A Philosophical Investigation

10

Jake drove herself to Cambridge and enjoyed the two hours she took to get there. During the journey she listened to the Rachmaninoff second piano concerto on the disc player and resolved to buy the software to play the piece on her own piano at home. The melancholy product of the’ composer’s own hypnotherapy, Jake had always believed that it was essential music for anyone who wished to gain a profounder understanding of depression.

Further on into her journey she stopped at a little tea-shop in Grantchester only to find that it had closed. So for a while she just sat in the car, allowed the windows to mist up, and smoked a cigarette thoughtfully while she listened to the opening moderato, with its famous eight chords, once again.

It felt strange, she thought, to be going back after all this time. Stranger than she would have believed was possible.

It was almost twelve by the time the wheels of Jake’s BMW rolled down the ramp of Cambridge’s short-term multi-storey car-park. She unfolded the sun-visor and, particular about her appearance as usual, checked her make-up in the vanity mirror.

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 likely 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.

‘But it’s also worth remembering that Wittgenstein came to regard the early work contained in the Tractatus as fundamentally mistaken. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the killer might similarly be persuaded of the error of what he is doing. He promised to communicate with you, did he not? Yes indeed, he seemed to imply that you and he might have some sort of a dialogue. That might present you with a real opportunity to argue with him and, utilitarian considerations notwithstanding, maintain a logical position at odds with his own. If he’s in any way sophisticated, he ought to respond to that challenge.’

Jake nodded thoughtfully.

‘I don’t suppose you might consider helping me out with that as well?’ she asked.

‘Frankly, I’d be delighted,’ he said. ‘I was rather hoping you would ask me. The idea of engaging a murderer in a philosophical dialogue is certainly an intriguing one. Contemporary philosophy in action, so to speak. But tell me, Chief Inspector, do you have any idea how he will make contact with you?’

Jake shook her head vaguely. ‘However he does it, you can bet he’ll be too clever for us to trace him. My guess is that he’ll try and use a portable phone from a car he’ll have stolen. If he called us while he was sitting in some multi-storey car-park in Central London it could take forever to find him.’

‘Then hadn’t we better give consideration to where you and I will be when he calls. If I’m to help you, then I ought to be at your side. And I regret that I am presently unable to leave Cambridge. At least for the next week or so, anyway.’

‘I don’t suppose that you have any video-conferencing facilities here?’ she asked. ‘A pictophone, maybe.’

The professor shook his head. ‘No, we do not. Trinity finances are no longer what they were. It’s the same for the whole university: thus we have monstrosities like Yamaha. Trinity has already been obliged to sell its unique wine cellar.’

‘Would you be willing to have a pictophone installed here, Professor?’ said Jake. ‘I can have my people set up a permanent telecommunications link between us. That way, when the killer calls, you can participate in our conversation.’

Sir Jameson Lang shrugged. ‘Just as long as I wouldn’t have to do anything technical. Unlike Wittgenstein, who was rather good with his hands, I have no practical skills whatsoever.’

‘All you’d have to do is press a button to open the conference.’

‘Very well then. I’d be happy to.’

‘Then I’ll arrange it immediately. The sooner the equipment is installed, the better.’

It was time for Jake to leave.

‘You can leave the disc with me, if you like,’ Lang suggested. ‘I’d like to listen to it again, if I may. There may be something that I missed. Incidentally, it might interest you to know that Wittgenstein had a real fascination for detective stories. The hardboiled, American variety. When you conduct your own investigations, Chief Inspector, it might be useful to remember that he himself placed little reliance on the so-called deductive science of Sherlock Holmes. He liked his detectives to be rather more intuitive. If one assumes that your killer is of the same frame of mind, trusting your own intuitions might ultimately prove to be very useful. To that end, I wonder if I could suggest something, while you’re here.

‘Perhaps’ — he said hesitantly — ‘perhaps, while you are here, you might like to take a look at Wittgenstein’s old rooms.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘Yes, I think you’ll find them interesting.’ He glanced round his own quarters and smiled. ‘They’re not at all like this, of course. No, he was much more simple. As a professor he would have been entitled to have something rather grander. You know he came from one of the richest families in Austria, and reacted against everything that reminded him of that former privileged, luxurious existence. Even to the extent of having a brief fling with Communism. I shan’t accompany you. I’ll probably give you his whole biography if I do. No, I’ll get someone to take you.’

