by Philip Kerr
Of course there are many other approximations of reality which one can explore. These other RAs include the erotic, the romantic, the fantasy, the comic, as well as the musical and even the intellectual. Many of these programs I have devised myself, and I look upon these pictures and sensations as a kind of art form, like cinema.
Of course RA is not without its drawbacks. Like any form of escapism such as drugs, or alcohol, it can become addictive for the weaker-minded individual. But that cannot be a problem for me.
It has been said, by the manufacturers of RA and other products like it, that what is real and what is unreal we must merely apprehend, for both are incapable of analysis. But this seems to me to be nothing more than the kind of tautology that typifies advertising.
The fact of the matter is that nothing empirical is knowable.
8
JAKE TOOK HER place at the table between Gilmour and the man whom she had replaced in charge of the inquiry and who, heading up the Murder Squad, was nominally her boss: Commander Keith Challis. Adopting expressions of cool, calm, detached gravitas, they faced a roomful of journalists who were armed with cameras, boom microphones and discrecorders. As Gilmour opened the press conference, Jake recalled his last few words to her as they left his office on the fifteenth floor of New Scotland Yard, to take the lift down to the conference room.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he had said gruffly. ‘If this blows up in our faces, it’ll be your head, not mine, that the Minister asks for. To my mind it looks as if she’s giving you all the rope you need to hang yourself.’
‘Yes, well I’m not ready to string myself up yet,’ Jake had replied.
The introductions to the press over, Jake, as senior investigating officer, took charge of the police statement. A number of public relations seminars had helped her to develop presentational skills. She recognised the importance to the success of the conference of her own physical appearance and that morning had dressed with even greater care than was usual, choosing to wear a two-piece suit made of turquoise bouclé. She knew that it would be harder for the press to make a target of someone who didn’t conform to the standard grey-flannel image of police authority. It wasn’t her first experience of handling the press during a murder inquiry, but she treated it as if it was. There was no point in risking making the impression that she was in any way casual about things. She spoke clearly, carefully, watching both sides of the room like a presidential bodyguard, as if expecting that one of the journalists would throw something heavier than a loaded question. It was best to expect the unexpected.
‘The police are now disposed to treat a number of random homicides of men, committed during the past few months, as the work of one individual. There are certain features of the killer’s modus operandi which lead us to make this conclusion. While we are unable to supply details of the murderer’s modus operandi for reasons of operational security, we can confirm, however, that all the victims were shot several times in the head, and at a fairly close range.
‘I am sure that I don’t have to explain to you all that, as is common with this kind of apparently motiveless crime, there is a paucity of facts as to the murderer’s identity. At this stage of our inquiry, where there are hundreds, possibly thousands of remote possibilities to be checked, the investigative task is comparable to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Consequently, an advisory team of experts, chaired by myself, has now been set up with the aim of studying all the murders using the resources of the European Criminal Intelligence Service, and in particular, the ECIS computer system. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular system, the integrated European Computerised Intelligence Service performs the task of the police intelligence officer, supplanting human judgment with pre-set computer programs. It is hoped that this will provide the analytical capacity needed to determine if there is, for want of a better term, a centre of gravity for all these killings.’
Jake nodded at a couple of uniformed police officers to hand out copies of the ComputaFit picture which the police artist had produced with the help of Tony Chen. She had accepted the possibility that his unconscious mind might have been lying, but without the picture there was very little that might have justified her calling a press conference.
‘As a result of a description given to us by the killer’s last victim, Oliver Mayhew, before he died, we are now able to issue an artist’s impression of the killer. He is described as being aged about thirty-five or forty, of medium height, with wavy brown hair, blue eyes, sharp features and slightly built. When last seen, he was wearing a brown tweed jacket, white polo-neck sweater, brogue-type shoes, and carrying a beige raincoat.
‘This is an extremely clever and ruthless, possibly psychotic individual with whom we are dealing, and who kills without discrimination or restraint. However, it would seem that it is only men who are at risk. So I would urge members of the public, especially men, to exercise greater vigilance when walking home alone at night.’
That ought to piss him off, Jake thought. She raised her voice above the slight murmur that had followed the issuing of the artist’s impression.
‘Let me take this opportunity to scotch the rumour that any of the killer’s victims were selected by reason of a criminal record or their sexual persuasion. Or that any of them were murdered in response to an assault, an attempted robbery or a sexual proposition. There is absolutely no evidence to support the speculation that this killer is some kind of Hollywood-style vigilante. Nor is there any evidence that these killings are related to the criminal underworld. I cannot emphasise too strongly that these unfortunate victims were all, I repeat all, innocent men going about their lawful business when the killer struck. None of them had any reason to suppose that they had been selected by the killer. Moreover I am completely satisfied that none of them knew, or had ever met the killer before.’
‘I would also like to quash the rumour that the murderer has already been in touch with the police. This is completely untrue. There has been no communication of any kind whatsoever. But if anyone believes that he has information which might be pertinent to this inquiry I would urge that person to come forward and make contact with the police immediately.
