A Philosophical Investigation

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.’

That much seemed certain, Jake thought.

She turned away from the empty pictophone screen and banged her desk with frustration. Somehow she knew that Waring’s plan might well work and that unless she thought of something, and quickly, Wittgenstein’s collar was going to slip through her fingers. Perhaps his own as well.

Later that same morning, Jake’s thoughts returned to this picture she had of things slipping through fingers. Somehow it brought to mind Wittgenstein’s A-Z again, and a teasing game she had sometimes played at school.

She called Detective Inspector Stanley and asked him to bring Wittgenstein’s A-Z to her office immediately.

It had been a simple childish sort of joke which involved grabbing a novel by D. H. Lawrence, or some other moral iconoclast, from the briefcase of a friend and, with the aim of embarrassing her, trying to determine if the book was at all inclined, by the implication of an excessively frequent consultation, to fall open at one of the more lurid pages. As if to confirm her theory now, Jake drew open the desk drawer and took out her own copy of London’s A-Z. She balanced the book by its perfect bound spine on the palm of her hand and allowed it to fall apart into two sections, at the pages covering that area of south-west London where New Scotland Yard is located.

Stanley arrived carrying the A-Z in a plastic evidence bag as if it was a goldfish he had won at the funfair.

Jake flung her own copy aside and grabbed the bag from out of Stanley’s outstretched fist. His jaw dropped as she tore off the special warning label that had been stapled on to it.

‘This is such a simple idea that I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it before,’ said Jake, and took hold of the book.

‘What are you doing?’ hissed Stanley. ‘That’s evidence. You can’t handle that. There are fingerprints on it — you’ll spoil them.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jake and repeated the simple manoeuvre. The book parted itself slowly and then lay open on her palm like an exhausted bird. Jake uttered a yell of satisfaction.

‘Just like Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ she said. ‘It opens first where it’s most been read.’

She scanned the two facing pages of streets, underground stations, parklands, dual carriageways, fire stations, and hospitals, closely, as if she had been reading from the Book of Life.

‘Pages seventy-eight to seventy-nine,’ she murmured. ‘From Waterloo Station as far east as Rotherhithe; Tower Bridge down to Peckham Road. Let’s see now. There are one — two — three — four hospitals in this area. And one of them is Guy’s.’ She stated this last fact as if it had been what the thunder said.

Stanley corrected his shirt collar. ‘I’m sorry I don’t quite see the significance,’ he said.

‘Don’t you?’ said Jake, turning to her pictophone screen and keying out Mrs Porter’s number at the Ministry of Health. ‘Guy’s Hospital was where the real Wittgenstein worked, during the war. In the pharmacy.’

‘That’s a hell of a hunch you’re playing.’

‘Have you got a better one?’

Stanley shook his head.

When Jake found Mrs Porter, she asked her to check for a German or a man of Germanic origin who might be working at Guy’s.

‘My goodness, you have narrowed it down,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘Right then. No problem at all. Just give me a couple of minutes.’ She turned away from the pictophone camera and devoted her attention to her computer.

Jake waited with patient expectation, like someone having her Tarot read by a famous clairvoyant. Stanley looked on, vaguely disapproving. Finally, Mrs Porter looked back at the camera.

‘At Guy’s Hospital there are three male persons of the racial type you’ve designated,’ she said, with all the natural sententiousness of her profession. ‘A Mister Hesse and a Mister Deussen, but both of them are surgeons. And then there is a Mister Esterhazy, who works in the hospital pharmacy.’

‘He sounds interesting,’ said Jake. ‘Can you send me all there is on him?’

‘Well really I should get the Chief Secretary’s permission...’

‘Mrs Porter,’ said Jake. ‘I can’t tell you too much, but people’s lives are at stake here.’

‘Then I can’t very well refuse,’ said Mrs Porter. ‘It’s not much, but I’ll send you what’s in the file.’

‘Is there a photograph?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Damn,’ said Jake. ‘A handwriting sample, perhaps?’

‘Er yes, a small one.’

‘Then send that as well, if you would, please. And thanks, Mrs Porter. You’ve been a great help.’

Jake gave Mrs Porter her computer’s data communication number and then watched as the information started to arrive on her screen.

‘Right,’ she said to Stanley. ‘Let’s make a MAP.’

Jake moved the Ministry of Health’s data onto one half of the computer screen while on the other she called up an investigative menu. From the twenty available files she selected the one titled ‘Criminal Information Database’. The computer gurgled for several seconds and then provided Jake with another list. Finding ‘Multiple Homicides’ featured as File Number 15, Jake typed that number and waited. The system was hopelessly antiquated with a response time that could infuriate all but the most patient of people: sometimes Jake found herself waiting as long as thirty seconds for the computer to find a specific information file. Once again the computer gurgled and once again a series of further choices appeared before her eyes. Finally Jake managed to key into the Multiple Analysis Program.

