A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  When she exited onto Corn Exchange Street, her direction lay east, down Guildhall Place and across Market Hill, and it was only force of habit that carried her footsteps up Wheeler Street towards King’s Parade, and the turrets and pinnacles of her old, eponymously named college’s long roofed chapel.

  Confronted with the magnesian white limestone of the place close up, memories of another person she had once been awoke in her like krakens. As usual, it was raining, but the rain felt good after the drought of London. A harsh wind blowing south off the nearby Fens cooled the old market town and she was not inclined to linger there. Instead she turned into the face of the wind and walked briskly away from her past, from the friends she had had, and from the acquaintances who there seemed friends.

  Jake did her best to ignore the pink granite, techno-Gothic tower that was Yamaha College, now occupying the site of old Great St Mary’s Church, which had been destroyed by fire at the turn of the century, and hurried on to Trinity Street.

  Entering Trinity College by the Great Gate, she reported to the Porter’s Lodge and informed a bowler-hatted Chinese, who reminded her of Charlie Chan, that she had an appointment with the college Master.

  The man scrutinised his visitors’ list, nodded curtly, picked up the telephone, buttoned the Master’s number, and announced Jake’s arrival in an accent that would have confounded Henry Higgins - a combination of Fenman, old Etonian, and camp Oriental.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘there be a lady to see you. Shall I escort her to your door?’ He listened for a second or two and then nodded. ‘Sure thing. Whatever you say, boss.’

  Then he came round the desk, accompanied Jake out of the lodge and down a couple of steps, and pointed towards an ivy-clad building on the opposite side of the quadrangle.

  ‘See that there building?’ he asked.

  Jake said that she did.

  ‘The Master’s housekeeper will greet you at the centre door,’ he added. ‘You got that, lady?’

  Jake said that she had and the man went back inside his lodge.

  The clock was striking its familiar bi-sexual note of twelve as Jake crossed the Great Court and, in spite of her determined negligence of sentiment, she found memories crowding in upon her: of the occasion when first she had tried to listen to her own male and female voice; of her early sexual experiences with an older Trinity woman called Faith; and of how, once, Faith had bent her head between Jake’s naked thighs and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring her sister to orgasm within the time it took the loquacious clock to strike its dual note of twelve — forty-three seconds — while poor, simple schoolboys raced around the Great Court with self-conscious honour and importance.

  She knocked at the Master’s low, half-windowed door with its brightly polished letterbox. There was more evidence of smooth housekeeping within and the woman who answered the door had no sooner explained that the Master was just taking a telephone call and shown Jake into the sitting room than she was off polishing something else.

  Jake walked over to the rear window and, stimulated by the sight of the Cam, allowed herself the recollection of a practical joke which some thug had played on Jake and her friend Faith as they had punted underneath a bridge near the back of Queen’s. The thug had painted a football so that it looked like one of the bridge’s stone pommels and with a tremendous show of effort, he had pushed the lethal-looking object into their boat. Thinking that they and their punt would be smashed to pieces, Jake and Faith leaped, as they imagined, for their lives, and were soaked. It was Faith, now Professor of English Literature at Glasgow University, who had seen the funny side. Faith always saw the funny side of everything, with one notable exception: when Jake, inspired by her friend’s strident and family-estranging lesbianism, decided to tell her own father she herself was gay.

  It was a piece of pure sadism made all the more satisfying for Jake, since by then she was as certain that it was not true as she was that her father was dying.

  Banishing these and other memories, Jake turned away from the window and stood in front of the blazing coal fire. Having warmed herself, she surveyed the Master’s books, some of them written by himself, and one of which Jake had read.

  Although Sir Jameson Lang had been teaching Philosophy at Cambridge for over ten years, it was as the author of a series of highly successful detective novels that he was chiefly known to the public. Jake had read the first of these, a story in which the philosopher Plato, while on a visit to Sicily during the year 388 BC, turns detective in order to solve the murder of a courtier to King Dionysius of Syracuse. Jake recalled that in solving the crime (with the aid of Pythagorean mathematical principles) at the request of the King himself, Plato had managed unwittingly to offend this young tyrant who then proceeded to sell the philosopher/detective into slavery.

