A Philosophical Investigation

5

Jake paused in front of one of the pictures. She liked William Blake. Always had done. There were two prints of his paintings on the wall of her bathroom. Blake was not everyone’s taste, she knew. Some people found him too mystical, especially for a bathroom. But Jake had a soft spot for all kinds of mysticism and her best investigative thinking was often done in the smallest room. While her thinking was more temporal than terrestrial, nevertheless Blake’s pictures inspired her with an insight as to the darker side of man which, as a detective, she found useful.

She turned her attention to the large bloodstain on the floor which was now being photographed from every conceivable angle, as if its shape contained some symbolic significance. The scenes-of-crime officer, whose name was Bruce, squatted down beside her.

“What have we got, Sergeant?’ she asked him.

‘Well, it’s not Jerusalem, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you that much.’

‘I will not cease from mental fight, Sergeant Bruce,’ she returned. ‘Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. But I’d be grateful if you would kindly stop stating the obvious, albeit poetically.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bruce, quickly flipping open his PC. ‘Oliver John Mayhew, of 137 Landor Road, SW9. Shot six times in the head, fairly close range, at around 1.20 this afternoon. The security guard found him. Says he didn’t see or hear anything.’

‘Dead?’

‘Not quite. Been taken to Westminster Hospital, ma’am. I’ve sent a constable with him just in case he has time for a last soliloquy. What’s the Yard’s interest in this case?’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you, Sergeant,’ she said, disliking herself for this reticence.

Jake hated keeping any investigating officer in the dark, but with the Home Office taking such a particular interest in keeping the lid on the Lombroso connection, she had little choice in the matter. She was as surprised to find herself there, staring at the bloodstain on the floor of the Tate Gallery, as the sergeant. Less than half an hour before she had been at the Brain Research Institute when a call came in from the Yard. Even while she had been standing next to the Paradigm Five as Yat Chung tried to trace the origin of the Lombroso system burglar, the machine had tracked the name Oliver John Mayhew as appearing, albeit as a victim, within the context of a violent crime inquiry on the police computer at Kidlington, and alerted the other computer to Mayhew’s status as a VMN-negative.

‘Let’s just say that I’m investigating a similar case,’ she told Bruce. ‘Any of the art lovers see anything?’

‘Doesn’t look like it so far. If any of them did, they probably thought it was some kind of performance art.’

‘Broad daylight. Don’t tell me, all the goddamned doors were locked as well. I don’t think I feel like playing Sergeant Cuff this afternoon. No witnesses at all? Jesus Christ.’

‘Speaking of whom, the director of the gallery is over there, ma’am. Perhaps, as the senior investigating officer, you wouldn’t mind speaking to him. Mr Spencer.’

It was the sergeant’s revenge for her not telling him anything. Jake smiled wryly. She’d have done the same thing herself. Looking over her shoulder to the edge of the room which housed the Blakes, she caught sight of a tall, distinguished man wearing a grey suit. He stood, with his arms folded, barely able to contain his impatience.

Jake went over to him, introduced herself and then let him complain about how intolerable it was that no one, himself included, should have been permitted to leave the gallery. Jake waved Sergeant Bruce towards her.

‘Have your men finished checking ID cards yet, Sergeant?’

‘Yes ma’am.’

She turned to address the director. ‘Well, Mr Spencer. Everyone can leave now. Yourself included.’

But Spencer had not yet finished with his complaints about the high-handedness of the Metropolitan Police.

‘Mister Spencer,’ said Jake after a couple of minutes of patient listening. ‘You know, this isn’t much of a room for England’s greatest artist. Don’t you think it’s on the small side for a man with as big a vision as Blake?’

Spencer’s frown deepened. ‘Don’t tell me how to run an art gallery, Chief Inspector,’ he growled.

‘Well then, please don’t tell me how to run a police investigation,’ Jake returned.

