A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (41 page)

When she was satisfied that there was nothing more she could usefully add, Jake instructed the program to calculate the degree of probability. The machine gurgled, emptied half of the screen, flashed several colours and was silent for almost a minute. Finally a number arrived on screen.

‘56.6 per cent probable,’ said Jake.

‘Not much better than an even chance,’ said Stanley.

Jake grunted. Accessing the original MAP once again, she asked to review the existing 300 characteristics of the database. This took several minutes to read through.

‘You know,’ said Jake finally. ‘There’s nothing here about transportation. What’s a multiple’s most common mode of transport?’

‘Truck,’ said Stanley, hardly hesitating. ‘Small van, or an estate car.’

‘Right,’ said Jake. She cleared the screen and accessed the main menu. This time she selected the National Vehicle Licensing File to check if a vehicle was registered to Esterhazy. After a short pause the computer returned with the information.

‘Bullseye,’ said Jake. ‘He owns a blue Toyota Tardis van, registration Gold Victor Bravo 7-8-3-7 Romeo. Now if we assume that the van is worth another three points, that takes us to almost 60 per cent.’

‘That’s a bit more like it,’ agreed Stanley.

Jake started typing again.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘That racial marker we had from the killer’s DNA ...’

‘A German. So?’

‘So Esterhazy isn’t an English name.’

‘It isn’t?’

Jake fed Esterhazy’s name and identity card number into the computer.

‘It’s Hungarian or Austrian, I think. Let’s see what his birth certificate says, shall we?’

A copy of the document flashed up on the screen.

‘Parents born in Leipzig,’ said Jake. She looked at Stanley triumphantly. ‘I’d say that about clinches it.’

 

 

Five minutes after Jake finished the Multiple Analysis Program, Detective Sergeant Jones came into her office. He was holding a compact disc and looked angry.

‘Yes?’ said Jake. ‘What is it?’

‘It was orders,’ he said. ‘From Gilmour. I didn’t have any choice.’ Jake guessed what he was talking about. ‘Wittgenstein called, didn’t he?’

Jones took a deep breath. ‘About half an hour ago. Gilmour said you weren’t to speak to him.’ He glanced awkwardly at his shoes. ‘He told me to leave it to Professor Lang to handle the conversation.’

Jake nodded numbly. ‘With what result?’

‘I brought the recording,’ said Jones and handed her the disc. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

Jake smiled bitterly. ‘It’s not your fault. Did he say that he was planning to kill another one?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘What about Lang’s little suggestion? Do you think that it had its desired effect?’

Jones shrugged. ‘Hard to say, ma’am.’

‘All right. Get onto Airborne Surveillance. See if they can find a blue Toyota Tardis van, registration Golf Victor Bravo 7-8-3-7 Romeo.’

Detective Sergeant Jones leaned on Jake’s desk and made a note of the number.

‘Come on, Stanley,’ said Jake, heading out through the office door. ‘We’ll listen to the recording in the car.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jones shouted after them.

‘Hospital,’ said Jake. ‘To get my fucking head examined. Maybe they can tell me why I bother coming here.’

 

 

‘That’s all we need,’ Jake screamed as the car twisted loudly onto Victoria Street. ‘This madman to go and top himself just as we’re in sight of arresting him. I could kill those stupid bastards in the Home Office.

‘Better put the siren on,’ she told her driver. ‘We need to make tracks.’

Jake switched on the disc player and inserted the recording.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to settle with having me today,’ Jake heard Lang tell Wittgenstein, much as if he had been apologising to a student for another don’s absence from a tutorial. ‘Chief Inspector Jakowicz is unable to come to the phone right now.’

‘The lying piece of shit,’ said Jake. ‘So much for moral philosophy.’

‘I hope she isn’t sick,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘I hope she isn’t upset because of what happened the last time. I had promised to talk, after my lecture. To discuss things.’

‘No, no,’ insisted Lang. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘Well, something more important, no doubt,’ he replied, sounding rather piqued. ‘I dare say we can get along without Chief Inspector Jakowicz, just this once.’

Immediately she heard Wittgenstein’s voice she realised that he sounded different: lacking confidence, tired, depressed even. And as their conversation progressed he allowed the professor to take the conversational initiative, to lead the argument. He seemed hardly sure why he had bothered to call at all. He spoke quietly, in dull monotones, with long, ponderous silences. Jake realised how vulnerable he might actually be to whatever phenomenological interrogation Lang had planned for him.

‘Man is a temporal being,’ said Lang.

‘Yes,’ said Wittgenstein dully.

‘A self-creating being who chooses his own fate, wouldn’t you say so?’

‘Oh, I agree.’

‘And being conscious, through one’s own will of one’s own temporality, then the only real certainty about the future is ...’

‘... is death,’ added Wittgenstein.

Jake held on to the door handle as the car swerved through traffic.

‘To live well,’ she heard Lang say, ‘to really live life to the full, you have to live in the hard light of that fact.’

‘Absolutely, yes,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘That is both one’s nature and one’s ultimate fate.’

‘The more so in your case.’

‘How so?’

‘Well,’ said Lang, ‘it seems to me that by killing all these other men who, like you, tested VMN-negative, you are merely postponing your real desire to take your own life.’

