A Philosophical Investigation

4

‘How was Frankfurt?’

Detective Inspector Ed Crawshaw closed the door of Jake’s office at New Scotland Yard and sat down.

‘That’s what I want to talk to you about, Ed,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably heard about this multiple who’s killing men?’

He nodded. ‘Something about it, yes. To do with the Lombroso Program, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. While I was at the conference, the APC asked me to take over the investigation. I’ll still be leading our own inquiry into the Lipstick killings, but there’s pressure from the Home Office to get this other one solved, so I’ll be spending more time on doing just that. It’ll mean that I have to leave you on your own a lot more. You’ll have to make your own initiatives and follow up your own ideas. Just keep me informed of what’s going on. And if you need to come and pick my brains about something, don’t hesitate to walk right in here. I want this bastard caught, Ed, and caught soon.’

Crawshaw nodded slowly.

‘Did you put Mary Woolnoth’s details through the computer?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There was something that came up. Victim number five, Jessie Weston, liked reading murder-mysteries, same as Mary. Her briefcase contained a copy of Burn Marks by Sara Paretsky. I was wondering if she might have bought it at the same shop where Mary bought her Agatha Christie. The Mystery Bookshop in Sackville Street.’

‘No reason why not,’ said Jake. ‘She worked in Bond Street. That’s not far from Sackville Street. If you’re right it could be that he’s not just interested in reading about murder...

‘... he’s also interested in doing it too. It’s a thought, isn’t it? Want me to get a man in there, undercover?’

‘Like I said, you’ll have to make your own initiatives, Ed,’ said Jake. ‘But I think you’d do a lot better if you tried to find a few women police constables to volunteer for book-browsing duty.’

‘A stake-out.’

Jake winced. ‘I’ve never much liked that term,’ she said. ‘It always seems to imply that whatever is staked out gets devoured. When I was back in the European Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioural Science Unit, we always used to call that kind of operation a golden apple. Psychologically, it’s a lot more encouraging for the volunteer.’

Jake glanced at her watch and stood up. ‘I have to be downstairs,’ she said and then added: ‘And, Ed. Make sure they wear lots of red lipstick. I think our man could turn out to have a chromatic trigger for his aggression. I wouldn’t want to lose catching this son-of-a-bitch because some little fashion-conscious WPC prefers a different shade of lipstick that suits her skin a lot better. It’s got to be the colour of blood or nothing.’

The Police Computer Crime Unit occupied an air-conditioned section of the basement at New Scotland Yard. Semi-transparent sliding doors succeeded in hiding the mess, which was that of an electrical repair-shop, without stopping the light.

Jake picked her way through a large room that was home to a miniature city of redundant monitors, discarded keyboards, and stocking-snagging laser-printers. She cursed loudly at the discovery of this last fact, but continued on to the end of the room where a brightly coloured open iron stairway led straight up to a short gallery of offices. Jake knocked at the crinkled fibreglass that was the door of one of these and went in. She was supposed to meet the head of the CCU there and be introduced to the expert assigned to her investigating team: the best man in the CCU, as had been requested.

The best man in the CCU, according to its own Chief Inspector, was Detective Sergeant Yat Chung.

Jake found herself repeating the name with some surprise. ‘Kind of a name is that?’

Chief Inspector Cormack shrugged. ‘Yat,’ he said again, nodding. ‘He’s a Chink.’

Jake smiled thinly. ‘Yes, well I didn’t figure he was the Prince of Wales.’

‘He’s God as far as I’m concerned,’ Cormack stated. ‘There’s nothing he doesn’t know about artificial intelligence. And quite a lot he could guess at that hasn’t even been invented yet. Gilmour says I’m supposed to lend you my best man. But you people worry me. There’s a psycho involved here, isn’t there? Normally the most dangerous thing Yat has to deal with is a short circuit. So I’ll tell you frankly that if there’s the slightest chance of any physical harm coming to him from your investigation, I’d prefer to tell you to sod off and risk the disciplinary hearing.’