Just at that moment, Spencer wailed and pointed frustratedly at one of Bruce’s team who was cutting out the bloodstained area where Mayhew’s body had been found, with a lino-knife.

‘Oh really,’ he said. ‘This is too much. What about that? What about my carpet?’

‘Don’t worry sir,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll return it to you just as soon as we’ve finished all our tests. Who knows, with a nice frame, you could try exhibiting it.’

Spencer’s mouth opened and closed, and hearing nothing emerge from its mephitic pinkness, Jake wished him a good afternoon and then left.

Mayhew’s company medical scheme meant that he was taken to a private clinic attached to the Westminster Hospital. The clinic itself looked like an expensive hotel. Thick pile carpets, leather furniture, big modern paintings, and bonsai trees. There was even a small fountain trickling along with the Muzak in the reception hall. The smell of disinfectant and the occasional white uniform seemed oddly out of place, as if some kind of accident had happened to disturb the atmosphere of quiet luxury.

Detective Inspector Stanley was waiting for her in a silent corridor outside the operating theatre. When, on taking charge of the investigation, Jake recalled the circumstances of their first meeting, she had asked herself if she should keep him on the case: if a police officer investigating a homicide who could attend a scenes-of-crime report on the gynocide could be anything but a liability. Ed Crawshaw, who knew Stanley from Hendon, said he was a good copper, reliable if also rather literal. Jake was inclined to accept this criticism as a point in Stanley’s favour. Trusting herself to make the imaginative leaps necessary to solving a case, she preferred working above all with people whom she could trust to do only what they were told. Jake’s opinion of the majority of her colleagues at the Yard was that imagination was usually an indication of corruption.

Stanley was a tall, fit-looking man with long hair and the pallor of goat’s cheese. He swayed a little on his feet as he started to make his report.

‘Shit, what’s the matter with you?’

‘Hospitals,’ he said biliously. ‘They always set me off. It’s the smell.’

‘Well, don’t pass out in here. You couldn’t afford it.’ Jake searched inside her shoulder bag and found a small bottle of smelling salts she had carried since she was a beat copper. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Snort on this a bit.’

Stanley held the bottle underneath his flaring nostrils. He sniffed a few times and then nodded gratefully. ‘Thanks,’ he said weakly.

‘You’d better hang on to it,’ she said. ‘Feeling up to filling me in?’

He nodded. ‘They’re operating on Mayhew right now. But it looks pretty hopeless. The front of his head has got more holes in it than a bowling ball. And he’s lost a great deal of blood. But he did come round very briefly while the constable was with him in the ambulance.’

Stanley beckoned to the armed policeman who was standing a short distance away. The man walked towards the two senior officers, his boots squealing on the expensive rubber flooring like a pair of small furry animals.

‘Constable, tell the Chief Inspector what Mayhew said to you in the ambulance.’

The constable pushed his machine pistol out of the way, unbuttoned the breast pocket on his flak-jacket and took out his computer. ‘He said, “Those bastards. They lied. They lied. I should have known, they always meant to kill me. They lied. Brain. Brain”.’ He shook his head. ‘He wasn’t very audible, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re sure of all that?’ said Jake. ‘That was exactly as he said it?’

‘As exactly as I was able to judge, ma’am. He was more or less delirious.’ The constable returned the computer to his pocket and swung the machine pistol back across his chest.

‘And he only spoke the one time?’

The constable nodded. ‘By the time we got here he’d stopped breathing. I believe they managed to revive him in the operating theatre. The nurse has promised to keep an ear on anything else he might say while he’s in there.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jake. ‘If he says anything else, no matter how trivial, I want to know about it. Understand?’

‘Ma’am.’

Jake and Inspector Stanley were half way along the corridor leading to the front door when they heard a shout behind them. They turned and saw the constable wave them back. Beside him stood a man in a green overall.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the surgeon, when they reached him. ‘But your man never regained consciousness.’

Lester French, a firearms expert in the Forensic Pathologist’s Office at the Yard, stood up from his collection of microscopes and cameras and dropped a bullet into Jake’s outstretched palm.

