A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (45 page)

‘Moreover, I for one welcome the presence of cameras here today. The public has a right to know about the punishments meted out in its name and at the taxpayer’s expense. Just as long as the faces of those participating in the execution of the sentence can be obscured. I look on this kind of broadcasting as performing a valuable public service.’

Jake could stand no more of someone as manipulative as Mrs Miles defending the freedom of the press, and walked slowly away from the cameras. She was surprised to find Mark Woodford come after her. She hadn’t seen him since the day when he and Waring had tried to persuade her to let Sir Jameson Lang try and talk Wittgenstein into killing himself.

‘Haven’t had a chance to speak to you,’ he said. ‘But well done, you know. For catching this poor fellow. No hard feelings?’

Jake shook her head. ‘I was just doing my job.’

‘That’s right. We were all acting for what we thought was the best, weren’t we? By the way, congratulations about your promotion. I hear you’re heading up the Murder Squad, now.’

‘It’s just temporary,’ said Jake. ‘Until they can get someone to replace Challis.’

Woodford lowered his voice. ‘Oh I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up doing the job permanently,’ he said. ‘The Minister likes your style.’

Jake glanced back at Mrs Miles who was still talking to Anna Kreisler.

‘I can’t say I care much for hers.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t say I care for my own very much either. Not when I see a circus like this.’ Jake was walking towards the chief warder.

‘Well just remember this: it was you who found the star act.’

‘Like I said, Woodford, I just did my duty.’

‘You heard that Doctor St Pierre resigned?’

Jake said she hadn’t.

‘Oh yes. It’s not public yet. But someone’s head had to roll for what happened. And St Pierre was the obvious candidate, I’m afraid. There’s a new security chap on it now. He’s going to change the whole system procedure, before the Program is implemented throughout the European Community, so there shouldn’t be any more problems of unauthorised entry. And when the thing is up and working it really will make your job a lot easier.’

Jake smiled sardonically. ‘I wonder,’ she said. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me.’

She went over to the chief warder and asked if she could see Esterhazy alone for a few minutes.

The warder looked at the flower and then at Jake. ‘What’s the plant for?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘It’s for Esterhazy,’ she explained. ‘Something beautiful for him to see and smell before he’s PC’d.’

‘Against the regulations probably. But under the circumstances, I suppose it’ll be all right. This way, if you please.’

Jake found Esterhazy watching television in his cell, under the watchful eyes of two warders. His hands manacled in front of him he was sitting on the edge of a chair, engrossed in the BBC’s outside broadcast coverage of his own punishment. When he saw Jake he turned and smiled.

‘Ah, the hyacinth girl,’ he said. ‘You know I shall miss colour most of all. It’s my experience that one only ever dreams in black and white.’

Esterhazy was older and more distinguished than Jake remembered from the trial. Lofty even. Like someone who was easily tired by the mundane thoughts of his fellow men. She was struck by his physical resemblance to the real Wittgenstein. Only he was more athletic — vigorous even — than she might have imagined. And there was about him an air of electric intelligence such as Doctor Frankenstein might have set his sights upon in creating his famous creature. He spoke in an exaggerated sort of way, like a character from some Victorian melodrama. His restless eyes became fixed for a few seconds on the flower in Jake’s hands. She said nothing. He rose from his chair, took the pot out of her trembling hands and laid it on the table beside the television set.

‘How kind of you to bring me a red flower,’ he said. Nostrils flaring he pushed his whole muzzle into the bloom and closed his eyes.

Jake heard him breathe deeply through his nose, savouring the sweet scent of the flower. He repeated this behaviour several times before his eyes opened again. He glanced at Jake and she saw mischief run down his face like a bead of sweat.

‘If I had asked you to bring me a red flower, would you have looked up the colour red in a table of colours and then brought a flower of the colour that you found in that table?’

Jake shook her head. ‘No.’

‘But when it is a question of choosing or mixing a particular shade of red, we do sometimes make use of a sample or table, do we not?’

‘Yes, we do sometimes,’ she agreed.

‘Well,’ said Esterhazy, returning his slightly-hooked nose to the flower, ‘this is how memory and association may be said to work, within the context of a language game.’

‘You’re still playing games, even now?’

‘Why not?’ He pouted and pointed to the television screen. ‘When I myself am to be made the subject of what might be conceived as a game, albeit a concept with rather blurred edges. Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re asking if a blurred concept is a concept at all. Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is a man who is neither wholly dead nor wholly alive still a man?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jake. ‘Perhaps.’

He grinned. ‘Then again, perhaps not. It seems to me that I shall be more like this plant. Hair and fingernails pruned from time to time. Watered and weeded. Periodically checked for signs of infestation. But largely shorn of relevance other than the purely symbolic.’

‘You killed people.’

He shrugged quickly. ‘I envy them.’ His grin widened. ‘I owe you my life, I suppose. But tell me, what were you saving me for?’

‘There are rules in my game too,’ Jake said. ‘It isn’t a proper game if there is some vagueness in the rules. You, of all people, should realise that.’

He sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right I suppose.’ His smile returned. ‘You know, you’ve done me a real favour, bringing me this little hyacinth. I’ve been racking my brain for a strapline of less than 150 characters, to put on my drawer’s computer screen. One of the condemned man’s last little privileges. Too generous. The gentlemen here have been reading me some of the other convicts’ lines in the hope that I might be able to decide what I wanted.’ He groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, most of them are impossibly sentimental. The average criminal has a rather vulgar turn of phrase, especially when it relates to how he wishes to be remembered. But you have inspired me with this flower of yours. Thank you.’

