A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  Neither one of these vulgar interpretations of violent criminality seems particularly satisfactory. Perhaps I can explain it better.

  In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Sherlock Holmes explains his ‘art’ of detection as ‘an impersonal thing - a thing beyond myself’.

  So it is also with the art of murder.

  ‘Crime is common. Logic is rare,’ he informs Dr Watson. ‘Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime you should dwell.’

  Yes indeed ladies and gentlemen, logic. Logic, where nothing is accidental. Logic, which deals with every possibility and where all possibilities are its facts.

  The logic of murder is a darker knowledge that follows the diligent study of an intellectual hatred. Now unlike love, hate’s a passion in my control, and a sort of broom to clear the soul. Once set free it shows how man at one time walked on earth before Christian love began, and how a man might walk when all such things are past. How hatred of God may bring the soul nearer my God, to thee.

  17

  JAKE THOUGHT IT might have been the Scotch. She awoke late and found that she had enjoyed her soundest sleep in years. And she felt better than she could have imagined possible. Better than perhaps she had a right to. As if she had been purged of something. True, she had thrown up, but now she was more ravenously hungry than something as epistemological as the voice of conscience would have allowed. It was not just a complete absence of guilt for what had happened: after all she had not meant to do anything but wing Parmenides. It was something else altogether. A feeling as if a great weight had been lifted from her, that it was time to put certain things behind her and start again.

  For once Jake had something in the fridge. She made herself a lavish breakfast of fresh orange juice, Greek yoghurt, bananas, strawberries, seedless grapes, toast and honey, and some strong coffee, and wolfed it all down.

  She knew it was wrong to think that some kind of account had been settled, but that was how it felt. And try as she might, Jake could not experience a sense of revulsion at the notion that somehow Doctor Blackwell had been right after all. That the horror she had experienced at having shot and killed a man had dislodged something that had been stuck like a fishbone inside of her. There were no easy explanations for what had happened but, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, Jake felt at peace with herself.

  When she arrived at the Yard the first visitor to her office, Ed Crawshaw, managed to restore Jake’s faith in herself even further.

  ‘I tried to call you last night,’ he explained. ‘Where were you?’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t feel like speaking to anyone.’

  Crawshaw nodded. ‘I was at the Greek’s flat all night, in Balham,’ he explained. ‘I thought you might feel better about what happened if you could have seen what we found there.’

  ‘What did you find there?’ she said quietly.

  He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. ‘Hell,’ he said, finally, and then shook his head. ‘Unspeakable.’

  ‘Then just tell me that I shot the right man, Ed.’

  ‘No doubt about it. Parmenides was the Lipstick Killer all right. We found some tapes he made: sort of a diary I guess. Pretty sick stuff, most of it. Apparently he came here and met you, right? And he was VMN-negative?’

  Jake nodded.

  ‘And this Lombroso killer tried to top him as well?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Yes, well it seems as if Parmenides thought that almost becoming the victim of another multiple killer himself endowed him with a kind of immunity. He decided that acting as any normal citizen would have acted in the circumstances and coming here with the Lombroso killer’s A-Z was the best way of demonstrating that he was just that: a normal citizen — just in case anyone wondered any different. Least that’s what was in his diary, anyway.’

  ‘I guessed it might be something like that,’ said Jake.

  Crawshaw shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he also reasoned that by coming here and, within the course of the Lombroso inquiry, confessing that he was VMN-negative, it might also have nullified the effect of his mental state becoming known to us within the context of our inquiry into the Lipstick killings.’

  Jake frowned. ‘Well, I met him and I’m not sure he would have been capable of the kind of sophisticated thinking you’re suggesting, Ed. I think I prefer your first explanation.’

  Crawshaw nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right.’ He smiled and moved towards the door. ‘Incidentally,’ he said. ‘It was the bookshop where he was selecting them. In his flat we found hundreds of murder-mysteries. The funny thing was that he never seemed to read any of them. Most of the books were still in their paperbags.’

  He nodded with an air of tired satisfaction.

  ‘I think it’s time you went home and got some sleep,’ said Jake.

  Crawshaw yawned. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘And, Ed?’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Later that same morning, after receiving a congratulatory call from Gilmour, Jake tried the Ministry of Health again.

  For several minutes she was shunted from one bureaucrat to another like a delivery of horse manure. Finally she was permitted to explain her request to a civil servant called Mrs Porter, whose double chin and smoker’s cough seemed to Jake a poor advertisement where matters of the nation’s health were concerned. Mrs Porter was not enthusiastic about Jake’s request.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ she wheezed. ‘You want someone in this department to check the personnel records of all male nursing and auxiliary medical staff in London and the South East, to see if among them, there are any men who are German, or of Germanic origin. Is that right?’

  Jake confirmed that it was.

  ‘Are you quite sure that you can’t be a little more specific, Chief Inspector?’

  Jake offered that if she could have been more specific she would very likely have been halfway to making an arrest. ‘All I’ve got is a suspect’s racial genotype and the probability that he’s employed in some kind of nursing or auxiliary work.’

