A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  ‘But it’s also worth remembering that Wittgenstein came to regard the early work contained in the Tractatus as fundamentally mistaken. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the killer might similarly be persuaded of the error of what he is doing. He promised to communicate with you, did he not? Yes indeed, he seemed to imply that you and he might have some sort of a dialogue. That might present you with a real opportunity to argue with him and, utilitarian considerations notwithstanding, maintain a logical position at odds with his own. If he’s in any way sophisticated, he ought to respond to that challenge.’

  Jake nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t suppose you might consider helping me out with that as well?’ she asked.

  ‘Frankly, I’d be delighted,’ he said. ‘I was rather hoping you would ask me. The idea of engaging a murderer in a philosophical dialogue is certainly an intriguing one. Contemporary philosophy in action, so to speak. But tell me, Chief Inspector, do you have any idea how he will make contact with you?’

  Jake shook her head vaguely. ‘However he does it, you can bet he’ll be too clever for us to trace him. My guess is that he’ll try and use a portable phone from a car he’ll have stolen. If he called us while he was sitting in some multi-storey car-park in Central London it could take forever to find him.’

  ‘Then hadn’t we better give consideration to where you and I will be when he calls. If I’m to help you, then I ought to be at your side. And I regret that I am presently unable to leave Cambridge. At least for the next week or so, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that you have any video-conferencing facilities here?’ she asked. ‘A pictophone, maybe.’

  The professor shook his head. ‘No, we do not. Trinity finances are no longer what they were. It’s the same for the whole university: thus we have monstrosities like Yamaha. Trinity has already been obliged to sell its unique wine cellar.’

  ‘Would you be willing to have a pictophone installed here, Professor?’ said Jake. ‘I can have my people set up a permanent telecommunications link between us. That way, when the killer calls, you can participate in our conversation.’

  Sir Jameson Lang shrugged. ‘Just as long as I wouldn’t have to do anything technical. Unlike Wittgenstein, who was rather good with his hands, I have no practical skills whatsoever.’

  ‘All you’d have to do is press a button to open the conference.’

  ‘Very well then. I’d be happy to.’

  ‘Then I’ll arrange it immediately. The sooner the equipment is installed, the better.’

  It was time for Jake to leave.

  ‘You can leave the disc with me, if you like,’ Lang suggested. ‘I’d like to listen to it again, if I may. There may be something that I missed. Incidentally, it might interest you to know that Wittgenstein had a real fascination for detective stories. The hardboiled, American variety. When you conduct your own investigations, Chief Inspector, it might be useful to remember that he himself placed little reliance on the so-called deductive science of Sherlock Holmes. He liked his detectives to be rather more intuitive. If one assumes that your killer is of the same frame of mind, trusting your own intuitions might ultimately prove to be very useful. To that end, I wonder if I could suggest something, while you’re here.

  ‘Perhaps’ - he said hesitantly — ‘perhaps, while you are here, you might like to take a look at Wittgenstein’s old rooms.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’ll find them interesting.’ He glanced round his own quarters and smiled. ‘They’re not at all like this, of course. No, he was much more simple. As a professor he would have been entitled to have something rather grander. You know he came from one of the richest families in Austria, and reacted against everything that reminded him of that former privileged, luxurious existence. Even to the extent of having a brief fling with Communism. I shan’t accompany you. I’ll probably give you his whole biography if I do. No, I’ll get someone to take you.’

  The Master went to the telephone and called the Porter’s Lodge. Then he wished Jake goodbye.

  By the time Jake re-crossed Great Court, a man in a raincoat, not the Chinese, but another man, was standing on the steps of the Porter’s Lodge to conduct Jake on her tour.

  ‘Right then, miss,’ he said, ‘I believe the Master said it’s K10 that you want to see.’ He led the way back out the Great Gate and onto the street. ‘That’s in Whewell’s Court,’ he explained as they passed through another ancient doorway set in a wall beside the post office. ‘So who was this bloke? The one who lived here?’

  ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein,’ she said. ‘He was a great Cambridge philosopher.’

  The porter nodded.

  ‘Do you get many visitors wanting to see his old rooms?’ she asked, wondering if the killer might have made some sort of similar pilgrimage.

  ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been here over ten years, and you’re the first in my memory.’

  They came to the foot of a small staircase, with red-ochre painted walls.

  ‘It’s at the top,’ he said, going on ahead. ‘Saw a philosopher on the telly once. Near enough a hundred years old, he was. And the bloke says to him: Having lived for so long, do you have advice for mankind? Anyway the philosopher laughed and said that he did have some advice. He says: “Yes. Don’t ever help your own children.” What about that, eh? “Don’t ever help your children.” What a mean old bugger, eh?’ The porter laughed derisively. ‘Philosophers eh? What do they know about real life, I ask you.’

  Jake, who had received nothing but hindrance from her own father, admitted that there might be something in what he said.