‘That’s what killed Mayhew,’ he said. ‘That, and five others like it. Your killer’s no fool, I’ll tell you that much. There’s quite a lot of stopping power in that little beauty.’

‘And this is the same kind of bullet that killed all the others?’

French nodded firmly.

‘How does it work?’

‘The cartridges themselves are masterpieces of precision engineering,’ he said with real admiration. ‘A machined brass cartridge case with a self-contained high pressure air reservoir. A simple and effective valve system.’ He picked up a small gas cylinder from the laboratory’s work bench. ‘You charge your cartridges up with this.’

‘Are you saying that this killer has been manufacturing his own ammunition?’ Jake asked uncertainly, confused by the expert’s enthusiasm for his special field.

‘No, no. As I said, it involves precision engineering. This particular shell is made by a Birmingham gunsmith. You buy the cartridges from any gun shop. But you stick whatever bullet you like on the end of it. To that extent, your man has been manufacturing his own. And it’s pretty heavy stuff too. Hollow-nosed, conical-conoidal, pointed and streamlined.’

‘But it is a gas-gun,’ Jake said, in search of further elucidation. ‘Is that like an air-gun?’

‘In the firing of the weapon, yes. But with regard to what comes out of the barrel, no.’ He lifted the piece of misshapen metal from Jake’s palm and held it up to the light. ‘I mean, a conventional air-pellet bears no more resemblance to this than a bloody pea. Whatever you hit with this, stays hit.’

‘What does the gun look like?’ said Stanley.

French led them through a door at the back of the laboratory to a small firing range. On a trestle table lay what looked like a long-barrelled.44 calibre revolver. He picked the weapon up and handed it to Jake. ‘That’s the sort of thing,’ he said.

‘It looks like a normal gun,’ she said.

French pursed his lips. ‘It does everything that a normal gun is supposed to do.’ He nodded in the direction of one of the targets. ‘Try it. It’s loaded.’

Jake thumbed back the hammer. It felt lighter than a conventional revolver.

‘That’s it,’ said French. ‘Now push the safety off and you’re ready to fire.’

She levelled the barrel at the target, aimed and then squeezed the trigger. The gun hardly moved in her fist as it fired, with no more sound than a hand slapping a desk top.

‘Smooth, eh?’

French led them down to the target.

‘This plywood’s two centimetres thick, so it ought to give you a pretty good idea of what a good-sized gas-gun will do to a man.’

Jake’s bullet had hit the human-shaped target in the centre of the groin.

‘Nice shot,’ said French. He pulled a pen from his top pocket and probed the hole. ‘Clean through. Impressive, eh?’

‘It certainly is,’ murmured Stanley.

‘You can even buy a silencer for this weapon if you still think it’s too noisy. But the most remarkable thing about it is that no firearms certificate is required. Anyone over the age of seventeen can walk into a shop and buy one today, no questions asked.’

Jake shook her head. ‘How come?’

French shrugged. ‘With all the legislative attention focused on conventional firearms, nobody noticed that air-guns were becoming more and more sophisticated. Mind you, you’d have to pay over five hundred dollars for a piece like the one you’re holding, Chief Inspector. Twice that for a rifle.’

‘You mean to say that there are rifles like this too?’ said Stanley.

‘Oh yes. Some of them with laser-guided nightsights if it’s a bit of poaching you fancy. And, with mercury or glycerine exploding bullets, a gas-rifle would be just the thing for your amateur Lee Harvey Oswald.’

‘Presumably the rifles are even more powerful,’ Jake observed.

‘With the right sort of ammunition, a good gas-rifle could drop a decent-sized stag. Of course, some of those weapons are regulated.’ French grinned fiercely. ‘Let’s hope your man hasn’t got hold of one of those. There’s no telling what he’d do. Still, it’s not like he hasn’t been busy already, eh? To shoot a man in the Tate Gallery, in broad daylight. The newspapers are going to love that.’

