A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  When the all-clear signal sounded, Jake wiped her fingers clean of chocolate spread, tore the padded envelope open and then withdrew the contents. It was several seconds before she realised that the gynaecology spread for the benefit of the camera was putatively her own; and several more seconds before she stopped trying to account for how someone had been able to take such pictures without her knowledge and guessed that they were photo-composites. Instinctively she laid the pictures down and put on a pair of cellophane gloves before re-handling what might turn out to be forensic evidence.

  Not that she would have cared for them ever to have been produced in court or held in some police file. Fakes or not, there was no escaping the fact that they were good fakes, of the kind that were appearing increasingly often in the tabloid newspapers.

  Probably produced by a computer, she thought. The sort of thing that would entertain many of her male colleagues. The type of evidence some pervert might think to make copies of, for the general locker-room titillation of the lads at the Yard. Jake knew that there were many of her male colleagues who were jealous of her success and who might welcome the sight of photographs which would certainly embarrass her. Fakes or not, pictures which showed a chief inspector pushing a vibrator up her own vagina, and licking another woman’s genitals, were nothing less than explosive.

  She was surprised to discover that it was Wittgenstein who had sent them. She was sure it was he because there was a compliments slip on which he had typed ‘yours bloodily’. He would surely have known that Jake’s duty as a police officer would require her to have the photographs tested in the laboratory; and, as a corollary, that this would cause her acute embarrassment. Jake swore fluently for several seconds and for one brief moment she felt hatred for him. Somehow she had supposed he would be different. A fly buzzed on the window pane, and hardly bothering to even look, Jake killed it without a moment’s hesitation.

  Jake had the morning off, her first in several weeks. She bought some groceries, failed to get into her local hairdresser, and went to see Doctor Blackwell at her clinic in Chelsea.

  Her eyes closed, naked, standing to attention before the doctor, Jake found her thoughts returning to the photographs now in her shoulder bag. Her original irritation had given way to a curiosity that Wittgenstein should have been sexually interested in her. This was something unique in her experience as a detective. The subject might almost have been worthy of a paper. She wondered what she would have done if instead of Doctor Blackwell, her therapeutic nude encounter had been with Wittgenstein. She felt herself blush as she lay down on the couch and waited for the Doctor to begin the session.

  ‘Sleeping all right?’

  ‘Not particularly ...’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sleeping with anyone?’

  ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘Hostility to men?’

  Jake swallowed. ‘There was a tramp on Westminster Bridge. He asked me for money, but I thought he was going to try and rob me. I almost hoped he would, so that I could have shot him.’

  ‘You were carrying a gun?’

  ‘I always carry a gun.’

  ‘Have you ever used it?’

  ‘Yes, but only in self-defence.’

  ‘Ever killed anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  Doctor Blackwell’s tone stiffened a little. ‘You know,’ she said carefully, ‘perhaps you should have shot this tramp you met.’

  Jake sat up on one elbow. ‘You’re joking,’ she said.

  ‘Am I? This is Neo-Existential therapy, Jake, not something behavioural. We approach psychotherapy from the point of view that the major emotional sickness of our times is the inability to endow life with meaning. Don’t you think it’s just possible you might have worked something out of yourself if you had murdered him?’

  Jake was shocked. ‘But that’s just it,’ she said. ‘It would have been murder.’

  ‘You’ve said before that you’d like to have killed your own father, for the way he messed up your childhood.’

  ‘But that was different.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you had shot this tramp, perhaps in a way you could have killed your father. Exorcised his memory. Some worthless old man. What would it have mattered to anyone? And you a policewoman: who’d have questioned it?’

  Jake frowned, angry now. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t believe that.’

  Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor do I. I just wanted to hear you say it.’

  In the lab at the Yard, Jake handed over a plastic bag containing the photographs.

  ‘Run some tests on these, would you?’ she said to the technician, whose name was Maurice. ‘Fingerprints, fibres, hairs, and anything else you can think of.’

  Maurice nodded coolly and then slipped on some gloves. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that disc you brought down? It was clean.’

  Jake nodded uncomfortably.

  ‘Now what we got here?’ Maurice opened the bag and took out the photographs. ‘Be a couple of hours at least,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ said Jake, sitting down. ‘But I’m staying here.’

  Maurice frowned and was about to argue until he caught sight of the first picture.

  ‘Those photographs aren’t leaving my sight,’ she said determinedly. ‘Not for one second.’

  Maurice shuffled through the rest of them and then grinned.

  ‘Anyone ever tell you? You sure one photogenic lady.’

  ‘Oh come on, Maurice,’ said Jake. ‘Those are fakes, photo-composites.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Nice though. Real nice.’

  Jake resisted the temptation to punch him on his black jaw.

  ‘There are ten of them,’ she said. ‘I want ten back. Have you got that?’

  Maurice shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Maurice, I’m saying so in capital letters as big as your stupid male libido. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ But the grin persisted.

  Two hours later Maurice counted the pictures back into Jake’s hand. ‘Ten,’ he said.

