A Philosophical Investigation

9

Jake’s advisory team of experts was made up of Professor Waring, Doctor Cleobury, Detective Inspector Stanley, and Detective Sergeants Chung and Jones. Two days after the press conference they met in a room at New Scotland Yard to discuss the progress of the inquiry.

‘This is the newspaper advertisement which the agency devised,’ said Jake, drawing a PMT copy of the ad across the table in front of Waring and Cleobury. ‘So far there’s been only a limited response to this, or to my statement.’

Waring glanced down the list of VMN codenames and shook his head. ‘I wonder what the public makes of this?’

‘There have been one or two curious calls from the press,’ Jake admitted. ‘Which reminds me. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Professor. Where did the original list of codenames held by the computer come from?’

Waring shrugged. ‘Do you know, Doctor Cleobury?’

She smiled. ‘It was Doctor St Pierre’s idea,’ she explained. ‘He was looking for some sort of list of names of people who he could be sure were dead — you know, for legal reasons. Anyway, he picked the current Penguin Classic catalogue, and fed it straight into the computer.’

‘Penguin Classics?’ repeated Jake. ‘As in the paperback publishing company?’

‘That’s right. And when that list runs out, he’s planning to use the names of all the characters who appear in the novels of Charles Dickens.’

Jake raised an eyebrow at that one. But the idea of catching the murderer of Edwin Drood was not without its own peculiar appeal.

‘How is your effort with the Lombroso computer coming along, Chief Inspector?’ asked Waring. ‘The electronic spike.’

Jake looked at Sergeant Chung. ‘Perhaps you could tell us, Sergeant,’ she said.

Chung straightened up in his chair. ‘My hope that there might be some kind of an electronic spike has been pretty well fulfilled,’ he explained. ‘The computer decided to treat the erasure as accidental, although the basic memory is still in the process of reconstruction. However, the suspect’s deletion of his own personal details could not be retrieved. Since then, as you may know, I’ve been working with our own police computer, and having created a fictional murder investigation, I’ve been using a series of names drawn by the computer at random from the list of telephone subscribers to create a list of hypothetical suspects, with the aim of generating a response from Lombroso.’ Now he shrugged. ‘But this sort of thing takes time. And not all of these VMNs are on the telephone.’

‘How many so far?’ asked Jake.

‘Eight,’ said Chung.

‘Out of a possible 120,’ said Waring.

‘With the two who answered our advertisement, the six who replied to the letter they received from their counsellors, and the nine who are already dead, that makes a total of twenty-five,’ said Jake. ‘Less the VMNs who are already in prison, that still leaves seventy-five.’

‘Seventy-four,’ said Chung. ‘We know that Wittgenstein deleted himself.’

‘I wonder why there hasn’t been a better response?’ said Professor Waring.

‘They’re scared,’ said Jake. ‘Did you know that some of them think that they’ll be rounded up, and quarantined. Maybe even worse. If I was in their position, I don’t suppose I would be too anxious to come forward either.’

‘Well, that’s all nonsense,’ said Waring. ‘Stupid gossip, put about by irresponsible people.’

‘Nevertheless, it’s what some of them do believe,’ insisted Jake.

Professor Waring nodded gloomily and stared at one of the papers in his file. It was clear he did not wish to discuss the matter any further. Which made Jake wonder if there might, after all, be some truth in the rumour. But she kept this uncertainty to herself. She recalled that Waring had been opposed to her ideas as to how the investigation should be handled. At the same time, she had a respect for his abilities as a forensic psychiatrist. He was the best in the country and there was no sense in further alienating Waring at this stage in her investigation. She could see that Waring was looking at the list of codenames which constituted Wittgenstein’s nine victims. He read them slowly and in the chronological order of their murders.

‘Darwin, Byron, Kant, Aquinas, Spinoza, Keats, Locke, Dickens and last, but not least, Bertrand Russell.’ He looked up at the others seated round the table. With his prematurely white hair, half-moon glasses, undernourished, ascetic-looking features, and an Aran sweater of permanently-knit eyebrows, it wasn’t difficult for him to appear thoughtful. ‘I don’t suppose there could be some kind of pattern there, could there?’ he said vaguely.

‘You mean some kind of intellectual pattern?’ said Jake. ‘Not according to the Computerised Intelligence System.’

‘Computers have no imaginations,’ Waring said contemptuously. ‘How about we try for one minute to use our own brains to look for a pattern?’

Jake shrugged. ‘Sure, why not.’

‘Let’s take Darwin for a moment,’ he said. ‘He was first. Well, who else would be? Origin of Species, you get the idea.’

Doctor Cleobury shook her head firmly. ‘Except that this is the grandfather, not the son. It was Erasmus Darwin, not Charles, who was killed, Professor.’

‘What’s Erasmus Darwin written that could possibly merit inclusion as a Penguin Classic?’ he said.

‘He wrote some poems about plants,’ said Jake.

Doctor Cleobury nodded, smiled pleasantly at Jake and then shifted on her largish bottom. Comfortable once more she checked the hem of her tight black skirt and then the edge of her permed blond hair. Jake thought she looked more like a barmaid than a psychiatrist.

‘Surely what is more significant,’ said Jake, ‘is that five out of the nine were philosophers.’

