A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (37 page)

When she was satisfied that she had induced the hypnotic trance, she explained that she wanted to ask him some questions in Chinese and that he would hear another voice next. She told him that he should answer in Chinese and that he should now nod if he understood.

Chen nodded slowly, and then they began.

‘Would you please ask him if he remembers the patient codenamed Wittgenstein,’ Jake instructed Chung.

Chung translated the question into his own language.

Jake thought that Chinese, with its high and low sounds existing so close together, sounded like someone trying to tune an old radio. Listening to the pair of them jabbering away, Jake found it hard to accept that Chinese could have anything in common with English, even at the deep, genetically preprogrammed level.

‘Ask him if he can remember some of the things Wittgenstein said.’

Maybe she was wasting her time. Here she was, trying to investigate how language represents reality and yet she had given no consideration to the question of how anything manages to represent anything. It was not something they taught you at the Hendon Police Training College. Not something that anyone taught, except maybe people like Sir Jameson Lang. And just how far should any criminal investigation go? Had she not already gone a lot further than she was supposed to?

‘Ask him to describe Wittgenstein once again,’ she told Chung. ‘Let’s see if we didn’t miss something.’

Once again Chung translated her question, frowning fiercely as he spoke. What was there about the Chinese language, Jake wondered, that seemed to make people irritated while they were speaking it? Chen sighed and then drooled slightly while he thought of his answer. He spoke hesitantly, adding one word to another and then another, almost at random.

‘Brown raincoat,’ Chung repeated. ‘Brown shoes, good ones. Brown tweed jacket, with leather bits on the elbows. He doesn’t know what you call them. A special word. Not badges. Like badges.’

‘Patches?’ said Jake.

‘Maybe, yes.’ Chung craned his head forwards so as not to miss the rest of Chen’s speech.

‘White shirt. No, not a shirt. Like a pullover, but not like a pullover. A pullover with a polo neck. But not made of wool. Made of the same material as a shirt.’ Chung shrugged. ‘A white polo neck anyway.’

Chung’s words seemed to touch something deep within Jake’s own memory.

It was curious that Wittgenstein had mentioned her perfume, because a sense of smell - something clinical and antiseptic - was what she remembered most about him now.

‘Yat,’ she said, ‘ask Doctor Chen if it’s the same kind of white polo neck that a dentist might wear.’

Chung translated and then, hearing Chen’s reply, nodded.

‘Yes, he could have been a dentist.’

Jake shook her head.

She had offered to help Wittgenstein and he had smiled at her with what he might have thought looked like confidence. But what Jake had seen had been teeth that were scaled and yellow - teeth that were badly in need of dental work.

‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think he’s a dentist. His teeth aren’t good enough. I’ve never ever seen a dentist with bad teeth.

‘Yat, you remember you said that the only way the killer could have broken into the Lombroso system would have been if he was using a computer that was already on the EC Data Network?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ask Doctor Chen if he thinks that Wittgenstein might be a male nurse or some other kind of hospital auxiliary staff?’

Chung put the question and Chen replied that he thought he probably was.

‘Just like the real Wittgenstein,’ said Jake. ‘He worked in a hospital for a while, during the Second World War. It was one of the reasons that enabled him to avoid being imprisoned as an enemy alien.’

Chung shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble with you British,’ he said. ‘It was the same with the boat people back in Hong Kong. You always locking people up who couldn’t possibly do you any bloody harm.’

Jake brought Chen out of the trance.

‘Find anything useful in there?’ he said pleasantly.

Jake explained her hunch about Wittgenstein working at a hospital.

‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, and then stood up and stretched.

‘Well,’ said Jake, looking at her watch. ‘I think we’ve taken up enough of your time, Doctor Chen. I’m grateful.’ It was probably too late to find anyone still working at the Ministry of Health.

‘No problem,’ he said again. ‘Next time see if you can’t help me to stop smoking.’

Jake and Chung returned to the office they used when they were at the Institute, where Jake called the Ministry. She found herself connected with a picture of an impossibly fit and healthy looking girl in a leotard, and an incongruously brusque male voice on an answering-machine which informed her that the Ministry was closed until nine o’clock the following morning.

‘Well I guess that’s it until tomorrow,’ said Jake. ‘Thanks a lot for your help, Yat. I really think that was useful.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Translation makes a nice change from computers.’

They walked back to the Yard.

‘Your train goes from Paddington, doesn’t it?’ said Jake. ‘Can I offer you a lift?’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But only on one condition. That you let me take you to the best Chinese restaurant in Soho first. It’s owned by a cousin of mine.’

