A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (14 page)

 

 

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.

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.

S
ERGEANT CHUNG WAS seated on a triangular stool at a grey perspex table in the main computer room at the Institute. Along one section of the circular table’s circumference was a keypad and, in the centre, a holographic projection of the data he was currently using. In the partly darkened room the machine had the appearance, to Jake’s eyes, of some ancient oracle.

‘Holy Priest,’ she said, on seeing Chung, ‘ask it if we will think it worthwhile to have been turfed out of our beds at three o’clock in the morning.’

‘You can afford to lose a bit of beauty sleep,’ Chung growled over the lip of his coffee cup.

‘Coming from you, Yat, that sounds suspiciously like a compliment.’

‘Yeah, well I’m tired,’ he said, and yawning, rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s these holograms. I can’t stand them. It’s like hallucinating. I prefer a proper screen myself.’

Jake drew up another stool and sat down next to him at the operator table. The bulk of the Lombroso computer was underneath their feet, with the information fed through the table legs and onto the projector. Closer to him now, she sensed his smell, which was none too good.

Chung caught the prickle in her nostrils and snorted derisively.

‘If I stink, it’s because I’ve been sitting here for the best part of three days.’

Jake decided that it was an opportune moment to smooth and flatter Chung.

‘And don’t think I haven’t appreciated it,’ she said. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked. I couldn’t have asked for more. Believe me, Yat, if you’ve got a lead which opens this case I’ll see the APC gets to hear about it.’

Chung’s narrow eyes became even narrower.

‘All right, all right,’ he chuckled. ‘I get the picture. No need to go over the top. To be honest, I don’t give a fuck what you tell anyone.’

But at the same time, Jake could see that he was pleased.

‘Please, Yat,’ she said, affecting a sort of girlishness. ‘I’m dying to know what you’ve found out.’ She hammered her fists on both knees and uttered a little squeal of excitement.