A Philosophical Investigation

15

‘Absolutely not,’ said Jake. She stared at Mark Woodford and Professor Waring with a mixture of surprise and contempt. ‘No way. I’m sorry.’

‘The Minister thought it was a good idea,’ Woodford said smoothly.

Jake shook her head firmly. ‘The Minister’s not investigating this case. I am, and I think it stinks.’

The meeting took place several days after Mr Parmenides had come to the Yard with Wittgenstein’s A-Z, in the Minister’s rooms at the Home Office, overlooking St James’s Park. Grace Miles was not present, as she was opening a new police station at her constituency in Birmingham.

Jake sat back in her chair and glanced uncomfortably around her. She wondered about the incongruity of the room’s sleek, modern furniture, the cheap green china, and the pair of elephant tusks that were mounted on one of the beige-coloured walls. She thought this last item rather tasteless given that the elephant was now all but extinct, the few remaining kept in private zoos and safari parks. It was her favourite animal. She thought it ought to have been every policeman’s favourite animal, on the basis that an elephant never forgets. And here were these bastards asking her to do just that. To forget all about catching Wittgenstein.

Mark Woodford sighed and avoiding Jake’s eyes, inflated his lips thoughtfully. ‘Normally we pretty much go along with the constitutional separation of powers,’ he said, feigning some awkwardness. ‘Legislative, executive...’

‘Spare me the constitutional lecture,’ said Jake. ‘I know what they are.’

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘But there are circumstances in which the legislative function might feel obliged to interfere in the workings of one of the other governmental functions.’

‘I think what you’re trying to say,’ said Jake, ‘is that you’ll have me taken off the case. Is that it?’

‘Yes,’ said Waring.

‘Go ahead and try,’ said Jake. ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at journalism.’

Woodford smiled placatingly. ‘There’s no question of that surely, Chief Inspector.’ He leaned across the table and folded his hands impatiently. ‘Look, I don’t understand what your objection is. Professor Waring’s suggestion might solve all of our problems.’

‘Everyone except Wittgenstein’s.’

Woodford shrugged. ‘I can’t say I care much about his problems,’ he said. ‘The last victim, Hegel, makes it twelve people he’s killed, for God’s sake.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Jake. ‘But he’s still got some rights. There is still a proper way of doing things. And even if it could work, which I doubt, your way would just sweep it all under the rug. What is more, if it didn’t work, he might break off contact with us altogether. Go underground for a while and then start this business all over again in about two years’ time. Worse still, you’ll end up making a legend out of this man, just like Jack the Ripper became a legend when he disappeared.’

‘Look, just listen to the professor explain the idea to you himself,’ Woodford insisted. ‘Hear him out, please.’

Jake shrugged. ‘Go ahead. But I can’t see that it’ll make much difference. Saint Francis could explain this to me and it would still smell like shit.’

Professor Waring glanced questioningly at Mark Woodford, who nodded at him as if to say that he ought to give it a try anyway. Woodford opened a file in front of him and started to turn the pages.

‘From a reading of all the transcripts of your telephone conversations with Wittgenstein, and from everything we know about him, I have formed a very distinct impression of the kind of character we are dealing with.

‘In many ways, he is like patients I have met before, in custody. My own clinical research has revealed that his type is commonly suicidal. His placing no value on the life of others, makes it probable that he places little value on his own.’

He cleared his throat as he approached what Jake knew to be the more delicate part of his thesis.

‘In this particular case, I’m certain of it. And given the killer’s identification with or delusion that he is Ludwig Wittgenstein, I see no reason why we may not turn his aggression against society towards himself. After all, one of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide and he himself had suicidal tendencies. I think that it is entirely feasible that Sir Jameson Lang might successfully maintain an argument for the killer to take his own life.’ Waring shook his head uncertainly.