‘Relax,’ Jake told him. ‘I won’t so much as let him floss his teeth in case he makes his gums bleed. All I want him to do is a scenes-of-crime on a computer, not talk a gun out of a killer’s hand.’

Cormack nodded. He was a tall, gruff Scot with a prophet’s beard and a scruffy, unworldly air about him, as if he had grown up on a Petri dish. Behind smudged glasses Cormack’s eyes stared. They followed the ladder in Jake’s black stocking up to her thigh and under the hem of her short skirt. Even though he himself knew he was too long in the tooth for such things, he still found himself breathing heavily like an infatuated sixth-former at the vision of womanhood sitting opposite him. Tall, severely feminine with a knuckle-rapping voice and the kind of stare that could crack a man’s glasses and frost his beard. He had a taste for women like Jake: handsome rather than pretty, athletic as opposed to elegant, intelligent rather than charming. Women who looked as though they knew one end of a soldering-iron from the other. But most of all Cormack liked them to be hard bitches, the type he had often seen in magazines wearing leather and wielding whips.

‘What kind of a computer?’ he said swallowing a couple of litres of oxygen.

‘A Paradigm Five,’ she answered.

‘And the operating system?’

‘The European Community Data Network.’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Shit,’ he said wearily. ‘They’ve not long finished installing it. Where’s the breach?’

‘The Brain Research Institute. The Lombroso computer.’

‘Yes, I thought I did hear something about that.’

‘Yeah, well keep it under your toupee. The Home Office is pretty touchy about the whole thing. I want your man to tell me whether the breach came from the inside or the outside.’

‘Who’s their bod?’

Jake spread the PC open on her lap and consulted the file.

‘Doctor Stephen St Pierre,’ she said. ‘Know him?’

Cormack grunted. ‘St Pierre was formerly the head of computer security in the British Army,’ he said.

‘And?’

Cormack rocked his head from side to side as if deliberating which side to come down on. At the same time Jake crossed her legs. After a few seconds of vacuuming the sight of Jake’s underwear onto his retinas, Cormack pursed his lips and said, ‘Basically he’s all right. If he does have a fault it’s that he’s too literal. Tends to sound as if he writes computer manuals in his spare time. Trouble is that most computer crime these days is committed by people with rather more imagination than you could find evidence for in any system manual.’

‘Army security, eh?’ Jake typed a note onto the file. ‘How long?’

‘Five years. Went into the army straight from Cambridge.’

‘College?’

‘I believe it was Trinity. He read classics.’

‘So where does the interest in grey goods come from?’

‘Computers? Oh, his father worked for IBM.’ Cormack smiled. ‘That’s something we have in common.’

‘Your father too?’

‘No. Me actually. I used to design business software. Accounts packages, that kind of thing.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jake.

‘Not really. That’s why I joined the Met. To catch electronic burglars.’

‘The Lombroso people were pretty stiff about the suggestion that anyone could have broken into their system. But they were just as stiff about the idea of an inside job. What do you think? Is it possible, from the outside?’

‘Twenty years ago, when the UK Government installed the Government Data Network specification on all departmental computers, they thought it was impregnable. But within five years, the system was revealed to have more holes than a Russian condom. You see, systems are designed by people, and people are sometimes fallible, and sometimes corrupt. If you could eliminate the human element of the equation altogether then you could probably make a system that was completely secure.’ He shrugged. ‘The most probable case-scenario here? Someone was careless. Probably they change the password every day at this Brain Research Institute. Well that’s a double-edged sword. On one level it makes it difficult for someone to work out what the password could be by process of elimination. But it also makes it difficult for the people who work there to remember. Maybe someone writes the word down. Maybe he asks someone else to remind him. In this way an unauthorised person might catch sight of or overhear the password. And then he’s in. It could be that simple.’

