A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Meaning is physiognomy.’ Yes, she liked that. It referred to how a word has meaning, but all the same it seemed to speak of something vaguely forensic too. Jake also appreciated the implicit warning to those who would make a case based on the purely circumstantial that was contained in the thought that ‘the most explicit evidence of intention is by itself insufficient evidence of intention’. And there was certainly a message for every detective in the answer to the question ‘What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.’ How often had she felt just like that fly?

  Professor Jameson Lang had been right: there was so much common ground between the detective and the philosopher. More than she could ever have appreciated.

  This growing interest in philosophy had, as its most important corollary, a sense of fascination for the man who had, indirectly at least, inspired it: the Lombroso killer. It was, she knew, not uncommon for multiples, spree-killers and lone gunmen trying to make a name for themselves by killing a public figure to arm themselves with some intellectual baggage as evidence of their being something better than a common criminal. Just as often it enabled their lawyers to try and shift the moral responsibility for their actions onto some hapless author, even to try and sue him if he was unfortunate enough still to be alive. Books do furnish a room, wrote Anthony Powell. Jake reflected that in these post-millenial days, books also furnished the well-educated life of many a mass-murderer.

  Jerry Sherriff, the man who assassinated EC President, Pierre Delafons, had read him the whole of Eliot’s Waste Land before blowing his head off. Spree-killer Greg Harrison was listening to a disc of John Betjeman’s poetry when, armed with several hand-grenades, he ran amok through the streets of Slough, killing forty-one people. The American multiple Lyndon Topham claimed that he had killed twenty-seven people out riding in various parts of Texas, because they were the Black Horsemen from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And Jake had lost count of the number of serial killers who claimed that their actions had been influenced by Nietzsche.

  There was something different about this particular killer, however: Jake had feelings for him that detectives were not supposed to have about multiple murderers. Admiration was too strong a word for it. Rather it was that she felt fascinated by him. Her imagination had been roused by him. Through him she had come to learn certain things about the world. About herself.

  Trying to understand him, trying to catch him was about the most stimulating thing Jake had ever done.

  Jake slept for four hours and woke in the dark with a question gnawing at her memory like a dog’s bone. Where the hell had he met her?

  She rolled out of bed, pulled on her dressing-gown and went through to the kitchen where she put some ice and a slice of lime into a long glass, and poured herself some mineral water. She drank it greedily, like a small child after a nightmare. Then she sat down in front of her computer and switched it on.

  If she could remember ‘where’ then she might also remember ‘who’. She typed ‘Where?’ and waited for inspiration. When, after several minutes, none came she erased the word and thought again.

  Another question en route to ‘where’. When? When had he met her? As she typed ‘When?’ Jake was suddenly possessed of the certainty that he had already given her the answer. She felt a chill of excitement as she tried to recall what it was. Something small. Something in the very air around her. Something ...

  Her perfume. Rapture, by Luther Levine. He had complimented her on it.

  Jake jumped up, grabbed her shoulder bag from off the back of the chair and emptied its contents onto the floor. Rapture had been a recent purchase. But when and where had she bought it? She sorted through the various till receipts and credit-card vouchers collected during the last few months thanking the slut in her who rarely ever tidied out her bag.

  At last she found what she was looking for. Frankfurt Airport. That was where she had bought it. Until her trip to the European Law Enforcement Symposium, she had always worn Lolita, by Federico D’Atri. The purchase of the bottle of Rapture had been a spur of the moment thing. She had even scolded herself for buying it, imagining that she had succumbed to the sexy 48-sheet poster featuring a modern version of Fragonard’s painting, The Swing. Since she felt guilty that she had fallen for the hype, it had been some time before she had actually worn Rapture. She remembered wearing Lolita at the press conference where she had issued a description of Wittgenstein. And it had been several days after that before she had actually finished the bottle of Lolita.

  The first time she had worn Rapture — had been the day she had gone to see Sir Jameson Lang. Whoever Wittgenstein was, he had met her after that. He had made a mistake, she was sure of it.

  Now if she could only recollect everyone she had met since her trip to Cambridge ...

  The problem with the RA equipment is that it does not merely convey an approximation of physical pleasure, such as the sexual act, it also conveys a close approximation of pain. Or, to put it another way, just as I am able to experience an approximation of killing someone, I am also able to experience an approximation of being killed myself. Hence, the machine needs careful handling.

  This morning, when I awoke, it seemed to me that there was a rhinoceros standing in the room with me. The huge beast, two metres high at the shoulder, stood squarely at the bottom of my bed, scraping the carpet with its umbrella-stand feet and jerking its huge scimitar of a horn in my direction. It was so close that I could feel the animal’s hot breath snorting from its nostrils onto my bare toes. I hardly dared to breathe, seeing that it had already turned most of the bedroom furniture into matchwood. I had the certain feeling that the slightest movement on my part would cause the rhino to charge.

  My problem was this: if I was dreaming, then I could safely shake my head clear of the nightmare and jump out of bed; but if this was an approximation of reality, then, for reasons already described, I was in serious trouble. Even an approximate reality of a rhino’s horn up my arse was not something I was eager to experience.