As developed by her former employers, the European Bureau of Investigation, the MAP was the very latest expert guidance system for assessing a suspect’s personality as a possible multiple killer. From a worldwide database of some 5,000 multiple killers, compiled over a period of fifteen years, the MAP included up to 300 common characteristics of known multiple offenders.

The detective fed information about a suspect into the computer. Then the MAP awarded a certain number of possible points for each item of information that tallied with known multiple behaviour. For instance, the MAP awarded maximum points if the suspect was white, since it happened that most multiple killers were white. Blacks could only obtain a maximum number of points in this respect if the victim was elderly and white: this was because the existing database showed that murders of elderly whites were most commonly committed by blacks. When all the information available to the detective had been fed into the computer, the MAP counted up the number of points and offered the detective a statistical probability that the suspect was indeed a multiple killer. Even then there was nothing automatic about what resulted from the program’s assessment. The sole responsibility for if and how the results were used remained the detective’s. For Jake it was the one computerised system of investigative analysis that she actively enjoyed using.

Stanley stood over her shoulder as Jake started to key in the information using the Ministry’s personnel file on Esterhazy as a reference. When it came to the suspect’s religion Jake was surprised to see that Esterhazy had described himself as a Manichean.

‘What the hell’s a Manichean?’ Stanley growled.

‘Manichean? It’s not really a religion at all,’ Jake explained. ‘More a kind of viewpoint that considers Satan to be co-eternal with God. Equal sides of the same coin, so to speak. St Augustine was a Manichean for a while, until he thought better of it. Eventually it was denounced as a heresy.’

She glanced at the record of Esterhazy’s distinguishing marks. ‘Excellent,’ she murmured. ‘This guy has three tattoos.’

The EBI held that tattoos were one of the most common physical similarities among multiple killers. Examination of the bodies of 300 multiple killers, dead or alive, had revealed that almost 70 per cent of them were marked in this way. It was generally held by forensic psychiatrists that self-mutilation was often an early indicator of criminally aggressive behaviour. The greater the percentage of body area covered with tattoos, the greater number of points the MAP would allocate to the suspect.

She glanced over at the laser-printer as it sprang into swift action.

‘Is that the handwriting sample they’re sending?’ she asked Stanley.

Stanley leaned over the machine and inspected the printout. Then he tore it off the main sheet and handed it to Jake.

She opened her desk drawer and took out a magnifying glass which she passed over the handwriting as if she had been looking for a fingerprint. Graphology had been a major part of her training with the European Bureau of Investigation.

‘Look at this,’ she murmured. ‘The handwriting is hardly joined up at all. It’s mostly capital letters. Small ones too.’

Stanley bent over her to take another look.

‘Neat though,’ he observed.

‘Too neat,’ said Jake. ‘This is someone who’s really straining to keep things under control. It’s almost like he could explode at any minute. I wonder when this was written.’

‘Maybe when he joined the hospital,’ Stanley suggested.

Jake typed a description of Esterhazy’s handwriting onto the program.

‘Other distinguishing characteristics?’ She picked up the glass and was silent for a minute while she searched again. Finally she handed Stanley the glass.

‘Take a look at the way he writes his letter “W”,’ she said, pointing them out on the copy. ‘Here, and here.’

‘It’s more like a letter “V”,’ said Stanley. ‘With a stroke in the middle. Like a pen nib.’

‘But don’t you think it’s actually rather vaginal?’

Stanley looked again.

‘Now you come to mention it,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re right, I think.’

Jake typed her description and then pondered her own graphologist’s analysis.

‘You know, that might just indicate a possible Oedipus complex.’

‘The bloke who fucked his mother, right?’

‘Yes, Stanley,’ she said coolly, ‘the bloke who fucked his mother, Jocasta. More pertinently, he also murdered his own father, Laius, King of Thebes.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘It means that our friend here may be paranoid. He may resent paternal and, therefore, all male authority. Believe me,’ she added, ‘I know what I’m talking about. That’s one thing Esterhazy and I have in common.’ She smiled to herself, and glanced sideways at Stanley but his crumpled face registered no sign of surprise. She almost thought there ought to have been a fanfare of trumpets.

‘That sounds criminal enough,’ said Stanley. ‘Where does this bastard live?’

Jake glanced up at the side of the computer screen still containing the details of Esterhazy’s personnel file. She hit the keyboard to send the cursor in search of this information.

‘Nurses’ home, at Guy’s Hospital,’ she said.

‘The nurses’ home?’ Stanley sounded shocked.

‘I imagine it’s the male nurses’ home,’ Jake said patiently.

‘Whatever it means, he sounds like a bit of an outsider to me,’ said Stanley. ‘Leastways someone who’s not much at home in this world.’

‘You could be right,’ said Jake. ‘But let’s see what the program says, shall we?’

She finished typing in the rest of the information and glanced over the result.

When she was satisfied that there was nothing more she could usefully add, Jake instructed the program to calculate the degree of probability. The machine gurgled, emptied half of the screen, flashed several colours and was silent for almost a minute. Finally a number arrived on screen.