  ‘I don’t mean to sound unhelpful,’ said Mrs Porter, ‘it’s just that since we became part of Federal Europe, there are quite a few Germans working in British hospitals. It would help if we could try and narrow down that sample. If you could give me the name of a few regional health authorities, something.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m sorry. Couldn’t you use your computer to do the checking?’

  Mrs Porter’s voice took on a weary tone. ‘Yes, well I wasn’t planning to try and do it manually,’ she said. ‘Look here, what I mean to say is, I’ll do my best for you. All right?’

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’

  ‘But these things do take time to set up. Much longer than they take to carry out.’

  Didn’t it always? reflected Jake. There could be little question that the male obsession with mathematics had helped to make the world a more dangerous place. But had the technology which it had inspired actually made things any easier? Jake had her doubts.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  It was depressing, Jake thought bitterly, but managed to fix a smile to her face all the same.

  ‘Any earlier than that would be great,’ she said. ‘But a couple of days would be fine.’ There was no point in trying to bully the woman. No point at all. Unless she wanted to end up with nothing.

  She was beginning to wonder how much her own reliance on male technology was affecting her ability to reason as a woman. Jake liked the idea of feminine intuition a lot more than she liked the phrase with all its implied patronisation. She preferred a more scientific approach to account for sex difference in cognitive ability. But there was no doubt in her mind that it was something like feminine intuition which was now required in this particular case. A change in attitude and approach of the kind that she had lectured the conference in Frankfurt about.

  Men
had a tendency to complicate matters, to look for problems before they looked for solutions. They were obsessed with their own importance and, it seemed to Jake, they did their best to guard this with unnecessary obfuscation.

  Women were more straightforward, less romantic in their thinking. What was needed now was a simpler thought process than all the computers and laser-tracking technology seemed to allow.

  It seemed impossible to dig the hole deeper, but perhaps she could dig the same hole in a different place.

  The hospital where I work is only a short way south of the River Thames and close to the wreck of HMS Belfast, bombed by the IRA just over a decade ago. On the other side of the river is the Tower of London, and although it continues to receive many visitors every year, I have yet to see it myself, although I have worked in the lab as a pharmacy technician for several years. Perhaps one day I shall take a chance and walk across Tower Bridge and visit it, but there always seems to be something else more important to do.

  Not that many people feel inclined to spend much time near the river these days. The large number of illegal immigrants living in boats on the river has made the area near the hospital as dangerous as it is insalubrious. In high summer the stink of untreated sewerage dumped straight into the Thames is almost overpowering. At night the area is such as Dickens might have described, containing a whole underworld of robbers, prostitutes, drug-dealers, sharps, scavengers, beggars, pickpockets and pimps. Of the police there is little evidence, except at the hospital where the protection of nursing staff from their own patients necessitates the presence of a large contingent of armed constables.

  On one occasion, the dispensary itself was subjected to a well-organised raid when several men armed with sawn-off shotguns held us up and stole every drug we had, killing a dispensary porter who offered them resistance. You can still see the bloodstain on the dispensary floor where he fell. When two of the robbers were caught, it was this hospital which supplied the drugs to Wapping New Prison (formerly the offices of The Times newspaper), where their sentences were carried out. And it was me who prepared the two insulin injections which sent them into irreversible punitive coma. (Insulin is no longer used: the ticket being one way only. Today the penal system employs other substances, like TLG, or HL8, the effects of which can be reversed, although sentences of irreversible PC are frequently handed out. Especially for convicted murderers.)

  It says something about the state of a modern hospital that it supplies drugs to prisons to put men into comas. This place used to be the most famous teaching hospital in the world. I once saw a film, made over fifty years ago, which was all about the humorous carefree lives of the nurses and medical students who were at this place. How quaint it all seemed then, and how very English. Of course the major changes are that this is no longer a teaching hospital, no longer part of something called the National Health Service, no longer surrounded by grass and trees. A high fence now encloses the hospital, and medical students now learn their medicine in Edinburgh - the one university hospital still to receive a direct grant of money from the Government - or somewhere abroad. Anyone who was a medical student here in 1953, when that film was made, and who saw the hospital now, probably wouldn’t even recognise it as a hospital at all.

  Still, the work is satisfying enough, in an unimaginative sort of way: preparing ointments, capsules, suppositories and medicines. Most of it is cheap substitute stuff for more expensive drugs which are manufactured in Germany or Switzerland. I wouldn’t touch any of it myself. If I’m sick I attend a private clinic where they can get all the proper drugs. Mind you, I have to pay for it and so it’s just as well that I don’t have to manage on a pharmacy technician’s miserable allowance. Fortunately my parents left me a substantial income from a trust fund. The fact is, I needn’t work at all, however it is real work among real people and when I am doing it I don’t have to think about anything else. Dealing with drugs and medicines requires that one be very precise and this exactness in what I do is the most pleasing part of it. Everything is what it is and not another thing. And of course there’s always the added attraction of an armful of something decent.

