A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (12 page)

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 Cam
bridge 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.

J
AKE 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.