‘56.6 per cent probable,’ said Jake.

‘Not much better than an even chance,’ said Stanley.

Jake grunted. Accessing the original MAP once again, she asked to review the existing 300 characteristics of the database. This took several minutes to read through.

‘You know,’ said Jake finally. ‘There’s nothing here about transportation. What’s a multiple’s most common mode of transport?’

‘Truck,’ said Stanley, hardly hesitating. ‘Small van, or an estate car.’

‘Right,’ said Jake. She cleared the screen and accessed the main menu. This time she selected the National Vehicle Licensing File to check if a vehicle was registered to Esterhazy. After a short pause the computer returned with the information.

‘Bullseye,’ said Jake. ‘He owns a blue Toyota Tardis van, registration Gold Victor Bravo 7-8-3-7 Romeo. Now if we assume that the van is worth another three points, that takes us to almost 60 per cent.’

‘That’s a bit more like it,’ agreed Stanley.

Jake started typing again.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘That racial marker we had from the killer’s DNA...’

‘A German. So?’

‘So Esterhazy isn’t an English name.’

‘It isn’t?’

Jake fed Esterhazy’s name and identity card number into the computer.

‘It’s Hungarian or Austrian, I think. Let’s see what his birth certificate says, shall we?’

A copy of the document flashed up on the screen.

‘Parents born in Leipzig,’ said Jake. She looked at Stanley triumphantly. ‘I’d say that about clinches it.’

Five minutes after Jake finished the Multiple Analysis Program, Detective Sergeant Jones came into her office. He was holding a compact disc and looked angry.

‘Yes?’ said Jake. ‘What is it?’

‘It was orders,’ he said. ‘From Gilmour. I didn’t have any choice.’ Jake guessed what he was talking about. ‘Wittgenstein called, didn’t he?’

Jones took a deep breath. ‘About half an hour ago. Gilmour said you weren’t to speak to him.’ He glanced awkwardly at his shoes. ‘He told me to leave it to Professor Lang to handle the conversation.’

Jake nodded numbly. ‘With what result?’

‘I brought the recording,’ said Jones and handed her the disc. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

Jake smiled bitterly. ‘It’s not your fault. Did he say that he was planning to kill another one?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘What about Lang’s little suggestion? Do you think that it had its desired effect?’

Jones shrugged. ‘Hard to say, ma’am.’

‘All right. Get onto Airborne Surveillance. See if they can find a blue Toyota Tardis van, registration Golf Victor Bravo 7-8-3-7 Romeo.’

Detective Sergeant Jones leaned on Jake’s desk and made a note of the number.

‘Come on, Stanley,’ said Jake, heading out through the office door. ‘We’ll listen to the recording in the car.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jones shouted after them.

‘Hospital,’ said Jake. ‘To get my fucking head examined. Maybe they can tell me why I bother coming here.’

‘That’s all we need,’ Jake screamed as the car twisted loudly onto Victoria Street. ‘This madman to go and top himself just as we’re in sight of arresting him. I could kill those stupid bastards in the Home Office.

‘Better put the siren on,’ she told her driver. ‘We need to make tracks.’

Jake switched on the disc player and inserted the recording.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to settle with having me today,’ Jake heard Lang tell Wittgenstein, much as if he had been apologising to a student for another don’s absence from a tutorial. ‘Chief Inspector Jakowicz is unable to come to the phone right now.’

‘The lying piece of shit,’ said Jake. ‘So much for moral philosophy.’

‘I hope she isn’t sick,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘I hope she isn’t upset because of what happened the last time. I had promised to talk, after my lecture. To discuss things.’

‘No, no,’ insisted Lang. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘Well, something more important, no doubt,’ he replied, sounding rather piqued. ‘I dare say we can get along without Chief Inspector Jakowicz, just this once.’

Immediately she heard Wittgenstein’s voice she realised that he sounded different: lacking confidence, tired, depressed even. And as their conversation progressed he allowed the professor to take the conversational initiative, to lead the argument. He seemed hardly sure why he had bothered to call at all. He spoke quietly, in dull monotones, with long, ponderous silences. Jake realised how vulnerable he might actually be to whatever phenomenological interrogation Lang had planned for him.

‘Man is a temporal being,’ said Lang.

‘Yes,’ said Wittgenstein dully.

‘A self-creating being who chooses his own fate, wouldn’t you say so?’

‘Oh, I agree.’

‘And being conscious, through one’s own will of one’s own temporality, then the only real certainty about the future is...’

‘... is death,’ added Wittgenstein.

Jake held on to the door handle as the car swerved through traffic.

‘To live well,’ she heard Lang say, ‘to really live life to the full, you have to live in the hard light of that fact.’

‘Absolutely, yes,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘That is both one’s nature and one’s ultimate fate.’

‘The more so in your case.’

‘How so?’

‘Well,’ said Lang, ‘it seems to me that by killing all these other men who, like you, tested VMN-negative, you are merely postponing your real desire to take your own life.’