‘What words are you going to have?’

‘Surprise,’ he said. ‘Read my drawer in a couple of hours.’

‘I’m sorry about ... all this. Really I am.’

He shook his head dismissively. ‘Will you do me a service?’

‘If I can.’

‘I understand that it is permitted to visit someone who is in a coma. Gardeners say that if you talk to a plant then it will thrive. Would you come and talk to me now and again?’

Jake shrugged. ‘What shall I say?’

‘Name things. Talk about them. Refer to them in talk. As if there were only one thing called “talking about a thing”. Speak to me as if you were a little girl talking to her doll. You owe me that much for keeping me alive. Will you do this?’

‘I never much liked dolls,’ said Jake. ‘But I’ll make an exception in your case.’

He seemed relieved by this assurance.

Finally she asked him why he had done it. What was it that had motivated him to kill all those men?

The bright eyes rolled heavenwards. His accent suddenly turned American.

‘My motivation?’ He smiled laconically. ‘Well gee, it was all based on my inner emotional experience I guess, discovered through the medium of improvisation.’ He shook his head. ‘Motivation ... You make me sound like Lee Strasberg, for God’s sake. People always ask a killer that question, Jake. “Say, Cody, what made you do it? What made you go and kill all those women?” They must get so tired of being asked that question, and not finding much of an answer. Embarrassing for them. They ruin their lives and don’t even have a good explanation for it. So after a while, they try and think of some kind of explanation, just to get people off their backs. And what do they say, these killers? “I had visions of Christ and all his angels telling me to do it.” Or, “The voice of Allah spoke to me and told me to kill the infidels”. But you know, this kind of explanation goes right back to man’s beginnings and was first employed by Abraham. “God told me to kill my son, Isaac, and I was going to do it.” How lucky for Abraham that he heard His voice again, and stopped short of murder.

‘Today, when we accept that a killer believes what he says to be true, that religious defence strikes as being evidence of his insanity. And if we think he’s bogus and that he’s lying about having heard a voice, then we go ahead and jab him. But whichever one applies, this kind of explanation for committing such appalling crimes remains generally comprehensible to us. It’s not particularly original, but we can readily accept that there would surely have to be some extraordinary explanation to do something as heinous as kill your mother and your father and your own puppy dog. In a sense, it’s the only explanation which people can understand.’ Esterhazy smiled to himself and looked distant for a moment.

‘But if you want an explanation that’s better suited to these modern times, Jake, I’ll give you one. If the absence of logic is what characterises faith, then the opposite also holds true. Where one has faith in nothing, then there is only logic that’s left to answer to. So just as another man might have claimed that God made him kill twelve men in cold blood, I’m saying that it was not the voice of God which made me do it, but the voice of Logic. I heard the voice of Logic and his ministers of Reason and I had this compulsion to kill.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s a different kind of madness, that’s all.

‘But you’ve read the notebooks, haven’t you?’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘What do you think? You’re the detective. This was your investigation. You caught me. You must have the answers. It’s you who have restored the moral order to a world that was temporarily upset by my crimes. How very Shakespearean of you, Jake. Perhaps it’s me who should be asking you questions. Well, what do you think, Chief Inspector?’

Jake shrugged. ‘Any restoration such as you describe would be an illusion, in my opinion,’ she said. ‘You ought to know all about illusion, Paul. Look at you, spending half your life with that Reality Approximation machine. Even now you might believe that you’re still wearing your RA suit and helmet. If I have an explanation at all, it’s that you can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is unreal. But that doesn’t make you so very different from a lot of other people. Nobody cares much for reality anymore. Maybe they never did. Is that what you would call a moral order? If you ask me, there’s not much balance around anywhere. And this — this investigation was just a holding action. Until the next time.’

They didn’t say much more after that. For a few moments she sat in silence and let him hold her hand. She tried to remember the last time she had held a man’s hand. Her father had tried to hold her hand as he lay dying in hospital and she had pulled away. Things were different now. She had stopped hating. It was time to be compassionate. To care. Maybe even to love.

Jake left him alone during the few minutes which remained. She would have left the prison if she could. She had no stomach for what was to follow. But the provisions of Homicide (Punishment of Murderers) Act 2005 required that, as senior investigating officer, she be present when the sentence was carried out.

Watched by almost twenty people, to say nothing of the millions watching on television, Esterhazy met his punishment as bravely as was possible, considering that he was already strapped down onto a hospital trolley when the coma technician produced the hypodermic. There was an audible gasp among two or three of the spectators as the needle caught the light from the glass ceiling like an upturned sword. Esterhazy turned his head away from the television camera and waited in silence. The technician swabbed his neck with a piece of cotton wool and the air was filled with the scent of something antiseptic.

The prison clock was still striking midnight as the needle entered his jugular vein and the plunger was depressed. Coma was almost instantaneous.

Next the body was wheeled into the main storage hall, and under the huge eye, it was transferred to the waiting drawer. Electric wires and pipes were attached to Esterhazy’s naked torso, and when everything was in place and working to the coma technician’s satisfaction, the drawer was pushed smoothly shut.

Jake waited until the television cameras had gone before moving in closer to read what the technician was typing on the screen: Esterhazy’s epitaph. She recognised it as some lines from
The Waste Land,
the ones which followed the hyacinth girl.

Jake wiped the tear from her eye, collected the hyacinth, and went out into the sunshine.