  So I closed my eyes and tried to isolate my mind from my senses, asking myself some logical questions. Had I fallen asleep wearing the RA outfit? I certainly remembered putting it on, but not taking it off. I remembered using the erotic software, but there was no way that this would have included a rhinoceros. If I was in fact wearing the RA equipment, the only possibility was that having fallen asleep, there had been a power-cut and that when the power returned, the machine simply picked out a program at random.

  On the other hand there existed the possibility that even these deliberations were part of my dream.

  Naturally I recognised the program that the RA machine had chosen — or the one I was dreaming it had chosen. It was a short program based on an incident which had occurred in a Cambridge lecture theatre, when I had refused to accept, as Russell had insisted, that there was not a rhinoceros in the room with us.

  The program had not been particularly useful as providing an experience of a real philosophical argument with a Cambridge don, for the simple reason that computers are excessively literal. The machine translated the sense of assertion involved as being something psychological, that existence could be a matter of simple will, and created a two-ton rhino. All I had really meant to say was that it is hard to regard the non-existence of a two-ton white rhinoceros when true, as a fact, in quite the same sense in which the existence of a rhinoceros would be a fact if it were true. Something of which I was now only too acutely aware.

  I must have lain there for quite a while. And what happened was this: somehow I must have dozed off for a few minutes and when I awoke, the rhino was still there. This seemed to prove that I was not asleep, since it appeared unlikely that I could wake to the same dream twice and in quick succession. It seemed much more probable that I had, as feared, an approximation of reality. I was, after all, just going to have to bite the bullet, raise my visor-screen and accept what pain there would be in the few seconds before the other sensation
al parts of the program were able to turn themselves off.

  This was easier said than done. And almost impossible to describe. Intense pain has that quality. Suffice to say that as soon as I moved my hand to raise the visor, the beast charged. Three or four seconds of an approximate sensation of being stamped and gored left me vomiting on the floor of my real bedroom. I had to call in sick and spent the rest of the morning in a hot bath trying to soak away some of my aches and pains.

  But around lunchtime I felt well enough to do some reading. Perhaps the rhino shook me up more than I realised but re-reading some of my earlier notes, I could not avoid the conclusion that there were very many statements in the book with which I now disagree.

  Indeed some of my ideas have changed so fundamentally that I wonder if I should go on with the Brown Book at all. In particular, my squeamishness with regard to the use of the word ‘murder’ now seems to me to have been mistaken. Morality had coloured my use of this word and I now think that a more perspicacious use of grammar will enable me to say what I want to say about various propositions.

  I have been much too dogmatic. I think that I perceived something as if through a thick film and yet still wanted to try and elicit from it as much as possible. But I have resolved to let the earlier work stand, if only as a presentation of my old thoughts which, it cannot be denied, are nevertheless the basis of my new ones. Perhaps my old notes alongside my new notes will serve to present a kind of dialectic, not with the aim of arriving at a theory, but with the simple object of illustrating the ambiguities in language.

  We can say that the word ‘murder’ has at least three different meanings; but it would be mistaken to assume that any theory can give the whole grammar of how we use the word, or try to accommodate within a single theory examples which do not seem to agree with it.

  14

  JAKE STOOD ALONE in the room, watching the man on the other side of the lightly tinted glass. He too was alone. He sat motionless in a chair, too tired to seem nervous, staring at Jake and yet not seeing her. Seeing himself and yet hardly interested in a reflection he had become used to during the many hours of his interrogation. He smoked languidly, like a man who had been waiting for a flight long delayed.

  She envied him the cigarette. On her side of the two-way mirror, all smoking, even a nicotine-free cigarette, was very strictly forbidden. The glow of a cigarette end was the one thing a suspect could see on the other side of the mirror in the interview room.

  The door to the observation room opened and Crawshaw came in. He came over to the mirror and yawned.

  ‘John George Richards,’ he said. ‘His story checks out, I’m afraid. He did make a delivery of olive oil to the shop in Brewer Street on the day Mary Woolnoth was murdered. But he made the delivery at around three-thirty, which was when Mary’s body was first discovered. One hour before that he was making a delivery in Wimbledon. The time was recorded on the computer when it issued his delivery note. He couldn’t possibly have driven all the way from Wimbledon, selected Mary, killed her, and then made the delivery in anything less than a couple of hours.

  ‘Then there are the previous victims: Richards was away on holiday in Mallorca when Alison Bradshaw was killed; and he was in hospital having his wisdom teeth out on the day that Stella Forsythe was murdered. All of which puts him in the clear.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said reluctantly. ‘We had better let him go. Too bad. He was looking good.’

  Crawshaw nodded wearily and turned to leave the room.

  ‘Oh, and, Ed,’ said Jake. ‘Better put the surveillance team on that bookshop again.’

  Back in her office Jake tried to bring her mind back to Wittgenstein. She re-read a transcript of their first dialogue, alongside a forensic psychiatrist’s report which concluded, much as Jake herself had already concluded, that the subject was a highly organised non-social personality — an egocentric who disliked people generally; outwardly it was likely that he was capable of getting along with his fellow man but that he harboured resentment towards society as a whole.