‘There may be something in what you say.’

Jake punched the back of her driver’s headrest.

‘Can’t we go any faster?’ she yelled. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Stanley nervously lift his Adam’s apple clear of his shirt collar as the car gave a lurch of speed forward. The driver, who was used to angry demands from the back seat that he should go faster, betrayed no emotion on his lean moustachioed face. He fed the steering wheel through his strong hands as calmly and expertly as if he had been making a perfect circle of pizza dough. In front of the car, the traffic widened like an opening zipper. Speeding past Waterloo Station and round the three-storey-high shanty town of hardboard and corrugated iron, they almost hit a vagrant who was standing motionless in the middle of the road like a traffic bollard. They missed him by only a few centimetres.

‘Stupid bastard,’ Stanley muttered, twisting around in his seat to look through the rear window at the quickly shrinking figure. ‘Someone ought to move all these people.’

‘I think I’m right in saying, Professor Wittgenstein,’ said Lang, ‘that suicide has been rather common in your family. Not to mention the fact that your own adolescent hero, Otto Weininger, took his own life.’

‘You’re right, of course. My brother Rudolf killed himself. It was a merely theatrical gesture. Weininger’s death was altogether something else. It was an ethical acceptance of an intellectually predisposed fate. A noble thing.’

‘As I recall, there were many Viennese men who were moved to kill themselves in imitation of Weininger. But you did not. Was it simply that you did not dare to kill yourself? That you did not have the courage?’

Wittgenstein uttered a long, deep snort of amusement. ‘You’re very good, Professor. I see your game. Well perhaps you’d call it a game. It certainly isn’t a perfect game. It has... impurities. I compliment you. Well then I shall also call it a game. Existential Leaps, perhaps. But only because I am dazzled by your ideal.’ He spoke languorously, as if savouring the full implication of Sir Jameson Lang’s design. ‘It is quite admirable.’

‘I am glad that you think so,’ said Lang, apparently undisturbed by Wittgenstein’s complete understanding of what he was trying to achieve. ‘If I may add one more thing, however...’

‘I should insist on it.’

‘I’d be correct in assuming that you believe in God?’

‘Yes, you would be correct.’

‘Therefore, you have the perspective for suicide. The God relationship and the Self. That’s very important. I mean, any atheist can commit suicide. They have no sense of spirit. The point about suicide, that it is a crime against God Himself, altogether escapes the atheist. Well, what I’m trying to say is this: all this time I imagine you’ve been thinking that in killing these other men you were killing God.’

‘That’s fair I suppose.’

‘I won’t ask you why. I’m not interested why. But I’m sure you have your reasons. Whatever they are, I respect them. I feel quite sure you must have given the matter a great deal of thought. But look here, if you really want to wave two fingers in the face of God, then you’ve been missing the point. That’s not the way to do it. To flee from existence itself is the most critical sin, the ultimate rebellion against the Creator. What is required of you is intensified defiance, the heightening of despair.

‘The last time we spoke you described yourself as an artist. I don’t doubt it. Only as such, yours is a common dilemma: the sin of living life in the imaginative as opposed to the real world, of Art instead of Being. Naturally God plays the crucial role in your heightened sense of despair. In your secret torment, God is your only hope, and yet you love the torment and will not abandon it. Somehow you are aware that what you must do is let go of your torment and take it upon yourself in faith, and that you cannot do. So your defiance of God intensifies and you kill others to prove it. But, as I say, real defiance is shown most of all by killing oneself.’

Wittgenstein sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘What you say about the artist’s existence feels true.’

‘How do you feel about killing yourself?’

There was a long silence.

The car left Southwark Street and sped along Southwark Bridge Road into Borough. St Thomas Street. Guy’s Hospital. The security guards on the gate lifted the barrier and stepped quickly back as the car roared past.

‘Does it make you feel afraid?’

Jake cursed Lang loudly.

‘Do you believe in eternal life?’

‘Eternal life,’ Wittgenstein whispered, ‘belongs to those who live in the present.’

Jake heard him smile as he added:

‘Is some riddle solved by me surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question. Well then. The riddle does not exist. And the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’ Then he rang off.

Jake buttoned down the electric window and leaned out of the car to address the gate-keeper.

‘Where’s the nurses’ home?’ she asked.

‘Nurses’ home? You’re a bit out-of-date, aren’t you? That closed two years ago.’

‘Drive on,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll try inside the butcher’s shop.’

The car accelerated forward and came to a screeching halt at the hospital’s front steps. Jake sprang out of the car and raced up to the front door where, startled by the speed of her arrival, two police guards met her with pointed guns. She waved her ID in front of their bovine faces and demanded to be taken to the hospital administrator.

The first policeman took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Don’t have one, ma’am,’ he said.

‘The manager then,’ she said. ‘The director. Whoever’s in charge.’

Both men continued to look puzzled.

‘Who is in charge?’ the first policeman said to his colleague. ‘I dunno.’