‘As to the moral-judicial issues that the chief inspector mentions, I think we must keep before us the very real danger to society of allowing him to remain unchecked. Naturally, as a doctor I have reservations about recommending this particular course of action. It might be argued that it runs counter to my own Hippocratic oath. But that oath is worth nothing if it allows an even greater loss of life. And really, Chief Inspector, don’t you honestly think it would be better to kill yourself than to be sentenced to a lifetime’s punitive coma? I know which option I would prefer.’

‘That’s rich,’ Jake sneered at him, ‘considering that you were on the Home Office Select Committee that recommended implementing coma as a viable punishment.’

Waring frowned and looked at Woodford. ‘Perhaps the chief inspector is concerned that without an arrest at the end of her investigation, her career progress might be held up.’

‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she said quickly.

Woodford smiled thinly and helped himself to a rich tea biscuit. ‘Look, I understand what it must be like for you,’ he said. ‘You’ve given everything to this case with a very definite end in mind. And now we come along and suggest a different sort of goal. Well, I can see how it would be very frustrating. Nobody expected you to be happy about it.’

‘You’re damned right I’m not happy about it. Look, you people can do what you like, but I still intend going after Wittgenstein in my own way.’ To that end, Jake had already decided to say nothing of how Parmenides had brought her Wittgenstein’s list of targets, and of how these were being kept under permanent watch.

Woodford shrugged. ‘Well we certainly can’t stop you doing your duty,’ he said.

‘And what about Sir Jameson Lang?’ she asked. ‘What does he have to say about your little scheme? He doesn’t strike me as the type to go along with what you’re proposing. Technically speaking, this is a conspiracy to commit an unlawful homicide.’

‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’ said Woodford.

‘And as for Sir Jameson Lang,’ said Waring, ‘you leave him to us.’ He turned to Woodford. ‘I’ll call him this afternoon.’

Jake stood up, pressing her chair away with the backs of her legs.

‘Murder,’ she said quietly. ‘And don’t kid yourselves that it’s something else. Even Wittgenstein doesn’t do that.’

The lift down from the top floor was a slow one and by the time Jake reached the ground, she had all but recovered her temper. A security woman searched her and then, glancing at a computer screen, checked to see that Jake had not left any unauthorised bags or packages behind her.

While she waited for her security clearance, Jake surveyed the many Russians and East Europeans waiting patiently in the lobby for whichever jobsworth Home Office clerk would interrogate them about their status. She knew that some of them would have been waiting there for several days in order to prove that they were in Britain legally. No one cared much for their comfort or their convenience. No one tried to make the whole process less indifferent than it already was. Small wonder, thought Jake, that people sometimes got violent.

When her clearance arrived, she walked out of the petrol-pump-shaped building onto Tothill Street, turning almost immediately right towards New Scotland Yard and the famous revolving cheese on a pole which had identified it in a hundred television series. The silver cheese caught the hot midday sun at regular intervals, flashing at her like a slow stroboscopic light. She wondered why that particular image seemed to be significant. Back in her own office at the Yard, Jake called the lab.

‘Maurice? Where are we on that autoradiograph?’ she asked. ‘Has the computer matched an identity card with the sample yet?’

‘I wish you’d make up your mind,’ he snarled back. ‘You mean you want to start the DNA-matching program again?’

‘What do you mean again?’ she asked. ‘Who told you to stop?’

‘You did. I got a signed memo from you just yesterday. You told me to send you the graph too.’

‘And did you?’

‘You mean you haven’t got it?’

Jake was beginning to smell a rat. ‘Maurice. I’d like you to find that memo and then bring it to my office. Immediately.’

She waited several minutes and then he called back. Even on the pictophone screen, she could see he looked worried.

‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he said. ‘Because I’ve got better things to do, lady.’

‘It’s no joke,’ Jake said. ‘Well? Did you find the memo?’

‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t locate it.’

‘You say that the memo arrived on your computer screen yesterday, right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I copied it onto my dayfile and made a hard copy to attach to the autoradiograph.’

‘So what you’re saying is that someone’s been into your office and erased the record from your dayfile’s memory.’

Maurice shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Looks that way,’ he said. ‘But who would do a thing like that?’

