Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

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 hardboiled 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.