  She dropped them quickly into her shoulder bag and quickly zipped it up. ‘Find anything?’

  Maurice stretched and rolled his head on his broad shoulders. ‘I found it all really interesting,’ he said, and then laughed as Jake thumped him on the chest. ‘All right, all right, take it easy. No prints. Not a one. But I got an eyelash. Not yours. Not your natural colour. And some traces of semen.’

  Jake’s nose wrinkled with disgust. Men were like animals.

  ‘Looks like your admirer got hisself all excited at his own handiwork. Well that’s no surprise to me. I was beginning to get a little warm under the collar myself. Anyway I’ve subjected his stuff to gel electrophoresis, and you’re lucky — what we got was highly polymorphic.’

  ‘You’ve got a DNA type?’

  ‘Not quite. You’re going to have to wait until I confirm it with the autoradiograph. But looks like, yes.’

  ‘When you’ve got that we’ll be able to match him with anyone we arrest, right?’

  ‘Oh, for sure. Only there’s not enough sample should any ambiguities arise on an appeal, or anything like that. I want you to understand that now. I’ve used all the semen there was to get the autoradiograph.’

  ‘Thanks, Maurice. Thanks a lot. I won’t forget this.’

  He grinned again. ‘Hell, I sure won’t.’

  Several hours later, Jake asked the three senior members of her investigating team to attend a meeting in her office. Sergeant Chung was the last to arrive and seated himself at a short way’s distance from Detective Inspector Stanley and Detective Sergeant Jones. Jake sat on the edge of her desk. In her hand was a thin file supplied by the lab and containing the sheet of X-ray film used to produce Wittgenstein’s autoradiograph.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Jake. ‘I’ve called this meeting to inform you all of an impo
rtant development.’ She brandished the file in front of them. ‘A DNA type.

  ‘This morning I received some photographs. At least what purported to be photographs, of me, but were in fact photo-composites. Mr Wittgenstein had married the photographs of me which recently appeared in one of the weekend colour supplements with some pornographic pictures.’

  ‘Do you think he was trying to blackmail you, ma’am?’ asked Jones.

  ‘No. I think he just meant to embarrass me. Well, he was only partly successful. The pictures are now in my safe and that’s where they’re going to stay for the time being. However, the lab has run some tests on them and found traces of semen. They ran a number of probes to see if they could determine some allele frequencies and found our killer’s genotype. Gentlemen, the man we’re looking for is most probably German, or of German parents.’

  ‘Like the real Wittgenstein then,’ said Jones.

  ‘Actually, he was Austrian,’ said Jake. ‘But for the purposes of the genotype, they’re more or less the same.’

  Detective Inspector Stanley cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But aren’t we forgetting something? The European Court has ruled that genetic population tests are inadmissible as evidence on the ground of their obvious racism.’

  ‘We’re hardly at the stage of preparing a case for the courts,’ Jake said crisply. ‘Right now we’re trying to catch this bastard, not worry about his human fucking rights, Stanley. And if the database on allele frequencies within population structures speeds up the computer’s matching the killer’s DNA type to his identity card, then so be it. We’ll bridge questions of what is and what is not inadmissible as evidence once we’ve got this maniac in a cage, right?’

  Stanley shrugged back at her, and then nodded.

  ‘Sergeant Chung,’ said Jake. ‘What is the current average time for matching?’

  ‘How long is a piece of string? Well, as a rough rule of thumb, it takes the computer twenty-four hours to make a million comparisons. If you were to assume that the killer was in the last million of population, then seventy million comparisons, seventy days.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, you could get lucky. He could turn up in the first million. There’s no other way to do it. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘Assuming he’s got a genuine identity card,’ said Jones. ‘He might be one of those Russo-German refugees who came here illegally after the Russian Civil War.’

  ‘Yes, he might,’ said Jake. ‘But let’s try and be a little optimistic, eh?

  ‘Sergeant Chung, how’s that random accessing program with the Lombroso computer coming along?’

  ‘Not bad. So far I’ve been able to get Lombroso to release about twenty names and addresses.’

  ‘How many answers to the advertisement?’

  ‘Ten,’ said Stanley. ‘One of them an imposter.’

  ‘Any of those with philosophers’ codenames?’

  ‘No,’ said Stanley, ‘but we’ve got them all under surveillance anyway.’

  ‘That still leaves fifty. How many of them are philosophers?’

  Stanley opened his file and glanced down the list. ‘Sixteen, ma’am.’

  ‘Any luck with the gunsmiths?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Stanley. ‘With his own gas cylinder he can make as much of his own ammunition as he wants. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll get any leads from that direction.’

  ‘What about that student at Cambridge? Mr Heissmeyer - ’

  Stanley shook his head. ‘The locals have got someone keeping an eye on him. But so far all he’s done is spend his time on the river. And for what it’s worth, ma’am, Mr Heissmeyer is an American, not an Austrian. Rowing scholarship, or something. Should get his blue this year.’

  Jake shrugged and then turned to Jones. ‘Jameson Lang’s pictophone: is that installed yet?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I spoke to the professor on it earlier today.’