‘Six,’ said Cleobury. ‘If you want to count Erasmus Darwin’s so-called Sensational School of Philosophy. Wait a minute—’

‘What is it?’ said Jake.

‘Just that it was Erasmus Darwin who was one of the first thinkers to try and establish a physiological basis of mental phenomena — a medullary substance.’ She shook her head and waited for everyone else to catch her up. ‘Well, don’t you see? That’s precisely what Lombroso is all about.’

Jake nodded, uncertain that the discussion was leading anywhere.

‘Highly apposite,’ agreed Waring, warming to his original idea. ‘But what could be the connection with Immanuel Kant?’

Jake caught Chung’s eye. He shrugged disinterestedly. Detective Inspector Stanley was studying the contents of his tea cup as if searching for some clairvoyant indication as to a future line of inquiry. Detective Sergeant Jones, who was supposed to be making notes of the meeting, was yawning at his computer screen. Jake smiled as she noticed the obscene spelling he had given the name of Kant. Waring saw it too, and shook his head with vigorous self-reproach.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘How stupid of me. His family came from Scotland and changed their name of Cant into Kant to suit the German pronunciation. Darwin took his degree of medicine at Edinburgh. Of course, it’s not as strong a connection to Kant as Hume would have been, but still—’

Jake let the professor and Doctor Cleobury carry on in this rarefied vein for a while, establishing insignificant connections between the nine dead codenames, before finally drawing them back to her original remark.

‘I suggest we try not to let ourselves get too carried away,’ she said with a smile. ‘I think what’s important is that out of a list of 120 VMNs, twenty of these codenames are the names of philosophers. Not only do we know that the killer’s own codename is that of a philosopher, but several of his victims have also had the names of philosophers. It strikes me that what we have here is a killer with a sense of humour. The idea of one philosopher killing others just tickles him.’

Waring considered this for a moment. ‘But then why not choose all nine of them that way? Why just the five?’

‘Or six,’ added Doctor Cleobury. ‘Don’t forget Darwin.’

Jake shrugged. ‘Possibly he may want to deny us the establishment of some kind of pattern.’

Waring sighed wearily. ‘Then he’s making a damn good job of it.’

Detective Sergeant Jones looked up from his screen. ‘I wonder if he actually knows any philosophy?’ he said.

Jake nodded. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question.’

The meeting meandered on through the remainder of the afternoon before Jake declared it over. At five, she went out to get some coffee. When she came back she found Chung waiting for her in her office. He looked uncharacteristically excited.

‘What’s up with you?’ she said. ‘Your premium bond come up?’

‘Could be,’ he said, grinning, and waving a piece of paper.

Jake sat down at her desk, exhausted, and removed the lid from the Styrofoam cup. Meetings always made her feel as dull as carpet underlay.

‘Let’s hear it then.’

‘A random name and telephone number just got a response from the Lombroso computer,’ he explained. ‘Bloke called John Martin Baberton. Anyway, at the same time, the police computer at Kidlington reveals that this Baberton fellow has got a criminal record for computer fraud and attempted murder.’

Jake looked up from her coffee. ‘You’re joking,’ she said.

Chung glanced at the printout he was clutching. ‘And what about this? He’s got a degree in Philosophy, and a history of psychiatric disorder.’

‘He sounds too good to be true,’ said Jake. ‘Have you got the file there?’

‘That’s the funny thing. Records can’t find the manual file. It seems to be missing. There’s just his computer record.’

He handed Jake the printout and watched her as she read it over. She lingered over Baberton’s laser-jet-printed picture.

‘These pictures aren’t the best for identification purposes,’ she said. ‘But I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen this man before. What’s his VMN codename?’

‘According to Lombroso, it’s Socrates.’

‘Another philosopher.’

‘Address?’

‘Two known. There’s one on his Lombroso printout, and another on the police file.’

‘Which one matches his ID card number?’

‘The police file.’

Jake read the warning from the Lombroso computer with interest. It was the first time she had come across one within the course of an investigation.

ATTENTION. THE SUBJECT YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED HAS BEEN TESTED VMN-NEGATIVE, SOMATOGENICALLY PREDISPOSED TO VIOLENT CRIME. HE SHOULD BE APPROACHED WITH CAUTION. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON VMNS, YOU SHOULD CALL THE LOMBROSO PROGRAM AT THE BRAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE. PLEASE DESTROY THIS COMMUNICATION WHEN YOU HAVE READ IT. IT IS AN OFFENCE TO MAKE A COPY OF THIS COMMUNICATION, OR A RECORD OF THE SUBJECT TO WHICH IT REFERS. THIS COMMUNICATION IS INADMISSIBLE AS EVIDENCE IN A COURT OF LAW.

Jake fed a length of hair into her mouth and sucked it thoughtfully.

‘There’s something strange here,’ she said. ‘We know that somebody with the codename Wittgenstein deleted himself from the original VMN database, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So who’s this well-qualified bastard? You couldn’t hope to pick a better suspect if you went down to central casting.’

There was a knock at the door and Detective Chief Superintendent Challis entered Jake’s office.