Later that afternoon Jake had an appointment with her psychotherapist, Doctor Blackwell. The clinic was a smart, three-storey house in Chelsea, just off the King’s Road, and Jake had been seeing Doctor Blackwell for almost a year.

Blackwell belonged to the Neo-Existential school of psychotherapy. This avoided the more mechanistic aspects of classical Freudian analysis and encouraged the patient to take charge of her own life. The key element in the relationship between existential therapist and patient was the encounter, wherein the patient’s problems were discussed and the therapist tried to direct the patient to the life-enhancing, authentic solutions that were to be discovered through the exercise of free choice. According to Doctor Blackwell the experience derived from these encounters was ultimately transferred to the way in which the patient saw herself and others.

The receptionist smiled as Jake came into the clinic and stood up from behind the desk.

‘You’re to go straight in,’ she said, ‘as soon as you’ve undressed.’ She led the way to the changing cubicles.

In common with other Neo-Existential therapists, Doctor Blackwell required that her patients should make the encounter in a state of total nudity, to encourage a sense of greater personal openness. Jake entered the cubicle and drew the curtain behind her. She took off her jacket and laid it on the chair for a moment. Next she unzipped her skirt and hooked it on a hanger to which she then added the jacket. While she was unbuttoning her blouse she heard the familiar rustle of Doctor Blackwell’s skirt as she approached the other side of the curtain.

‘Just come through when you’re ready, Jake,’ said the doctor.

It was a small, well-spoken voice that bordered on the edge of being reverent, as if Doctor Blackwell were the Mother Superior of a quiet and very devout order of nuns. The kind of voice that reminded Jake of the headmistress at her own convent school. Perhaps that was one reason why she consulted Doctor Blackwell and not someone else: because she was like someone who had once been kind to her and understanding, and at a time when, thanks to her father, she most needed it.

‘All right,’ said Jake, stepping quickly out of her pants and unclipping her brassiere. There was a full-length mirror on the wall of the cubicle and briefly Jake regarded her own naked body with criticism. Her breasts were too big, but apart from that everything still looked about the same as when she left Cambridge. Not bad for a woman of thirty-seven. Some of Jake’s friends who had had families now looked more like her own mother. There was no doubt, it was having children that really aged a woman.

A red cotton dressing gown that seemed to Jake to be rather masculine was hanging from the clothes peg. Jake put it on, tied the sash and then pulled the curtain back.

Doctor Blackwell’s room was big and airy with a deep-pile blue carpet that was specially designed to feel relaxing under barefoot. She was sitting at a large grey leather-topped desk that faced the wall and on which was hanging a copy of a painting by Francis Bacon. Behind her shoulder were two arched windows that were each the size of a telephone box. As Jake came into the room she looked up from Jake’s case-notes and smiled sweetly.

‘And how have you been?’

‘Fine,’ said Jake. ‘Well, I mean, about the same really. No different.’

Doctor Blackwell nodded. She was a largish woman of about fifty with big, farmer’s wife hands and an incongruously doll-like face. Her hair was expensively cut, curving neatly in under each side of her lower jaw, and she wore a short white bouclé dress which showed the tan of her arms and seemed only remotely clinical.

‘Is it warm enough for you in here?’

Jake said that it was.

‘All right then. Close your eyes and try to relax. That’s it. Breathe in, breathe out. Now when I tell you to, I want you to slip off your gown and at the same time I want you to imagine that you’re throwing off all your inhibitions, that you’re uncovering not just your body, but all your innermost feelings as well.’ She paused for a second. ‘Now take it off.’

Jake shrugged the gown onto the carpet and stood silently at attention. She felt no sense of shame or embarrassment, only a sense of complete liberation.

‘Open your eyes,’ Doctor Blackwell said cheerily. ‘And lie down.’