  Jake had smiled the previous evening when Sir Jameson Lang had telephoned her at home with his own reaction to this assessment: ‘The way these psychiatrists describe him,’ he had said, ‘he sounds like a typical academic. With a personality assessment like that I should recommend that you conduct your investigation here, in college.’

  The report concluded that on evidence other than the killings themselves, there was nothing to indicate insanity. The killer killed because he liked killing. He enjoyed the sensation of power that it gave him. He was playing God.

  ‘That’s something different,’ Lang had remarked. ‘Now, there you have the typical novelist.’

  Jake had asked him how he proposed to handle a second dialogue, assuming that Wittgenstein rang again.

  ‘Moral philosophical argument didn’t seem to have much effect, did it?’ Lang had said. ‘Next time I thought I’d argue from a phenomenological point of view: scrutinise a few essences and meanings he might otherwise have taken for granted. You know, concentrate on the objective logical elements in thought. It’s rather a useful way of investigating these extreme states of mind. Just the thing if he should turn out to be existentialist. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all.’

  But she was not long back at her desk when Wittgenstein did ring a second time; and as things transpired, there was to be no opportunity for Jameson Lang to argue with Wittgenstein.

  Immediately he telephoned, Wittgenstein declared that in response to Jake’s own lecture to the EC symposium on techniques of law enforcement and criminal investigation, he intended to deliver his own lecture, entitled ‘The Perfect Murder’ which he claimed he had recently given to the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.

  When Jake tried to open a conversation with him, Wittgenstein declared that they could either listen or he would ring off and kill someone straightaway. So, in the hope of preventing another murder, and in the vague expectation that they might learn something more of Wittgenstein himself, Jake reluctantly agreed.

  In all, Wittgenstein spoke for almost eighteen minutes. He spoke as if there had indeed been an audience that was composed of anything but Scotland Yard detectives: as if there had just occurred some splendid dinner at the Guildhall and now, in front of five hundred guests wearing evening dress who comprised the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, he, Wittgenstein, had risen from his place to give the keynote address.

  After several minutes Jake glanced at her wristwatch. She didn’t much care to be lectured by anyone, least of all a killer talking about the perfect murder. It crossed her mind to interrupt him, to challenge one or two of the statements Wittgenstein had made. But at the same time she did not want to risk angering him and provoking him to ring off. So she kept silent, fascinated with this protracted insight into the mind of a mass-murderer, occasionally glancing over at Stanley who, on catching her eye, would tap the side of his head meaningfully.

  But when Wittgenstein announced that at the conclusion of his lecture, he would be committing another murder, Jake was finally moved to contradict him.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I forbid you.’

  The voice on the telephone uttered a short laugh. ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘I forbid you to kill anyone,’ Jake repeated firmly.

  There was a short silence. ‘May I proceed with my lecture please?’ said Wittgenstein. He sounded like some dry-as-dust old academic.

  ‘Only if you promise that you will discuss this matter at the end of it,’ said Jake.

  ‘What matter is that?’

  ‘What you said about killing another man. You promise to discuss it or I hang up right now. D’you hear?’

  Another pause. ‘Very well,’ he sighed. ‘May I continue now?’

  ‘We’ll discuss it?’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I?’

  ‘Very well then. Continue.’

  ‘Let me turn now to the murders themselves ...’

  ‘Be my guest,’ s
aid Jake.

  But this time Wittgenstein ignored her.

  Jake settled back in her chair and lit a cigarette. From time to time she glanced at the pictophone screen to see how Sir Jameson Lang was reacting to this bizarre example of public speaking in absentia. But the Cambridge philosopher and Master of Trinity College betrayed no signs of anything but fascination.

  She reflected that he was probably thinking of how his own fictional detective creation, Plato, would have handled the situation. Better than she was doing, Jake didn’t doubt. She admired and respected Lang, but all the same she found his interest in crime rather puzzling. She knew that he was hardly unique in this respect. The English fascination with the murder mystery was, as even now Wittgenstein was suggesting, more prevalent than ever. She had no explanation for this peculiar phenomenon other than the purely sociological: that it was the product of society’s own decadence. Of that particular characteristic there was more than enough in Wittgenstein’s twisted lecture and irritation began to give way to a certain astonishment the detective felt with regard to the perversity of a murderer’s arguments.

  Astonishment became absorption and after her first interruption she did not challenge him again. Later on, she thought she had been naive to have trusted him to keep his word, for Wittgenstein had no sooner delivered the last phrases of his speech, which was to pass over a series of supposedly traditional toasts to a number of famous murderers, than he had rung off, leaving Jake to curse him for a liar.

  But what was far worse than the feeling that she had been duped was the knowledge that somewhere he was almost certainly in the very act of committing his twelfth murder.

  Later on that day, Jake was called to the City of London where, beside a public bar on Lower Thames Street, an as-yet unidentified male Caucasian’s body had been found with six gunshots to the back of the head. There wasn’t much to see beyond the simple confirmation that Wittgenstein had struck again and, leaving the scenes-of-crime officers to do their job, Jake returned to the Yard.