In the early stages of the investigation, when he had been effectively supplanted by Jake, Challis had shown no inclination to become involved in the case again. But ever since the press conference, Challis had taken to appearing in Jake’s office at all times of the day and asking her for progress reports. She wondered if his suddenly-reawakened interest in the case was spontaneous, or if someone higher up, perhaps someone in the Home Office, had requested that he keep an eye on things. Whatever the reason, she disliked his interference almost as much as she disliked Poison Challis himself. Challis was another old-style policeman, one who thought that women in the police force were best employed communicating bad news to the families of accident victims.

‘Did I hear the word suspect, Jake?’ he boomed, rubbing his hands.

For a moment Jake considered stalling him and then decided against it. He was the kind of senior officer who was apt to be unforgiving about being kept in the dark on something. So she told Chung to repeat what he had just told her, after which she added a note of caution.

‘I’d like to keep this man under surveillance for a while,’ she explained. ‘It’s just a precaution, only there’s something strange about all this.’

Poison Challis sniffed. ‘I’ll tell you what’s strange,’ he said. ‘It’s this John Martin Baberton who’s bloody strange. You heard it yourself. The man’s a bloody psycho.’

‘No, sir,’ insisted Jake. ‘What I mean is that this is all a little too—’ She shrugged. ‘Too convenient.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Challis demanded. ‘What do you mean, too convenient?’

Jake wondered if it was her imagination or whether she could smell drink on his breath.

‘Haven’t you got any faith in your own law-enforcement technology? Jesus Christ, woman, it’s supposed to make things convenient. Not every result has to come from months of painstaking detective work. Not these days, anyway. Or is this just some of that bloody feminine intuition I hear you always banging on about?’

‘No, sir,’ said Jake patiently. ‘I’d just like to wait a little, sir. I’d like to...’

But Challis was already on the pictophone. ‘I want a tactical firearms squad ready immediately,’ he barked at the startled man appearing on Jake’s screen. ‘What’s the bloody address, Sergeant? Here, give me that piece of paper.’

Chung handed Challis the printout and looked questioningly at Jake as Challis read out the address to the squad constable. Jake shrugged silently, but when Challis had finished speaking, she said to him, ‘Sergeant Chung? For the record, I would like you to note that this course of action is being taken by Detective Chief Superintendent Challis against my advice. In my judgment—’

‘To hell with your judgment,’ snapped Challis. ‘Who the hell do you think you are? I run the Murder Squad, not you. I’ll say when we make an arrest and when we don’t. You may know a lot about criminal psychology, Chief Inspector, but I know about law enforcement, and I can recognise a bloody collar when I see one. Now you can either be a part of this, or you can stay here and sulk. Which is it to be?’

Jake felt her eyes grow smaller. She thought of the set of tungsten electronic knuckles in her bag and wanted to hit him. She could barely conceal the sarcasm in her voice as she told Challis that she wouldn’t miss it for the world.

But before she followed him out of the door, Jake called Gilmour’s office.

The police car carrying Challis, Jake and Stanley left New Scotland Yard and headed north up Grosvenor Street, Park Lane and then the little Egypt that was the Edgware Road, before turning west towards the A40. The slip-road climbed and looped like a big dipper until they emerged into the main eight-lane carriageway, sandwiched precariously between two enormous water-tankers. It was almost eight o’clock but the Westway was still choked with homeward-bound traffic. Drivers in their two-door Honda micro-cars stared up at the light railway speeding by overhead, and almost envied the passengers aboard it but for the knowledge that they would certainly have been travelling in conditions that would have left an agoraphobic battery hen short of air. Jake shook her head pityingly. One of the few compensations about working the unsocial hours that her job required was that at the times she usually drove to and from the Yard, the roads were all but empty.

The big police BMW moved powerfully onto the toll-paying, speed-unlimited lane which, at the flat fee of $100 a day, was comparatively free of all but the fastest and most expensive German cars. They passed one set of high-rise flats and then another — airborne rabbit-hutches, the road so close to the smoke-grimed windows that Jake could almost see the irradiated lettuce on the plastic dinner plates.

In a few minutes they were at the White City, the two white concrete towers of the new European Television Centre towering over the landscape like a twin pack of toilet rolls, reminding Jake that however long the job kept her out, she wasn’t likely to be missing anything good on the Nicamvision. Seconds later they were driving by H. M. Remand Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, recently expanded into what had been the old Hammersmith Hospital, and surrounded with a no-man’s-land of searchlight and razor-wire.

At the Hangar Lane roundabout, they turned south towards Ealing and Jake quickly lost her bearings in a maze of quiet suburban roads that ran close to the Honda Corporation’s golf course. At the end of one road, already blocked off by police, they met the flak-jacketed commander of the Tactical Firearms Squad.

‘We’ve got the place surrounded, sir,’ he said, indicating a large detached house set in about a quarter of an acre. ‘My boys have just finished having a quick sniff around the place. Apparently there’s a man’s body lying in some long grass close to the tennis courts.

‘Bingo,’ Challis muttered, and glanced balefully at Jake.

‘What did I tell you?’ He nodded at the house. Behind drawn curtains there were lights burning.

‘We haven’t approached the place yet, sir,’ said the TFS commander, whose name was Collingwood. ‘But we’ve shoved a couple of mikes on the wall and it looks as if there’s someone at home all right. Funny thing though. There’s a man standing in the porch.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He’s just standing there.’

‘Didn’t you bring nightsights?’