Cormack lit a small cigar. Smoking was forbidden anywhere in the building, but with the door shut, nobody was likely to make a fuss about it except Jake herself and Cormack knew that so long as she was asking favours from his department she would not object to it.

‘Of course, having got into the system he then has to understand its language. He’d need a protocol analyser.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A protocol is a set of rules. An analyser is a portable device with its own miniature screen and keyboard. Looks much like that computer on your lap. Bigger maybe. This examines the target system’s telephone line or the port itself and carries out tests to see which of the hundreds of datacomm protocols are in use. A good one, fully digital, will handle asynchronous or synchronous transmissions. Some of them even have dedicated hacker’s software to make the whole process even easier.’

Jake was relieved when the intercom on Cormack’s desk buzzed noisily. Technical explanations like this one left her feeling short of air. Cormack stabbed the answer button as if it was a midge which had been irritating him.

‘Detective Sergeant Chung, sir,’ said a voice. ‘You said to buzz you.’

‘Yat, I want you to come up to my office,’ he said, so loudly that he hardly seemed to require an intercom at all. ‘Someone I want you to meet.’

Cormack released the button and pointed the same finger at Jake.

‘Just a word or two about Yat,’ he said, frowning. ‘He’s a bit of a grumpy bastard. Like most Hong Kong Chinese, he’s had a pretty rough time of it. Came here when he was a kid, when the colony folded. But — well you know what I’m talking about.’

Jake who still remembered watching the whole tragic affair on television knew very well what Cormack was talking about. The return of the colony to Communist China had been achieved with a spectacular degree of inefficiency and injustice. At the same time, Jake hated the idea of having to persuade people to do what they were supposed to do anyway. She didn’t much care to tiptoe round the feelings of people who thought that their sex or race gave them special privileges. New Scotland Yard was full of that kind of bullshit.

‘I’m sure we’ll get on just fine,’ she said coolly. ‘Just as long as he gives me his best work.’

It never seemed to rain anymore, thought Jake as the police car taking her and Yat Chung to the Brain Research Institute crawled slowly along the dusty streets. Here it was, the middle of winter and the previous summer’s water-rationing was still in force. In some parts of southern England they had been taking their water from stand-pipes for over five years now. She wondered what the slight little man sitting beside her thought about it. He lived near Reading, in the centre of the main drought area. After living in Hong Kong, he was possibly used to taking water from a communal tap. She wondered if he would have laughed at the suggestion. Considering the matter a second time she thought it seemed unlikely that he would have laughed at all. Cormack had not exaggerated about Yat Chung’s temperament. He seemed to possess a temper that was the equal of any of three killers Jake had helped send into punitive coma.

‘I don’t believe this fucking country,’ he snarled as once more the car came to a halt. It had taken them fifteen minutes to drive fifty metres.

‘What don’t you believe about it?’

‘Fucking traffic for one thing,’ he said, hardly looking at her.

‘Yeah, well we’d have walked but for all your computer equipment. It’s not like this place is very far away.’

‘Fucking people for another.’

Furious at something, he jerked his head in the direction of an enormous crowd of people who were waiting to get on a bus.

‘Look at them all. Why doesn’t someone do something?’

‘It wasn’t always this bad,’ Jake said drily. ‘I remember a time when life in this city was really quite tolerable.’

‘Yeah? When was that then?’

‘Before 1997.’

‘And then all us fucking lot turned up, eh?’ He grinned quite unexpectedly. ‘You’re one fucking funny lady.’

Jake smiled back. She disliked being called a lady almost as much as she disliked being called a fucking funny one.

‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate the compliment,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather you watched your fucking language a little more when you’re with me, please.’

‘My language wasn’t always this bad,’ said Yat. ‘Before 1997, it was really quite tolerable.’

He laughed so heartily at his own joke that for a moment Jake found herself wondering if he could be quite as expertly familiar with computers as Cormack had said: there was a crude aspect to him that seemed to be quite at odds with the very idea of something as precise as a computer.