In the centre of the room was a black leather couch, and beside it a chair. Jake lay down and stared at the expensive light fitting that helped to heat the room. Then she heard the chair creak as Doctor Blackwell sat down.

‘Any more nightmares?’ she asked.

‘Not lately.’

‘Seeing anyone at the moment?’

‘You mean am I sleeping with anyone, don’t you?’

‘If you like.’

‘No, I’m not sleeping with anyone.’

‘How long has it been since you made love?’

Jake shook her head and remained silent. Then she said: ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever done that.’

She heard Doctor Blackwell write something on her notepad.

‘And do you still experience feelings of acute hostility to men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me about the most recent one.’

‘There was a man in a hotel in Frankfurt. He tried to pick me up and I was rude to him. Later on, when I saw him in the lift, he assaulted me.’

‘How did he assault you?’

‘He touched my breast.’

‘Did you think he meant to rape you?’

‘No, I don’t think so. He was just a bit drunk, I think.’

‘So what happened then?’

Jake smiled uncomfortably. ‘What do you think happened? I decked him.’

‘And how did that make you feel?’

‘For a while I felt just fine about it,’ she said. ‘But later on, I wished I hadn’t. At least I wished I hadn’t hit him quite so hard. Like I said, I wasn’t in any danger. I don’t know why I did it.’

‘Ultimately we are what we choose to do.’

‘Well that’s why I come here,’ said Jake. ‘To feel better about the choices I do make.’

‘I’m not sure I can help you feel better about assaulting someone,’ said Doctor Blackwell. ‘But tell me how you feel in general when you discover that some of the choices you’ve made have been wrong ones. As with this man you hit.’

Jake sighed. ‘I feel as if my life has no real meaning.’

‘What about your father: how do you feel about him these days?’

‘I suppose I hate him even more now that he’s dead.’

‘Even so, your father was just one man — not every man.’

‘A father is every man when you’re a child.’

‘If your father hadn’t been the monster you tell me he was, Jake...’

She snorted loudly.

... Sometimes she thought it might just have been easier to have told Doctor Blackwell that she had been sexually abused by her father, because the reality of what she had experienced was so much more difficult to explain. Incest between father and daughter and the traumatising effect it could have on a girl was so much more tangible, so much easier to understand than what Jake had been through. It didn’t seem quite enough to say that throughout her adolescence Jake had been verbally abused and reviled by her father; that he never missed an opportunity to belittle her in front of other people; that he displayed absolutely no affection for her at all.

She might have been able to have forgiven her father all of that. What she could never have forgiven was his hatred of her mother.

Jake’s mother had been a timid, long-suffering sort of woman, apparently able to ignore or to excuse each and every manifestation of her husband’s vile behaviour: his crippling sarcasm; his angers; his sulks; his many infidelities; his lies; and his violence. She never found the courage to leave him. Life may have been unspeakable with him, she had said to Jake, but it would have been unthinkable without him. Until finally the day came when that unspeakable existence had suddenly become unbearable and she had killed herself.

It had been the seventeen-year-old Jake who found her lying on the floor of the garden shed, with a kitchen knife in her chest. Naturally she had assumed that her mother had been murdered by her father. Perhaps that was how she had meant it to look. But the police had discovered that a vice on her father’s workbench was adjusted to the width of the knife handle. They had concluded that she had fixed the knife in the vice and then deliberately impaled herself upon it, in the manner of a Roman general. For a long time Jake had held the belief that the police had been wrong and that her father had indeed murdered her mother. It was only after she herself joined the police that she was finally able to accept the truth of their conclusion.

Discovering her own mother’s suicide left Jake with an abiding horror of suicide. Not to mention a fully focused hatred for her father; and by the time he himself died of a brain tumour some three years afterwards, which at least explained his appalling behaviour, Jake’s hatred for the most important man in her life had become something altogether more generic...

‘... do you think it’s possible you might not have hated men in general?’

Jake paused for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s possible.’

‘And in theory, do you think it’s possible that you might have experienced a satisfactory relationship with a man?’