  ‘Call tracing. Where are we on that one? I want to be ready for this bastard when he phones.’

  ‘I’ve organised a digital trace for any normal telecommunications traffic, and a keyword satellite monitor of the whole country. If our man uses the words “Lombroso” or “Wittgenstein” on a phone, the satellite should be able to tell us where the signal is coming from.’

  ‘Discrecording facilities?’

  ‘Automatic on all your lines, ma’am,’ said Jones. ‘Here, at home, and on your portable.’ He grinned. ‘Best make sure you don’t say anything rude about the Commissioner, eh? We wouldn’t want you to get suspended like Mr Challis.’

  Jake smiled at Jones, and wondered if he really meant what he had said.

  Real meaning. There was never any doubt of what that amounted to with Mrs Grace Miles. She called towards the end of the day when Jake had started to think about going home. Jake noticed from the picture that the Minister herself was already at home. In the corner of the room she could see a baby crawling round Mrs Miles’s red dispatch box.

  ‘Gilmour tells me that you’ve got a genetic fingerprint. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. We’re trying to find a match with an ID card.’

  ‘Good. Someone’s tabled a question about these killings in the House tomorrow. I want to be able to say that we expect to be making an arrest very shortly.’

  ‘Shortly could be as long as seventy days, Minister,’ said Jake. ‘It might take the computer all of that to make the comparisons.’

  Jake watched the Minister frown and then tug nervously at the string of pearls she wore round her neck. Jake wondered if they were real. She was dressed to go out. The sequin-covered dress was cut low to reveal what appeared to be a child’s bare backside but was in fact the Minister’s chest. She wore her long black hair pinned back from her but loose about her shoulders so that she looked like some kind of ancient Persian princess.

  ‘Better to say something like “The police investigation is coming to a conclusion and they are confident of making an arrest before very long”,’ suggested Jake. ‘Then if we make an arrest within the next few days it will seem as you knew more but weren’t saying. That you were being tactically vague as opposed to being misleading. But to say that we will shortly be making an arrest seems rather wide of the mark, ma’am.’

  Mrs Miles’s slow nod accelerated as she saw the wisdom of Jake’s advice. Even so she wasn’t inclined to be grateful for it. Instead her face took on an irritated aspect.

  ‘Yes, I expect you’re right,’ she said, and then added: ‘Oh and by the way, what do you mean by making this loony an offer of medical help at your press conference? I’m afraid I was away in Brussels at the time, and I’ve only just read the transcript of what you said. I certainly don’t recall anyone clearing that little idea with the Attorney General.’

  ‘I wanted him to make contact with us,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe even to give himself up. There’s not much percentage in that if all he has coming to him is a hypodermic needle and a long term of punitive coma. In my judgment — ’

  ‘In your judgment - ’ Her tone was contemptuous. ‘Need I remind you, Chief Inspector, that your job is to catch this maniac, not to determine whether or not he is to be regarded as fit to plead. Moreover, the theory of justice pursued by this Government, and for which we received an overwhelming mandate at the last election, is retributive. It is not reformative. No more does justice permit that individual offenders shall escape the full rigour of the law merely because of some alleged insanity. The public simply won’t stand for it. They must be satisfied that a criminal has been punished. I would hope that when this man is caught he will be sentenced to an irreversible period of coma. At the very least he should undergo a minimum vegetative state of thirty years. But having said all that, my own feeling is that it would be better for everyone if he were not to be taken alive. I just hope that he’s armed when you catch up with him, in which case you’ll have little choice but to shoot him dead.’

  Jake started to disagree but found herself, once again, cut short.


  ‘That is standard practice, Chief Inspector: to shoot and kill all armed criminals. Or don’t you read your own police policy documents?’

  ‘Yes and I’ve written some of them too,’ said Jake. ‘All the same, we owe it to criminology to bring this man into custody. There’s a great deal to be learnt from a subject like this in terms of forensic profiling.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘That’s your speciality, isn’t it? Well Chief Inspector, the only thing the voters are interested in learning about this maniac is that he cries for his mother when they come to stick the needle in him. I hope I’ve made myself clear to you. Goodnight.’

  The screen flashed and then went blank. After a couple of seconds, the machine asked Jake if she wished to save the automatic recording that had been made of her conversation with the Minister. Jake stabbed the ‘yes’ button angrily, sensing that it might be useful to keep a record of all her future conversations with a woman like Mrs Miles.

  Jake swung around in her chair and stared at the blackened window in which her reflection was floating.

  That was probably what it was like to be in a punitive coma, she decided. To be there and yet not there at all. A half-existence between life and death. Awful. She knew very well that Mrs Miles had not exaggerated about criminals facing an icy hypodermic full of limbo crying for their mothers. She herself had been obliged to attend the induction of several punitive coma states. As punishments went it was worse than a long term of imprisonment and almost worse than death itself. But this was what happened when society had become morally squeamish about capital punishment and when prisons had become too overcrowded and expensive to be practical for any but minor offenders.