Jake grinned. ‘All right. It’s a deal. But won’t your wife be waiting for you?’

Chung smiled back. ‘Her mother’s staying with us at the moment. She thinks her daughter should not have married a man from Hong Kong.’

‘It’s because she’s narrow-minded,’ Jake offered.

‘No.’ Chung laughed. ‘It’s because she’s never eaten at my cousin’s restaurant.’

T
HEY DROVE TO Soho and ended up parking as far away as St James’s Square. Chung apologised for the distance to his cousin’s restaurant.

‘I don’t mind walking a bit,’ said Jake. ‘Frankly, I could use the exercise.’

‘Me too,’ he agreed. ‘Although I do manage to work out a bit at home. I’ve got a heavy punch bag hanging from the ceiling in the garage. I give that a good kicking in the morning. Lately I’ve been imagining that it’s my mother-in-law.’

‘They walked up the short hill that led onto Jermyn Street and turned east towards Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus.

Opposite Simpson’s, Jake paused in front of red brick office building and nodded at the smoked glass door.

‘A girl was murdered in there,’ she said. ‘Just a month or two ago. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’ She glanced up and down the street. ‘It all seems so peaceful, so civilised, so very ...’ Her eyes alighted on the black wall of St James’s Church.

‘What is it?’ asked Chung.

Jake shook her head vaguely. ‘Nothing,’ she said, but started to retrace her steps in the direction of the church’s curiously theatre-like door. ‘At least, I don’t think it’s anything.’

In front of the church, which seemed hardly like a church at all with its bulletin board of visiting speakers, Jake considered the matter syllogistically, as two separate premises. She could not see how the conclusion she had in mind might logically follow these. But even as she told herself that such an invalid conversion would of course lead to an invalid judgment, she remained convinced of the possibility that the thing might be tested empirically. The question was: how?

Seeing her momentarily absorbed like this, Chung remained silent, even when he was obliged to follow her as she walked through the church, out into the stone-flagged courtyard on the other side, and across Piccadilly. She led him up Sackville Street and stopped outside the Mystery Bookshop which, even at that time of the evening, was busy with browsing customers. He noticed that she was smiling a little now and when finally she spoke again, there was a quiet look of triumph in her face.

‘Crime is common,’ she said. ‘Logic is rare.’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘Or shall I just call you an ambulance?’

‘It is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.’ She pointed not to the Mystery Bookshop, which Chung felt might have better suited her cryptic remark, but to the donerkebab restaurant next door. A man was writing some prices onto the inside of the window with what looked like a piece of red crayon. The name above the door was Parmenides.

‘Would you mind very much if we ate Greek rather than Chinese?’ she said.

‘Not at all. So long as you tell me what the hell you’re up to.’

‘Certainly, but let’s get off the street. He mustn’t see us yet.’ She led him into the doorway of a nearby tailor’s shop. ‘The man in the restaurant window is called Kyriakos Parmenides,’ she explained. ‘But his Lombroso-given name is William Shakespeare.’

‘He’s VMN-negative?’

Jake nodded. ‘A few weeks ago, Wittgenstein followed him to St James’s Church, back there, where he planned to shoot him. But Parmenides scared him off and while he was making his escape, Wittgenstein left behind his A-Z of London. This contained the addresses of all his potential victims who lived here.

‘Parmenides found it lying in a church pew where Wittgenstein had been sitting. Well then, after a while, he realised the significance of the book, and like a good citizen handed it into the police.

‘But consider this, Yat: Parmenides works next door to a bookshop from where, one hour before she was horribly murdered, Mary Woolnoth bought a paperback novel. When Wittgenstein attempted to shoot Parmenides, he was sitting in a church that’s not twenty metres from the office where Mary’s naked body was found. The killer wrote on her body with a red lipstick. And he was left-handed.’

Jake leaned out of the doorway and nodded at the restaurant window.

‘And there he is, also left-handed, writing a menu on his windowpane with what looks like a piece of red lipstick.’

Chung nodded. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

‘Jessie Weston, the girl he killed before Mary Woolnoth, was also a murder mystery novel fan. I can’t prove it yet, but I wouldn’t mind betting that she also bought a book in that shop. Which is where he saw her. I wouldn’t mind betting that all the murdered girls came down this street at some time or another prior to their deaths.’

‘It’s an interesting hypothesis,’ agreed Chung. ‘But it all sounds a bit circumstantial.’

‘If I’m right, it should be easy enough to push him out into the open.’

‘What have you got in mind?’

‘Are you carrying a gun?’