‘That’s a hard question. If you were in my line of work and you saw some of the things that men, and only men, are capable of... Jesus.’

She thought of Mary Woolnoth’s dead body, and the abuse lipsticked on it.

‘Well in theory, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But look, I’m not here because I think there’s something wrong with my sexual make-up.’

‘Yes, I know, you’re here because you think your life has no meaning.’

‘That’s right.’

‘All the same, your life has no meaning because of your own ontological insecurity, Jake. Because you’re divided against yourself. The division in you manifests itself in these pathological displays of hostility to men. You’re an intelligent woman. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

Jake sat up and covered her bare breasts with her hands. She sighed deeply and swung her legs off the couch. Doctor Blackwell stood up and walked back to her desk where she sat down again, and made a note on Jake’s file.

‘You know, we’ve made real progress today,’ she said with equanimity. ‘This is the first occasion when you’ve admitted that but for your father things might have been different for you.’

Jake got off the couch, picked the gown off the carpet where she had dropped it, and slipped it on.

‘So what does that prove?’ she said.

‘Oh I don’t know that it proves anything. Proof is not something that’s accorded particular importance in Neo-Existential therapy. But it’s obviously something that’s of fundamental importance in your life.’

‘Of course it is. I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake...’

‘That’s just fine. Only I question its validity as the sole criterion for determining your personal life as well. The violence and hostility are merely reinforcement techniques for what it is that you’re trying to prove to yourself. And what you’re trying to repress. Perhaps when you have accepted the veracity of the choices you do have, proof will seem to be of less importance to you. But you know, before anything improves, I think you have to discover at least one man you can whole-heartedly admire, in the same way that you once admired your father. Maybe then you’ll start to feel authentic again.’

Jake nodded sullenly. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘That’s what choice is all about.’

Jake, who was in her mid-thirties, lived alone in Battersea, close by the Royal Academy of Dancing. She remembered a time when she wanted to be a ballet dancer, only her father had told her she was too tall and for once, he had been right.

Her flat was on the top floor of an old-style modern building and, from a small concrete terrace which hosted an unlikely profusion of greenery, it commanded a fine view of the river. Jake loved her flat and her garden terrace and if it had a disadvantage it was that it was too close to the Westland Heliport. White-bodied helicopters had a tendency to circle noisily above her terrace, like giant seagulls, especially when she was sun-bathing.

For a brief period Jake had tried sharing her home with a lodger, a girl called Merion, whose mother was a friend of Jake’s mother. At first she and Merion had got along well enough. Jake had not even minded when Merion started bringing her hairy boyfriend Jono back to the flat, to make noisy love in Jake’s bathtub. She had not even objected that they did not clean it particularly well afterwards. But when, in an unforgivable state of total sobriety, Jono had made a very determined pass at Jake and Jake had responded by punching him out cold, Merion took exception to Jake’s forthright manner and left soon afterwards.

There followed a period of intense promiscuity in which Jake engaged as much to celebrate the return of her privacy as it was born of any real appetite, and which matched an equally intense, equally protracted and equally unsatisfactory period of promiscuity during her twenties. After that she had a brief and inevitably stormy relationship with an actor who lived in Muswell Hill and who maintained a fashionable hostility to South London and the police, with Jake an occasional and simultaneous exception.

Since then two years had passed, during which Jake had remained more or less celibate. The more when a man she had been questioning kicked her in the crotch and left her having to take four weeks off work; and the less the previous New Year’s Eve, at a party with an equally callous man who worked for the BBC.

When Jake arrived home she watered her plants and then cooked herself a microwave dinner. Then she turned on the television and picked up the evening paper.

French had been right. The shooting had made the final edition of the Evening Standard, and although there was no mention of the Lombroso Program, the writer was still able to say that the police were working on the assumption that the attack on Mayhew was connected with a number of other recent and unsolved killings.

