Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

‘Thanks, Maurice. Thanks a lot. I won’t forget this.’

He grinned again. ‘Hell, I sure won’t.’

Several hours later, Jake asked the three senior members of her investigating team to attend a meeting in her office. Sergeant Chung was the last to arrive and seated himself at a short way’s distance from Detective Inspector Stanley and Detective Sergeant Jones. Jake sat on the edge of her desk. In her hand was a thin file supplied by the lab and containing the sheet of X-ray film used to produce Wittgenstein’s autoradiograph.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Jake. ‘I’ve called this meeting to inform you all of an important development.’ She brandished the file in front of them. ‘A DNA type.

‘This morning I received some photographs. At least what purported to be photographs, of me, but were in fact photo-composites. Mr Wittgenstein had married the photographs of me which recently appeared in one of the weekend colour supplements with some pornographic pictures.’

‘Do you think he was trying to blackmail you, ma’am?’ asked Jones.

‘No. I think he just meant to embarrass me. Well, he was only partly successful. The pictures are now in my safe and that’s where they’re going to stay for the time being. However, the lab has run some tests on them and found traces of semen. They ran a number of probes to see if they could determine some allele frequencies and found our killer’s genotype. Gentlemen, the man we’re looking for is most probably German, or of German parents.’

‘Like the real Wittgenstein then,’ said Jones.

‘Actually, he was Austrian,’ said Jake. ‘But for the purposes of the genotype, they’re more or less the same.’

Detective Inspector Stanley cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But aren’t we forgetting something? The European Court has ruled that genetic population tests are inadmissible as evidence on the ground of their obvious racism.’

‘We’re hardly at the stage of preparing a case for the courts,’ Jake said crisply. ‘Right now we’re trying to catch this bastard, not worry about his human fucking rights, Stanley. And if the database on allele frequencies within population structures speeds up the computer’s matching the killer’s DNA type to his identity card, then so be it. We’ll bridge questions of what is and what is not inadmissible as evidence once we’ve got this maniac in a cage, right?’

Stanley shrugged back at her, and then nodded.

‘Sergeant Chung,’ said Jake. ‘What is the current average time for matching?’

‘How long is a piece of string? Well, as a rough rule of thumb, it takes the computer twenty-four hours to make a million comparisons. If you were to assume that the killer was in the last million of population, then seventy million comparisons, seventy days.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, you could get lucky. He could turn up in the first million. There’s no other way to do it. Not yet anyway.’

‘Assuming he’s got a genuine identity card,’ said Jones. ‘He might be one of those Russo-German refugees who came here illegally after the Russian Civil War.’

‘Yes, he might,’ said Jake. ‘But let’s try and be a little optimistic, eh?

‘Sergeant Chung, how’s that random accessing program with the Lombroso computer coming along?’

‘Not bad. So far I’ve been able to get Lombroso to release about twenty names and addresses.’

‘How many answers to the advertisement?’

‘Ten,’ said Stanley. ‘One of them an imposter.’

‘Any of those with philosophers’ codenames?’

‘No,’ said Stanley, ‘but we’ve got them all under surveillance anyway.’

‘That still leaves fifty. How many of them are philosophers?’

Stanley opened his file and glanced down the list. ‘Sixteen, ma’am.’

‘Any luck with the gunsmiths?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Stanley. ‘With his own gas cylinder he can make as much of his own ammunition as he wants. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll get any leads from that direction.’

‘What about that student at Cambridge? Mr Heissmeyer—’

Stanley shook his head. ‘The locals have got someone keeping an eye on him. But so far all he’s done is spend his time on the river. And for what it’s worth, ma’am, Mr Heissmeyer is an American, not an Austrian. Rowing scholarship, or something. Should get his blue this year.’

Jake shrugged and then turned to Jones. ‘Jameson Lang’s pictophone: is that installed yet?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I spoke to the professor on it earlier today.’

‘Call tracing. Where are we on that one? I want to be ready for this bastard when he phones.’

‘I’ve organised a digital trace for any normal telecommunications traffic, and a keyword satellite monitor of the whole country. If our man uses the words “Lombroso” or “Wittgenstein” on a phone, the satellite should be able to tell us where the signal is coming from.’

‘Discrecording facilities?’

‘Automatic on all your lines, ma’am,’ said Jones. ‘Here, at home, and on your portable.’ He grinned. ‘Best make sure you don’t say anything rude about the Commissioner, eh? We wouldn’t want you to get suspended like Mr Challis.’

Jake smiled at Jones, and wondered if he really meant what he had said.

Real meaning. There was never any doubt of what that amounted to with Mrs Grace Miles. She called towards the end of the day when Jake had started to think about going home. Jake noticed from the picture that the Minister herself was already at home. In the corner of the room she could see a baby crawling round Mrs Miles’s red dispatch box.

‘Gilmour tells me that you’ve got a genetic fingerprint. Is that right?’

‘Yes. We’re trying to find a match with an ID card.’

‘Good. Someone’s tabled a question about these killings in the House tomorrow. I want to be able to say that we expect to be making an arrest very shortly.’

‘Shortly could be as long as seventy days, Minister,’ said Jake. ‘It might take the computer all of that to make the comparisons.’

Jake watched the Minister frown and then tug nervously at the string of pearls she wore round her neck. Jake wondered if they were real. She was dressed to go out. The sequin-covered dress was cut low to reveal what appeared to be a child’s bare backside but was in fact the Minister’s chest. She wore her long black hair pinned back from her but loose about her shoulders so that she looked like some kind of ancient Persian princess.

‘Better to say something like “The police investigation is coming to a conclusion and they are confident of making an arrest before very long”,’ suggested Jake. ‘Then if we make an arrest within the next few days it will seem as you knew more but weren’t saying. That you were being tactically vague as opposed to being misleading. But to say that we will shortly be making an arrest seems rather wide of the mark, ma’am.’

Mrs Miles’s slow nod accelerated as she saw the wisdom of Jake’s advice. Even so she wasn’t inclined to be grateful for it. Instead her face took on an irritated aspect.

‘Yes, I expect you’re right,’ she said, and then added: ‘Oh and by the way, what do you mean by making this loony an offer of medical help at your press conference? I’m afraid I was away in Brussels at the time, and I’ve only just read the transcript of what you said. I certainly don’t recall anyone clearing that little idea with the Attorney General.’

‘I wanted him to make contact with us,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe even to give himself up. There’s not much percentage in that if all he has coming to him is a hypodermic needle and a long term of punitive coma. In my judgment—’

‘In your judgment—’ Her tone was contemptuous. ‘Need I remind you, Chief Inspector, that your job is to catch this maniac, not to determine whether or not he is to be regarded as fit to plead. Moreover, the theory of justice pursued by this Government, and for which we received an overwhelming mandate at the last election, is retributive. It is not reformative. No more does justice permit that individual offenders shall escape the full rigour of the law merely because of some alleged insanity. The public simply won’t stand for it. They must be satisfied that a criminal has been punished. I would hope that when this man is caught he will be sentenced to an irreversible period of coma. At the very least he should undergo a minimum vegetative state of thirty years. But having said all that, my own feeling is that it would be better for everyone if he were not to be taken alive. I just hope that he’s armed when you catch up with him, in which case you’ll have little choice but to shoot him dead.’