‘Ask her,’ suggested the other, and pointed to a nurse.

‘We want the person in charge,’ the first policeman said to the nurse. ‘The one that runs the place.’

The nurse smiled unpleasantly, as if she had been about to provide some very nasty medicine.

‘Make your mind up please,’ she said. ‘Which is it to be? The person in charge, or the person who runs the place? They’re not the same.’

Jake resisted the temptation to draw her weapon and press it to the nurse’s forehead.

‘We want someone who knows about the personnel who work here,’ she said patiently.

‘Well why didn’t you say? You don’t want the person who runs the place. You want a personnel director. But which one? Student, surgical, nursing, administrative, technical or...’

‘Technical,’ yelled Jake. ‘I want a pharmacy technician.’

‘All the way down that corridor, then second corridor on your right, fourth door on the left,’ said the nurse and walked quickly away.

Jake turned to look for Detective Inspector Stanley and found him leaning against one of the graffitied walls, already looking decidedly greenish. Hardly disguising her contempt, Jake said: ‘Oh yes, I was forgetting about your stomach, wasn’t I. You’d better wait outside.’

Stanley nodded weakly and staggered out of the doors.

‘I’ll come with you ma’am,’ said one of the policemen. ‘It’s best I do, to be quite frank. You never know who’s hanging around in this place. There are some very dodgy types who walk in and out of these doors, I can tell you. It’s not like the Metropolitan Police Clinic at Hendon.’

‘All right,’ said Jake. ‘Come on then.’

They walked briskly down the foul-smelling corridor the nurse had directed them to. Further away from the entrance hall, they started to find that the corridor was lined with patients lying on the floor, some of whom got up from their dirty mattresses to beg for a few dollars towards their hospital bills. The guard thrust them all roughly aside.

The technical personnel director’s office was opposite what looked like a bank vault, but was in fact the hospital dispensary. Another two armed guards stood on either side of a barred window in a steel-plated door. The door to the personnel director’s office was made of reinforced glass. Jake’s guard pressed the bell and lifted his mug towards the video camera scanning the both of them.

‘Visitor for the TPD,’ he said.

The door buzzed and sprang open.

The technical personnel director’s office was small and barely furnished. The telephones looked like they’d been there since the hospital was built. The computer was a cheap Strad such as the poorest student might have owned. A half-eaten hamburger lay on the desk. On the television were some girls doing aerobics in costumes that were a couple of sizes too small. From the prurient camera-angles it didn’t look like the kind of aerobics that the viewer was meant to join in with.

Jake confronted a Welshman wearing a pinstripe suit and a zip-up cardigan who smelt heavily of sweat and fried food. She handed him her identity card.

‘I’m Chief Inspector Jakowicz,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to find one of your employees, Paul Esterhazy, at the nurses’ home, however I understand from the gate-keeper that it has closed. Is Mr Esterhazy currently in the building?’

‘It’s his day off,’ said the director, examining Jake’s identity card with considerable interest. ‘Murder Squad, eh? Is Paul in trouble or something.’

‘It is very urgent that I speak to him, sir,’ said Jake. ‘Do you have his present home address?’

‘He only lived in the men’s hostel very briefly,’ said the director. ‘Temporary like. Just while he found himself somewhere permanent to live.’

‘Well then if you could just oblige me by telling me where that is.’

The man’s piggy eyes narrowed. ‘Paul wouldn’t harm a fly, you know. I’ve known him for years. Gentle as a lamb, he is.’

Jake, who wished she had a dollar for every time she’d heard that, said that she merely wanted Esterhazy in order that he could help her with her enquiries.

‘But that’s always what you people say when you arrest someone. Are you going to arrest Paul? Because if you are, I’ll have to speak to the hospital lawyer before I can give you his address.’

Jake sighed and asked why.

The man smiled a patronising sort of smile. ‘Believe me, Chief Inspector,’ he said, ‘there’s not much that we do in this hospital that we don’t speak to the lawyer first of all. If you only knew the number of malpractice suits we have to deal with here.’

‘Look,’ Jake hissed back at him. ‘I’m not one of your damned patients, and I’m in a hurry, so if you wouldn’t mind...’

The director tut-tutted and shook his head. ‘Well, put the case that I did give you Paul Esterhazy’s address, which I’m not saying I do have, mind. And put the case that you went there to arrest him. Put the case that while you were there arresting him you, or one of your men, shot Esterhazy. Put the case that prevented by law from suing the police, he or his family might well decide to sue the hospital instead, for releasing confidential information to you.’

Jake nodded grimly. ‘Very well then. You give me no choice. Put the case that you give me Paul Esterhazy’s address this minute, or I shall be obliged to arrest you.’

‘On what charge?’

‘Double parking. Sex with a minor. Drunk and disorderly. Come on, will you? What charge do you think? I’m a police officer trying to do my duty, and you’re obstructing me. So what’s it to be? Postal code or caution?’