  Just as well, Jake told herself, that the Metropolitan Police had trades union representation. As in Plato’s day, there were few people who ever really welcome the Truth. The truth meant a trial and nobody, apart from the lawyers, ever welcomed that. Certainly not the murderer, and certainly not the murder victim’s family who often regarded a criminal investigation as an unwarranted invasion of its privacy. It is said that justice must not only be done, but it must also be seen to be done. But Jake had her doubts. In her experience most people preferred that things be swept underneath the rug. No one cared much if an innocent man went to prison, or if a terrorist was shot dead while surrendering. No one thanked you for building a case against someone and then insisting on a show. As Jameson Lang had had Plato say to Dionysius, ‘It is not every truth that sounds as sweet as birdsong, not every discovery that is welcomed among the occult, not every light that is approved from within the shadows.’ Whatever you thought of his prose style, there was a lot in that, she thought.

  The college Master made his appearance, apologising for the delay, only there had been a call from his copy editor querying a couple of points before his latest book went to press. Jake asked him if it was another Plato novel, and he said that it was. She added how much she had enjoyed the first. Sir Jameson Lang, a handsome man wearing a three-piece suit of Prince of Wales check, looked flattered. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, and with a shy, tight-looking mouth which gave the appearance of having suffered a small stroke, Lang appeared the quintessence of Englishness, although he was in fact Scottish.

  ‘How kind of you to say so,’ he drawled in the kind of voice which Jake felt might have suited some stuffy gentlemen’s club, and offered her a sherry.

  While he filled two glasses from a matching decanter, Jake glanced up at the painting above a mantelpiece that was heavily populated with porcelain figures. The scene in the painting was Arcadian in its setting and seemed vaguely allegorical in its meaning. Lang handed Jake her glass and bending down to the scuttle retrieved a couple of lumps of coal the size of small meteorites which he dropped onto the fire. Noticing Jake’s interest in the painting he said, ‘Veronese’. Then he ushered her to a seat and sat down in an armchair facing her. ‘Belongs to the college.

  ‘I was intrigued by your call, Chief Inspector,’ he said, and sipped a little of his sherry. ‘Both as a philosopher and as someone with a tremendous fascination for - the detective form.’

  His eyes narrowed and for a second Jake wondered if he was making some reference to her own body.

  ‘Now exactly how can I be of assistance to you?’

  ‘There are a number of questions I was hoping you might be able to answer, Professor,’ she said.

  Lang’s crooked smile widened slowly.

  ‘Bertrand Russell once said that philosophy is made up of the questions we don’t know how to answer.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a philosopher,’ she admitted.

  ‘Oh, but you should, Chief Inspector. Think about it for a moment.’

  Jake smiled. ‘Why not just give me a short tutorial?’

  Lang frowned, uncertain whether or not Jake was being sarcastic.

  ‘No, really,’ Jake
said. ‘I’m interested.’

  Lang’s mouth relaxed into a smile again. It was already clear to Jake that it was a subject he had devoted a great deal of thought to, and one which he was keen to discuss.

  ‘Well then,’ he began. ‘Detection and philosophy both promote the idea that something can be known. The scene of our activity comes with clues which we must fit together in order to produce a true picture of reality. Both of us have, at the heart of our respective endeavour, a search for meaning, for a truth which has, for whatever reason, been concealed. A truth which exists behind appearances. We seek to penetrate appearances and we call that penetration, knowledge.

  ‘Now whereas the commission of a crime is natural, the task of the detective, like that of the philosopher, is counter-natural, involving the critical analysis of various presuppositions and beliefs, and the questioning of certain assumptions and perceptions. For example, you will seek to test an alibi just as I will aim to test a proposition. It’s the same thing, and it involves a quest for clarity. It doesn’t matter how you describe it, there exists the common intention of wresting form away from the god of Muddle. Of course, sometimes this is not a popular thing to do or to have done to you. It makes most people feel insecure and quite often they resist what we do very strongly indeed.’