‘Of course I did. But he’s in shadow, I’m afraid.’

‘Perhaps he’s just stepped outside for a quiet smoke,’ suggested Detective Inspector Stanley. ‘I do that myself sometimes. Perhaps he lives with a non-smoker.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said the commander, and pressed his earpiece closer to his ear. ‘One of my boys says he’s got a gun. A machine pistol it looks like. Seems as if he might be waiting for us, sir.’

Challis nodded grimly. ‘Probably using that body in the garden as some kind of bait. Gets one of us to walk up to the door to try and make an arrest and then opens fire.’ Challis turned to Jake. ‘What do you think about him now, eh? I suppose this bastard with the gun is there to stop the garden gnomes being nicked.’

‘I’ll admit I don’t have an explanation,’ said Jake. ‘But I still think we ought to wait, sir.’

‘For what?’ sneered Challis, not expecting an answer. ‘Can your men take a closer look, Commander?’

‘No problem.’

‘We could train some searchlights on the front of the place,’ Jake suggested. ‘Get a loudhailer.’

‘And let him know we’re here, so he can hole up in there? No way,’ said Challis. ‘I’m not going to risk a siege. The last thing we want on this is the press turning up.’

So, Jake thought, Challis was looking out for the interests of the Home Office after all.

Meanwhile the TFS commander had twisted a small microphone attached to his helmet round to his mouth and given the order.

For several minutes there was only the sound of what passed for silence in that part of London: traffic moving on the North Circular, a Nicamvision’s stereo sound system turned up too loud, a dog exercising its owner’s freedom to let it bark its head off, an ice-cream van insanely spewing out its signature tune “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”, and the wind stirring the rhododendron trees.

Jake breathed uncomfortably, still unable to articulate precisely what was wrong with the whole situation. A long dark Mercedes drew up alongside the other police cars. Gilmour, wearing a dinner jacket, got out and extended an index finger in the direction of Challis. Whatever he said was almost immediately forgotten.

The sound of automatic gunfire is not at all distinctive, at least in a West London suburb. There, people are so unused to hearing the sound that it would almost always be attributed to a late or early fireworks party, no matter what the time of year, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the sound would indeed turn out to be just that. But on this occasion, Jake, Stanley, Challis, Gilmour, and the TFS commander knew better. Instinctively they ducked and two of them, Challis and the commander, even reached for their weapons.

‘What the hell’s happening, Sergeant?’ the commander yelled into his headset.

There was another, more protracted burst of gunfire and then silence again: traffic still moving in the distance, the Nicamvision still blaring, the dog barking more furiously than ever, and the wind in the trees. After a minute or two there were shouts from somewhere in the target’s garden and the TFS commander, fingers pressed against his earpiece like some affected pop singer, stood up.

‘All over,’ he said breezily. ‘The man in the house has been arrested.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Gilmour.

‘What about the gunman in the porch?’ asked Jake.

‘He opened fire and was shot,’ explained the commander.

‘Dead?’ enquired Gilmour.

The commander frowned uncomfortably. ‘In cases involving terrorists, a termination is the usual policy, sir. Unless there are instructions to the contrary.’ He glanced awkwardly at Challis as if seeking confirmation that no such instruction had been given.

‘And who ordered this operation?’

The commander’s frown grew more profound as now he sensed that something was not quite right. He pointed at Challis. ‘Him, sir. I mean, Detective Chief Superintendent Challis, sir.’ He touched the earpiece again and turned round. Two members of his squad were frogmarching a handcuffed man towards them.

Gilmour stepped squarely in front of Challis as if he meant to kiss both his cheeks like a French general. But the congratulations he offered were bent double with sarcasm.

‘Well done, Challis, well done,’ he said grimly. ‘You’ll get a medal for this. I’ll see that you do. And I’ll be the one who pins it on your chest. With a fucking bayonet. If I’m not mistaken they’ve just managed to shoot one of our own people. An armed guard from Special Branch.’

Challis’s jaw slackened. ‘What? Well we didn’t know, sir. I mean, who’s he supposed to be guarding?’

‘Him,’ said Gilmour.

The two arresting TFS officers presented their charge, a fat, blowing, angry-looking figure with blood pouring from his nose and mouth, the result of a blow from the butt of a machine pistol. His fair hair was dishevelled and his shirt was torn, but there was no mistaking the corpulent figure of the Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Bedford, MP.

‘You will understand that I couldn’t prove this. Not exactly anyway. Some of it’s nothing more than informed guesswork by Sergeant Chung and myself. And it will take a while to include all of this within the context of the official report—’

A day or so later, with Challis suspended pending an inquiry, the explanation for what had happened was supplied to Gilmour, Jake and Stanley by Inspector Cormack of the Computer Crime Unit, in Gilmour’s office at the Yard.

‘Just get on with it, Cormack,’ Gilmour growled. ‘And try to keep it simple.’

‘Well, sir, it’s like this,’ explained Cormack. ‘Wittgenstein must have hacked onto the police computer at Kidlington, possibly with the intention of leaving a message for the Chief Inspector here. But while he’s there he decides to have a look around the system and discovers Sergeant Chung’s random name and number program. He has an idea. He creates a police record in the name of the man he is planning to kill: a VMN-negative codenamed Socrates, real name John Martin Baberton — the body that was found in Mr Bedford’s garden. He gives Baberton the kind of background that is just perfect for us: an ideal suspect, and one that we might not be able to resist. And because he has a sense of humour he adds in one or two details, such as Mr Bedford’s home address and Mr Bedford’s picture.’