Jake took an extra interest in the report, knowing that it contained an important piece of misinformation. At her own order, the Press Office at New Scotland Yard had concealed the fact of Mayhew’s death. Instead they had fed the newspapers the story that a policeman was remaining beside Mayhew’s bed night and day in the hope that he might recover consciousness and offer a description of his assailant. It was Jake’s vague hope that the killer might be moved to try and finish the job. She knew it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was worth a try. If the killer did show his face at the Westminster Hospital, he would find the Tactical Firearms Squad waiting there for him.

Fat chance, she thought. That sort of thing only ever happened in the movies. Which was why she was at home and not at the hospital, and thinking about a bath and an early night. Professor Gleitmann’s book was on her bedside table and looked like providing her with an effective soporific. But first she turned on the Nicamvision to see if there was anything about Mayhew.

The TV news didn’t even bother to report it. It was only a shooting after all, and nothing to compare with the stories of war, famine, and human disaster which constituted the greater part of the bulletin. After the news there was a programme which devoted itself to the pros and cons of punitive coma. This was timely, because an IRA terrorist, Declan Fingal, was to have his sentence of irreversible coma carried out at Wandsworth Gaol the following evening.

Tony Bedford, MP, the opposition spokesman on Crime and Punishment, had joined a number of demonstrators outside the prison to protest against the sentence, and told the cameras of his repugnance at what was being done in the name of the law. He was his usual windy self and while Jake was generally in sympathy with most of what he said about punitive coma, she was left with the impression that if Bedford had been Home Secretary he would have sent Fingal back to Ireland with nothing worse than a stiff lecture.

There followed a studio interview with Grace Miles. Looking more relaxed than she had been in Frankfurt, Mrs Miles wore a black dress with jewelled buttons that were the size and shape of Viking brooches, and which was cut low on her well-bosomed chest. She looked more glamorous than a rockful of sirens. The camera cut to a wide shot of the Minister sitting in her chair and almost as if she had heard a cue, Mrs Miles crossed her legs to reveal just a fraction too much thigh, and, Jake could hardly believe it, a stocking top. That was one for the tabloids, she found herself thinking. Mrs Miles was the only woman in the Government who could, and did, trade on her own sex appeal.

While there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that Mrs Miles was an attractive woman, there wasn’t much that was attractive about what Mrs Miles had to say to her interviewer about punishment. And the voice was too hectoring and insistent to make for easy listening. Jake didn’t like to remind herself that she had voted for this woman’s stiff-necked punitive policies. But being a police officer, she reflected, sometimes played havoc with your political inclinations.

A pictophone-call at three in the morning is not usually a source of much pleasure for a police officer. The best that Jake could normally have hoped for would have been an obscene caller, exposing his genitals to the camera in the hope of outraging some helpless spinster. Blindly thumping the headboard that controlled the lights and the speaking clock — ‘The time is 3 a.m.’ — Jake shook her head clear of sleep and reached out for the remote control handset that worked the pictophone. For a brief moment she thought that it might be the hospital and that the stakeout might have worked. But when she had thumbed one of the buttons to take the call, it was Sergeant Chung’s face that appeared on the small screen on her bedside table.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ he said with delighted insincerity.

Jake sneered sleepily. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘Do I know what time it is? Of course I know what fucking time it is. Listen, I’ve just had my wife on the box to tell me the fucking time. Wanting to know why I’m still here at the Brain Research Institute instead of at home, fucking her.’

‘Yes, well I bet she’s missing that,’ said Jake, adjusting the colour on the screen, turning up the yellow until Chung’s head looked like a large lemon.

‘You’re fucking right she is,’ said Chung, oblivious to Jake’s irony.

Jake reached for her cigarettes and lit one. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘if you’ve got something to report...’

‘I didn’t call just so as I could see you without your make-up,’ he snarled. ‘Or who you’re sleeping with.’

‘Sleeping with?’ Jake murmured. ‘Why the sudden coyness?’

‘Eh?’

