A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (19 page)

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Authors: Philip Kerr

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Now and then their ideas of foul murder made Jake laugh out loud. Mostly they made her want to get one of these authors down to the lab so that they could see a really foul murder in all its mouldy, messy and utterly wasteful horror.
Well of course I have considered the possibility that I am barking mad. When you’ve murdered nine men, you have to really. There are some people who consider that killing in cold blood, and in any great number, is ample proof of an abnormal psychology. But of course, that simply won’t do. Not these days.
The policewoman on the Nicamvision said that I was possibly psychotic. Quite apart from the fact that modern psychiatrists have already abandoned the distinction between neurosis and psychosis, and dropped such outdated terms from the current official diagnostic catalogue of their profession, I don’t think that I could ever reasonably be described as psychotic, in the sense that my thoughts and needs no longer meet the demands of reality. Even if one ignores the fact that the only reality one can be sure of is the Self, I would suggest that if anything, my thoughts and deeds pay rather too close attention to the demands of reality.
You want a psychotic? I’ll show you a doozy. The Greek hero Ajax killing a flock of sheep he mistook for his Trojan enemies. Now there’s a fucking psychotic. The trouble is that most of these junk-psychobabble words don’t have much meaning. Schizophrenia is such a mouthful, for so little import. There’s a West African tribe called the Yorubas who, to my mind, have a much better word for what Western shrinks would refer to as schizophrenia. They say that a person is ‘were’. I think this might transpose rather well between the languages. To say that ‘he is were’ implies that someone no longer ‘is’, and operating in the present. What better word for indicating a split personality?
What Policewoman said made me laugh. ‘I will do everything in my power to ensure that you receive the proper medical treatment.’ Well that was sweet of her. Of course what she meant was that if I gave myself up, she would endeavour to make sure that I was diagnosed ‘unfit to plead by reason of insanity’, within the legal and, it is fair to say, entirely fallacious definition of insanity that is to be found in the English judiciary’s McNaghten Rules. This would mean that I could not then be tried and, more importantly, it would mean that I could not be sentenced to punitive coma - most probably, irreversible coma. Good thinking, Chief Inspector. There’s not much incentive to give yourself up to the police if you know there’s only a hypodermic needle waiting for you.
And all that stuff about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police? Now I have kept every one of the press-cuttings to do with my work in the Blue Book. There’s not one of them which suggests anything of the kind. This was pretty clever. The remark about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police was just the surface structure of what she was saying. If you look for the deep structure, what you would end up with would be a question: ‘Why don’t you communicate with me?’
At the same time, she keeps something in reserve in case I’m the shy type. She says ‘fuck you’ and slaps my face. She tells everyone about how butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of any of my victims. These were just innocents, she says, going about their lawful business. Nothing at all about them being VMN-NEGATIVE. (And the way that Detective Chief Superintendant dealt with that rogue question - well, they don’t want the Lombroso Program connected with these executions any more than I do. Their embarrassment would signal the end of my mission. Or at least make it bloody difficult. There’s not one of my famous brothers who wouldn’t be expecting me.) Now this is supposed to make me angry enough to get in contact with Policewoman in case the first tactic doesn’t work.
The bit I enjoyed most was my description and that ComputaFit picture. I wonder how she managed to obtain it? There are only two possibilities: either Bertrand Russell did somehow manage to splutter out a few dying words (all the same, I can’t see him working with a police artist), or that chink counsellor at the BRI managed to remember me. Still, the picture doesn’t resemble me all that much. ComputaFits never do. You look at them and you say to yourself that if someone looking like that were walking around he would have been arrested many times over just for being so weird. But on the whole it wasn’t a bad effort. The chink must have a good memory. Either that or they shot him full of something to make him remember.
Anyway, what is clear here is that Policewoman has issued a sort of challenge. What’s the sign of someone accepting one? Must one adhere to a certain etiquette or convention? No matter. It’s already quite obvious that she means it to be my move next. To accept the challenge or not. And clearly another killing must be made in accordance with some new rules which belong to the grammar of the word ‘game’.
Yes, a game with Policewoman is a fine idea. My favourite game used to be Monopoly, but it is not what it was. The board itself is half as thick as it used to be. The Old Kent Road no longer even exists, thanks to the developers. Oxford Street has become the New Oxford Street Shopping Mall. Fleet Street is a wasteland. The green houses and red hotels once reassuringly solid and wooden are now hollow and plastic, and are supplied in half the quantity than of old. ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards have become hopelessly outdated. Free Parking. In London? That’s a laugh. School Fees of $150. These days that would buy you a few textbooks. You win a beauty contest. This kind of thing was outlawed, several years ago. Doctor’s Fee, $50. For what, a bottle of aspirin? And no-one gets out of jail free: you have to pay to stay in a decent one, and you have to pay to get out. And the rents.
No, things have changed since I was a boy.
But here, you know nothing about my childhood, do you? Then let me describe my first thought.
 