‘That’s some sense of humour, all right,’ said Gilmour. ‘But where did he get Bedford’s address and picture? That’s what I want to know.’

Cormack winced. ‘It would seem from our own files, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Well you see sir, ECIS has a one-man, one-record database. It would seem that Mr Bedford has a small record. For civil disobedience during the protest marches against punitive coma a few years ago. He was arrested for obstructing a policeman in the execution of his duty.’ Cormack shrugged apologetically. ‘All Wittgenstein had to do was instruct our computer to copy some of Mr Bedford’s details onto a file in the name of John Martin Baberton, sir. The dead man.’

‘He’s not the only one,’ Gilmour said darkly.

‘I’m sorry, sir?’

‘Nothing. Then what did he do?’

‘Well, after he killed his victim, and left him at the foot of Mr Bedford’s garden — at least we assume that he did that first — Wittgenstein then had to activate Baberton’s name as a VMN on the Lombroso Program. To do that he must simply have added Baberton’s name and telephone number near the top of Chung’s random program. If anyone had checked they would have seen that the address he used matched only the address on the Lombroso file and not the fake record held on the police computer which provided Mr Bedford’s address, and said that the one on the Lombroso file was out of date. And of course, there was no manual file for a John Martin Baberton: another discrepancy. Also if Baberton had had a criminal record at the time of his being screened by the Lombroso people it would have been revealed on his identity card.’

Gilmour nodded solemnly. ‘Why do you say that Wittgenstein must have hacked onto our computer with the intention of leaving a message for the Chief Inspector?’

‘Well, in view of what happened, sir,’ said Cormack. When Gilmour did not reply, he added: ‘I heard that he left a disc, for Chief Inspector Jakowicz, in the dead man’s mouth.’

‘Who told you that, Inspector?’

‘Detective Sergeant Chung, sir.’

‘He had no business to do so. Things are quite bad enough with the press as it is. If they discover that the killer has made contact with us we’ll never hear the end of it. So keep your mouth shut. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘One more question and then you can go, Cormack. On the basis of what you have surmised about this unfortunate breach in our own data security, are you satisfied that the operation which ensued was precipitate?’

Cormack nodded. ‘Wholly precipitate, sir.’

Gilmour smiled ghoulishly. ‘Thank you, Inspector. That will be all.’

After Cormack had gone, they sat in silence for a few moments. Then Detective Inspector Stanley asked the APC what was going to happen to Challis. Gilmour drew one eloquent finger across his throat and shook his head.

‘I’ve no choice,’ he explained. ‘There will have to be a formal inquiry of course, but in view of what Cormack has just told me, it’s a foregone conclusion. Too bad. He was a good copper.’

Jake nodded, although she didn’t agree with Gilmour’s estimation of Challis’s detective skills.

‘This disc,’ said Gilmour. ‘Have you brought it?’

‘I’ve had a copy made, sir,’ said Jake. ‘The original is still with the lab. They’re subjecting it to every test that’s known to science: fingerprints, voiceprint, accent analysis, background noise, atmospheric adhesion. There’s nothing so far. We’ve traced the disc itself to one of a batch of Sony blank discs sold to an electrical retailer on the Tottenham Court Road. The owner sells ten boxes of the same brand every week.’

‘And the dead man? What about him?’

‘Six shots to the back of the head, as before. According to the lab report, he was killed in Bedford’s garden. He was full of vodka and we believe that Wittgenstein met him, struck up an acquaintance with him, and then lured him to Bedford’s address on the pretext that they would be having sex there. Baberton was homosexual. There’s a well-known gay bar in Chiswick which Baberton used to frequent. We’re still trying to find out if anyone saw Baberton on the evening he died, and if so, whether he was with anyone or not.’

‘Keep me informed on that.’ He nodded at the disc player on Jake’s lap. ‘All right. Let’s hear it.’

Jake placed the coin-sized disc into the machine.

‘The material is in two parts,’ she explained. ‘One on each side of the disc. The first half is a sort of crude axiomatic parody of Wittgenstein’s most famous philosophical work, the Tractatus. The second half — well, I’ll let you judge that for yourself, sir.’ She pressed the button to start the disc.

‘Like Moses and Aaron, his brother, I carry a walking stick. I carry it everywhere and in a way I think of it as like my penis, constantly stiff, engorged for love. But it also represents my conscience, for sometimes I mislay it.’

‘Ten of my brothers have been killed. And I think of death a great deal. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it for years.’

‘Death is the totality of Nothingness, the very opposite of what is in the world. It is determined by a combination of objects (things). The grave is a fine and lonely place but none I think do there embrace. It is only the boys of Chiswick who keep me logico-philosophicus.’

‘What we cannot speak about we must, like the Angel of Death, pass over in silence.’

‘We never talk. It is too dangerous to talk. The boys are rough and crude. Some of them are almost illiterate. There are no names, just the brutal, selfish enjoyment of another being as an object.’

‘If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.’

