“Knowledge,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it will make me better than I am.”
“And what are you?”
She looked blank.
“Suppose you acquired knowledge concerning methods of torture, knowledge of extreme cruelty, would this make you a better person?”
“What are you saying? That knowledge can be a bad thing?”
I decided to press the point home.
“I’m just suggesting that we question all our assumptions concerning value. Nietzsche said that before Socrates, the Greeks were brave enough to acknowledge the fundamentally terrible nature of existence, yet still affirm it – but in aesthetic and not moral terms. Just the horror, the horror. The exhilaration of seeing something almost as it is.”
“So the truth has a kind of beauty no matter how horrible it is?” she asked.
“Yes. Then along comes Socrates and says that virtue is knowledge, that we become better through it, and Plato compounds this by inventing a whole system of values, creating an imaginary world, supposedly better than this one, which we should aspire to and by which we should measure the shortcomings of this one, which we can no longer see because we are blinded by a desire to improve. And with this spurious invention comes all the nonsense about suffering makes us stronger, learning from our mistakes and tragedies blah blah.”
“The fictions of logic?” asked a young Asian boy trying to grow a moustache.
“Exactly,” I said. “These are the fictions of logic, a repugnant optimism that there is a greater reality than the one we have. The false promise of heaven. It’s what Nietzsche calls the beginning of decadence because thought and awareness become sugary once removed from their object.”
“So what’s the point of education?” asked a boy with a bobbing Adam’s apple.
“To look, and then to think. Isn’t it? To take a full look at the worst.”
“Isn’t that just depressing?”
“It might be exciting. Putting your head in the lion’s mouth. Putting out to sea in a full storm. Looking in the mirror and seeing what is really trying to look back at you.”
Then my Rook mobile beeped. I answered. It was the oh so cool redhead Dancy at Hebden Enterprizes, only now gibbering and clearly in shock.
“Come now. Please. I don’t know what to do. He said…”
“Who said?”
“Andy! Andy. He said call you if anything…”
“What’s happened?”
“He’s dead.”
*
Five minutes later Cass was cajoling me in the car park, asking to come with me. She knew it was Rook Investigations work and she wanted in. I told her if she wanted to be useful she could find out all she could about Jacques Brissot. Background. Activities. Company reports. Shareholders. Investments. Anything. She knew she was being fobbed off. As I got in my car she called out, “Friday night, I know you’re having a meal with Mum. You’ll screw it up, won’t you? I know you will.”
With that vote of confidence I left.
Chapter Four
That which we experience in dreams, if we experience it often, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we ‘really’ experience…
Friedrich Nietzsche
Andy Hebden hadn’t so much been murdered as recomposed. He was spread-eagled against the panoramic window, face squashed against the glass, arms out and each hand tied to a wall fitting with long pieces of rope. Given that the window was at least twenty metres long, that was a lot of rope. He had what looked like an ice pick embedded in the back of his head. Blood still dribbled in gravy-like globules, but it was growing tacky fast. Brain stuff was visible, some of it mashed and torn. The overall impression was of an inventive mix of a reverse crucifix and a giant insect that had been pinned out in a lab for some bizarre research. The smell of blood and faeces was stomach-turning. It was clear that this had been planned and, once dead, had taken a lot of time. He wore a gold chain with the letter M on it. I took the chain off and pocketed it. I took some photographs of him with my mobile phone. I found it difficult to believe that one person could have achieved this. Hebden was a big man and holding the body up, tying it, would have taken great strength, unless there were two people involved in the murder.
Dancy was eviscerated with shock. Her sangfroid had fried in the brain-shocking awareness that this was real. She sat in a chair looking at the carpet. She had no idea who or what the M referred to. She said she had wanted to call the police but Andy had expressly said to call me first if anything unusual happened, but had no idea what he meant by that, although his present state was certainly unusual. He had been like this when she came back from lunch. He had no scheduled appointments. She had no idea how the killer entered, unless Andy had let them in, suggesting it was someone he knew.