Out of the corner of her eye she toyed with the complexity of trying to describe him, supposing, for whatever reason, a police description had been required. Slim, medium height, aged about thirty-five, wearing an expensive-looking navy blue tracksuit with the sleeves rolled up his bony forearms. Then what? His face was young, almost childlike. The skin enviably smooth and soft-looking. Pretty much like any other young man from Hong Kong. It made her think about what it was to try and construct a description. Of how much more it was in the eye of the beholder, an internal as opposed to an external thing. Any description of another human being could reveal as much about the person who was constructing it as the person being described.

At last they pulled up outside a building of gold-hued plate-glass, reflecting the afternoon sky as if it were really some kind of meteorological centre. A jet moved from one side of the refractive edifice to the other, followed closely by a flight of silent pigeons and the disturbing speed of a bank of cloud. Coming up beside her, Yat followed the line of Jake’s gaze.

‘Does heaven always move like this for you?’ he asked.

She bit her lip and started purposefully towards the main, camera-controlled door. But Yat, insensitive to the rhythm and volume of Jake’s high heels which spoke volumes of her irritation, easily kept pace with her despite his several bags of equipment.

‘When you want the earth to move for you, just speak to me, right?’ He grinned suggestively.

Jake made the door first and held it open for him. As he passed through, she said, ‘Cormack tells me that you’re a bloody genius with computers. You’d better start proving it, Yat boy.’ She followed him up to the security desk and added, ‘I’ve got nothing personal against your kind. But I could make an exception in your case, Sergeant. Understand?’

He sneered back at her. ‘Trouble with you whiteys, you got no sense of humour.’

The Brain Research Institute was located in an intelligent building, with its own central computer controlling the lighting, security, temperature and telephone system. The building did more or less everything itself, from locating a fire and calling the fire brigade, to acting as the Institute’s receptionist. While Chung put the bags through the X-ray machine, Jake typed out their details onto the screen of the reception computer, which then told them to wait until someone could collect them. After a minute or so a thermal printer produced a couple of security passes which they affixed to their jackets. At the same time, a lift door opened and an immensely tall man wearing a white coat and a poorly-shaven face advanced to greet them, his outstretched hand extending from a shirt cuff that barely concealed what looked like a combination suit of body hair.

Jake almost gagged with disgust. Hirsuteness was the thing she found most physically repellent in men.

‘David Gleitmann,’ declared the lugubriously-faced man. ‘I’m Professor of Neuro-endocrinology here. I run the Research Institute and the Program.’

Jake introduced herself and Sergeant Chung who grunted and pointedly looked in the opposite direction. She had known him for less than an hour and already she felt like coshing him to a pulp.

The lift carried them to the top floor.

Womb-like: that was Jake’s thought as she followed Gleitmann into his office. The walls were the same shade of beige as the floor and the ceiling, and but for the expensive hardwood furniture, you could have turned the room upside down or sideways and inhabited it just as easily. What at first impression looked like windows were flat, rectangular-shaped lights. And although it was equally modern in its origin, the furniture had a slightly classical air about it, all plinths, cross-beams and arches, as if having once belonged to some mediaeval Greek philosopher, an effect which was enhanced by some enormous leather-bound books which lay on the floor like a pile of paving slabs. A free-standing bookcase that was the size and shape of a pagan family shrine occupied each of the room’s seven corners. Another man was already seated at the refectory-sized table. He stood up as they came into the office and Gleitmann introduced him as Doctor Stephen St Pierre. The computer man, Jake said to herself, noting only that he seemed nervous.

Gleitmann offered them coffee. Yat Chung announced that he would prefer tea and then avoided his superior’s eye as she tried to glare balefully at him.

They seated themselves at Gleitmann’s table, with Yat Chung several places away from the other three, almost as if he didn’t wish to be part of the meeting. But Jake noticed his renewed interest in being there when Gleitmann’s secretary, a beautiful Chinese, arrived bearing a tray of refreshments, which included Yat’s tea. She watched the sergeant’s eyes following the girl out of the door and approved of his taste. The girl was worth the look.

