Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Here, too, her exacting job was having an adverse effect on her life, for as Jake’s career progressed and kept her even later at the Yard, to the detriment of anything that might resemble a private life, she found that the effort required to read anything but trash was too great. Looking along her infrequently dusted shelves, Jake sometimes found it hard to believe that the books on them could belong to someone who had won an exhibition to Cambridge.

Many of her books were vulgarly-attired, improbably-plotted stories of parish pump murder investigated by wisecracking female private eyes or beery detective inspectors, whose lives were full of idiosyncratic hobbies, romantic dalliances, foreign adventure, smoothly-spoken villains, clever observations and satisfying denouements. Lives which seemed to Jake more richly various than her own. Jake’s one consolation was that these stories were invariably written by people who clearly had little or no appreciation of the dull, unthinking, brutal ordinariness of real murder. It was an impression reinforced by the author mugshots which appeared on the dustjackets. These revealed the faces of rosy fresh young mothers, catty intellectuals in glasses, sleek well-dressed advertising types, dry-as-dust academics, prim dyspeptic maiden aunts, and also-ran psychos whose hard, dark, Boston Strangler stares reminded Jake of her father.

Now and then their ideas of foul murder made Jake laugh out loud. Mostly they made her want to get one of these authors down to the lab so that they could see a really foul murder in all its mouldy, messy and utterly wasteful horror.

Well of course I have considered the possibility that I am barking mad. When you’ve murdered nine men, you have to really. There are some people who consider that killing in cold blood, and in any great number, is ample proof of an abnormal psychology. But of course, that simply won’t do. Not these days.

The policewoman on the Nicamvision said that I was possibly psychotic. Quite apart from the fact that modern psychiatrists have already abandoned the distinction between neurosis and psychosis, and dropped such outdated terms from the current official diagnostic catalogue of their profession, I don’t think that I could ever reasonably be described as psychotic, in the sense that my thoughts and needs no longer meet the demands of reality. Even if one ignores the fact that the only reality one can be sure of is the Self, I would suggest that if anything, my thoughts and deeds pay rather too close attention to the demands of reality.

You want a psychotic? I’ll show you a doozy. The Greek hero Ajax killing a flock of sheep he mistook for his Trojan enemies. Now there’s a fucking psychotic. The trouble is that most of these junk-psychobabble words don’t have much meaning. Schizophrenia is such a mouthful, for so little import. There’s a West African tribe called the Yorubas who, to my mind, have a much better word for what Western shrinks would refer to as schizophrenia. They say that a person is ‘were’. I think this might transpose rather well between the languages. To say that ‘he is were’ implies that someone no longer ‘is’, and operating in the present. What better word for indicating a split personality?

What Policewoman said made me laugh. ‘I will do everything in my power to ensure that you receive the proper medical treatment.’ Well that was sweet of her. Of course what she meant was that if I gave myself up, she would endeavour to make sure that I was diagnosed ‘unfit to plead by reason of insanity’, within the legal and, it is fair to say, entirely fallacious definition of insanity that is to be found in the English judiciary’s McNaghten Rules. This would mean that I could not then be tried and, more importantly, it would mean that I could not be sentenced to punitive coma — most probably, irreversible coma. Good thinking, Chief Inspector. There’s not much incentive to give yourself up to the police if you know there’s only a hypodermic needle waiting for you.

And all that stuff about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police? Now I have kept every one of the press-cuttings to do with my work in the Blue Book. There’s not one of them which suggests anything of the kind. This was pretty clever. The remark about a rumour that I had been in contact with the police was just the surface structure of what she was saying. If you look for the deep structure, what you would end up with would be a question: ‘Why don’t you communicate with me?’

At the same time, she keeps something in reserve in case I’m the shy type. She says ‘fuck you’ and slaps my face. She tells everyone about how butter wouldn’t melt in the mouths of any of my victims. These were just innocents, she says, going about their lawful business. Nothing at all about them being VMN-NEGATIVE. (And the way that Detective Chief Superintendant dealt with that rogue question — well, they don’t want the Lombroso Program connected with these executions any more than I do. Their embarrassment would signal the end of my mission. Or at least make it bloody difficult. There’s not one of my famous brothers who wouldn’t be expecting me.) Now this is supposed to make me angry enough to get in contact with Policewoman in case the first tactic doesn’t work.

The bit I enjoyed most was my description and that ComputaFit picture. I wonder how she managed to obtain it? There are only two possibilities: either Bertrand Russell did somehow manage to splutter out a few dying words (all the same, I can’t see him working with a police artist), or that chink counsellor at the BRI managed to remember me. Still, the picture doesn’t resemble me all that much. ComputaFits never do. You look at them and you say to yourself that if someone looking like that were walking around he would have been arrested many times over just for being so weird. But on the whole it wasn’t a bad effort. The chink must have a good memory. Either that or they shot him full of something to make him remember.

Anyway, what is clear here is that Policewoman has issued a sort of challenge. What’s the sign of someone accepting one? Must one adhere to a certain etiquette or convention? No matter. It’s already quite obvious that she means it to be my move next. To accept the challenge or not. And clearly another killing must be made in accordance with some new rules which belong to the grammar of the word ‘game’.

Yes, a game with Policewoman is a fine idea. My favourite game used to be Monopoly, but it is not what it was. The board itself is half as thick as it used to be. The Old Kent Road no longer even exists, thanks to the developers. Oxford Street has become the New Oxford Street Shopping Mall. Fleet Street is a wasteland. The green houses and red hotels once reassuringly solid and wooden are now hollow and plastic, and are supplied in half the quantity than of old. ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards have become hopelessly outdated. Free Parking. In London? That’s a laugh. School Fees of $150. These days that would buy you a few textbooks. You win a beauty contest. This kind of thing was outlawed, several years ago. Doctor’s Fee, $50. For what, a bottle of aspirin? And no-one gets out of jail free: you have to pay to stay in a decent one, and you have to pay to get out. And the rents.

No, things have changed since I was a boy.

But here, you know nothing about my childhood, do you? Then let me describe my first thought.

My first thought (in time it may also prove to be my last) was to cry out, no doubt stimulated by the hand of my deliverer and, in so doing, take my first breath of a strange new world. Of course we cannot talk about what went before and it’s still too early to say what will happen after. But I think this is a reasonable assumption of what first occurred inside my VMN-deficient brain.