‘Finally I want to address the killer. Whoever you are I urge you to give yourself up. I give you my word that you will be fairly treated and that I will do everything in my power to ensure that you receive the proper medical treatment. In saying this, I should like the record to state that my main concern is to prevent the taking of any more lives.’
Jake paused for a moment and glanced over her audience.
‘Are there any questions?’
A dozen hands were raised in the air and Jake pointed at a face she half-recognised.
‘Carol Clapham, ITN,’ declared the woman. ‘Chief Inspector, are you satisfied that robbery is not the motive behind these killings?’
‘Perfectly satisfied. None of these men were robbed. As I recall, one man was found still in possession of a wallet containing over a hundred dollars. Next question.’ She pointed to a man sitting in the front row.
‘James McKay, Evening Standard. You mentioned hundreds, possibly thousands of remote possibilities to be checked. Would you care to say what any of them are?’
‘No, I would not. Next.’ She pointed again.
‘Have any of the victims been mutilated in any way?’ asked a third journalist.
‘No comment.’ Jake had no wish to provide any information for the copycat killers. ‘Next.’
‘Do you assume that the killer will strike again?’
‘That would be a fair assumption, yes.’
She pointed a fifth time and then a sixth. Finally came the question she had been sure someone would eventually ask.
‘John Joyce, the Guardian. Chief Inspector Jakowicz, would you care to comment on the rumour that these killings may be connected with the Lombroso Program currently being run by the Government’s Brain Research Institute?’
&n
bsp; Before Jake could answer, Detective Chief Superintendent Challis beat her to it.
‘I think I can answer that question,’ he said, glancing at Jake as if to reassure himself that she didn’t mind him interrupting her. But she knew that this was just for appearance’s sake: Challis really didn’t care one way or the other whether his female junior minded or not.
‘As the Chief Inspector indicated, there have been a number of rumours about these killings, linking them with everything from England’s World Cup defeat to changes in the world’s weather pattern.’ He grinned, hideously. ‘Let’s just say that at this stage in our inquiry, we’re not disposed to eliminate any hypothesis, no matter how fantastic.’
With that, Gilmour stood up and announced that the press conference was at an end. There were questions shouted at the retreating triumvirate, but these were ignored. And when they were outside, in the corridor behind the conference room, Gilmour breathed a sigh of relief.
‘You fielded that one well, Keith,’ he said.
‘Thanks, sir,’ said Challis. ‘It was a bit of a googly, wasn’t it? You just can’t trust those fucking bastards on the Guardian to play a straight game.’
Gilmour nodded grimly. ‘It’s about time I had a word with the press office about them. Teach them a lesson. No press releases, that kind of thing. Keep ’em in purdah for a while, at least until they learn to toe the line like the rest of the reptiles.’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Jake. ‘You can’t blame them for trying.’
Gilmour looked squarely at Jake, and, ignoring her opinion, complimented her on her own performance.
‘You did well, young lady,’ he said, patronising her as if he had been some kind of indulgent uncle.
Jake forced a smile over her clenched teeth.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing. If this blows up in our faces - ’ For once he did not complete the prophecy. Instead, Gilmour pinched the bridge of his nose, and added, ‘Let’s just hope that this Wittgenstone bastard watches television.’
It was almost unthinkable that he would not, thought Jake as she drove home that night. Television was the great British god. True, she herself often came home and found that she had little energy left to do anything but stare into its unblinking eye. But it was for precisely this reason that Jake had located her own television set in an unusual position. Instead of being placed at an angle between two walls from where it could command the whole room like some kind of surveillance camera, Jake’s set was placed in such a way as indicated someone who was not much inclined to watch it. The TV sat high up on a set of shelves, at right angles to the shortest wall and immediately opposite the door, which obliged anyone who wished to view the thing to stand. It wasn’t that Jake disliked the newsreels of faraway wars, crime movies, or even the two-minute commercial segments that appeared every quarter of an hour. Even when Jake knew that there was nothing worth watching she still found television to be oddly compulsive. It was just that she tried to make her viewing sufficiently uncomfortable as to force her to do something else instead, like reading.
Here, too, her exacting job was having an adverse effect on her life, for as Jake’s career progressed and kept her even later at the Yard, to the detriment of anything that might resemble a private life, she found that the effort required to read anything but trash was too great. Looking along her infrequently dusted shelves, Jake sometimes found it hard to believe that the books on them could belong to someone who had won an exhibition to Cambridge.
Many of her books were vulgarly-attired, improbably-plotted stories of parish pump murder investigated by wisecracking female private eyes or beery detective inspectors, whose lives were full of idiosyncratic hobbies, romantic dalliances, foreign adventure, smoothly-spoken villains, clever observations and satisfying denouements. Lives which seemed to Jake more richly various than her own. Jake’s one consolation was that these stories were invariably written by people who clearly had little or no appreciation of the dull, unthinking, brutal ordinariness of real murder. It was an impression reinforced by the author mugshots which appeared on the dustjackets. These revealed the faces of rosy fresh young mothers, catty intellectuals in glasses, sleek well-dressed advertising types, dry-as-dust academics, prim dyspeptic maiden aunts, and also-ran psychos whose hard, dark, Boston Strangler stares reminded Jake of her father.
