absently for a few seconds before uttering a profound sigh.

  ‘Does Professor Gleitmann know about this yet?’ he said wearily.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Gilmour’s bushy eyebrows moved in to ask a silent question.

  ‘He wasn’t very pleased, sir,’ said Jake.

  ‘I can imagine. But you’re satisfied that it wasn’t Sergeant Chung’s fault, this logic bomb?’

  ‘Wholly satisfied, sir. Chung’s boss from the Computer Crime Unit has been over to the Institute to investigate exactly what happened. He has already confirmed Sergeant Chung’s account.’

  ‘Good. The last thing we want is the Home Office trying to post the blame for this one through our door.’

  Gilmour leaned back in his chair and swivelled around to stare out of the window of his New Scotland Yard office. They were only a kilometre away from the Tate Gallery, the site of the last Lombroso murder. Somewhere overhead could be heard the sound of a police helicopter as it constantly patrolled the rooftops around the Home Office and the Houses of Parliament, looking out for terrorists or lone crackpots. Jake knew that aboard it were cameras powerful enough to have photographed the comb in her hair and quite possibly the string on her tampon, not to mention the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment the helicopter carried. The temptation to use this equipment was obvious and sometimes the Police Airborne Surveillance teams went too far. The newspapers were still full of the political scandal that had been the result of one airborne team having recorded the compromising conversation of two homosexual Members of Parliament as they sat eating their sandwiches in Parliament Square.

  ‘So what’s next?’ asked Gilmour.

  ‘Well, sir, Sergeant Chung tells me that with the computer system the BRI have been using, it is sometimes possible to recover material that has been accidentally deleted. I
t’s called an electronic spike. I’ve told him to make that his first priority.’

  Gilmour shook his bald head and proceeded to stroke his Mexican-style grey moustache nervously. ‘I don’t understand these blasted computer people,’ he said irritably, transferring his attention to the buttons on his well-pressed uniform. ‘Either something has been deleted or it hasn’t.’ Anger made his light northern burr become more noticeably Glaswegian.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Jake reported. ‘But Chung says that sometimes artificial intelligence will find a way of erasing something from a file directory and yet keep it hidden safely, somewhere within the main memory.’

  ‘Any other bright ideas, Jake? Mayhew’s last words. What about that?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘It could be he thought that the Lombroso people set him up to be killed. It could be he was even right. Could be he was just paranoid.’

  ‘Yes, well I know just how he must have felt.’

  ‘Sergeant Chung has had one other idea, sir. He thinks he’s got a way of breaking into what’s left of the Lombroso database. You’ll recall that the Lombroso computer is connected to our own at Kidlington? And that their system is supposed to alert us if a name which we have entered into our computer, in the course of a violent crime investigation, should be on the Lombroso list of VMN-negatives?’

  Gilmour grunted an affirmative.

  ‘Well, Chung wants to take the entire UK telephone subscribers-list, which exists on a series of discs, and feed all the names and numbers at random into the police computer within the context of a fictitious murder investigation. It might take a while, but the idea is that one by one, Lombroso will be forced to release all the names and numbers of those men classed as VMN-negative. Or at least the ones it has left since the killer’s logic bomb went off. That way we can at least keep some of them under surveillance.’

  Gilmour held his head weakly. ‘Spare me the technical explanations, Jake. Do it, if you think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘I’ve also prepared a letter addressed to each VMN-negative person who has elected to receive psychotherapy. There are about twenty of them. Professor Gleitmann has agreed that Lombroso counsellors will give these letters to their patients. The letter asks each man, for the sake of his own safety, to contact me in total confidence. The only trouble is that these men aren’t much disposed to trust the police. They think it’s part of some grand plan that at some stage we’re going to round them all up and put them in a special prison hospital. But I still think it’s worth a try. I’d also like to take out some advertisements in the newspapers. Just a list of codenames, nothing else. But warning them to get in contact with a number.’

  ‘I think I’d have to clear that with the Home Office,’ said Gilmour.

  ‘We’ve got to try and warn all of these men,’ said Jake. ‘Surely - ’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, Jake. But I can’t promise anything.’

  Jake felt herself frown.

  ‘Was there something else?’

  ‘Perhaps now is not the best time,’ she said defensively. ‘It’s a bit wild.’

  ‘No, I’d rather hear it, Jake. No matter how fantastic.’

  She led Gilmour up to it gradually, telling him how she already had a team of officers checking the sales of gas-guns and combing the police files for those who had a record for unauthorised computer entry. Finally she described how one of the counsellors at the Brain Research Institute remembered having talked to the man, codenamed Wittgenstein, now assumed to have committed the murders.

  ‘At least, he can remember the codename and not much more,’ she explained. ‘So what I want to do is hypnotise him to see if his subconscious can make a better job of a description.’

  Gilmour pulled a face and Jake wondered how much longer he had before retirement. Not very long, she imagined. But he nodded.

  ‘If you think that it’s necessary.’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  The nod turned into a shrug of resignation.