‘I’ve a pretty shrewd idea,’ said Jake.

‘Maybe I should report this.’

Jake thought for a moment. While she couldn’t see Woodford or Waring snooping around the lab and erasing files from a technician’s PC, she had the feeling that they were behind it. No doubt there were others who were prepared to carry out their orders: police officers who did not wish to see the Lombroso Program and, as a corollary, the Government’s much-vaunted law and order platform irreparably damaged. As it certainly would be when the true facts became known of how Wittgenstein had exploited the very system that had been designed to control him.

No doubt these same people would have preferred that Wittgenstein be dealt with rather more discreetly than an arrest and trial allowed. It was bad enough that Woodford and Waring were intent on having Wittgenstein remove himself from the equation. But it seemed infinitely worse that there should be policemen who were willing to obstruct evidence in order that they should be given sufficient time in which to carry out this intention. What was clear was that if she wished to continue with her investigation, then she would have to move more subtly than any inquiry into missing evidence would permit.

‘No, Maurice,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me for the moment, will you?’

He looked relieved. Gratitude made him more respectful. ‘Yes, certainly Chief Inspector. Anything you say. I’ve more than enough work to do anyway, without answering a lot of questions.’

Jake ended their conversation with a push of a button. It seemed that she could no longer rely on catching Wittgenstein through the genetic fingerprint on his identity card. But nor could she simply sit back and hope that one of the police teams watching the various London addresses which he had marked in his A-Z would get lucky. She reminded herself that being a detective meant that one was never satisfied with what one already had: that the process of enquiry was, of necessity, a continuing one. Quite simply it was a matter of reassessing something because there was absolutely no logical reason to do so.

She turned to face her own computer screen and called up all her own case notes to check that nothing was missing. There wasn’t a great deal on the file, but everything she remembered was still there. Having accessed her notes, she decided to re-read them and so, page by page, Jake went through the file, hoping that some new line of enquiry might occur to her now. There was something in her mind of what Sir Jameson Lang had said about the real Wittgenstein’s preference for the more intuitive detective. Perhaps she herself could be more intuitive now. She knew from previous cases how, when an investigation was over, you could look back through the notes and see something you ought to have known was significant — something that had been there all along, just waiting to be noticed. She hit the ‘page-down’ button. Something so small she might have ignored it. Something she might have misunderstood, concerning the use of words perhaps. To some extent a detective’s job was a grammatical one. To shed light on a problem by clearing misunderstandings and ambiguities away, not to mention lies. She felt almost as if she were directing herself not towards phenomena but, as one might say, to the possibilities of phenomena.

Jake smiled to herself. She was beginning to sound like Sir Jameson Lang. Well maybe he was right. Maybe a detective was a kind of philosopher and her criminal investigation was, in reality, a philosophical investigation. Perhaps it had been that all along.

She needed a cigarette but found that she had run out. She had meant to buy another packet on her way back from the Home Office, only Woodford and Waring’s callous little suggestion had put it out of her mind. Cursing them both, Jake grabbed her bag and went outside again.

The roar of the traffic on Victoria Street robbed Jake momentarily of her bearings. It was force of habit that turned her to the right, towards her usual source of supply for smokes and good coffee, the Chestnut Tree Café.

In front of the Brain Research Institute, her arms folded against the draft from a passing water-tanker, Jake crossed the road. But as she made for the café’s open door she found her footsteps slowing.

On the pavement, near to his monstrous black beetle of a machine, sat a motorcycle messenger, drinking from a large Styrofoam cup of steaming tea. Jake paused as she recollected that her Gynocide Squad was still trying to catch the motorcycle messenger who had murdered several office receptionists. But it was not this which had attracted her attention. It was what this grimy-faced youth was balancing on his leather-trousered knees. An A-Z London street atlas.

‘Yeah?’ said the youth, frowning as he noticed Jake’s attention. ‘What?’ He looked himself over as if checking that he had not caught fire.

