Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Yet another unusual feature of the case, and what once again illustrates the two-dimensionality of including women in all serial gynocide investigations, was the significance of the times when all the victims were killed. It was always between 10.30 and 11.30 at night.

I’ll return to this fact in just a moment. But first let me go back to the beginning of the investigation when, as a matter of routine, the names of all sex offenders in the area during the previous twelve months were called up on the computer. Police constables questioned these men with a view to establishing their alibis. (I should also add here that this case took place prior to the inclusion of the genetic fingerprint on identity cards.) One man in particular, a twenty-nine-year-old male who had tried to rape a woman in a park where subsequently one of the murder victims was found, drew the interest of the male officer leading the inquiry. Meanwhile, I and another officer continued to make enquiries among the area’s previous sex-offenders.

It was while questioning a forty-two-year-old single man called David Boysfield, convicted of exposing himself in a local department store, that I noticed several copies of one particular issue of a woman’s magazine. Perhaps it is significant that my male colleague did not notice this. Not that there is anything wrong with a man reading a woman’s magazine. But all the same it made me curious to find out just a little more about Boysfield. And when I looked up the facts of his case it appeared that he had been in the store’s electrical department when the indecent exposure took place. What was even more interesting was the evidence of one witness which seemed to indicate that Boysfield had not exposed himself in the direction of the female members of staff, but to a number of television screens.

By now I was really curious and checking back through the television company’s broadcast sheets of the day of the offence, I discovered that a programme featuring a well-known television newsreader, Anna Kreisler, had been broadcast around the time that Boysfield was in the store. Indeed the programme was devoted to raising money for charity and at one stage Anna Kreisler had stripped naked for a telephonic pledge of one million EC dollars. It was Anna Kreisler who had also appeared on the front cover of the magazines I had seen in Boysfield’s apartment. More checking now revealed that she had been reading the ten o’clock news on every night when the killer had struck.

Obtaining a search warrant for the suspect’s home I found a number of pornographic magazines in which cut-outs of Ms Kreisler’s head had been glued onto other naked female torsos. I also found a personal televideodisc which Boysfield had used to watch his own custom-made pornographic movies using intercut footage of Ms Kreisler reading the news. And a masturbatory sex-mannequin, with Ms Kreisler’s voice, recorded off television, and a battery-powered suction-operated vagina. Both the videodisc player and the mannequin were found to be fitted with the same brand of batteries that had been found inside all eight murder victims. It appeared that, for want of a better term, Boysfield was a gadget-freak. His apartment was full of electrical appliances of every conceivable kind. Everything from an electric bottle opener, to an electric clothes-brush, and an electric fishfilleter. It was quite clear that in Boysfield’s gadget-run world, women had been reduced to the status of mere domestic electrical appliances.

A forensic DNA profile subsequently confirmed that Boysfield had restriction fragment length polymorphisms that were identical with the killer’s. He later confessed that he had killed all eight women after watching Anna Kreisler read the TV news. Obsessed with her, he had for a long time satisfied himself by exposing himself to Kreisler’s head as it appeared on his own high definition television screen. He fantasised about having oral sex with her, and so when after a while he could contain himself no longer and he started to attack women, he sought to ejaculate within the mouths of his victims. Boysfield was able to escape a sentence of punitive coma by virtue of the fact that his insertion of the batteries into the vaginas of his victims was deemed to have proved that he could not have had an intention permanently to deprive them of life. Boysfield is now detained indefinitely in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Of course, two-dimensionality works two ways. Just in case any of you were under the impression that I don’t think too highly of my male colleagues, I should like to say this: only a few weeks ago, in a situation that I myself had completely misjudged, it was only the quick-thinking of a male colleague which prevented me from being killed or seriously injured. Incidentally this was the same colleague who accompanied me to Boysfield’s apartment and failed to notice the women’s magazines there.

Earlier on I described the incidence of the Hollywood-style gynocide as a virtual epidemic. I did not exaggerate. European Bureau of Investigation statistics show that serial sex-killings in the EC have increased dramatically, by over 700 per cent, since 1950. Last year there were an estimated 4,000 such murders in the Community, comprising over 20 per cent of all Europe’s homicides for the year. Not only that, but the EBI estimates that even now there are at the very least 25 and possibly as many as 90 active killers of this type roaming the EC.

People still talk about Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, who killed thirteen women during the 1970s, and Jack the Ripper, who killed six. But there are people out there now killing twenty or thirty people, or more. And while the victims continue predominantly to be female, it behoves women everywhere not to leave it to men to try and put a stop to it.

Of the other seventeen Community members, only Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Germany show any signs of adopting the British model of the two-dimensional gynocidal inquiry. To those other member countries whose police forces remain resolutely patriarchal, not to say macho, I say this: unless you wish forever to categorise women as potential victims, you must permit them to abandon whatever submissive role you have historically kept them in, so that they may become joint custodians of our society’s future health. Thank you.

The audience applauded politely as Jake finished her speech and having acknowledged the applause for no longer than seemed modest, she stepped down from the rostrum and returned to her seat. The conference chairman, a fat German bureaucrat with an expensively-cut pink suit that did a great deal to disguise his bulk, came back to the microphone.

‘Thank you, Chief Inspector,’ he said in English. Some of the women in the audience, enthusiastic for Jake’s brand of feminism, continued clapping for another minute which obliged the chairman to pause before adding, ‘That was most informative.’

‘Yes indeed it was,’ said Mark Woodford, as Jake found her seat beside him. ‘A little strident in some parts, but I suppose that’s only to be expected considering the subject matter.’ He glanced around the auditorium uncertainly and chuckled. ‘Even welcomed.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Woodford’s smooth English features took on a devious aspect as he folded his arms and stared up at the vaulted mosaic ceiling, reminiscent of some early-Christian basilica, except that the scene depicted was a modern one reflecting Frankfurt’s history: Charlemagne, Goethe, the Rothschilds, and Marcuse all meeting up in one uneasy group against a sky-blue background, as if they had been waiting for God to put in an appearance and offer judgment.

Jake regarded Woodford’s aquiline, inbred-looking and horizontal profile. Was there not some resemblance there to the King? she asked herself.