‘Look, I’m not refusing to give you his address, see? I’m only saying that I should call the hospital lawyer first of all.’

‘I’ve no time for that,’ snapped Jake. ‘The address now, if you please.’

The director turned to face his computer screen, his face wrinkled with displeasure. He tapped the keyboard several times, then stood up and went over to the tiny printer which was already in action. Finally he tore off a sheet of paper and handed it to Jake.

‘Thank you,’ she said crisply.

‘Now perhaps you’ll tell me a little more of what this is all about.’

But Jake was already walking out. ‘If you leave your TV on for long enough, you’ll find out,’ she yelled out from the corridor.

Outside again, Jake found Stanley and her driver waiting patiently for her beside the BMW.

‘Docklands,’ she said, as she came down the steps and jumped into the back of the car. ‘Ocean Wharf as fast as you can.’

Stanley was opening and then closing the car boot.

‘Come on,’ she shouted. ‘Let’s go.’

He got in beside her and she saw that he was cradling a pump-action shotgun.

‘Just in case,’ he said, patting the weapon like a favourite pet. ‘That’s a pretty tough area.’

The car leaped forwards, heading east again, Druid Street and the Jamaica Road along to the Rotherhithe Tunnel, under the Thames where the air was cool and fetid. Then the sun again as the car emerged onto Limehouse Road in the shadow of the Docklands Light Railway overhead.

Turning south onto West Ferry Road, they caught sight of the Isle of Dogs, and then the car was immediately enveloped in a swirl of gritty dust blowing like a mini-typhoon off one of the area’s many abandoned building sites. Rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their roofs patched with corrugated iron gave onto modern tower blocks that stuck out of the dusty, rubble-strewn landscape like giant cacti. A helicopter skimmed around the pyramidical roof of Canary Wharf, hovering like a bluebottle: it was a unit of Airborne Surveillance on permanent attachment to protect what was left of what once had been the pride of the Docklands development from the depredations of the sordid colonies of wooden shanty-housing which, at a short distance away, surrounded it.

Canary Wharf Tower was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous structure of sunburnt steel and glass soaring up, floor after empty floor, 300 metres into the air, and visible from as far away as Battersea. From the backseat of Jake’s BMW it was just possible to read, picked out on its electronic advertising hoarding of white neon lights, in elegant green lettering, the rotating slogans of the only three companies which had offices there:

GOLDSTEIN LIFE ASSURANCE. BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT LIVE TO REGRET IT.

THE YAMURA 22-CARAT GOLD COMPACT DISC. 8 OUT OF 10 JAPS SAY THEY PREFER IT.

ROYAL MARSDEN ONCOLOGICAL INSURANCE. A LUMP SUM, JUST WHEN YOU NEED IT MOST.

Keeping pace with the toy railway as if they had been following some drug dealer who was aboard it and making a desperate attempt to escape the police, they had Canary Wharf, Heron Quays and South Quay on their left, the whole business area of the Docks on the other side of a maze of barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were patrolled by private security guards in black uniforms with jointed truncheons.

The car turned down one of these side streets where a small gang of youths had collected in front of a bonfire and were engaged in teasing a stray dog, and as if in confirmation of the area’s tough reputation, a rock bounced off the BMW’s toughened windshield, and Stanley worked the magazine of the riot gun expectantly.

‘Relax,’ said Jake, as the car pulled up to the fortress of razor-wire that was the Ocean Wharf compound. But she herself felt anything but that. The security guards waved them through, and in the car-park, beyond the entry gate, stood a blue Toyota Tardis van. They checked the registration.

‘Looks like our man’s at home,’ Jake said as she caught sight of it. If Wittgenstein was indeed contemplating suicide by now, thanks to Sir Jameson Lang’s persuasion, then being a pedestrian in Docklands would have been a good way of doing it.

There were four apartment blocks in Ocean Wharf and Jake consulted her printout to see which one was home to Wittgenstein.

‘Winston Mansions,’ she said as they climbed out of the car. ‘Seventh floor. Let’s hope we’re not too late.’

Stanley looked up at the height of building. ‘Let’s hope the lift is working,’ he added.

Inside the glass doors of Winston Mansions a fruity voice was describing a commercial for a brand of dog food that promised to produce less dog waste than any other brand. The voice came from a television screen behind the doorman’s desk. When the doorman saw Jake and Stanley he turned the volume down, and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. People rarely ever turned a television off completely.

‘Is Paul Esterhazy at home?’ said Jake, flashing her ID in front of the doorman’s face, although there was no need. He had already seen the police car.

‘Went up about thirty minutes ago,’ said the doorman. His eyes stayed on the screen. ‘Want me to call him?’

‘Metaslim. Increase your metabolic rate. The only effective way to help you lose weight,’ said the television.

‘No,’ said Jake, going towards the lift. ‘We’ll announce ourselves.’

Stanley pressed a button to summon the lift.

‘S’not working,’ said the doorman. ‘Company that’s supposed to service it went bankrupt.’