The Master went to the telephone and called the Porter’s Lodge. Then he wished Jake goodbye.

By the time Jake re-crossed Great Court, a man in a raincoat, not the Chinese, but another man, was standing on the steps of the Porter’s Lodge to conduct Jake on her tour.

‘Right then, miss,’ he said, ‘I believe the Master said it’s K10 that you want to see.’ He led the way back out the Great Gate and onto the street. ‘That’s in Whewell’s Court,’ he explained as they passed through another ancient doorway set in a wall beside the post office. ‘So who was this bloke? The one who lived here?’

‘Ludwig Wittgenstein,’ she said. ‘He was a great Cambridge philosopher.’

The porter nodded.

‘Do you get many visitors wanting to see his old rooms?’ she asked, wondering if the killer might have made some sort of similar pilgrimage.

‘Well,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been here over ten years, and you’re the first in my memory.’

They came to the foot of a small staircase, with red-ochre painted walls.

‘It’s at the top,’ he said, going on ahead. ‘Saw a philosopher on the telly once. Near enough a hundred years old, he was. And the bloke says to him: Having lived for so long, do you have advice for mankind? Anyway the philosopher laughed and said that he did have some advice. He says: “Yes. Don’t ever help your own children.” What about that, eh? “Don’t ever help your children.” What a mean old bugger, eh?’ The porter laughed derisively. ‘Philosophers eh? What do they know about real life, I ask you.’

Jake, who had received nothing but hindrance from her own father, admitted that there might be something in what he said.

The ascent to K10 came to an end before a plain black door above which was painted the name of the room’s occupant, one C. Von Heissmeyer. Jake wondered if this could be an Austrian name, and if so, whether there was anything suspicious in that.

The porter knocked and waited. ‘If the student’s in, we’ll need his permission,’ he said, and knocked again. Then, there being no reply, he produced a set of keys and opened the door.

The rooms were simplicity itself, consisting of a kitchen, a sitting room and a bedroom. The orange sofa and armchair were as hard on the eye as the blue carpet underfoot. The single bed, with its plain, purple cover had been carefully made. The kitchen was neatly kept, with three dinner plates draining on the rack like the three computer disks in their box on the desk.

Jake went over to the triple-arched window and sat on the edge of the desk. In the courtyard below sat a greenish bronze figure of a man. In the distance were two devil’s horns of the incongruous-looking Wolfson building. Her eye caught the reading list taped to the window pane, and then the matching pile of Penguin Classics.

It was strange how something so innocent, so commonplace as a pile of Penguin Classics could stir suspicion in her mind. This really was too absurd, she told herself. It smacked of something obsessive. But even though she knew it was ridiculous, Jake found herself paying close attention to the titles and their authors: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins; The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard; and The Last Days of Socrates by Plato. Pure coincidence, she told herself. The same was true of the row of books by Wittgenstein ranged along the mantelpiece and the framed photograph of him which hung above these. And weren’t there many young people who liked to have a poster of a gun-toting Humphrey Bogart in their rooms: this one was from Howard Hawks’s production of The Big Sleep. ‘The violence screen’s all-time rocker shocker,’ said the blurb at the top of the poster. ‘Bogy’n’ Baby paired off for a hot time and the big thrill in cold, cold crime.’

Hadn’t Professor Lang said something about how Wittgenstein had been interested in the American detective genre?

But what could have been more natural than that a student occupying Wittgenstein’s old rooms in Trinity should also have been interested in him? And like him, like any young man, interested in the hardboiled detective?

By the same token, what could have been more natural in the present circumstances than that she herself should have been interested in anyone who might feel he had some kind of spiritual affinity with Wittgenstein?

Sir Jameson Lang had surely missed one of the most important differences between the philosopher and the detective. For the detective, nothing is ever truly itself and nothing more. A cigarette end was never just a cigarette end: it was also sometimes a sign, a clue, a piece in a puzzle awaiting connection with something else. There was more semiology than philosophy in that particular aspect of her work.

Only connect. To be able to really know something was only to know how things were connected. Like a psychoanalyst, it required connecting the past to the present and thereby obtaining some sort of cathartic resolution.

