Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Back in the hall, the spectroscope sounded like a small air-conditioning system. It had been a routine piece of equipment for all senior police personnel since the early years of the new century, when the IRA had conducted a letter bomb campaign aimed at mainland police and their families. Mostly it had been a case of fingers and hands being blown off, but on one notorious occasion two children had been killed. Their deaths had been one of the factors which had persuaded the Government to introduce punitive coma.

When the all-clear signal sounded, Jake wiped her fingers clean of chocolate spread, tore the padded envelope open and then withdrew the contents. It was several seconds before she realised that the gynaecology spread for the benefit of the camera was putatively her own; and several more seconds before she stopped trying to account for how someone had been able to take such pictures without her knowledge and guessed that they were photo-composites. Instinctively she laid the pictures down and put on a pair of cellophane gloves before re-handling what might turn out to be forensic evidence.

Not that she would have cared for them ever to have been produced in court or held in some police file. Fakes or not, there was no escaping the fact that they were good fakes, of the kind that were appearing increasingly often in the tabloid newspapers.

Probably produced by a computer, she thought. The sort of thing that would entertain many of her male colleagues. The type of evidence some pervert might think to make copies of, for the general locker-room titillation of the lads at the Yard. Jake knew that there were many of her male colleagues who were jealous of her success and who might welcome the sight of photographs which would certainly embarrass her. Fakes or not, pictures which showed a chief inspector pushing a vibrator up her own vagina, and licking another woman’s genitals, were nothing less than explosive.

She was surprised to discover that it was Wittgenstein who had sent them. She was sure it was he because there was a compliments slip on which he had typed ‘yours bloodily’. He would surely have known that Jake’s duty as a police officer would require her to have the photographs tested in the laboratory; and, as a corollary, that this would cause her acute embarrassment. Jake swore fluently for several seconds and for one brief moment she felt hatred for him. Somehow she had supposed he would be different. A fly buzzed on the window pane, and hardly bothering to even look, Jake killed it without a moment’s hesitation.

Jake had the morning off, her first in several weeks. She bought some groceries, failed to get into her local hairdresser, and went to see Doctor Blackwell at her clinic in Chelsea.

Her eyes closed, naked, standing to attention before the doctor, Jake found her thoughts returning to the photographs now in her shoulder bag. Her original irritation had given way to a curiosity that Wittgenstein should have been sexually interested in her. This was something unique in her experience as a detective. The subject might almost have been worthy of a paper. She wondered what she would have done if instead of Doctor Blackwell, her therapeutic nude encounter had been with Wittgenstein. She felt herself blush as she lay down on the couch and waited for the Doctor to begin the session.

‘Sleeping all right?’

‘Not particularly...’

‘Nightmares?’

‘No.’

‘Sleeping with anyone?’

‘Not that I can remember.’

‘Hostility to men?’

Jake swallowed. ‘There was a tramp on Westminster Bridge. He asked me for money, but I thought he was going to try and rob me. I almost hoped he would, so that I could have shot him.’

‘You were carrying a gun?’

‘I always carry a gun.’

‘Have you ever used it?’

‘Yes, but only in self-defence.’

‘Ever killed anyone?’

‘No.’

Doctor Blackwell’s tone stiffened a little. ‘You know,’ she said carefully, ‘perhaps you should have shot this tramp you met.’

Jake sat up on one elbow. ‘You’re joking,’ she said.

‘Am I? This is Neo-Existential therapy, Jake, not something behavioural. We approach psychotherapy from the point of view that the major emotional sickness of our times is the inability to endow life with meaning. Don’t you think it’s just possible you might have worked something out of yourself if you had murdered him?’

Jake was shocked. ‘But that’s just it,’ she said. ‘It would have been murder.’

‘You’ve said before that you’d like to have killed your own father, for the way he messed up your childhood.’

‘But that was different.’

‘Was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you had shot this tramp, perhaps in a way you could have killed your father. Exorcised his memory. Some worthless old man. What would it have mattered to anyone? And you a policewoman: who’d have questioned it?’

Jake frowned, angry now. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t believe that.’

Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor do I. I just wanted to hear you say it.’

In the lab at the Yard, Jake handed over a plastic bag containing the photographs.

‘Run some tests on these, would you?’ she said to the technician, whose name was Maurice. ‘Fingerprints, fibres, hairs, and anything else you can think of.’

Maurice nodded coolly and then slipped on some gloves. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that disc you brought down? It was clean.’

Jake nodded uncomfortably.

‘Now what we got here?’ Maurice opened the bag and took out the photographs. ‘Be a couple of hours at least,’ he said.

‘All right,’ said Jake, sitting down. ‘But I’m staying here.’

Maurice frowned and was about to argue until he caught sight of the first picture.

‘Those photographs aren’t leaving my sight,’ she said determinedly. ‘Not for one second.’

Maurice shuffled through the rest of them and then grinned.

‘Anyone ever tell you? You sure one photogenic lady.’

‘Oh come on, Maurice,’ said Jake. ‘Those are fakes, photo-composites.’

‘If you say so.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Nice though. Real nice.’

Jake resisted the temptation to punch him on his black jaw.

‘There are ten of them,’ she said. ‘I want ten back. Have you got that?’

Maurice shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

‘Maurice, I’m saying so in capital letters as big as your stupid male libido. Right?’

‘Right.’ But the grin persisted.

Two hours later Maurice counted the pictures back into Jake’s hand. ‘Ten,’ he said.

She dropped them quickly into her shoulder bag and quickly zipped it up. ‘Find anything?’

Maurice stretched and rolled his head on his broad shoulders. ‘I found it all really interesting,’ he said, and then laughed as Jake thumped him on the chest. ‘All right, all right, take it easy. No prints. Not a one. But I got an eyelash. Not yours. Not your natural colour. And some traces of semen.’

Jake’s nose wrinkled with disgust. Men were like animals.

‘Looks like your admirer got hisself all excited at his own handiwork. Well that’s no surprise to me. I was beginning to get a little warm under the collar myself. Anyway I’ve subjected his stuff to gel electrophoresis, and you’re lucky — what we got was highly polymorphic.’

‘You’ve got a DNA type?’

‘Not quite. You’re going to have to wait until I confirm it with the autoradiograph. But looks like, yes.’

‘When you’ve got that we’ll be able to match him with anyone we arrest, right?’

‘Oh, for sure. Only there’s not enough sample should any ambiguities arise on an appeal, or anything like that. I want you to understand that now. I’ve used all the semen there was to get the autoradiograph.’