I looked through his appointments book. It was empty. This was a man who didn’t like to keep records. I found no trace of the incriminating document he’d mentioned regarding Brissot. It didn’t seem to be on his computer either. I got a list of the drivers who worked for him, a list of recent deliveries, then looked around. Dancy went to make some coffee. I looked at the wound. It had taken one hell of a swipe to go that deep in his head. Not so much rage as determination. I found a CCTV monitor in a small workroom and looked back on the laptop playback at the day’s events.
7.43 a.m. Andy arrives, walks out of the lift, through Dancy’s office into his and closes the door.
10.12 a.m. Dancy arrives, retouches her make-up, takes some water from a cooler, switches on her PC.
10.53 a.m. I arrive.
11.31 a.m. I leave.
12.30 p.m. Dancy goes to lunch.
1.38 p.m. Dancy returns.
3.17 p.m. Dancy goes into Andy’s office.
3.18 p.m. Dancy runs out, looking terrified, and goes to the bathroom, presumably to lose her lunch.
3.24 p.m. Dancy returns with a plastic cup of water, looks up a number and telephones, which is when I received her call.
I checked the CCTV further back to see if the killer had entered during the night and waited, but there was nothing, so how did they get in? I erased the footage of me entering and exiting. Dancy could tell me little concerning the Hebden’s real business and said no one out of the ordinary had called. She told me that she and Andy had an ‘arrangement’ which amounted to Wednesday and Friday nights, and asked what she should do now. I told her to wait until I had been gone for half an hour then call the police and say she had just found Andy’s body and not to mention me at all. She looked blank.
“I meant what shall I do? What about my job?”
The infinite adaptability of the human heart. A short while ago she found her lover ritualistically mangled and tied like a broken crucifix, but already the wheels had turned from How horrible to What about me? I took the staircase down two floors to avoid the CCTV, then got in the lift and suddenly realised something. A hunch. A thought. A possibility. I went back to the twentieth, just in time to stop Dancy telephoning the police; already she was clearing out her desk, probably the petty cash too, and planning her next career move. I told her to take off one of her stilettos, and went back to Andy’s office. I got on my knees and started tapping the parquet tiles all around the edge of the room with Dancy’s shoe. Twenty three tiles later I found it. I took a paper knife from Andy’s desk and the tile came up easily. There was enough light to see a small utility room beneath. I eased myself down, then opened the door to a suite of empty offices, also, as Andy had told me, rented by Hebden Enterprizes. This is how the killer entered and left. There was no reception at the entrance to the building and no CCTV to show who actually entered the building, so the killer remained unseen, but he knew the geography of the building. Presumably the RIP note on the train referred to Andy, or both of us. I looked around. A lot of empty storage boxes and flattened cardboard. There were some cleaning fluids on a table, a couple of dozen packets of aspirin, tea bags an
d packets of sugar. Patches on the floor, where plaster or paint had flaked away. I went back up to the twentieth floor.
My employer was dead but he’d paid me two weeks in advance so my work wasn’t over. I needed to find Marty and already I thought he would know more than a little about his brother’s death. The arrangement of the body had something gruesomely artistic about it, like a postmodern instalment. Marty liked pop art.
I asked Dancy what she would do with the hamster and she shrugged indifferently. I looked at the little champagne creature and decided Alfred would have a step brother.
Chapter Five
…our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.