Jake glanced around the lobby. ‘The stairs,’ she said. ‘Where are they?’

The doorman pointed at a brightly lit corridor behind him. At the end of it was a grey steel door. Jake started towards it.

‘Save you a journey,’ the doorman added. ‘Supposing you was planning to go up to the seventh floor. Mr Esterhazy’s the only tenant on that level. So he keeps the fire doors locked from the inside, for security, when I’m not around. S’made of steel, just like that door in front of you, miss. You might bang on it all day and he wouldn’t hear you.’

All through this explanation the doorman’s eyes never strayed from the television screen. He was like some small animal hypnotically fascinated by the movements of a snake.

‘Want me to call him now?’

Jake smiled politely and nodded with slow patience.

The doorman buttoned a number on the internal pictophone and then turned back towards the TV.

‘Usually takes a while for him to pick it up,’ he explained.

A minute passed with no answer.

‘Are you sure he’s in?’ Stanley frowned.

‘Only one way up, only one way down. Unless he jumped of course.’

‘Perhaps you were distracted,’ offered Stanley. ‘By the TV.’

The doorman looked scornfully at the policeman. ‘Nothing worth watching,’ he said. ‘No, he’s up there all right. In trouble then, is he?’

But it was Esterhazy who answered first.

‘Yes, Joe, I’m here. What do you want? I’m a bit busy right now.’

‘Not me,’ said the doorman. ‘The police.’

Jake recognised the voice immediately. It was Wittgenstein all right. There was no mistaking that voice. She pushed the doorman gently aside and looked into the pictophone.

He sat with his head tilted slightly to one side. Looking like an excrescence of thought, the curly hair grew wildly towards the same side as the angle of his head. The thin face was almost completely expressionless, but as Jake studied it more closely she saw something sulky and slightly petulant about it. It was the eyes that held Jake. They stared out from the deep shadowy hollows of his face as if from behind a masque, like the eyes of some nocturnal animal. She was reminded of photographs she had seen of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Chief Inspector Jakowicz.’

Esterhazy smiled broadly.

‘My dear Chief Inspector,’ he said smoothly. ‘Is this a social call or are you here on business?’

Jake’s heart was in her mouth. She had him. There was no way he could get away from her now. In a way she was almost sorry.

‘I’m here to arrest you.’

‘Well, what a relief. I thought you were going to try and bore me into killing myself, like your Professor Lang.’ He laughed. ‘The very idea of it: ridiculous.’

‘No, nothing like that,’ she said.

‘You know, I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘By which I mean I believed that you would come, though your coming did not occupy my thoughts. I don’t mean that I was eagerly awaiting you, Chief Inspector. What I mean here is that I should have been surprised if you hadn’t come at all.’

Out of the corner of her eye Jake caught sight of Stanley, his lips pursed in a silent whistle and his forefinger revolving suggestively next to his forehead.

‘Well, I’m here now. Can I come up and talk to you?’

‘But we’re already talking, aren’t we?’

‘In person.’

‘I am, in person. If I were not I should already be dead.’

‘I wish to talk to you about a number of murders,’ Jake said stiffly. It was the cop coming out in her and she flinched as she heard herself. She added, more gently, ‘Don’t you think it would be better—’ But it was too late.

‘This despotic demand of yours,’ he said. ‘This wish... Curious that you should have used that word, with its expectation of non-satisfaction. I wonder, what is your prototype of non-satisfaction? Strange, isn’t it? That a wish seems already to know what would satisfy it, even when that thing is not there at all. Even when it could not possibly exist.’

Jake tried to hang on to the conversation. ‘It seemed simple enough when I said it.’

Esterhazy tutted fussily. ‘You of all people should know that wishes are a veil between us and the thing wished for. It’s a problem for you, I know, to speak to someone like me with something as crude as ordinary language.’

‘We seem to be getting into a dead-end here,’ said Jake.

‘Easy, isn’t it? In philosophy. In life. But you’re right, a dead-end is exactly what this is, for both of us. For your philosophical investigation and for mine.’

He smiled, sadly it seemed to Jake.

‘I agree. So why don’t you stop wasting time and let me come up and we can sort it all out?’

‘I’m afraid I cannot permit that. You see I have no intention of being “sorted out” as you put it. That would mean spending the next thirty years of my life in a punitive coma. Now that really would be a waste of time.’

‘You know there’s no way out of here,’ said Jake.

‘Oh but there is,’ said Esterhazy. ‘By the time you manage to break in here, I shall be squaring the circle, so to speak.’

Stanley frowned. ‘What’s he mean?’ He looked belligerently at the doorman. ‘You sure there’s no way out?’

Jake said to Stanley, ‘He means Infinity. He’s going to kill himself after all.’

‘Oh not because of any argument deployed by that fool Jameson Lang,’ said Esterhazy.

‘So why?’

‘As I said, I have no intention of wasting time in a coma. As soon as you arrived here, I realised the game was over. You’re the reason I have to kill myself, Jake. You’re the reason.’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t do it.’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Jake. It was always part of my plans.’