‘There may be something in what you say.’

Jake punched the back of her driver’s headrest.

‘Can’t we go any faster?’ she yelled. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Stanley nervously lift his Adam’s apple clear of his shirt collar as the car gave a lurch of speed forward. The driver, who was used to angry demands from the back seat that he should go faster, betrayed no emotion on his lean moustachioed face. He fed the steering wheel through his strong hands as calmly and expertly as if he had been making a perfect circle of pizza dough. In front of the car, the traffic widened like an opening zipper. Speeding past Waterloo Station and round the three-storey-high shanty town of hardboard and corrugated iron, they almost hit a vagrant who was standing motionless in the middle of the road like a traffic bollard. They missed him by only a few centimetres.

‘Stupid bastard,’ Stanley muttered, twisting around in his seat to look through the rear window at the quickly shrinking figure. ‘Someone ought to move all these people.’

‘I think I’m right in saying, Professor Wittgenstein,’ said Lang, ‘that suicide has been rather common in your family. Not to mention the fact that your own adolescent hero, Otto Weininger, took his own life.’

‘You’re right, of course. My brother Rudolf killed himself. It was a merely theatrical gesture. Weininger’s death was altogether something else. It was an ethical acceptance of an intellectually predisposed fate. A noble thing.’

‘As I recall, there were many Viennese men who were moved to kill themselves in imitation of Weininger. But you did not. Was it simply that you did not dare to kill yourself? That you did not have the courage?’

Wittgenstein uttered a long, deep snort of amusement. ‘You’re very good, Professor. I see your game. Well perhaps you’d call it a game. It certainly isn’t a perfect game. It has ... impurities. I compliment you. Well then I shall also call it a game. Existential Leaps, perhaps. But only because I am dazzled by your ideal.’ He spoke languorously, as if savouring the full implication of Sir Jameson Lang’s design. ‘It is quite admirable.’

‘I am glad that you think so,’ said Lang, apparently undisturbed by Wittgenstein’s complete understanding of what he was trying to achieve. ‘If I may add one more thing, however ...’

‘I should insist on it.’

‘I’d be correct in assuming that you believe in God?’

‘Yes, you would be correct.’

‘Therefore, you have the perspective for suicide. The God relationship and the Self. That’s very important. I mean, any atheist can commit suicide. They have no sense of spirit. The point about suicide, that it is a crime against God Himself, altogether escapes the atheist. Well, what I’m trying to say is this: all this time I imagine you’ve been thinking that in killing these other men you were killing God.’

‘That’s fair I suppose.’

‘I won’t ask you why. I’m not interested why. But I’m sure you have your reasons. Whatever they are, I respect them. I feel quite sure you must have given the matter a great deal of thought. But look here, if you really want to wave two fingers in the face of God, then you’ve been missing the point. That’s not the way to do it. To flee from existence itself is the most critical sin, the ultimate rebellion against the Creator. What is required of you is intensified defiance, the heightening of despair.

‘The last time we spoke you described yourself as an artist. I don’t doubt it. Only as such, yours is a common dilemma: the sin of living life in the imaginative as opposed to the real world, of Art instead of Being. Naturally God plays the crucial role in your heightened sense of despair. In your secret torment, God is your only hope, and yet you love the torment and will not abandon it. Somehow you are aware that what you must do is let go of your torment and take it upon yourself in faith, and that you cannot do. So your defiance of God intensifies and you kill others to prove it. But, as I say, real defiance is shown most of all by killing oneself.’

Wittgenstein sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘What you say about the artist’s existence feels true.’

‘How do you feel about killing yourself?’

There was a long silence.

The car left Southwark Street and sped along Southwark Bridge Road into Borough. St Thomas Street. Guy’s Hospital. The security guards on the gate lifted the barrier and stepped quickly back as the car roared past.

‘Does it make you feel afraid?’

Jake cursed Lang loudly.

‘Do you believe in eternal life?’

‘Eternal life,’ Wittgenstein whispered, ‘belongs to those who live in the present.’

Jake heard him smile as he added:

‘Is some riddle solved by me surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question. Well then. The riddle does not exist. And the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’ Then he rang off.

Jake buttoned down the electric window and leaned out of the car to address the gate-keeper.

‘Where’s the nurses’ home?’ she asked.

‘Nurses’ home? You’re a bit out-of-date, aren’t you? That closed two years ago.’

‘Drive on,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll try inside the butcher’s shop.’

The car accelerated forward and came to a screeching halt at the hospital’s front steps. Jake sprang out of the car and raced up to the front door where, startled by the speed of her arrival, two police guards met her with pointed guns. She waved her ID in front of their bovine faces and demanded to be taken to the hospital administrator.

The first policeman took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Don’t have one, ma’am,’ he said.

‘The manager then,’ she said. ‘The director. Whoever’s in charge.’

Both men continued to look puzzled.

‘Who is in charge?’ the first policeman said to his colleague. ‘I dunno.’

‘Ask her,’ suggested the other, and pointed to a nurse.

‘We want the person in charge,’ the first policeman said to the nurse. ‘The one that runs the place.’

The nurse smiled unpleasantly, as if she had been about to provide some very nasty medicine.