‘I’ve been told by the Home Office people that I’m to extend you every facility,’ Gleitmann stated with apparent discomfort.

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Jake said politely. Whether you mind or not, she said to herself.

Gleitmann stretched his lower lip against a perfect row of teeth and then bit it. ‘Mark Woodford mentioned something about everyone having to take a polygraph.’

‘That’s right. Detective Sergeant Jones from my investigating team will be handling that part of the inquiry. But I’d like him to carry out the tests as quickly as possible.’ She opened her bag, took out a packet of sweeteners and then added one to her coffee. ‘When can I tell him to bring his equipment?’

She saw Gleitmann exchange a brief look with St Pierre, who shook his head and then shrugged.

‘Whenever you like, Chief Inspector,’ Gleitmann sighed. ‘If you think it’s really necessary.’

‘I do,’ Jake said firmly. ‘Tell me something, Professor: are you still carrying out testing within the context of the Lombroso Program?’

‘I’ve certainly had no instructions to say that I should stop.’ He tapped the ends of his long fingers together as if waiting to be contradicted. Jake said nothing. ‘That is correct, isn’t it? There has been no order from the Home Office telling us to stop.’

Jake noticed the way a singular had been transformed into a plural. This was an obvious sign of weakness and she decided to take advantage of it.

‘It’s hardly a question of needing an order, surely,’ she said. ‘Under the circumstances I should have thought that you yourself might wish to call a halt to the Program. At least until Detective Sergeant Chung has had a chance to determine the origin of the security breach.’

‘I can’t see how that would help.’ This was Doctor St Pierre. ‘I think we have to assume that the killer is already possessed of all the information he or she requires.’

‘In my experience, it’s safer not to assume anything with this type of killer,’ said Jake, glancing negligently at her fingernails. ‘But if there are any assumptions to be made, Doctor, I’ll make them, if you don’t mind.’

‘But surely, Chief Inspector, stopping the Program now would be a case of shutting the stable door—’

Chung frowned, uncomprehending, as Gleitmann neglected to complete the saying.

‘Your assumption is that the killer’s familiarity with the Lombroso Program data is not current. I don’t think that it’s valid to decide that he, or she (although I believe that we are dealing with a man), no longer has access to the system, albeit unauthorised access. Until we know how system security was broken I would suggest that by continuing to make tests, you could be putting even more men at risk.’

Gleitmann stirred his coffee thoughtfully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there,’ he said flatly. ‘If you want to put a halt to the Program, I think you’ll have to take it up with the Home Office.’

Jake shrugged. ‘Very well then.’

The professor’s long dark face took on an exasperated sort of look.

‘Chief Inspector,’ he said pompously. ‘I don’t think you can have considered the substantial investment that a project like this represents. There are other ramifications beside the rather more manifest one of individual security. Need I remind you that this is a private facility? Any governmental association here results from a purely contractual obligation. I have a duty to my shareholders as well as to the patients. The financial, not to say political, implications of what you’re proposing—’

Jake brought him to a halt with the only traffic signal she could still remember from her Hendon training. Several gold bangles shifted noisily on her strong, slim wrist like a tiny tambourine.

‘I have considered these factors,’ she said. ‘And I say to hell with them.’

Doctor St Pierre leaned forward across the table and clasped his wrestler-strangling hands. Jake considered that he was not the obvious army type. A bulky strong man, he wore his dark hair cropped labour-camp short and his beard Karl Marx bushy. Rimless glasses enhanced an appearance of some intellectuality. He looked like a well-read Hell’s Angel. She wondered if such an obviously masculine personal image might not mean that St Pierre was gay. He smiled and when he spoke it was with a slight defect, as if his moustache was interfering with the manipulation of his lips.

‘Will that be in your memorandum to the Minister?’ he asked.