‘I should go away, somewhere quiet where there is no temptation. Here I am not safe from the love that dare not speak its name.’

‘Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot.’

‘It is loneliness that drives me from my rooms. I have sunk to the bottom. The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man.’

‘At The Funfair in Chiswick...’

Jake hit the pause button.

‘The gay bar in Chiswick, sir,’ she said, ‘it’s called The Funfair.’ She hit the button again.

‘... there is a merry-go-round where all the young queers wait to be picked up. They sit on the horses and flirt outrageously with all the male spectators. There was a boy who gave me the eye as I watched him going round and round. They were all in a certain sense, one.’

‘I asked him back to my room in Ealing. I gave him all the money I had. Money is not a problem for me. My relations, to whom I handed over the whole of my property, send me money when I need it. I object to the very idea of property.’

‘Here, the shifting use of the word “object” corresponds to the shifting use of the words “property” and “relation”.’

‘I imagined us both lying together. It made quite a picture, although it was hard to distinguish one form from another. Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture.’

‘For one glorious moment I was able to transcend my very being. I did not belong to the world. Indeed, I was at the very limit of the world so that I was almost something metaphysical. Language and its limitations prevent me from saying more.’

‘This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism.’

‘I am revolted at my own debauched behaviour, my very intimacy with this young stranger an endorsement of my own loneliness. But how things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.’

‘I am cast down into the deepest pit in hell. Reeking of my own degraded thoughts and in my desperation to be away from the scene of this foul tableau, I take the boy into the garden to kill him. When he sees the gun, he appears to want to say something, then thinks better of it, and just laughs.’

‘When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.’

‘And so my gun speaks for me, silently.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Gilmour muttered after a few seconds had elapsed. And then: ‘Is that it?’

‘Side one,’ said Jake, removing the disc and turning it over to play the other side of the killer’s recording.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Gilmour repeated. ‘You’ve got a right nutter there, and no mistake.’ He looked at Detective Inspector Stanley to elicit support for this view.

‘Sounds like it, sir,’ agreed the other man.

‘Has Professor Waring listened to that?’

‘Yes, he has,’ said Jake. ‘He recommended that I speak to an expert. A professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University.’

‘Listening to that disc, it sounds to me as if a professor of psychiatry would be more bloody use to you. Eh, Stanley?’

The other officer smiled and shrugged vaguely.

‘Sounds as if this fellow could be a queer after all,’ said Gilmour.

‘I don’t particularly care for that word, sir,’ she said. ‘But since you mention it, he might indeed be homosexual. Killing his brothers, as he calls those other VMN-negatives, might be a way of sublimating a homosexual inclination. Or he could be trying to sell us a dummy. To get us to waste our time conducting our investigation among the gay community. As before, there was no evidence that the dead man had been interfered with sexually. None at all.

‘As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein’s own sexuality has often been debated, and while there are some biographers who have sought, rather sensationally, to suggest that he was an active, predatory homosexual, there is little or no evidence for that either.’

Gilmour smiled uncomfortably.

‘Shall we listen to side two?’ Jake asked, and switched on the machine.

‘Greetings, Policewoman,’ said the voice. ‘Caught your show on television the other night. Thanks for the kind thought vis à vis my sanity and my pre-trial prospects. You need not worry. I have already given careful consideration to my own defence, in the unlikely but nevertheless logically possible event of my arrest.

‘I am certain that I could satisfy the court’s McNaghten Rules and maintain a successful plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. You should note that I would contend that it was the Lombroso test itself which disturbed the balance of my already precarious mind. At the same time I would almost certainly file a civil claim for damages on the basis of the duty of care owed to me and the reasonable foreseeability of my suffering some sort of nervous shock as a result of this scan. When this is all over and the Lombroso connection with these killings has been made public, I think you will find that many of the victims’ families will also want to pursue some sort of joint claim against the Brain Research Institute. But that’s another matter.’

The voice was cool and calm and entirely without an accent. As Tony Chen had described it, ‘like someone on the BBC’, except that it was almost too robotic. It had no modulation, no expression, no lilt; no idiosyncrasy of pronunciation that might indicate an area of origin. Received pronunciation, as it was sometimes described. It made Jake shiver a bit as she listened to it once again.

‘Your suggestion that my brothers are innocent was, as you must have supposed it would be, irritating to me. The fact is that I am providing the public with a valuable service. You see, these are all potentially dangerous men who cannot simply be left to their own devices. The logical extension of their identification is, as a bare minimum, containment. But since the advent of an official shoot-to-kill policy among law-enforcement agents, and the implementation of punitive coma as the new cornerstone of penal theory, the incarceration of violent criminals has been demonstrated to be of only secondary importance to an obsessively cost-conscious administration. As a consequence of this governmental example, I am moved to kill them myself, humanely and efficiently, and with the least possible inconvenience to society.’

Wittgenstein allowed himself a small chuckle.

‘You know, instead of trying to hunt me down, you should be grateful to me, Policewoman. Just consider how many of my brothers might have turned into killers of women. Tomorrow’s gynocidal maniacs. That’s your bag, isn’t it, Policewoman? Serial gynocide? At least that’s what the papers say, and we always believe what we read there, don’t we? Like poor Mr Mayhew’s brave struggle for life in hospital?’ He laughed again. ‘Anyway, you just ask yourself how many more lives may have been saved as a result of the few that have already been sacrificed? Is this not simply a kind of utilitarianism?