‘Forget it. Look just tell me what you’ve got so I can get back to sleep, you little yellow bastard.’

‘You want to watch it, you know. I could report you to the Racial Harassment Unit for a remark like that. I’ve solved your problem, white lady.’

Jake sat up in bed. ‘You mean you can explain the breach of security?’

‘Not bad,’ said Chung, grinning at the sight of Jake’s suddenly exposed breasts. ‘Not bad at all. Tell you what: give me a quick flash of the rest and we’ll call it quits about the racism, okay?’

Jake gathered up her sheet and held it up to her neck. She wanted to tell Chung to fuck himself, to put him on a charge. At the same time she didn’t want to risk him becoming even more uncooperative than he was already. She knew him well enough to realise that he was capable of any amount of obstruction. So she gritted her teeth, ignored his sexist remark, and asked him to explain what it was that he had discovered.

‘If I were you, I’d get my white arse down here,’ he said. ‘Right now. See, it’s not something that’s easy to explain on the pic and I won’t be here if you come looking for me in the morning. I’ve been working solid on this thing for over twenty hours and as soon as I’ve explained things to you, I’m off home to get some fucking sleep.’

‘This had better be worth it,’ Jake growled, and hit the remote to end the call.

Naturally I was just a little concerned when I saw the evening paper. It only goes to prove what I was saying about encephalisation of function. I knew it was a mistake to shoot him in the anterior as opposed to the posterior of the brain. That’s what you get for being impatient.

Mind you I didn’t doubt that, at the very least, I would have left Russell visually impaired, the optic nerve and septal and preoptic areas all being located around that part of the brain. (Come to think of it, I might have also damaged his all-important hypothalamus, which is of course, where his, and my trouble started.) So the chances of his being able to identify anything more than the inside of his own eyelids were slim, despite what was written in the Evening Standard. You see how it doesn’t do to believe everything you read in the Evening Standard? All the same, in future I would have to be more careful and always aim for the cerebellum and cortex.

It’s a fascinating area, brain function. Anyone who doubts me should try and think exactly which part of his brain is doing the thinking at that precise moment. Try it: close your eyes and concentrate on a picture of your own brain. Easier if you have a Reality Approximation machine to help you, but if you don’t, let me try and describe it.

Viewed from the top, your brain most resembles something from Dante’s Inferno, a pit to which lost souls have been consigned, their fleshy bodies coiled together with hardly a space to separate their desperate agonies of damnation. It is a sight such as might have greeted the liberators of Auschwitz as they stared into the mass piles of naked, unburied corpses. A ghastly, pressed jelly of humanity, this pâté de foie gras of thought.

Seen from the side, your brain is a dancer, or an acrobat, impossibly muscled — will you look at those biceps and those pectorals — bent into a foetal position, the arm (temporal lobe) wrapped around the leg, the head (cerebellum) resting on the shins (medulla oblongata).

From underneath, your brain is something obscenely hermaphrodite. There are the frontal lobes meeting like the labia of a human vagina. And beneath them, the pons and the medulla oblongata that reminds you of a semi-erect penis.

Dissected, sectioned coronally from ear to ear, the imperfect symmetry of your brain is like a Rorschach inkblot, that diagnostic tool of unstructured personality tests once favoured by psychologists.

But where, you say, among all these lobes and hemispheres, stalks and tracts, fissures and bulbs — where are the thoughts, these logical pictures of facts? The plain fact is that we must think on an even smaller scale if we are to find their origin. We must come down to a measurement of one thousandth of a millimetre, to the simplest element of nervous action, the neuron.

Now can you picture them? So quick in their synaptic jumps from one to the other that you could be forgiven for missing it the first ten thousand times. And listen, can you hear the electrical energy that is generated as these synapses take place? You can? Congratulations. You’re thinking.

So now think of this: if you could lump all the true thoughts together, namely the logical pictures of facts, what you would have would be a picture of the whole world.

We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.