Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

‘And the dead man? What about him?’

‘Six shots to the back of the head, as before. According to the lab report, he was killed in Bedford’s garden. He was full of vodka and we believe that Wittgenstein met him, struck up an acquaintance with him, and then lured him to Bedford’s address on the pretext that they would be having sex there. Baberton was homosexual. There’s a well-known gay bar in Chiswick which Baberton used to frequent. We’re still trying to find out if anyone saw Baberton on the evening he died, and if so, whether he was with anyone or not.’

‘Keep me informed on that.’ He nodded at the disc player on Jake’s lap. ‘All right. Let’s hear it.’

Jake placed the coin-sized disc into the machine.

‘The material is in two parts,’ she explained. ‘One on each side of the disc. The first half is a sort of crude axiomatic parody of Wittgenstein’s most famous philosophical work, the Tractatus. The second half — well, I’ll let you judge that for yourself, sir.’ She pressed the button to start the disc.

‘Like Moses and Aaron, his brother, I carry a walking stick. I carry it everywhere and in a way I think of it as like my penis, constantly stiff, engorged for love. But it also represents my conscience, for sometimes I mislay it.’

‘Ten of my brothers have been killed. And I think of death a great deal. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it for years.’

‘Death is the totality of Nothingness, the very opposite of what is in the world. It is determined by a combination of objects (things). The grave is a fine and lonely place but none I think do there embrace. It is only the boys of Chiswick who keep me logico-philosophicus.’

‘What we cannot speak about we must, like the Angel of Death, pass over in silence.’

‘We never talk. It is too dangerous to talk. The boys are rough and crude. Some of them are almost illiterate. There are no names, just the brutal, selfish enjoyment of another being as an object.’

‘If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.’

‘I should go away, somewhere quiet where there is no temptation. Here I am not safe from the love that dare not speak its name.’

‘Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot.’

‘It is loneliness that drives me from my rooms. I have sunk to the bottom. The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man.’

‘At The Funfair in Chiswick...’

Jake hit the pause button.

‘The gay bar in Chiswick, sir,’ she said, ‘it’s called The Funfair.’ She hit the button again.

‘... there is a merry-go-round where all the young queers wait to be picked up. They sit on the horses and flirt outrageously with all the male spectators. There was a boy who gave me the eye as I watched him going round and round. They were all in a certain sense, one.’

‘I asked him back to my room in Ealing. I gave him all the money I had. Money is not a problem for me. My relations, to whom I handed over the whole of my property, send me money when I need it. I object to the very idea of property.’

‘Here, the shifting use of the word “object” corresponds to the shifting use of the words “property” and “relation”.’

‘I imagined us both lying together. It made quite a picture, although it was hard to distinguish one form from another. Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture.’

‘For one glorious moment I was able to transcend my very being. I did not belong to the world. Indeed, I was at the very limit of the world so that I was almost something metaphysical. Language and its limitations prevent me from saying more.’

‘This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism.’

‘I am revolted at my own debauched behaviour, my very intimacy with this young stranger an endorsement of my own loneliness. But how things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.’

‘I am cast down into the deepest pit in hell. Reeking of my own degraded thoughts and in my desperation to be away from the scene of this foul tableau, I take the boy into the garden to kill him. When he sees the gun, he appears to want to say something, then thinks better of it, and just laughs.’

‘When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.’

‘And so my gun speaks for me, silently.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Gilmour muttered after a few seconds had elapsed. And then: ‘Is that it?’

‘Side one,’ said Jake, removing the disc and turning it over to play the other side of the killer’s recording.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Gilmour repeated. ‘You’ve got a right nutter there, and no mistake.’ He looked at Detective Inspector Stanley to elicit support for this view.

‘Sounds like it, sir,’ agreed the other man.

‘Has Professor Waring listened to that?’

‘Yes, he has,’ said Jake. ‘He recommended that I speak to an expert. A professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University.’

‘Listening to that disc, it sounds to me as if a professor of psychiatry would be more bloody use to you. Eh, Stanley?’

The other officer smiled and shrugged vaguely.

‘Sounds as if this fellow could be a queer after all,’ said Gilmour.

‘I don’t particularly care for that word, sir,’ she said. ‘But since you mention it, he might indeed be homosexual. Killing his brothers, as he calls those other VMN-negatives, might be a way of sublimating a homosexual inclination. Or he could be trying to sell us a dummy. To get us to waste our time conducting our investigation among the gay community. As before, there was no evidence that the dead man had been interfered with sexually. None at all.

‘As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein’s own sexuality has often been debated, and while there are some biographers who have sought, rather sensationally, to suggest that he was an active, predatory homosexual, there is little or no evidence for that either.’

Gilmour smiled uncomfortably.

‘Shall we listen to side two?’ Jake asked, and switched on the machine.

‘Greetings, Policewoman,’ said the voice. ‘Caught your show on television the other night. Thanks for the kind thought vis à vis my sanity and my pre-trial prospects. You need not worry. I have already given careful consideration to my own defence, in the unlikely but nevertheless logically possible event of my arrest.

‘I am certain that I could satisfy the court’s McNaghten Rules and maintain a successful plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. You should note that I would contend that it was the Lombroso test itself which disturbed the balance of my already precarious mind. At the same time I would almost certainly file a civil claim for damages on the basis of the duty of care owed to me and the reasonable foreseeability of my suffering some sort of nervous shock as a result of this scan. When this is all over and the Lombroso connection with these killings has been made public, I think you will find that many of the victims’ families will also want to pursue some sort of joint claim against the Brain Research Institute. But that’s another matter.’

The voice was cool and calm and entirely without an accent. As Tony Chen had described it, ‘like someone on the BBC’, except that it was almost too robotic. It had no modulation, no expression, no lilt; no idiosyncrasy of pronunciation that might indicate an area of origin. Received pronunciation, as it was sometimes described. It made Jake shiver a bit as she listened to it once again.

‘Your suggestion that my brothers are innocent was, as you must have supposed it would be, irritating to me. The fact is that I am providing the public with a valuable service. You see, these are all potentially dangerous men who cannot simply be left to their own devices. The logical extension of their identification is, as a bare minimum, containment. But since the advent of an official shoot-to-kill policy among law-enforcement agents, and the implementation of punitive coma as the new cornerstone of penal theory, the incarceration of violent criminals has been demonstrated to be of only secondary importance to an obsessively cost-conscious administration. As a consequence of this governmental example, I am moved to kill them myself, humanely and efficiently, and with the least possible inconvenience to society.’