‘You challenged me to communicate with you, Policewoman. And I have now done so. Both semantically and syntactically you may find the message — or at least the first part of it — not much to your liking. No doubt you should have preferred it if I had seemed more obviously criminal. And if there had been a few clues to help you track me down. Sorry. I’ll try harder the next time we play our little game. Expect a telephone call from me any day now, when I’ll tell you where to find the next body. And thanks. This is so much more fun. Frankly I was becoming rather bored just executing brothers one after the other, day in day out.

‘Until then, I urge you to sharpen up your thinking and to consider carefully the grammar of what you will say to me. Remember, when eventually we communicate in a real sense you and I will be doing Philosophy. So be prepared. Yours bloodily, Ludwig Wittgenstein.’

Jake switched off the disc player.

‘Well,’ said Gilmour, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before.’

‘It is quite unusual,’ Jake admitted. ‘However, the subject’s sense of omnipotence, his feeling of invincibility is entirely typical in cases where a multiple killer has contacted police. It’s something I’m familiar with, sir. Even Jack the Ripper was given to telling the police that he didn’t think they were going to catch him. So to that extent at least he was actually conforming to type.’

Gilmour nodded approvingly. ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Jake,’ he said.

Although Jake knew she was correct in what she was saying, at the same time the killer’s disembodied words had made her feel anything but confident within herself. She had recognised a certain logic in what he had said about the need to eliminate those other VMNs. Hadn’t she said as much herself?

When Jake returned to her office she found Ed Crawshaw at her desk, writing out a note. As Jake came through the door he crushed it in his hand and stood up sheepishly.

‘I know you’re busy with this other thing,’ he said, ‘but I thought you’d like to know: we’ve a sort of lead in the Mary Woolnoth case.’

Jake closed the door, squeezed past Ed Crawshaw’s large frame and dumped herself in her chair. She felt the colour rise in her cheeks.

‘So what am I — your bloody nanny?’

Crawshaw shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

Jake sighed and closed her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Ed,’ she said. ‘It’s this other thing, as you put it. It’s got me worn out. Sit down.’ She pointed to the chair on the other side of her desk.

He sat down and opened his mouth to speak, but Jake stopped him.

‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t say anything for a moment. Just let me try and clear my mind.’

Crawshaw nodded and, adjusting his belt, leaned back in the chair.

Jake opened her shoulder bag, took out a small hand-mirror and checked her make-up as if trying to render herself more human. Her eyes looked bloodshot and her hair was a mess. The ends were split like bamboo. She could hardly remember the last time she’d been to the hairdresser. At the same time, out of the corner of her eye she observed that Crawshaw was putting on weight. His grey suit fitted him rather too snugly, she thought. He had always been a big man but now she could see how he had the potential to become a fat one. It was an impression made easier by the red-haired Crawshaw’s lardy complexion. He was spending too much time in the office and probably not eating properly: the wrong kind of food at the wrong time of day. It was easy to let yourself get out of shape when you were at the Yard. Jake counted herself fortunate that she wasn’t much interested in food.

She found her lipstick and fixing her mind on the lipstick writing she had seen on Mary Woolnoth‘,s dead stomach, she touched up the corners of her diamond-shaped mouth. Finally, as she studied the waxy red end of the lipstick she said, ‘So what sort of a lead do we have, Ed?’

Crawshaw opened the manila file on his lap, drew out a sheet of yellow paper and floated it across the desktop to her.

‘Detailed lab report on the dead girl’s clothes. The collar of her jacket showed light traces of olive oil. Her mother says that Mary was always very careful with her clothes. She spent a lot of money on them, and had things regularly dry-cleaned. So the chances are it didn’t come from her. The olive oil on the collar lapels would be consistent with the killer having grabbed hold of her. There was just a trace of the same olive oil on the clothes of one of the other victims too.’

Jake glanced over the sheet of paper.

‘ “Cold pressed olives from the Tuscany region of Italy”,’ she read, ‘ “producing extra virgin olive oil.” Interesting. So we could be looking for — ?’

‘- for a wop.’ Crawshaw grinned. He shook his head to indicate that he was joking. ‘For someone who eats pizza with his fingers. Or maybe someone who prepares it.’

‘For that matter it might be anyone involved in food preparation,’ said Jake. ‘I think I’ve got some Italian olive oil in my own kitchen at home.’

And that was probably all she had, Jake told herself. The kitchen might have contained every modern convenience, but of food itself there was really very little. Somehow the late supermarket was never quite late enough.

She sent back the paper. ‘Look, see if we can match this oil to a specific supplier.’

‘That’s not going to be easy,’ said Crawshaw. ‘This stuff’s pretty common. I mean olive oil is olive oil, right?’

Jake smiled. ‘I hear what you say, but do your best. By the way, how’s the golden apple operation coming along? The one in the Mystery Bookshop.’

‘No bites so far.’

‘You might take a look at their stock,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe our greasy-fingered killer left a few prints on a book.’

Crawshaw nodded.

‘Anything else?’

‘Er no.’ But Crawshaw stayed in the chair, shaking his head vaguely. ‘Well, yes: some of the squad were wondering what’s going to happen to Poison. I mean to Challis.’