  Lang sipped some more of his excellent sherry and laid his head back against the antimacassar on his chair.

  ‘The work we do is often repetitive, going over familiar ground which one has already covered and breaking the stereotypical conclusions which may have been reached by others as well as by oneself. Indeed it is our Sisyphean fate often to be undoing what has already been done so as to grasp the nature of the problem more firmly.’ He looked across at Jake. ‘How am I doing so far?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jake.

  He nodded. ‘Despite Nietzsche’s reservations about the dialectical method, that it is nothing more than a rhetorical play, our inquiry into truth, with its question and answer structure, has its origins in the Socratic form of dialogue. If confusion does arise it is because, to an inexperienced eye, it might seem that we are always looking for answers; but just as often, we are looking for the question. The real crux of what we both do is to attempt to see the anomaly in what appears familiar and then to formulate some really useful questions about it.

  ‘In its purest form, ours is a narrowly intellectual activity, involving a dialogue with the past. And where we fail it is more often because of some false assumption or conceptual error in that cognitive, explanatory activity of ours.

  ‘Of course, lack of proof is a recurrent problem with both of our activities. Much of our best work fails because we are unable to prove the validity of our thinking.’

  Jake smiled. ‘Yes. And yet it seems to me that I have one great advantage over what you do, Professor. I may occasionally lack proof for my theories. But I can always trick a suspect into confessing. And sometimes, worse than that.’

  ‘Philosophers are not without their intellectual tricks,’ said Lang. ‘However, I take your point.’

  ‘Now I see how you managed to make a detective out of Plato,’ said Jake. ‘And how it works as well as it does. I wonder what he would have thought about us.’

  ‘Who, Plato?’

  Jake nodded.

  ‘Oh, I am sure that he would have approved of you, Chief Inspector. As an auxiliary guardian, in the service of the state, you are pretty much what he suggested.’

  ‘Except that I’m a woman.’

  ‘Plato was generally in favour of equality between the sexes,’ said Lang. ‘So I guess that it would have been all right, your being a woman. On the other hand, I don’t think there can be any doubt that he would not have approved of me.’

  ‘Oh? And why’s that?’

  ‘A philosopher and a novelist as well? Unthinkable. Plato was enormously hostile to art of any kind. That’s what made writing a novel about him such fun.’

  Lang stood up and fetched the sherry decanter.

  ‘Top you up?’ he asked.

  Jake held out her glass.

  ‘But look here, I’m diverting you, Chief Inspector. I’m sure you didn’t come all this way for a philosophy tutorial.’

  ‘Oh, but I did, Professor. But not on Plato. I’m interested in Wittgenstein.’

  ‘Isn’t everyone?’ he said darkly, and sat down again. ‘Well, of course you’ve come to the right place. No doubt you already know that Wittgenstein was a member of this college. So what do you want to know about him? That he was a genius, but that he was wrong? No, that’s hardly fair. But this is too exciting, Chief Inspector. I’m as fond of reading conspiracy theories in the newspapers as the next man, but you’re not going to tell me that he was murdered, are you? That sixty-odd years ago, someone bumped him off? You know, from everything I’ve read about him, he was rather an irritating, punctilious sort of fellow. An ideal candidate for murder.’

  Jake smiled and shook her head. ‘No, it’s not quite that,’ she said. ‘But before I tell you, I must ask for your undertaking to treat this matter as confidential. There are people’s lives at stake.’

  ‘Then consider it given, on one condition. That you tell me about it over lunch.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

  ‘No trouble at all. Mrs Hindley always makes too much, just in case I invite someone back.’

  Jake thanked the professor and they adjourned to the dining room where Sir Jameson Lang’s housekeeper served them with chicken broth, Spam fritters with baked beans, and then creamed rice with tinned mandarin oranges. While they ate, Jake told him what she knew: about the Lombroso Program, and of how someone, codenamed Wittgenstein, was eliminating all the other men who had tested VMN-negative. And then, over the coffee, she played him the disc.