Gleitmann butted in before Jake could reply. ‘Your brief, as I understand it, Chief Inspector, is merely to determine the source of our security breach. Is that not so?’ He wasn’t looking for an answer. ‘That hardly seems to cover something as important as the continued operation of the Program. I suggest that you stay within your original brief. Naturally we shall afford Detective Sergeant Chung here all the help we can. We’re as anxious as you are to clear this thing up. But anything more than that—’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘As you prefer,’ said Jake. ‘However I would like to speak to each of your counsellors.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘So as not to waste any time I’d like to work on the assumption that the security breach occurred externally. Moreover that it was somebody who had himself been tested VMN-negative who was responsible. Let me explain. As I understand it, the Lombroso Program determines those men who may eventually suffer from a serious aggressive disorder. At least for the moment I’d like my investigation to proceed on the basis that one such VMN-negative male has done just that — developed a serious aggressive disorder — and that it is directed against those others like himself. It may be that one of your counsellors can recall an individual who may have exhibited a significant level of hostility towards the Program and its participants.’

‘You do appreciate that all men testing VMN-negative are given codenames by the computer,’ said St Pierre. ‘Even if one of our counsellors could remember such an individual as you describe, it would only be by that codename. I can’t see how that would help you.’

‘Nevertheless I should still like to question them. Or do you have objections to that as well?’

St Pierre combed his beard with both sets of fingers and then cleared his throat. ‘No objections at all, Chief Inspector. I’m just trying to save you some work, that’s all.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Perhaps I could show Sergeant Chung the Paradigm Five now.’

Jake nodded at Yat who drained his tea cup and stood up. While he and St Pierre were on their way out of the room Jake stared at the smudged red-crescent her lipstick had left on her own cup and wondered how Crawshaw would be getting on. This was going to be harder than she had imagined. Gleitmann and his people didn’t look like they were going to be much help. She already had troubles back at the Yard with her superior because of his having been removed from the case. Except for the ban on smoking in all office buildings she would have had a cigarette. Probably two. Then Gleitmann said something to her.

‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘I said, Let’s hope your man can sort this out.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ Jake agreed. She helped herself to more of the coffee. ‘We were discussing your counsellors,’ she said.

‘Yes. Doctor Cleobury is head of psychiatry here at the Institute. She’s responsible for all the counsellors. Would you like me to ask her to join us?’

Jake shook her head. ‘No that won’t be necessary at this stage. We’ll start here in London and then question the counsellors in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow.’

‘All of them?’

‘All of them. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you could provide me with an office with a pictophone and a computer, from where I can conduct my enquiries.’

‘Of course. I’ll have my secretary arrange it. But please speak to the computer if you need anything else. This is an intelligent building, after all. Meanwhile I’ll have Doctor Cleobury make all the counsellors available to you.’

‘Thank you.’

She watched him make the call and then turned her attention to his library. Quite a few of the books were familiar to her from her days as a forensic psychologist with the European Bureau of Investigation; and quite a few had been written by Gleitmann himself, some of them collected in bulk as if he had been running a bookshop. On one shelf alone she counted fifty copies of The Social Implications of Human Sexual Dimorphism. He was proud of his work, that much was clear. She pulled a copy down and started to read.

‘I’d like to borrow this,’ she told him when he had finished on the pictophone.

Gleitmann smiled sheepishly. ‘Help yourself.’

When she returned home Jake ate the remains of a tuna salad she had made the night before. Then she sat down at her electronic piano. She selected a disc from the many she had collected and slid it into the piano’s software-port. It was the Schubert piano trio in B flat, or at least the recordings of the cello and violin parts, with the score for the piano appearing on the keyboard’s integrated LCD screen.