‘Challis is suspended on full pay, pending the result of an inquiry. That’s all I can tell you, Ed.’

‘On full pay, eh? Shame. A meat-hook would have been better. The word is that it was Poison’s incompetence that got that copper killed.’

‘That’s for the inquiry to determine,’ Jake said firmly.

‘I guess so.’ Crawshaw smacked his thighs and stood up. ‘How’s it going anyway? This other thing. Making any progress?’

‘Some.’

‘Need any help?’

‘Thanks for the offer, Ed, but no. But what I need right now is a tame philosopher.’

My own feelings at the time of the death of Socrates were quite extraordinary. It never occurred to me to feel sorry for him, which you might have expected at the death of a brother. But he seemed quite happy, both in his manner and in what he said. He met his death obediently, without fear and with some nobility. I could not help reflecting that on his way to the other world he would be under the providence of God, and that when he arrived there, all would be well with him. So I felt no sadness or sense of remorse.

At the same time, however, I felt no satisfaction either. Before his death our conversation had taken the form of a philosophical discussion. Strange to describe, but I suppose I experienced a sense of pain and pleasure combined as my mind assimilated the fact that my brother was going to die, and that it was I who was going to kill him.

Largely our discussion centred around the topic of immortality, although I rather think that many of the views which he expressed to me were really Plato’s. But that’s another issue. At its most simple, we discussed whether it was a man’s body or his soul which matters most. Considering where we were at the outset of this dialogue — a gay bar in Chiswick — it is strange to report that Socrates was of the opinion that it is the latter which must be cultivated at the expense of the former. If this seems an unduly ascetic position to take, this may have been due to the fact that I had spiked his Brandy Alexanders, not with hemlock, as you might have thought, but with ZZT, the so-called Obedience Drug much favoured among S & M devotees, and thus he may have been led to agree with me.

Nevertheless, his famous last words seem to me to be curiously ambiguous. Before I shot him, he asked me to offer a cock to the god of medicine. Perhaps there was some humorous homosexual double entendre to this remark. Or he may have been trying a little irony with regard to the Lombroso Program. At the same time, and this is the interpretation which I myself favour, he may also have been trying to indicate that death itself is a cure for life.

It is often assumed that death is the negation of life. But how can this be? Anyone who understands negation knows that two negations yield an affirmation. Can it therefore be said that ‘this man is not alive’ and that two such negations would equal an affirmation, ergo, life? Of course not.

You see how mysterious life really is. Life is no more the negation of death than death is the affirmation of life. Yet it is only death which can confirm that there has indeed been life as we know it. Death is not the opposite of anything. It is death, and nothing else besides. Schopenhauer writes of how a state of non-existence is really man’s more natural condition, given that we spend so many billions of millennia in this fashion; and of how life itself is little more than an unnatural blip on the supramillennial screen.

Aside from an approximately real experience, the nearest one ever comes to the full comprehension of death is the contemplation of the non-existence of that which itself gave life: the death of a parent.

It is curious how this Brown Book works both as a journal of my life and as an event in my life. And you who come after me — well, to you this may be a book like any other: but just as I have read a story and then myself am a participant in it, I hope that this will be true of this story and you.

Perhaps now you can see what it means to speak of ‘living in the pages of a book’. This is because the human body is inessential for the occurrence of experience. Indeed, many of my most profound experiences have occurred within the pages of a book. Experiences which have affected my life. If we understand one sentence, even a sentence in a child’s comic, it has a certain depth for us.

Have you ever caught yourself reading? You know, you’re sitting in a chair engrossed in a good book, enjoying the story and the author’s prose-style, and then suddenly, it’s as if you have an out-of-the-body experience and you catch sight of yourself as you really are: not trading wisecracks with Philip Marlowe, or struggling with Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls, but as someone sitting alone in a room, with a book open on your lap. It can be quite shocking. Like a sudden jolting shot of phenothiazine to the schizophrenic. One minute he’s battling international Communism and the next he’s just a guy in a wet bed and a pair of dirty pyjamas.

It is this rare ability to step in or out of the picture which distinguishes reading. Perhaps Keats perceived as much when he wrote to his sister describing the pleasure he should take in being able to sit beside a window on Lake Geneva and spend all day reading, like the picture of someone reading. Like a picture of someone reading... that’s a lovely revealing sentence. And quite typical of those Romantics, always trying to escape themselves. It conjures up such a powerful image of someone not only living but lost in the pages of a book, oblivious to the exterior physical world, to the hand which turns the page, even to the eye and visual field which conducts the printed information to the brain. Without a book I am chained to the earth. Reading I am Prometheus Unbound.

But perhaps our subject, namely my story, has stolen away from us while I have been theorising, like a shadow from an ascending bird. Perhaps you have found that the bird and its shadow are too far apart. I could make more matter with less art, if that was what you really wanted. But must this Brown Book of mine become simply a catalogue of blood with every lethal detail painstakingly described so that you can witness the full horror of my work? Surely we can agree that this improvised bible of my endeavour should remain something detached, a sideshow inside the main show that is my dark heart. And after all it will be entirely your affair how you read it, day and night.

Just remember this, however: thou read’st black where I read white.