  The ascent to K10 came to an end before a plain black door above which was painted the name of the room’s occupant, one C. Von Heissmeyer. Jake wondered if this could be an Austrian name, and if so, whether there was anything suspicious in that.

  The porter knocked and waited. ‘If the student’s in, we’ll need his permission,’ he said, and knocked again. Then, there being no reply, he produced a set of keys and opened the door.

  The rooms were simplicity itself, consisting of a kitchen, a sitting room and a bedroom. The orange sofa and armchair were as hard on the eye as the blue carpet underfoot. The single bed, with its plain, purple cover had been carefully made. The kitchen was neatly kept, with three dinner plates draining on the rack like the three computer disks in their box on the desk.

  Jake went over to the triple-arched window and sat on the edge of the desk. In the courtyard below sat a greenish bronze figure of a man. In the distance were two devil’s horns of the incongruous-looking Wolfson building. Her eye caught the reading list taped to the window pane, and then the matching pile of Penguin Classics.

  It was strange how something so innocent, so commonplace as a pile of Penguin Classics could stir suspicion in her mind. This really was too absurd, she told herself. It smacked of something obsessive. But even though she knew it was ridiculous, Jake found herself paying close attention to the titles and their authors: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins; The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard; and The Last Days of Socrates by Plato. Pure coincidence, she told herself. The same was true of the row of books by Wittgenstein ranged along the mantelpiece and the framed photograph of him which hung above these. And weren’t there many young people who liked to have a poster of a gun-toting Humphrey Bogart in their rooms: this one was from Howard Hawks’s production of The Big Sleep. ‘The violence screen’s all-time rocker shocker,’ said the blurb at the top of the poster. ‘Bogy’n’ Baby paired off for a hot time and the big thrill in cold, cold crime.’

  Hadn’t Professor Lang said something about how Wittgenstein had been interested in the American detective genre?

  But what could have been more natural than that a student occupying Wittgenstein’s old rooms in Trinity should also have been interested in him? And like him, like any young man, interested in the ha
rdboiled detective?

  By the same token, what could have been more natural in the present circumstances than that she herself should have been interested in anyone who might feel he had some kind of spiritual affinity with Wittgenstein?

  Sir Jameson Lang had surely missed one of the most important differences between the philosopher and the detective. For the detective, nothing is ever truly itself and nothing more. A cigarette end was never just a cigarette end: it was also sometimes a sign, a clue, a piece in a puzzle awaiting connection with something else. There was more semiology than philosophy in that particular aspect of her work.

  Only connect. To be able to really know something was only to know how things were connected. Like a psychoanalyst, it required connecting the past to the present and thereby obtaining some sort of cathartic resolution.

  Of course there were times when connections eluded her, when she could connect ‘nothing with nothing’, when something could not be known.

  And there it remained only to make things fit.

  To fit. No detective much liked the verb. It smacked of corruption and of malpractice, of suppressing some connections and highlighting others. It was much too active. Too premeditated.

  But life was hard, and Jake found herself taking a note of the student’s name, just in case.

  This morning, after dreaming of my father, I woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on my lips.

  The television clock was emitting a loud buzz which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. At the same time, the television turned itself on for the early morning aerobics show. It was seven-fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. I had worked the day before, a Sunday, and although I had Monday off, I didn’t like to miss my physical jerks. So I wrenched my body out of bed and seized a dirty singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.

  The music started and, after a violent fit of coughing, I took my position in front of the screen on which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, and dressed in a virtually luminous green leotard and tights, had already appeared. In time to the music, she started to run on the spot, raising up each thigh in turn to her chest.

  ‘Come on now’ — she grinned virtuously — ‘let’s stretch those muscles and work those lungs. And one, and two, and three and four ... And one, and two, and three and four ...’

  I did my best to observe the pace she had set.

  ‘Remember, I’m watching you,’ she joked. ‘So no cheating now. And one, and two...’

  The rhythmic movements of the exercise began to jog a few recollections of my dream. But it had been more than just a simple dream. It was a real memory of early childhood and my father, one of the first real memories (as opposed to approximately real memories) I had had in a long time. As I bounced mechanically up and down, I struggled to hang on to it for a while. It was extraordinarily difficult, and after a few more minutes the memory did not persist, fading like the image on a piece of photographic paper that has been treated with the wrong kind of chemical. No amount of bouncing seemed able to jog the memory back again.

  ‘And relax,’ said the instructor. ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.’ Big smile. ‘The weather next, after these messages.’

  I collapsed onto the bedroom chair. But while physical exercises for the day may have been complete (I never bothered with the second session), there still remained my mental preparation. I always treat the first two-minute commercial break of the morning as the perfect opportunity for a therapeutic hate period. The fact is that I take violent exception to being patronised and find that the commercials help to bring out the very worst in me. So, for two whole minutes, I just shout and scream the vilest abuse at the various TV advertisers whose thirty-second messages fill the screen. Fortunately the apartments above and below my own are no longer occupied.