Of course there were times when connections eluded her, when she could connect ‘nothing with nothing’, when something could not be known.

And there it remained only to make things fit.

To fit. No detective much liked the verb. It smacked of corruption and of malpractice, of suppressing some connections and highlighting others. It was much too active. Too premeditated.

But life was hard, and Jake found herself taking a note of the student’s name, just in case.

This morning, after dreaming of my father, I woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on my lips.

The television clock was emitting a loud buzz which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. At the same time, the television turned itself on for the early morning aerobics show. It was seven-fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. I had worked the day before, a Sunday, and although I had Monday off, I didn’t like to miss my physical jerks. So I wrenched my body out of bed and seized a dirty singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.

The music started and, after a violent fit of coughing, I took my position in front of the screen on which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, and dressed in a virtually luminous green leotard and tights, had already appeared. In time to the music, she started to run on the spot, raising up each thigh in turn to her chest.

‘Come on now’ — she grinned virtuously — ‘let’s stretch those muscles and work those lungs. And one, and two, and three and four... And one, and two, and three and four...’

I did my best to observe the pace she had set.

‘Remember, I’m watching you,’ she joked. ‘So no cheating now. And one, and two...’

The rhythmic movements of the exercise began to jog a few recollections of my dream. But it had been more than just a simple dream. It was a real memory of early childhood and my father, one of the first real memories (as opposed to approximately real memories) I had had in a long time. As I bounced mechanically up and down, I struggled to hang on to it for a while. It was extraordinarily difficult, and after a few more minutes the memory did not persist, fading like the image on a piece of photographic paper that has been treated with the wrong kind of chemical. No amount of bouncing seemed able to jog the memory back again.

‘And relax,’ said the instructor. ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.’ Big smile. ‘The weather next, after these messages.’

I collapsed onto the bedroom chair. But while physical exercises for the day may have been complete (I never bothered with the second session), there still remained my mental preparation. I always treat the first two-minute commercial break of the morning as the perfect opportunity for a therapeutic hate period. The fact is that I take violent exception to being patronised and find that the commercials help to bring out the very worst in me. So, for two whole minutes, I just shout and scream the vilest abuse at the various TV advertisers whose thirty-second messages fill the screen. Fortunately the apartments above and below my own are no longer occupied.

When all my little procedures for starting the day were complete, I showered, ate breakfast and went through the Sunday newspapers, looking for anything to do with my own story. As usual, there was something — you kill enough people, you get your story in the papers all the time. On this occasion it was a colour feature on the victims, with unnecessarily vivid close-ups of their gun-shot heads and their dead bodies.

There were also some nice pictures of Policewoman, taken at her touching little press conference. These revealed a truly beautiful woman, a fact which until now had not been made clear to me, even on high-definition television. This is, I suppose, hardly surprising. Television, even high-definition television, does strange things to people. It makes their heads bigger, it makes them taller. In short, it makes them seem altogether different from how they really are in the world. That was also the case with Policewoman.

Clearly she is Jewish in origin. Her name would tell me as much. Her appearance confirms the matter. A dark-haired Sephardic beauty with cadmium-green eyes and cheekbones that were cut from purest marble (I was never much of a poet). Her chin is equally strong and helps to make her full mouth as stubborn as a salesman’s optimism. Yet there is also just a hint of the coquette about the angle of her head and the purse of her crimson-lake lips — enough to soften the hard, questioning look in her eyes which might easily turn into contempt. A policewoman’s face, albeit a distinguished one. Lady Disdain.

I imagine she must have been some kind of athlete when she was at school. It’s difficult to tell from television and the photographs, but I think she must be tall. I expect she was captain of netball, and with those long, strong legs I’d also guess she might have become an efficient high-jumper. I dare say she wore her shorts a size too small and broke a few hearts.

She looks quite intimidating and it would not surprise me if there were a few unsatisfactory relationships with boys who found themselves unable to measure up to her advanced maturity. Doubtless they would have turned this fear of her powerful physicality against her in order to lend themselves comfort and protection. Did they call her names in mockery of her size, I wonder.

There was little information which the newspaper provided about Policewoman, except that she was thirty-seven, a graduate of Cambridge University, that she had served with the Met for thirteen years, and that she was an expert in the investigation of serial killings. It was fortunate that I had been able to access her file in the police computer which, in addition, revealed her name and address.