  Lang listened to the killer’s voice with a look of rapt concentration. Occasionally he noted something down on a pad he had produced from his jacket pocket. And sometimes, frowning with what perhaps was horror, he shook his head slowly. When side one had finished, Jake played him side two. Lang sneered silently at some of the arguments, but when it too was finished he nodded emphatically.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he breathed. ‘Quite fascinating. And you say that this disc was found in the mouth of his last victim: Socrates?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Lang pursed his lips. ‘I suppose that could in itself be symbolic.’ He gave a brief snort of astonishment. ‘But the whole case is ripe with symbolism. Only you’re not here to talk about that, are you? I presume you have questions which relate to this fellow’s pretensions to being a philosopher himself. Perhaps even to the extent of believing that he is himself Wittgenstein. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jake admitted. ‘I can see the obvious parody of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. But concerning the content, I need your help.’

  ‘All right then,’ he said, and glanced down at the notes he had made. Then he got up from the table and opened a box of Havanas, which lay on the sideboard, and from which he took out a silver tube. ‘But first I must have a cigar. I think more clearly when my lungs are clouded.’

  Jake took out her own cigarettes, and poked one between her lips. Removing both cigar and its wafer-thin lining, Lang dipped the latter into the fire with which he lit first Jake and then himself. He puffed happily for several moments, walking round the creaking oak-floored room and, from time to time, glancing at his notebook. Finally he sat down once again, removed the Churchill from his mouth, sipped some of his coffee, and then nodded.

  ‘First, he refers to his brother. Wittgenstein had brothers, one of whom killed himself. That might be significant.

  ‘Then there is the relation between the covert, hidden aspect of what cannot be said to Wittgenstein’s supposed homosexuality.’ Lang shrugged. ‘The theory that Wittgenstein was an active homosexual has been discounted by all but one of his biographers, an American.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘That he was homosexual is certainly possible. What is more li
kely is that he was simply asexual.

  ‘Clearly, as you say Chief Inspector, he seems familiar with the style and structure of the Tractatus. Indeed, I should say that he knows it quite well.

  ‘He recommends that you consider your grammar. Well, of course “Philosophical Grammar” was the substance of Wittgenstein’s work between 1931 and 1934 and this was published posthumously, in the mid-1970s.

  ‘It’s interesting that he signs off as “yours bloodily”. That’s how Wittgenstein himself often signed off in his correspondence with friends and colleagues.’

  Lang sucked some more at his cigar and then surveyed the darker brown end that had been in his mouth.

  ‘Next, you mentioned the possibility that he might wish to concentrate on killing those other VMN-negative men whose codenames are the names of philosophers. I think you could be right, Chief Inspector. Wittgenstein himself believed that in the Tractatus he had found all the answers to the problems of philosophy. That he had done away with all that went before. For instance, he believed he had disproved most of what Bertrand Russell had written. So it’s entirely characteristic that your killer should have eliminated him.’

  Jake nodded and sucked hard at her cigarette. With no nicotine it was hard to find much satisfaction in anything other than the sensation of the smoke itself. Nevertheless, the sucking and blowing of smoke always helped her to concentrate.

  ‘From what you’ve heard,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s possible that he might have read Philosophy as a student?’

  Lang smiled. ‘Chief Inspector, you’ve no idea the kind of strange people who apply to read Philosophy. Especially here, at Cambridge. To paraphrase Keats, they are the kind of people who would clip an angel’s wings. So, to answer your question, yes, it’s possible. And if a young philosopher wanted a role model, then Wittgenstein would certainly be your man. His work has a turbo-charged quality, rather like Nietzsche’s, and is always influential on students. That comparison with Nietzsche is useful because in the same way that he went mad, there’s a madness that’s also apparent in Wittgenstein’s writings. Remember that crappy old saying about the thin dividing line between genius and madness? Well, all his life Wittgenstein, who was certainly aware of his great abilities, was also terrified that he might cross that imaginary line and lose his mind. I can well see how he might have an extraordinary appeal for a mentally unbalanced individual as much as for a logician.