  When all my little procedures for starting the day were complete, I showered, ate breakfast and went through the Sunday newspapers, looking for anything to do with my own story. As usual, there was something - you kill enough people, you get your story in the papers all the time. On this occasion it was a colour feature on the victims, with unnecessarily vivid close-ups of their gun-shot heads and their dead bodies.

  There were also some nice pictures of Policewoman, taken at her touching little press conference. These revealed a truly beautiful woman, a fact which until now had not been made clear to me, even on high-definition television. This is, I suppose, hardly surprising. Television, even high-definition television, does strange things to people. It makes their heads bigger, it makes them taller. In short, it makes them seem altogether different from how they really are in the world. That was also the case with Policewoman.

  Clearly she is Jewish in origin. Her name would tell me as much. Her appearance confirms the matter. A dark-haired Sephardic beauty with cadmium-green eyes and cheekbones that were cut from purest marble (I was never much of a poet). Her chin is equally strong and helps to make her full mouth as stubborn as a salesman’s optimism. Yet there is also just a hint of the coquette about the angle of her head and the purse of her crimson-lake lips - enough to soften the hard, questioning look in her eyes which might easily turn into contempt. A policewoman’s face, albeit a distinguished one. Lady Disdain.

  I imagine she must have been some kind of athlete when she was at school. It’s difficult to tell from television and the photographs, but I think she must be tall. I expect she was captain of netball, and with those long, strong legs I’d also guess she might have become an efficient high-jumper. I dare say she wore her shorts a size too small and broke a few hearts.

  She looks quite intimidating and it would not surprise me if there were a few unsatisfactory relationships with boys who found themselves unable to measure up to her advanced maturity. Doubtless they would have turned this fear of her powerful physicality against her in order to lend themselves comfort and protection. Did they call her names in mockery of her size, I wonder.

  There was little information which the newspaper provided about Policewoman, except that she was thirty-seven, a graduate of Cambridge University, that she had served with the Met for thirteen years, and that she was an expert in the investigation of serial killings. It was fortunate that I had been able to access her file in the police computer which, in addition, revealed her name and address.

  Almost idly I copied the magazine photographs of her onto the computer and, using the 3-dimensional imager, turned her this way and that, almost as if she had been a child’s doll. But I soon grew bored of this and went to make myself a cup of Brio.

  I was glancing through a pornographic magazine when it occurred to me that I could see Policewoman naked. Quickly I returned to the computer and copied a selection of photographs onto the program and started to assemble some photo-composites of her head and various naked female torsos.

  I decided that her breasts should be neither too small, nor too large and that her nipples were probably as yet undarkened by a pregnancy. The pubic area presented a greater problem. First I found a pudenda with not enough hair and then one with too much. I was forced to find some more magazines. These were better and more explicit. When these were fed into the computer, she sat, wearing just a pair of white, self-supporting stockings, with her legs drawn up so that her knees almost hid her mouth, tugging at her immaculate labia with well-manicured fingers, and allowing me a midwife’s view of her insides.

  In another sequence of shots, I found a girl whose head position exactly matched those photographs I had of Policewoman, and who was depicted in the act of fellating a man, as well as in the act of full intercourse. When I had married this new material together with Policewoman I was able to see what little pleasure she might have taken in the heterosexual act. Of course, this had a great deal to do with her original facial expression which was that of someone appearing before a press conference as opposed to an erect penis. But all the same, intuitively I perceived more or less how it would be.

  By way
of contrast I found some shots of the same model engaged in lesbian acts. This sexual behaviour seemed to suit Policewoman’s features rather better and I managed to comp an effective one of her guzzling on another girl’s toffee-coloured clitoris.

  With all this excitement under my belt, I simply had to have sex with her, or an approximation of her anyway. So I copied the picture disk onto the RA machine and climbed into my exoskeleton. Then I unwrapped an RA condom and peeled it onto my erection before attaching the terminal to the suit. When all was ready I donned my helmet, plugged myself into the computer, and started to run through the pre-RA checks like a pilot about to test fly the old X-15. This was to avoid any accidents that might result from a sudden surge of approximate reality to the ears or, more importantly, the penis.

  ‘Textures, on. Dynamics, on. Sound, on. Head tracking, on. Body sensing, on. Phallus sensor, on.’

  Then I dropped the visor-screen.

  And there she was, standing before me in a pleasant forest glade, like Eve herself, without so much as a fig leaf to cover her nakedness. The image blurred a little as I stepped towards her and I made a small adjustment to the visor. Then I reached out and caressed her breast to test the glove, and felt her nipple harden as I touched her. Next, I slapped her face hard to test the sound quality, which was fine. Policewoman took the blow with a cry of pain, but no reproach. She just stood there, awaiting my next move, as programmed. I motioned her down onto her knees to check the RA condom and felt her approximate mouth envelop my penis. Everything was working perfectly. So long as the visor was down, the software would remain in operation, and approximate reality would be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. (Sometimes I think that I’m living a real life in an approximate way. Or should that be the other way round?) Better even. There are no laws in RA.