Now and then their ideas of foul murder made Jake laugh out loud. Mostly they made her want to get one of these authors down to the lab so that they could see a really foul murder in all its mouldy, messy and utterly wasteful horror.
Well of course I have considered the possibility that I am barking mad. When you’ve murdered nine men, you have to really. There are some people who consider that killing in cold blood, and in any great number, is ample proof of an abnormal psychology. But of course, that simply won’t do. Not these days.
The policewoman on the Nicamvision said that I was possibly psychotic. Quite apart from the fact that modern psychiatrists have already abandoned the distinction between neurosis and psychosis, and dropped such outdated terms from the current official diagnostic catalogue of their profession, I don’t think that I could ever reasonably be described as psychotic, in the sense that my thoughts and needs no longer meet the demands of reality. Even if one ignores the fact that the only reality one can be sure of is the Self, I would suggest that if anything, my thoughts and deeds pay rather too close attention to the demands of reality.
You want a psychotic? I’ll show you a doozy. The Greek hero Ajax killing a flock of sheep he mistook for his Trojan enemies. Now there’s a fucking psychotic. The trouble is that most of these junk-psychobabble words don’t have much meaning. Schizophrenia is such a mouthful, for so little import. There’s a West African tribe called the Yorubas who, to my mind, have a much better word for what Western shrinks would refer to as schizophrenia. They say that a person is ‘were’. I think this might transpose rather well between the languages. To say that ‘he is were’ implies that someone no longer ‘is’, and operating in the present. What better word for indicating a split personality?
What Policewoman said made me laugh. ‘I will do everything in my power to ensure that you receive the proper medical treatment.’ Well that was sweet of her. Of course what she meant was that if I gave myself up, she would endeavour to make sure that I was diagnosed ‘unfit to plead by reason of insanity’, within the legal and, it is fair to say, entirely fallacious definition of insanity that is to be found in the English judiciary’s McNaghten Rules. This would mean that I could not then be tried and, more importantly, it would mean that I could not be sentenced to punitive coma - most probably, irreversible coma. Good thinking, Chief Inspector. There’s not much incentive to give yourself up to the police if you know there’s only a hypodermic needle waiting for you.
And all that stuff about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police? Now I have kept every one of the press-cuttings to do with my work in the Blue Book. There’s not one of them which suggests anything of the kind. This was pretty clever. The remark about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police was just the surface structure of what she was saying. If you look for the deep structure, what you would end up with would be a question: ‘Why don’t you communicate with me?’
At the same time, she keeps something in reserve in case I’m the shy type. She says ‘fuck you’ and slaps my face. She tells everyone about how butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of any of my victims. These were just innocents, she says, going about their lawful business. Nothing at all about them being VMN-NEGATIVE. (And the way that Detective Chief Superintendant dealt with that rogue question - well, they don’t want the Lombroso Program connected with these executions any more than I do. Their embarrassment would signal the end of my mission. Or at least make it bloody difficult. There’s not one of my famous brothers who wouldn’t be expecting me.) Now this is supposed to make me angry enough to get in contact with Policewoman in case the first tactic doesn’t work.
The bit I enjoyed most was my description and that ComputaFit picture. I wonder how she managed to obtain it? There are only two possibilities: either Bertrand Russell did somehow manage to splutter out a few dying words (all the same, I can’t see him working with a police artist), or that chink counsellor at the BRI managed to remember me. Still, the picture doesn’t resemble me all that much. ComputaFits never do. You look at them and you say to yourself that if someone looking like that were walking around he would have been arrested many times over just for being so weird. But on the whole it wasn’t a bad effort. The chink must have a good memory. Either that or they shot him full of something to make him remember.
Anyway, what is clear here is that Policewoman has issued a sort of challenge. What’s the sign of someone accepting one? Must one adhere to a certain etiquette or convention? No matter. It’s already quite obvious that she means it to be my move next. To accept the challenge or not. And clearly another killing must be made in accordance with some new rules which belong to the grammar of the word ‘game’.
Yes, a game with Policewoman is a fine idea. My favourite game used to be Monopoly, but it is not what it was. The board itself is half as thick as it used to be. The Old Kent Road no longer even exists, thanks to the developers. Oxford Street has become the New Oxford Street Shopping Mall. Fleet Street is a wasteland. The green houses and red hotels once reassuringly solid and wooden are now hollow and plastic, and are supplied in half the quantity than of old. ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards have become hopelessly outdated. Free Parking. In London? That’s a laugh. School Fees of $150. These days that would buy you a few textbooks. You win a beauty contest. This kind of thing was outlawed, several years ago. Doctor’s Fee, $50. For what, a bottle of aspirin? And no-one gets out of jail free: you have to pay to stay in a decent one, and you have to pay to get out. And the rents.