‘Do you need any assistance?’ Jake said, half to herself.

‘I’m sorry?’

Then she had nodded at the man’s A-Z.

‘No, it’s all right,’ said the messenger, his tone and expression making it clear that he thought Jake was probably mad. ‘I er... know where I’m going. All right?’

Jake went into the café and bought the cigarettes. But her thoughts were somewhere else. She had suddenly realised that this was where Wittgenstein had met her. Here, in the Chestnut Tree Café. She had dropped her change and he had helped her to pick it up. No wonder he had been able to recognise her perfume. She had been so close to him. Their hands had actually touched.

Breathless with excitement, Jake sat down at the table where he had been sitting, lit one of her cigarettes and then glanced through the window. From here he would have had a perfect view of anyone going in or out of the Institute. He might even have come in here after his own Lombroso test.

Wittgenstein’s face lay half-melted across the hard edge of her mind’s eye, Jake thought, like one of the soft watches in Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory. She roped her brain tightly onto the rack and tried to stretch out a full and accurate account of what she remembered.

When she could think no more she walked quickly back to the Yard. Seated behind her desk again she called up the ComputaFit pictures of Wittgenstein on the screen of her terminal and compared her own mental image of the man in the café with the ones which had been constructed by Clare and Grubb after the murder of Descartes in Soho. Then she looked at the ComputaFit obtained from Doctor Chen, Wittgenstein’s psychotherapist at the Institute, through hypnosis.

Of the three pictures, the one that most matched her own memory was Chen’s. So much for Professor Gleitmann’s opinion that Chen’s unconscious mind had lied.

She wondered if she had devoted enough time to Chen. He was after all, the only person who had spoken at length to the killer. There could be no question that his hypnosis had been handled expertly. But had enough account been taken of the language barrier? Chen spoke excellent English, but was it his first language? Was it English that his subconscious mind used, or Chinese? Might that not make a difference to his answers to her questions? Questions which, directed to his subconscious, were also directed towards the essence of language. Might not those questions see in the essence only something that already lay open to view and that became surveyable by a rearrangement? But what about what lay beneath the surface of his answers? Was there something that lay within, which could be seen when you looked into it and which further analysis might dig out?

Perhaps that was why the stroboscopic light effect on the silver cheese outside the Yard had seemed significant.

Jake called the Brain Research Institute and asked to speak to Doctor Chen. She asked him if he minded being hypnotised once again, only this time she wanted to question him and for him to answer in Chinese.

‘What you’re saying’ — Chen grinned — ‘is that you think there’s something wrong with the way I speak English.’

Jake smiled back at him and shook her head.

‘Not at all. Look,’ she said, ‘you learned English, right?’

He nodded.

‘But you grew up speaking Chinese?’

‘Yes.’

‘These are very different languages.’

‘Only on the surface,’ he said. ‘Man is a syntactical animal, surely. And all languages share the same deep structure. The genetic universal grammar, as it were. The blueprint for language that’s in every newborn baby’s mind. It’s the merest accident that I grew up speaking Chinese rather than English.’

‘Agreed,’ said Jake. ‘However my enquiry here relates to linguistic use. And that’s a factual question. I need to know how form and function interact. I have to try and understand your intentions. For instance, how what you say relates to the reality you have perceived.’

They were in Chen’s office at the Institute. Jake was accompanied by Sergeant Chung who was setting up the stroboscopic light on Chen’s desk.

‘I want to speak to your unconscious in your natural language,’ she added. ‘The translation will be done by Sergeant Chung at a conscious level.’

Chen shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a try, if you think it will help.’ He smiled inquisitively. ‘Are you planning to try and induce the trance yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said Jake. ‘I have a master’s in Psychology. Rest assured, I’ve done this before. But we’ll forgo the use of an intravenous substance this time. I don’t much like them, and of course you’ll be able to return to what you were doing, almost as soon as we’ve finished here.’

Chen nodded and settled back in his armchair as Jake switched on the light.