Jake, who had been an accomplished pianist as a teenager, played with precision, although she lacked the skill of the two string players on the recording to add the expression that made the piece such a masterpiece of youthful optimism. She particularly relished playing the scherzo with its extended staccato crotchets and quavers and its artful counterpoint. If there was one piece of music that was almost guaranteed to put her in a good humour it was this Opus 99 scherzo. And when the gypsy-like rondo of the fourth and last movement had brought her playing to its charging, bouncing climax, she collapsed into an armchair and sighed with pleasure.

The memory of the music lingered on her finger ends and in her invigorated senses for several minutes afterwards; and later on, she was even equal to the task of reading Gleitmann’s book.

It was, she considered, not a bad book at all. She liked it better than she had expected. It was true, a lot of it was guesswork, but it was intelligent plausible guesswork.

Jake was reminded of her own work in the field of male sexual psychology with the EBI, before a career at Scotland Yard had beckoned. Sometimes she was asked why she had joined such a male-dominated institution as the Yard, especially when men were so obnoxious to her. For Jake the answer was simple: with so many women falling victim to male criminals it did not seem politic to entrust the protection of women exclusively to men. Women had the responsibility to help protect themselves.

When at last she put Gleitmann’s book down, having read almost half of it, she was amused to discover that he had previously signed it.

That, she told herself, was just men all over.

Be patient. I’ll describe the next execution in just a minute. In Cold Blood, as Truman Capote would say. First, let me quickly mention the last factor in my life’s new gestalt.

After my night on the computer and my idea about those other men who tested VMN-negative, I kept the appointment I had made before the test with my analyst, Doctor Wrathall.

You will ask why I was already seeing a psychoanalyst. Actually, I’m a bit of a neurotic and I’ve been having a weekly session for almost two years now. My relationship with Doctor Wrathall has really helped me a lot. (This is all so imprecise, but it can’t be helped.) Much of what he and I discuss relates to my own feelings of personal dissatisfaction.

The world is independent of my will, at least in so far as my will is essentially the subject of ethical attributes, and of interest as a phenomenon only to people like Doctor Wrathall. So it is easy to see that by discussing the phenomenon of my will in this way, I was attempting to determine the limits of my world and how these might be altered.

So straightaway I asked Doctor Wrathall if a man who suddenly perceived his real duty in life should risk everything to achieve it. I was not referring to the kind of duty one owes one’s fellow motorists. Nor the kind of duty one has to honour one’s father and mother. No. I was of course referring to the greatest duty one can ever owe, which is the duty one has to oneself, to the ‘creative demon’.

Doctor Wrathall hummed and hawed and finally said that by and large he was himself of the opinion that in life it was good to take a few risks now and again. A sense of mission and purpose was what made it worth living.

It would be wrong to add a structure to what was said. Doctor Wrathall is a simple soul and, like most analysts, he is not able to articulate much that is of any real consequence. Usually it is quite enough for me that he has listened, albeit uncomprehending. And so this question was a comparatively rare phenomenon, occasioning an even rarer response. Indeed, Doctor Wrathall was moved to ask a question or two himself, as to the nature of this ‘creative demon’. By the tramline-thinking of his profession he even made the predictable enquiry as to why I thought I had used the words ‘duty’ and ‘demon’. I lost the poor devil when, by way of an answer, I asserted that the issue was metaphysical rather than empirical. What untidy minds some people have!

By the time I reached home again I was convinced not merely that I should follow my impulses with regard to my brother VMNs, but that I had a moral obligation to do so. Look at Paul Gauguin for instance: he threw up everything — wife, home, children, job, security — because he had a passionate, profound, intense desire to paint pictures. That’s the sort of man to be.

Perhaps you will say that killing isn’t much of a vocation compared with painting. But I ask you to look beyond the conventional moralities and consider the phenomenology of the matter. I blush to use a word like ‘existentialism’; however, that is the essence of what I am describing. Think of the character of Meursault in L’Etranger and you have it. Only the prospect of death — one’s own, or of others, it makes no difference — makes life real. Death is the one true certainty. When we die the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Death is not an event in life. But killing... killing is.