Almost idly I copied the magazine photographs of her onto the computer and, using the 3-dimensional imager, turned her this way and that, almost as if she had been a child’s doll. But I soon grew bored of this and went to make myself a cup of Brio.

I was glancing through a pornographic magazine when it occurred to me that I could see Policewoman naked. Quickly I returned to the computer and copied a selection of photographs onto the program and started to assemble some photo-composites of her head and various naked female torsos.

I decided that her breasts should be neither too small, nor too large and that her nipples were probably as yet undarkened by a pregnancy. The pubic area presented a greater problem. First I found a pudenda with not enough hair and then one with too much. I was forced to find some more magazines. These were better and more explicit. When these were fed into the computer, she sat, wearing just a pair of white, self-supporting stockings, with her legs drawn up so that her knees almost hid her mouth, tugging at her immaculate labia with well-manicured fingers, and allowing me a midwife’s view of her insides.

In another sequence of shots, I found a girl whose head position exactly matched those photographs I had of Policewoman, and who was depicted in the act of fellating a man, as well as in the act of full intercourse. When I had married this new material together with Policewoman I was able to see what little pleasure she might have taken in the heterosexual act. Of course, this had a great deal to do with her original facial expression which was that of someone appearing before a press conference as opposed to an erect penis. But all the same, intuitively I perceived more or less how it would be.

By way of contrast I found some shots of the same model engaged in lesbian acts. This sexual behaviour seemed to suit Policewoman’s features rather better and I managed to comp an effective one of her guzzling on another girl’s toffee-coloured clitoris.

With all this excitement under my belt, I simply had to have sex with her, or an approximation of her anyway. So I copied the picture disk onto the RA machine and climbed into my exoskeleton. Then I unwrapped an RA condom and peeled it onto my erection before attaching the terminal to the suit. When all was ready I donned my helmet, plugged myself into the computer, and started to run through the pre-RA checks like a pilot about to test fly the old X-15. This was to avoid any accidents that might result from a sudden surge of approximate reality to the ears or, more importantly, the penis.

‘Textures, on. Dynamics, on. Sound, on. Head tracking, on. Body sensing, on. Phallus sensor, on.’

Then I dropped the visor-screen.

And there she was, standing before me in a pleasant forest glade, like Eve herself, without so much as a fig leaf to cover her nakedness. The image blurred a little as I stepped towards her and I made a small adjustment to the visor. Then I reached out and caressed her breast to test the glove, and felt her nipple harden as I touched her. Next, I slapped her face hard to test the sound quality, which was fine. Policewoman took the blow with a cry of pain, but no reproach. She just stood there, awaiting my next move, as programmed. I motioned her down onto her knees to check the RA condom and felt her approximate mouth envelop my penis. Everything was working perfectly. So long as the visor was down, the software would remain in operation, and approximate reality would be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. (Sometimes I think that I’m living a real life in an approximate way. Or should that be the other way round?) Better even. There are no laws in RA.

Then I fucked her, slowly, from behind, from the front, bent double like a suit carrier, legs splayed wider than a ballet-dancer’s, in the mouth and up the ass...

Well, at least I am alive. As long as I can work and feel sensual, things cannot be too bad.

Of course this awakening of the sexual impulse vis à vis Policewoman suffices to kill any love I might have had for her.

Unfortunately, the technology does not yet exist that would have enabled me to have recorded these events on film. So later on I had to make do with several photo-composites of the work I had done on the computer, and these I put into an envelope to send to Policewoman’s home.

Having returned to reality, I read the rest of her file which included extracts of a speech she made to some European Community conference on law enforcement. She took her starting point to be George Orwell’s The Decline of the English Murder (don’t they all?), and argued the increase of the Hollywood-style murder, meaning the apparently motiveless serial killings of women which seem so fashionable these days. There’s something in all of this (although I feel she missed the cultural importance of murder to our society).

I think that I will make a few notes for a paper on this. I could provide her with a few examples. But wouldn’t her understanding have to be deeper than any examples I could give? Have I not got more than I could provide in any explanation? After all, can you really explain to another person what you yourself understand? Really she would have to guess what I intend. But still, I suppose it’s worth a try.