 
My first thought (in time it may also prove to be my last) was to cry out, no doubt stimulated by the hand of my deliverer and, in so doing, take my first breath of a strange new world. Of course we cannot talk about what went before and it’s still too early to say what will happen after. But I think this is a reasonable assumption of what first occurred inside my VMN-deficient brain.
Since the moment I was plucked, head first, from out of eternity and dangled by my ankles in the cold light of what is temporal, I have spent some considerable time in attempting to think of what cannot be thought. The nearest that one may come to this is in the contemplation of the state of non-existence that exists prior to birth and after death. Believe me I have found it easier to bend my mind in trying to say what cannot be said.
I suppose you could say that my motive, such as I was ever possessed of one in this matter, was partly blasphemous, since my mission resembled the utterance of the Tetragrammaton — JHVH. I feel I must accept this since what is thinkable is possible too, in the sense that one cannot think of anything illogical: we could not honestly say what something that was illogical would look like.
No doubt there are some who would disagree with this, but the reality - such as reality exists in this poor world - is that
it
is as hard to think of something illogical as it would be to determine the precise ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, and thus construct a circle of the same area as a given square. (A piece of pie you might think, but speaking as one who has tried, it cannot be done.)
Commonly the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem, as dreamt up by the Nazis, is considered to have been something unspeakable. But this is simply not so, and to say that language cannot represent the Holocaust is to misrepresent it as something not of this world. It is to suggest that it is a riddle, that the explanation for why it happened lies outside time and space, and that the ultimate responsibility for it does not belong to man. (These are the people who suggest that understanding implies condonation.) Yet it is the fact that the Holocaust is so very much of this world and therefore that it can indeed be said and is not something unspeakable, which makes it so terrible. (For it was a culture producing Mozart, Beethoven and Goethe which committed this crime. In the same way the Romans produced Horace and Pliny and yet still threw Christians to the lions. Great crimes are a corollary of great civilisations.)
The only limit to what can be said is the limit that separates sense from nonsense. (By this limitation it will be seen that the Holocaust makes perfect sense, although one condemns it.) And yet there persists this belief that that which may indeed be understood may also be unspeakable: that the sense of the world may be found inside the world.
But if there is any one value which does have value it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens. The fact of the matter is that all propositions are of equal value and there are no such things as propositions of ethics. Ethics are transcendental and cannot be put into words. In short Ethics are impossible.
Why else should anyone choose to go against them? If it was possible for there to be some kind of moral proposition which forbade murder I would not deny it. But it is also impossible to speak about human will in so far as it is the subject of ethical attributes. And so I kill because there is no logical reason not to.
The truth of thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problem.
Die Endlösung.
 
 
... But here I’ve been killing time, when I should have been killing the next name on my list. And what a name it is. One of the shapers of the whole Western intellectual tradition: Socrates.
9
J
AKE’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.

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