Consider then the concept of killing: the assertion of one’s own being by the denial of another’s. Self-creation by annihilation. And how much more self-creating where those others who must be destroyed are themselves a danger to society in general. Where the killing is done with a very real purpose. Thus, the taint of nihilism is avoided. The authentic act of pure decision is no longer committed at random with scant regard to meaning. All this provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism.

My next victim, codename Bertrand Russell, was an art lover. In all else he was unpredictable. So unlike his illustrious name-sake with his mathematical logic. Russell left for work at different times of the morning and returned home at different times of the evening. I imagine he was on flexi-time or whatever it is they call it. He was employed in an office on the Albert Embankment in some minor sales and marketing role for the company that makes a brand of caffeine-plus beverage called Brio: ‘Coffee’s never been so full of beans’.

But every lunchtime at precisely 12.45, Russell would cross over Vauxhall Bridge and walk up Millbank to the Tate Gallery, where he would eat a sandwich in the café downstairs (I don’t think I ever saw him drink any coffee), and then spend approximately thirty minutes looking at the pictures.

He was an odd-looking fellow, although he seemed to blend in well with all the art-students that the place attracts. There was something gnomic about his features: the ears too large and too prominent, the chin too recessive, the nose too bulbous, the eyes too small, and the head too large for his scrawny neck. You could have used him as the cover illustration for any gothic fantasy novel. This effect was. enhanced by the long, grey coat he was wearing which seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and which put me in mind of Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And yet there was nothing benign about this peculiar creature. Russell’s was a wicked face of the kind that guest-star in children’s nightmares. If ever a man looked like a potential killer it was Bertrand Russell.

Following him around the gallery (he seemed to be particularly fond of the Pre-Raphaelites, which, in itself, is a good reason to shoot anyone) I wondered how much he knew about the Cambridge philosopher whose Lombroso-given name he bore. When you think about it, I ought to have introduced myself. I could have made some caustic remark about the Principia Mathematica, or even disputed the value of his attempt to arrive at atomic propositions. Not that it really matters. We never really got on, he and I. I always thought that he was a bit of an old fraud.

Of course none of this crossed my mind as I trailed after him, awaiting my opportunity to grant him the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, assuming that such a thing exists. I must confess that I was just a little nervous about (and contrary to my usual practice) the prospect of killing in a public place, in broad daylight. So I said nothing at all. Just watched.

Did he sense something perhaps? Was there, in the ether between us, a picture of a deadly thought that slowly transferred itself from my mind to his? Because there was one moment — I think it must have been while he was bending over a glass case to inspect some watercolours painted by William Blake — when he looked up and, catching my eye, smiled at me. I cannot say what I might have looked like. Nevertheless, I have the impression that I must have appeared comic somehow, or perhaps my jaw dropped dramatically, because he laughed. He laughed as if I had been a small child saying something impossibly cute.

At this I felt real anger towards him for the very first time and, in the same second, realising that that part of the gallery which houses a woefully inadequate number of the works of the greatest Englishman who ever lived was empty, I drew my gun from my shoulder-holster and fired at the very centre of his under-resourced forehead.

Russell collapsed onto the floor, catching his chin on the edge of the cabinet as he fell. For a brief second one hand pressed at the hole my first shot had made as the blood started down the bridge of his nose, while the other held on to the cloth cover that protects the drawings and watercolours from the damaging sunlight. I almost thought that he would tear it, but then it was through his fingers and I was striding round the cabinet to stand over him and let go with the rest of the clip. My second and third shots silently blasted away two of his fingers. And there was more blood than perhaps I am used to — another reason why working in daylight is more difficult. Some of his gore even splashed onto the toe of my shoe. For all these reasons I could not recall if I heard the sound that denotes a successful headshot or not.

It was then I became aware that I had shot him in the front and not the back of the head, which is of course my usual practice. So, as I strode nonchalantly away from Russell’s body, I was possessed only of the probability that I had succeeded in killing him. And we only use probability in default of certainty.