If I could put it into words, fill in the gaps, add some light and shade, colour things in, she would surely be in the picture. I am not saying that it would make things easier for her. After all, the certainty of mathematics is not based on the reliability of ink and paper. But in the same way that people generally agree in their judgments of colour, perhaps we could arrive at some sort of understanding.

I had started to tell you about how when I awoke this morning I had Shakespeare on my mind. I don’t know much Shakespeare. At least, I can’t quote very much. I’ve meant to do something about this, to brush up my Shakespeare as it were. Brush up my Shakespeare? Let me tell you, on this particular morning, I had something rather more lethal than that in mind.

I boarded a train to follow him from his home close by Wandsworth Common, to Victoria Station. From there he walked down Victoria Street and, to my surprise, went into the Brain Research Institute. This was as near as I had been to the place since my fateful discovery. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually take up the offer of counselling from the Lombroso Program’s staff of psychotherapists.

I waited for him in the Chestnut Tree Café on the opposite side of the street where I had gone on the day of my own PET scan, and from where I had a clear view of the front door. I ordered a cup of tea and looked at my watch. It was three o’clock.

This was a preliminary surveillance. I didn’t plan on actually killing him that afternoon. All the same, I had brought my gun along, in case a suitable opportunity presented itself. After all, this was my day off and it would be several days before I could operate like this again.

While I sipped one cup of tea and then another, I looked at my A-Z, trying to see which routes might best suit me were I to snatch an assassination attempt. A walk through St James’s Park, perhaps. Or a stroll across Westminster Bridge. Those would do very well.

It was then that I caught sight of her coming out of the Institute: Policewoman. Taller than I had imagined, but then television does strange things to people. And of course now that she was wearing clothes, she seemed more formidable than the pliant, approximate reality of her I had been fucking earlier. I wondered what she would make of the photo-composites I had sent her and wished that I could have been a fly on the wall when she opened the envelope.

For a moment she stared across the street at the café, almost as if she had been looking straight at me. The door of her police BMW was open but she did not get into the car. Instead, her driver stepped out and they exchanged a few words. Then, to my horror, she started across the street, heading directly towards the café.

My first instinct was to make a run for it, but a second’s reflection told me that it was unlikely she had anything but a cup of tea on her mind. So it appeared best to stay where I was, to sit it out, examining my A-Z, and pretend to be a German tourist if I was challenged. But at the same time I kept thinking of the ComputaFit picture that Policewoman had issued to the press and, as I waited for her to come through the café door, it now seemed a better likeness of me than ever before. I was glad I was wearing a hat.

I had sat near the door in order to be ready to follow quickly after Shakespeare, and I kept my eyes down as she passed by me on her way to the counter, so close that she could have touched me, and near enough for me to catch her scent in my nostrils and suck it down into my throat. I was not prepared for that. The smell, I mean. Smell is not something that RA has yet managed to simulate. The fact is that she smelt delicious, like some rare and expensive dessert-wine. I heard myself vacuum the air she walked in down my nasal passages as if she had been made of pure cocaine. It was obscene the way it happened, and for a brief moment I felt quite disgusted at myself. Now I started to feel myself colour at the memory of what I had done to an approximation of her body and hoped that she would not find it remarkable that a complete stranger should look so obviously embarrassed at his proximity to her. For several seconds I felt so conspicuous that I even asked myself if, in resisting arrest, I was prepared to shoot her. But then shooting things, real or approximately real, has become second nature to me and so I had no doubt that if I had to, I would.

I heard her ask the café proprietor for a coffee to take away and twenty Nicofree. The next sound I heard was her dropping her change on the linoleum floor. Instinctively I bent down and grabbed a few of the coins before they rolled out of the door. It was done in a split second, without any thought at all, a Pavlovian response to a commonplace occurrence. Something automatic, unthinking, and very stupid.

‘Thank you,’ said Policewoman, rising from the floor where she had found the rest of her change, and holding out her hand in front of me.

Our skins made brushing contact as I dropped the coins into her outstretched palm, an approximation of which had earlier cupped my balls as she sucked me.

‘Do you need any assistance?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

She nodded at the A-Z open on the table in front of me.

I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence. ‘No, it’s all right,’ I stammered, ‘I know where I’m going.’

Then she smiled, nodded once again, and walked out of the café.