Covering the microphone with her hand, Jake asked the doorman if there was a way onto the roof.

‘Don’t try and stop me,’ said Esterhazy.

‘I can’t let you go like this,’ said Jake. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

The doorman handed Stanley a set of keys.

‘I’m touched,’ said Esterhazy. ‘Really I am.’

‘Don’t think I’m climbing all the way up there with you,’ said the doorman.

‘But, Jake, you don’t understand. Feeling the world as a limited whole — now that is something to be afraid of.’

The screen went blank. Jake turned to the doorman.

‘These apartment buildings usually have some kind of window cleaner’s hoist on the roof. Is there one up there?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But it’s never been used these past twelve months. The cleaning contractor went bust at the same time as the lift company. I don’t know that I’d want to trust my life to it.’

But Jake was already through the door to the stairs, followed closely by Stanley.

He said nothing until they were standing on the roof, recovering their breath.

‘Look, ma’am,’ he wheezed. ‘Why don’t we leave it to the TFS? Let them handle it, eh?’ He helped Jake to manoeuvre the hoist out over the edge of the roof.

‘What? And let them shoot him dead? No, I want this collar. I want a proper trial. Besides, by the time they get here he may well have topped himself.’

She climbed into the hoist and inspected the controls which required two operators standing at opposite ends. Stanley peered nervously over the edge.

‘Best for him, best for us, eh? Save us the bother.’

‘You sound like one of those bastards at the Home Office,’ she said. ‘Look, are you getting in or not? I can’t operate this thing by myself.’

‘But it’s ten storeys,’ pleaded Stanley. He shook his head grimly and climbed aboard. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. The bloke’s a nutter.’ He took hold of the control handle and nodded to Jake at the other end of the platform. ‘What do I care if he tops himself or not?’

The hoist jerked and then dropped half a metre.

‘Slowly,’ yelled Jake.

‘What the fuck happens when we get to his window? Suppose he doesn’t decide to top himself? Suppose he decides to kill us first? What then?’ Stanley drew his gun as he spoke. Jake was already holding hers. The hoist was moving smoothly now.

‘When we get to the seventh floor, we’ll shoot the windows out,’ said Jake. ‘Then climb inside.’

‘Jesus,’ muttered Stanley, and trembled visibly.

Jake looked up at the distance they had covered. The sun had lent a huge fireball to the smoked windows of the top two floors. For a moment Jake had the thought that she and Stanley were both disposal experts working to defuse some huge nuclear device which had exploded in their faces. A blast of wind cooled her face and shook the hoist under their feet. Stanley groaned. They reached the seventh floor. She blinked and tried to focus through the brightened window and when at last she saw him it was like seeing an X-ray photograph develop in front of her eyes.

There is nothing that cannot be solved by murder, money, or suicide. I’ve killed an apostolic number. And I’ve got plenty of money. Which only leaves option three. No problem.

If, as Malraux says, ‘death changes life into destiny’, then suicide makes destiny subject to personal choice. In life’s great bridge game it’s the last card you can play.

Naturally enough, suicide affects the total perception of a life in a way that no other death can ever do. Fatal car accidents, air-crashes, cot-deaths, executions, even murders are as nothing when you take a long look at the sui side of life. If eternity changes us into what we really are, then suicide is the ultimate moving force for that change.

Take Mr and Mrs Suicide, Vincent and Sylvia: what would their reputations have been had they not killed themselves? Both were completely unknown at the time of their deaths. But after that dread act, not only does their work become famous, but also a certain poignancy attaches to it. They achieve the status of artistic martyrdom. Their works become icons.

No such delusions on my part need detain us here. Nor is my self-slaughter referable to my recently concluded philosophical dialogue with Professor Sir Jameson Lang. His arguments, strongly reminiscent of something Kierkegaard once wrote, were already familiar to me. Indeed I hold his truths to be self-evident.

The fact is that it was already in my mind to kill myself and it might just as well be done now as later on. Especially as my mind is clear and equal to the task of the great philosophical discourse with the terrible nameless one which will follow the big sleep.

How then, am I to tell you of the circumstances of my death?

Do you wish to be told plainly that I returned home and hanged myself? Even if it were true, it would not be much of an end to my life’s story. To say only what is true is as dull as it is to say nothing except what can be said, that is, something that has nothing to do with philosophy. Although this method is the only strictly correct one, I suspect it may not be satisfying to you. Naturally you require something more, something metaphysical perhaps. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. No doubt you would have preferred some story of the way I killed myself, and what happened immediately after my death. Some story which might serve as an explanation for everything that has gone before.

But my stories only serve as explanations in the following way: anyone who understands these stories eventually recognises them as nonsensical when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them. Just as, in a few minutes, I will use some steps to climb up and put my head in a noose. Like me, you must also, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up it. You must transcend the story as a mere proposition, and then you will see the world aright.

I regret that circumstances prevent me from saying any more than this, however what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.