  ‘There’s something else, sir. I’m convinced that our man believes that what he’s doing is in the public interest.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Killing men who have tested VMN-negative. Men who are potentially killers themselves. I’m sure that - our man ...’ She still couldn’t bring herself to refer to the killer by his codename. It seemed too absurd that a homicidal maniac should be named after one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. ‘Well, he might just have worked out some sort of justification for his actions, sir. I’d like to draw his fire a little. Try and engage him in some sort of dialogue.’

  ‘How would you manage that?’

  ‘I’d like to arrange a press conference, sir. To talk about these murders. Naturally I won’t refer to the Program itself. But I would like to try and provoke him a little. Talk about the complete innocence of the victims, how these murders were committed without reason, the work of a lunatic, that sort of thing. If I’m right, he won’t like that much.’

  ‘And suppose you only succeed in provoking him to go to the newspapers to explain what he thinks he’s up to? We’re just about keeping the lid on this as things stand. But if this lunatic were to go to the newspapers with a story, that would be it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No, sir, I’m certain he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t want to alarm all the other VMN-negatives he’s got on his list. It would make his job a lot harder if they were all scared shitless and looking out for him as a result of reading his story in the newspapers. No, sir, my guess is that he’d try to contact us, to try and put the record straight.’

  ‘And if you do manage to get him to contact you, then what?’

  ‘Depending on how he chooses to make contact, there’s a lot of valuable profiling data we might be able to obtain: handwriting analysis, linguistic analysis, personality assessment - all of this would be invaluable in tracking him down. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, sir, that this is notoriously the most difficult kind of killer to catch. It may look as if we’re grasping at a few straws here but frankly, sir, it’s only these small fragments of data that will enable us to build up a complete picture of our man.’

  Jake paused to see if Gilmour was with her. He wasn’t, she knew, a sophisticated kind of man. He was one of the old school of policing: left school at sixteen to join the force and then up through the ranks. The Scot knew as much about forensic psychiatry and criminal profiling as Jake knew about Robert Burns. But seeing that his eyes hadn’t yet glazed over, she kept on going.

  ‘I’m talking about systematic composite profiling,’ she said.

  ‘We’re trying to establish the type of man responsible, as distinct from the individual. The Yard’s own Behavioural Science Unit has already compiled in-depth psychological studies of everyone from the Yorkshire Ripper to David Boysfield. We’ll be using their body of work as a comparison in an attempt to identify the type of offender that we’re looking for. But I can’t make bricks without straw. I need some data. Contact with the killer would give us something.’

  Gilmour nodded gravely. ‘What kind of man do you think we’re looking for, Jake?’

  ‘My guess?’ Jake shrugged. ‘Well, this is no disorganised asocial we’re dealing with, I can tell you that much. He’s a cunning, methodical, calculating killer for whom homicide is an end in itself. That is, on its own, highly unusual. Most serial killing is driven by lust. But this man is inspired by nothing other than his own sense of mission. It means he has no obvious weakness, and that makes him very dangerous.’

  Gilmour sighed. ‘All right, Jake, you’ve made your point. You’ll get your press conference, if I have to go down on my knees to that bitch.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘One more question, Jake.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Exactly who was this fellow, Wittgenstein?’

  The psychiatrist who remembered counselling a VMN-negative codenamed Wittgenstein was Doctor Tony Chen. Like Sergeant Chung, he was anothe
r immigrant from Hong Kong, only a little older and better-mannered. He seemed pleased to cooperate with Jake’s inquiry, even one which involved raiding his own subconscious mind.

  ‘I don’t remember too much about the guy,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve counselled quite a few VMNs since then. After a while, it’s difficult to separate them. Especially the ones who don’t come back for regular counselling. Wittgenstein didn’t; that much I can remember.’ He rolled up his sleeve. ‘All right, let’s do it.’

  Doctor Carrie Cleobury, the Lombroso Program’s Head of Psychiatry, took charge of her colleague’s hypnosis in her office at the Institute, accompanied by Professor Gleitmann and Jake. Having injected Chen with a drug to help him to relax, she told him that she would induce trance with the aid of both stroboscopic light and a metronome.

  ‘This has the advantage of combining auditory and visual fixation,’ she said to Jake. ‘I find it the most effective technique.’

  Jake, who herself held an M.Sc in Psychology, was already well aware of this, but she remained silent on the subject, reasoning that she preferred having Doctor Cleobury working for her rather than against her.

  Chen sat in an armchair facing the light, and waiting for the drug to take effect. After a minute or two he nodded at Doctor Cleobury who switched on the light machine and set the metronome in motion, adjusting the speed until it matched the flashing of the light. Then she began her induction talk. She had a pleasant voice, calm and self-assured, with just the trace of an Irish accent.

  ‘Keep looking into the light and think of nothing but the light ... In a little while your eyelids will begin to feel heavy and you will feel drowsy ... and relaxed, as your eyelids become heavier and heavier ...’

  Light and shadow flickered on Chen’s broad Oriental face like the wings of a great moth, and as the minutes passed, his breathing grew more regular and profound.

  ‘... you will want to close your eyes soon, because they are becoming so heavy and you feel so drowsy ...’

  Chen’s small nostrils flared, his mouth slackened a little as his eyes grew so narrow that it was soon impossible to tell whether they were open or closed.