There is a popular misconception that good hypnotic subjects tend to be weak-willed acquiescent individuals who are given to submissive behaviour. But it is entirely the opposite state of affairs which is true: the more intelligent make the more susceptible hypnotic subjects, having a greater capacity for concentration than weaker-minded people. Chen was an easy subject and highly absorptive which, as Jake was aware, indicated a developed imagination.

When she was satisfied that she had induced the hypnotic trance, she explained that she wanted to ask him some questions in Chinese and that he would hear another voice next. She told him that he should answer in Chinese and that he should now nod if he understood.

Chen nodded slowly, and then they began.

‘Would you please ask him if he remembers the patient codenamed Wittgenstein,’ Jake instructed Chung.

Chung translated the question into his own language.

Jake thought that Chinese, with its high and low sounds existing so close together, sounded like someone trying to tune an old radio. Listening to the pair of them jabbering away, Jake found it hard to accept that Chinese could have anything in common with English, even at the deep, genetically preprogrammed level.

‘Ask him if he can remember some of the things Wittgenstein said.’

Maybe she was wasting her time. Here she was, trying to investigate how language represents reality and yet she had given no consideration to the question of how anything manages to represent anything. It was not something they taught you at the Hendon Police Training College. Not something that anyone taught, except maybe people like Sir Jameson Lang. And just how far should any criminal investigation go? Had she not already gone a lot further than she was supposed to?

‘Ask him to describe Wittgenstein once again,’ she told Chung. ‘Let’s see if we didn’t miss something.’

Once again Chung translated her question, frowning fiercely as he spoke. What was there about the Chinese language, Jake wondered, that seemed to make people irritated while they were speaking it? Chen sighed and then drooled slightly while he thought of his answer. He spoke hesitantly, adding one word to another and then another, almost at random.

‘Brown raincoat,’ Chung repeated. ‘Brown shoes, good ones. Brown tweed jacket, with leather bits on the elbows. He doesn’t know what you call them. A special word. Not badges. Like badges.’

‘Patches?’ said Jake.

‘Maybe, yes.’ Chung craned his head forwards so as not to miss the rest of Chen’s speech.

‘White shirt. No, not a shirt. Like a pullover, but not like a pullover. A pullover with a polo neck. But not made of wool. Made of the same material as a shirt.’ Chung shrugged. ‘A white polo neck anyway.’

Chung’s words seemed to touch something deep within Jake’s own memory.

It was curious that Wittgenstein had mentioned her perfume, because a sense of smell — something clinical and antiseptic — was what she remembered most about him now.

‘Yat,’ she said, ‘ask Doctor Chen if it’s the same kind of white polo neck that a dentist might wear.’

Chung translated and then, hearing Chen’s reply, nodded.

‘Yes, he could have been a dentist.’

Jake shook her head.

She had offered to help Wittgenstein and he had smiled at her with what he might have thought looked like confidence. But what Jake had seen had been teeth that were scaled and yellow — teeth that were badly in need of dental work.

‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think he’s a dentist. His teeth aren’t good enough. I’ve never ever seen a dentist with bad teeth.

‘Yat, you remember you said that the only way the killer could have broken into the Lombroso system would have been if he was using a computer that was already on the EC Data Network?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ask Doctor Chen if he thinks that Wittgenstein might be a male nurse or some other kind of hospital auxiliary staff?’

Chung put the question and Chen replied that he thought he probably was.

‘Just like the real Wittgenstein,’ said Jake. ‘He worked in a hospital for a while, during the Second World War. It was one of the reasons that enabled him to avoid being imprisoned as an enemy alien.’

Chung shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble with you British,’ he said. ‘It was the same with the boat people back in Hong Kong. You always locking people up who couldn’t possibly do you any bloody harm.’

Jake brought Chen out of the trance.

‘Find anything useful in there?’ he said pleasantly.

Jake explained her hunch about Wittgenstein working at a hospital.

‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, and then stood up and stretched.