Nietzsche
My dreams about my father often occur when I am beginning a case. As if I’m approaching an old house I’ve never visited before and I know that he’s in there somewhere, an incarnation of shadows and all I have never known, and each dusty room I search has a fragment – a half smile, a footstep, a figure disappearing, but nothing truly composed or substantial. Graffiti on the wall becomes a sneer. Mould on a rotting window ledge becomes a profile glimpsed on a crowded platform, then gone. My one photograph of him in profile, looking at a pier in the distance, already dreaming of leaving, as he probably left everything. I awoke at four a.m. in a twilight world of half thought, half dream, made tea and sat in my little study. Cass had dutifully left some notes on Brissot:
Jacques BRISSOT
Man of Mystery. Registered as a Financial Advisor but has no website or apparent PR machine. Never advertises. Doesn’t use social networks. Has same name as a bloke in the French Revolution who wrote about the Law: ‘Théorie des lois criminelles’ (1781) and ‘Bibliothèque philosophique du législateur’ (1782). Registered address is in Holland Park but when I Google-mapped it just looked like an ordinary house so maybe not his business address. Pretty posh, eh? Not on the Voter’s Register. Only one phone number, which I tried, and it went dead. Sorry couldn’t be more helpful. We need bread and milk. Do you know you’re on your second bottle of Famous Grouse this week and it’s only Wednesday? What are you wearing for your date with Mum? C XXXXX
I knew I wouldn’t sleep so I drove to Holland Park, parked a little away and walked past the house. A big white fronted semi with probably six bedrooms. Well-kept front garden and gate leading to the back. Places like this were going for three or four million. There was serious money around Monsieur Brissot. Was this where Marty was taken? Was he here still? It was 6 a.m. The curtains were closed so I assumed people were inside cruising on the peaceful dreams of the wicked. I took a long walk down to St. James’ Park and communed with the birds and ducks, then went to a breakfast van for coffee and a bacon roll. It was chilly, a remote dull sun trying to squeak something through the clouds and damaged ozone. I thought of Nietzsche on his lonely sojourns through Switzerland and Germany, failing health, syphilis already waiting to claw at his brain, staying cheaply in lonely little hilltop rooms, writing for a non-existent readership, and thinking the unthinkable. What kept this frail, lonely, misunderstood man going? It was because he had a hunger to know – what is a human being stripped of its artifice? What is a life, without a spurious moral architecture to bamboozle and desiccate it, without God, without the frail duty of faith, without systematised thought, sans everything except itself? What is left? A bright beast scalloping dreams on a cave wall while the thunder taunts him.
And I wanted to know too – what drove someone to kill Andy Hebden like that? What was the real engine of that brutal end? A pigeon hopped by me, one foot rotted away, it looked at me askance, one eye bright as an eel. I threw down the last bit of my roll and the ragamuffin bird skittered to it and pecked. At least we’d both had breakfast, whatever else the day held.
Suddenly I knew what drove the manner of Andy’s murder. It was love. That strange composing of the body was not mockery, not to strap it to a glass wall, but to release it in a dream of flight. A simulated crash into the giant unknown. An act of love. Destructive, warped, dark love, granted, but love nevertheless. I wanted to know more.
I went back to the house and rang the bell. I could hear it chiming inside. Curtains were now open, so they had perhaps gone. I looked through the window and could see a Chesterfield, a drinks cabinet and well stocked book shelves. Pretty Wilkinson leaded glass antique lamps on every available surface. A newish looking Chubb burglar alarm outside. I went through a little gate to the back garden. Rhododendron bushes, lilac, a herb garden already gifting heady smells of lavender and sage, mint and lemon balm, all very civilised. The back of the house was alarmed too, but on the first floor a window was slightly open. A housebreaker once told me that people waste fortunes on solid locks and reinforced doors and double locking systems, because a good burglar rarely enters through a door. He looks for the small opening, the lapse in security concentration that leaves a window, or hatch, vulnerable. Even better, a ladder near the bottom fence. I dragged a garden table to the wall and put the ladder on it, wedging it in a cross slat of the table. It wobbled but held and because I was in a garden alcove, was sheltered from the view of nearby houses. Trees protected me from being seen by houses opposite.