When Policewoman was safely back across the street, I took out my handkerchief and mopped my face. For a moment I felt utterly exhausted, but almost immediately, seeing her car drive away, this gave way to a feeling of exhilaration and I found myself laughing out loud. The very next moment Shakespeare came out of the Institute and, still chuckling like a stream, I followed.

He returned to Victoria Station where I almost lost him in the crowd. But instead of boarding a train south back to Wandsworth Common, he took the Underground to Green Park and then walked east, along Piccadilly.

Shakespeare was an uncouth, greasy-looking fellow, tall, and swarthy like a Greek. So I was surprised when he paused in front of a bookshop and went inside. The strangest people seem to read books these days. One hardly expects a fellow like that to be literate. But he had no sooner entered the shop than he had left it again, crossed over onto the south side of Piccadilly and gone into St James’s Church. Was he, I wondered, interested in architecture perhaps? This was, after all, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s great designs. Or had he spotted his tail and was now cutting through the Jermyn Street exit in an effort to lose me? Leaving what instinct told me wasn’t a decent-enough interval between us, I went after him.

Through the heavy glass doors separating the main part of the church from its vestibule I could see him sitting in a pew close to the altar. But for him, the place was empty.

I walked inside and occupied a pew only a few rows behind Shakespeare. His head was bowed and he seemed to be praying. Perfect for my purpose. No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize. Steeling myself with the thought that Charles Darwin had considered Shakespeare so dull as to make him feel nauseous, I reached inside my coat to get my gun. But before my hand was even on the handle, he was up and out of his pew and walking towards the door and then stopping beside my pew and then grabbing both lapels of my coat and hauling me onto my feet. He was a big man and extricating my hand from inside my coat, I struggled to prise his two meat-porter’s hands off me.

‘What’s your game, mate?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been followin’ me all afternoon. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?’ With each repeated question he pushed his unshaven mug closer to mine, until I was close enough to taste the garlic on his breath. ‘Ever since I left Wandsworth.’ He nutted me gently on the bridge of my nose several times, as if indicating what was in store for me if I didn’t answer him to his satisfaction.

‘I’m a tourist,’ I said weakly, pointing to the A-Z on the church pew as if to confirm my story.

His bristly face turned several shades of red on the way to becoming something darker.

‘Shit,’ he snarled. ‘That’s just shit, mate.’

‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I protested, still trying to reclaim my coat’s lapels.

‘No, you’re the one who’s made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Wandsworth Town, Victoria, Green Park, and now here. You tryin’ to tell me that you lost your fuckin’ coach, or something?’ He nutted me again, only this time more deliberately. His head may have been deficient in the small matter of a ventro medial nucleus, but it lacked for nothing in solidity. ‘Come on, you bastard, or I’ll really give you a kiss. Why you followin’ me?’

I really don’t know what I would have told him. That I found him attractive perhaps? Who knows? But at that moment a couple of people carrying musical instruments came into the church, and my assailant, momentarily embarrassed, it seemed to me, unclamped his greasy paws from my coat. I needed no more articulate invitation to freedom and took to my heels.

‘Bastard,’ he yelled after me but, to my relief, he did not give chase. Even so, running out into Jermyn Street and down the hill to St James’s Square, I did not stop until I reached Pall Mall.

When finally I recovered my breath and then my nerve I found myself laughing once again. That was always what was so interesting about Shakespeare, I said to myself. Right until the very last minute you never knew if it was going to end in comedy or tragedy.

Still keeping an eye out for him, I walked across Trafalgar Square and into the bar on the corner of Charing Cross Road where I ordered a beer and tried to think how best I could salvage something of the day.

While tailing Shakespeare I had been giving some thought to Policewoman and the promise I had made to contact her. Perhaps if I had been concentrating more on following Shakespeare... Now seemed to be as good a time as any to buy the equipment I needed to fulfil this undertaking. I already knew exactly what I wanted and where was the best place to get it. So I finished my beer and, via the nearest twenty-four-hour bank where I picked up some cash, I caught a bus up Tottenham Court Road.