  I’m not at all unusual in this. Most of the people I work with are involved in some kind of substance abuse. There are even one or two of them supplementing their meagre incomes by manufacturing methadone at home which they then sell to the local Chinese.

  Not that I can imagine why they want to bother with methadone when the junk-city contains plentiful supplies of good opium, which is about the only thing - apart from feeling-up the occasional cagegirl - to get me down there. A couple of afternoons a week you’ll find me aboard a particular junk moored close to Bermondsey Wall, smoking ten or fifteen pipes. Just like Dorian Gray. On average, I have about thirty or forty a week. This is not at all excessive. There are men I know, and not just Chinese, who smoke maybe two or three hundred pipes a week.

  The best thing about opium is what it does to time. Or to be more precise, what it does to the way one judges time. After a couple of pipes you have the impression that you might have been on the boat for a day at least. You ask yourself ‘What time can it be?’ Then you pause for a moment, perhaps imagining some vast clock-face, before stating a time. The idea is accompanied by a feeling of great conviction, inasmuch as you say a time to yourself with perfect assurance and without feeling any doubt whatsoever. If you were to ask me the reason for this feeling of conviction I would have none. I could not explain it any more than I could describe the aroma of coffee.

  So then, sometimes I will say to myself, ‘I am sure that several hours must have passed, and that it must be at least ten or eleven o’clock at night.’ But when I consult my watch and I see the correct time I realise that perhaps as little as ten or fifteen minutes have actually elapsed. That a quarter of an hour has become half a day. In this way it can be seen how time is little more than an aspect of human will.

  It’s at times like these, when I’m wondering about the riddle of life in space and time, that I think the solution lies outside time and space altogether. Outside my own life itself perhaps. It’s true, suicide is a very old solution to a very old problem, but perhaps ultimately it is the only solution. What is certain is that it is the final solution.

  18

  THE NEXT DAY, Jake called Sir Jameson Lang to discover whether or not he intended to cooperate with Professor Waring’s plan.

  ‘I rather expected you’d be calling,’ he said. ‘Waring said you were opposed to his idea. But you see, I’ve really no choice but to do as they ask. Trinity is no longer as rich as it was. In fact, college finances are pretty tight. The University has been pursuing the Government for a rather lucrative grant. I don’t think it would be too pleased if I put the Government’s nose out of joint at this precise moment in time. You know, I’m not even sure if I should be talking to you, Chief Inspector. They warned me that you might try and dissuade me.’ He looked awkward and embarrassed on Jake’s pictophone screen.

  ‘Are you telling me that they threatened to withdraw this grant?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes. And I don’t mind telling you, I wish I’d never set eyes on any of you people. The whole business has me worried sick. My academic reputation won’t be worth a damn if any of this ever gets out.’

  ‘Is that all you care about? What about due process? What about this man’s life? Think about that for a moment. You’re talking about persuading another human being to take his own life. Exactly where does that fit into moral philosophy, Professor?’

  ‘You’re right to regard it that way, as it happens,’ he said. ‘This is almost certainly one situation where moral philosophy can make a practical contribution to the solution of an actual moral dilemma. I’ve thought about this a great deal and I think society will be served if I can persuade this maniac to kill himself instead of other people.’

  ‘Sounds to me as if you’d rather rely on utilitarianism than on your own intuition, Professor,’ Jake replied. ‘Your own
gut-feel.’

  ‘It’s no good basing a moral approach on intuition. No good at all. Different people have different intuitions.’

  ‘But surely you don’t reject the idea of intuition altogether?’

  ‘Not for a moment, no. I’m in favour of intuitions. But which ones? We have to judge intuitions, to see which is the best one to have. And the best way of doing so is through a higher level of critical moral thinking.’

  ‘And how’s that to be done?’

  ‘We have to do our moral thinking in the world as it is,’ he argued. ‘But at the same time we are constrained by the logic of concepts. Facts are observed. Values are chosen. The intuitions we ought to cultivate are those which have the highest acceptance utility. Now I can’t see many people, apart from you, Chief Inspector, who would argue with trying, for the greater good, to persuade a man who has already killed a dozen innocent people to do away with himself. It seems to me that you are arguing from a rigidly legalistic principle. But you’re not looking at the facts of the matter. Look at the facts first, then decide what principles you should adopt.’

  ‘So why does my intuition tell me that what you’re planning to do makes you feel uncomfortable, Professor?’ she asked him. ‘Is it that you prefer to contemplate these moral dilemmas from the comfort of your rooms in Trinity College perhaps? Utilitarianism is a rather sharp sword for a philosopher to have to wield.’

  ‘Oh it’s not that I’m squeamish,’ Lang declared. ‘Only that I doubt that philosophical argument is entirely equal to the task. In my opinion they would be better advised in having a forensic psychiatrist to talk to this fellow. However, Professor Waring disagrees. He believes that Wittgenstein would prefer to talk to me: that he finds it intellectually flattering to cross swords with a Cambridge professor of philosophy. Waring says that philosophy is what this whole thing is about.’