‘Well,’ said Jake, looking at her watch. ‘I think we’ve taken up enough of your time, Doctor Chen. I’m grateful.’ It was probably too late to find anyone still working at the Ministry of Health.

‘No problem,’ he said again. ‘Next time see if you can’t help me to stop smoking.’

Jake and Chung returned to the office they used when they were at the Institute, where Jake called the Ministry. She found herself connected with a picture of an impossibly fit and healthy looking girl in a leotard, and an incongruously brusque male voice on an answering-machine which informed her that the Ministry was closed until nine o’clock the following morning.

‘Well I guess that’s it until tomorrow,’ said Jake. ‘Thanks a lot for your help, Yat. I really think that was useful.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Translation makes a nice change from computers.’

They walked back to the Yard.

‘Your train goes from Paddington, doesn’t it?’ said Jake. ‘Can I offer you a lift?’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But only on one condition. That you let me take you to the best Chinese restaurant in Soho first. It’s owned by a cousin of mine.’

Jake grinned. ‘All right. It’s a deal. But won’t your wife be waiting for you?’

Chung smiled back. ‘Her mother’s staying with us at the moment. She thinks her daughter should not have married a man from Hong Kong.’

‘It’s because she’s narrow-minded,’ Jake offered.

‘No.’ Chung laughed. ‘It’s because she’s never eaten at my cousin’s restaurant.’

My brain hurts. Really, it does.

But is it any wonder? Is it any wonder when there are over 30,000 different kinds of protein swilling around in there? Is it any wonder it hurts when you consider that one gram of brain tissue uses up more energy in keeping you conscious than a gram of muscle uses to lift a barbell? When you consider that your brain consumes about a quarter of all the calories you use in a day?

But before you calorie-conscious people start getting excited and reaching for your philosophy textbooks, let me quickly add that bending your brain to understanding something like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception uses no more calories than having a dump, or picking your nose. Unfortunately for fatties, the fact is most of the calories get used in just keeping the old head-set humming, otherwise G. E. Moore might unwittingly have been responsible for the world’s first Cambridge diet.

Even so it seems to me that my own Gulliver must have been putting in a lot of overtime lately. Sustained thought on the subject of Murder during the last few months must have been using that little bit more energy. Thus the skull-fracturing headache.

The problem is that brain cells are determinedly social. They will insist on speaking to their neighbours — up to 100,000 of them at any one time. And with all the mental sensation that is the inevitable corollary of mass-murder, the electrical firing that’s been going on inside the central coconut must look like the sky above El Alamein.

If only the brain wasn’t such an efficient little bastard — just 2 per cent of body weight, as a matter of fact. In my case that’s about 1.7 kilograms. It will insist on making hundreds of back-up copies of thoughts — even the thoughts one had hoped one had forgotten — storing them in all sorts of different neuronal nooks and cranial crannies. It is like a prudent man going abroad who, having considered the possibility of being robbed, separates his cash and spreads it throughout his luggage and person. This is why when one part of the brain is physically destroyed, for example that part dealing with the recognition of colour, there’s another part of the brain which can manage it just as well.

Try as I might to prevent it, my more murderous brain cells just love talking to the others, poisoning them with their logical pictures of the facts in an attempt to win them round to their cause.

This brings me no small discomfort. Insomnia being the worst torment. Sometimes I lie awake the greater part of the night, watching them at work. It’s easy enough to spot when something’s happening. All thought becomes an image, and the soul becomes a body. Thought actually manifests itself in little hot spots that are the colour of blood. Recently there’s been a lot more of this colour than normal and the other night, the inside of my dome resembled one of those volcanic lava flows that sometimes spew out of Mount Etna and engulf a couple of local villages.

The chief area of neuronal discussion seems to be that I should move on from killing my brothers and start on the human race in general. A sort of business expansion scheme. This seems to me to be a lamentable trend and one which worries me considerably. I had hoped that I could keep things in check a bit, but of course lacking a VMN, ultimately this may not be possible. It may be that in time I shall be forced to close down the company altogether.