TCR was much the same as always: dirty and disgusting, with rubbish strewn along the pavements from the piles of fastfood refuse sacks torn apart by the city’s many rats. Some of these, bigger than cats, lay dead in the gutters, poisoned with their warfarin takeaways, their bodies flattened by the passing traffic and dried like biltong in the early spring sun. About the only thing that swept TCR was the wind blowing south from the Euston Road to Oxford Street.

Stepping smartly into the shop I was met with the usual sea of brown faces. What is it about Indians and Pakistanis that so attracts them to the retailing of electrical goods? It’s the same the world over, from New York to Vienna. The Japs may have manufactured the equipment that now runs the world, but it’s the Asians who sell it. Is it that the profit margins are just so good? Or is it that they find something sexy in the obvious consumerism of all those switches, knobs, dials, and flashing lights? Or perhaps it is electricity itself that they so admire: Islam has always had a fascination for power.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a portable phone.’

‘Standard or video?’

‘Neither,’ I said, flatly. ‘I want a sat-phone.’

The man rippled his sovereign-ringed fingers nervously and then smiled a combination of apology and amusement. ‘These are illegal, sir,’ he announced. ‘We are not allowed to sell them.’

It was my turn to smile. I followed it with a hundred-dollar note.

‘Cash,’ I said. ‘And you can swear you never saw me before.’

He told me to wait and went to fetch the shop manager, a tubby, bumptious little man with thick glasses and as many gold necklaces around his fat, bhaji-coloured neck as his minion had rings.

‘The sort of phone you are requiring, sir, is not permitted,’ he said, still holding my C-note. ‘Please, what would happen to me if you were some fellow from the Home Office who was to catch me selling such a thing? I would be in court pretty damn quick and no mistake.’ He glanced around the shop, which was empty of any other customers, and moved closer to me.

‘What the hell are you wanting this kind of phone for anyway?’ he asked in lower tones. ‘If it’s the avoidance of a telephone bill you are requiring then I can sell you a black box dialer. You can use this anywhere and pay nothing for your call whether it is Bombay you are telephoning or merely Birmingham. And much cheaper than a satellite phone too.’

‘I’m going abroad,’ I said. ‘South America. Up the jungle, or what’s left of it. I want to be able to phone home.’

The Indian shook his head ruefully. ‘If this was me the last thing I should want to take would be a phone. What an opportunity you are having, to get away from the wife for a few weeks.’ He laughed.

‘Look,’ I said calmly. ‘I’m not Home Office. You can search me if you like. There’s no need to worry. I’ll give you a fair price, in cash.’ I retrieved my C-note from his podgy fingers. ‘Otherwise I can try somewhere else.’ I shrugged and started towards the open door.

‘Patience, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a virtue. I have just the equipment that you require. Only I must be careful. Come this way.’

He led me into the back of the shop which was stacked high with boxes of Nicam stereo televisions, discrecorders, portable karaoke players, and Reality Approximation equipment. Shifting several boxes out of the way, he said, ‘We don’t keep sat-phones in the front of the shop, for obvious reasons. You want a digital unit?’

I said that I thought I did.

He nodded and pulled out another box. ‘Digital is best. I show you a good one. Only four thousand dollars.’ He ripped open the box and tugged away at the ozone-friendly polystyrene packaging to reveal what looked like a small attaché case. For a moment he caressed it with his hand, before springing open the locks and folding the case open.

‘Just like James Bond, eh?’ He giggled, folding up a satellite dish that was about the size of a dinner plate. ‘It works off the Injupitersat. One dedicated channel with a band-width that’s five times the size of a normal portable phone. That gives you an extra-high-quality line. Focusing on the satellite is done automatically with the computer’s own built-in compass, so you don’t have to fuck about with books of astronomical tables or any shit like that. All you have to do is key the satellite’s number, which you see on the handset, and then the normal international code plus whatever number it is that you want to call. Its one and only limitation is that you can’t use it below ground level. In a house is fine, but don’t expect to get through if you’re sitting in some kind of basement.’

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, and counted out forty-odd bills.

‘You won’t regret it,’ he said. ‘The CIA use this model, so it must be good.’

I looked at the country of origin. It had been made in Japan.

‘Well that figures,’ I said.

He folded the dish away, closed the case and held it out to me.

‘Real pigskin too,’ he said, stroking the case with his hand again. ‘And it weighs less than two kilos. Anything else you would like?’

I handed him another couple of bills.

‘Just your silence.’