I dropped inside a small guest bedroom, fresh towel neatly folded on the bed. Being in someone’s house illegally is somehow more intimate than sex. It’s a transgression where they can have no secrets or artifice. You have invaded them completely. Cole & Son Folie wallpaper, showing follies, menageries and architecture found within grand French landscaped gardens; this stately and elegant selection of wallpapers takes you on a delightful stroll through some of the most beautiful gardens in France. Four hundred pounds a roll. The French theme covered the house. I went downstairs to check if there was a cellar, which there was. If Marty was here that would be the likeliest place to find him, but it had a perfectly ordered set of expensive tools and several hundred bottles of wine that could probably buy a small African continent. The man was clearly a serious oenophile. A 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam. Several bottles of 1961 Chateau Palmer Margaux. 1996 Chateau La Mondotte Saint Emilion. I resisted the impulse to open a bottle and go and lie in the garden sipping paradise. I found a study. The walls had photographs of Brissot and prints of his revolutionary ancestor. Copies of Brissot’s books lined the shelves in the original French, and prints of the frontispieces of the books occupied another wall – clearly the lineage appealed to his vanity. Desk drawers revealed little, except at the back of one was a little bundle of business cards. I flipped through them and took three. Two were for legal firms and one was for a Harley Street psychoanalyst called Septimus King. It was slightly crumpled and had a date on it – 12th June. On the way out I also took a bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafleur Pomerol. At three thousand pounds a bottle it wasn’t a crime to steal it, but an act of love.
I left and eased out of the window back on to the ladder. Just as I was coming out of the side of the house a car, a black Audi, pulled up. I kept walking, head down. Probably they hadn’t seen me. I crossed the road and got in my car. As I started the engine the back window exploded as someone hit it with a crowbar. I put my foot down and drove off. In the mirror I saw a tall man, jeans and a leather jacket, standing in the road holding the crowbar. He had short dark hair. Sunglasses. I caught a green light turning into Holland Park Avenue and joined the traffic. Just when I thought I was safe the Audi was suddenly behind me. Busy cities are preferable if someone is trying to follow you because everyone is at the mercy of traffic. I made a reckless overtaking of a taxi, the driver mouthing silent curses behind the windscreen at me, and thought I had lost him. I reached the end of the road and stopped at a red light before turning left into Ladbroke Grove. I looked to my right and next to me was the Audi. The driver leaned across and did a mock salute, a cut throat gesture, then watched me drive away as the lights changed. He stayed at the lights, ignoring the honking traffic behind him. I had been warned again. I also needed a new re
ar window. The familiar sensation of my natural cowardice brewed lethally with the heady excitement of having my life threatened. Better than any drug and even had the edge on Famous Grouse.
At the university I sat at my PC checking out the business cards. Alfred sat on my shoulder nibbling my ear. “The horror. The horror,” he whispered, copying what I’d said in the tutorial on value, and looking at the little hamster, who stood upright and eyed him with curiosity from the safety of his cage. “Into the valley of death…” said Alfred.
“…rode the six hundred,” I finished for him.
He cackled and wolf whistled shrilly, nearly deafening me. He eyed the hamster predatorily.
One legal firm was no longer listed. The other had been bought by a business consortium called Republic. I wondered if this was an abstruse reference to the French Revolution, and therefore to Brissot’s namesake. I rang them and said I was looking to start a company abroad and wanted legal advice. A plummy Englishman’s voice said the firm worked exclusively for Republic. I asked who the chairman was and the call was stopped. I rang back and was told in the same plummy voice to fuck off. Unfortunately Alfred must have heard because he spent the next five minutes muttering “Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off…”
I rang the number for the psychoanalyst but was told by an automated voice that this number no longer existed. I looked up Septimus King and found a small news report saying that he had been struck off for malpractice, but no other details. Before his fall he had been pre-eminent in the field of memory recovery and had an expensive cartel of clients with more money than sense – rock stars, actors, the super-rich who needed their vacuous lives validating as complicated and worthwhile by a renowned shrink ready to fleece them. I emailed the address on the card and asked if I could talk. Almost immediately I got a reply: The King is dead. Long live Freud.
Beyond Good and Evil Page 2