Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

My problem was this: if I was dreaming, then I could safely shake my head clear of the nightmare and jump out of bed; but if this was an approximation of reality, then, for reasons already described, I was in serious trouble. Even an approximate reality of a rhino’s horn up my arse was not something I was eager to experience.

So I closed my eyes and tried to isolate my mind from my senses, asking myself some logical questions. Had I fallen asleep wearing the RA outfit? I certainly remembered putting it on, but not taking it off. I remembered using the erotic software, but there was no way that this would have included a rhinoceros. If I was in fact wearing the RA equipment, the only possibility was that having fallen asleep, there had been a power-cut and that when the power returned, the machine simply picked out a program at random.

On the other hand there existed the possibility that even these deliberations were part of my dream.

Naturally I recognised the program that the RA machine had chosen — or the one I was dreaming it had chosen. It was a short program based on an incident which had occurred in a Cambridge lecture theatre, when I had refused to accept, as Russell had insisted, that there was not a rhinoceros in the room with us.

The program had not been particularly useful as providing an experience of a real philosophical argument with a Cambridge don, for the simple reason that computers are excessively literal. The machine translated the sense of assertion involved as being something psychological, that existence could be a matter of simple will, and created a two-ton rhino. All I had really meant to say was that it is hard to regard the non-existence of a two-ton white rhinoceros when true, as a fact, in quite the same sense in which the existence of a rhinoceros would be a fact if it were true. Something of which I was now only too acutely aware.

I must have lain there for quite a while. And what happened was this: somehow I must have dozed off for a few minutes and when I awoke, the rhino was still there. This seemed to prove that I was not asleep, since it appeared unlikely that I could wake to the same dream twice and in quick succession. It seemed much more probable that I had, as feared, an approximation of reality. I was, after all, just going to have to bite the bullet, raise my visor-screen and accept what pain there would be in the few seconds before the other sensational parts of the program were able to turn themselves off.

This was easier said than done. And almost impossible to describe. Intense pain has that quality. Suffice to say that as soon as I moved my hand to raise the visor, the beast charged. Three or four seconds of an approximate sensation of being stamped and gored left me vomiting on the floor of my real bedroom. I had to call in sick and spent the rest of the morning in a hot bath trying to soak away some of my aches and pains.

But around lunchtime I felt well enough to do some reading. Perhaps the rhino shook me up more than I realised but re-reading some of my earlier notes, I could not avoid the conclusion that there were very many statements in the book with which I now disagree.

Indeed some of my ideas have changed so fundamentally that I wonder if I should go on with the Brown Book at all. In particular, my squeamishness with regard to the use of the word ‘murder’ now seems to me to have been mistaken. Morality had coloured my use of this word and I now think that a more perspicacious use of grammar will enable me to say what I want to say about various propositions.

I have been much too dogmatic. I think that I perceived something as if through a thick film and yet still wanted to try and elicit from it as much as possible. But I have resolved to let the earlier work stand, if only as a presentation of my old thoughts which, it cannot be denied, are nevertheless the basis of my new ones. Perhaps my old notes alongside my new notes will serve to present a kind of dialectic, not with the aim of arriving at a theory, but with the simple object of illustrating the ambiguities in language.

We can say that the word ‘murder’ has at least three different meanings; but it would be mistaken to assume that any theory can give the whole grammar of how we use the word, or try to accommodate within a single theory examples which do not seem to agree with it.

Jake stood alone in the room, watching the man on the other side of the lightly tinted glass. He too was alone. He sat motionless in a chair, too tired to seem nervous, staring at Jake and yet not seeing her. Seeing himself and yet hardly interested in a reflection he had become used to during the many hours of his interrogation. He smoked languidly, like a man who had been waiting for a flight long delayed.

She envied him the cigarette. On her side of the two-way mirror, all smoking, even a nicotine-free cigarette, was very strictly forbidden. The glow of a cigarette end was the one thing a suspect could see on the other side of the mirror in the interview room.

The door to the observation room opened and Crawshaw came in. He came over to the mirror and yawned.

‘John George Richards,’ he said. ‘His story checks out, I’m afraid. He did make a delivery of olive oil to the shop in Brewer Street on the day Mary Woolnoth was murdered. But he made the delivery at around three-thirty, which was when Mary’s body was first discovered. One hour before that he was making a delivery in Wimbledon. The time was recorded on the computer when it issued his delivery note. He couldn’t possibly have driven all the way from Wimbledon, selected Mary, killed her, and then made the delivery in anything less than a couple of hours.

‘Then there are the previous victims: Richards was away on holiday in Mallorca when Alison Bradshaw was killed; and he was in hospital having his wisdom teeth out on the day that Stella Forsythe was murdered. All of which puts him in the clear.’

‘I suppose,’ she said reluctantly. ‘We had better let him go. Too bad. He was looking good.’

Crawshaw nodded wearily and turned to leave the room.

‘Oh, and, Ed,’ said Jake. ‘Better put the surveillance team on that bookshop again.’

Back in her office Jake tried to bring her mind back to Wittgenstein. She re-read a transcript of their first dialogue, alongside a forensic psychiatrist’s report which concluded, much as Jake herself had already concluded, that the subject was a highly organised non-social personality — an egocentric who disliked people generally; outwardly it was likely that he was capable of getting along with his fellow man but that he harboured resentment towards society as a whole.

Jake had smiled the previous evening when Sir Jameson Lang had telephoned her at home with his own reaction to this assessment: ‘The way these psychiatrists describe him,’ he had said, ‘he sounds like a typical academic. With a personality assessment like that I should recommend that you conduct your investigation here, in college.’

The report concluded that on evidence other than the killings themselves, there was nothing to indicate insanity. The killer killed because he liked killing. He enjoyed the sensation of power that it gave him. He was playing God.

‘That’s something different,’ Lang had remarked. ‘Now, there you have the typical novelist.’

Jake had asked him how he proposed to handle a second dialogue, assuming that Wittgenstein rang again.

‘Moral philosophical argument didn’t seem to have much effect, did it?’ Lang had said. ‘Next time I thought I’d argue from a phenomenological point of view: scrutinise a few essences and meanings he might otherwise have taken for granted. You know, concentrate on the objective logical elements in thought. It’s rather a useful way of investigating these extreme states of mind. Just the thing if he should turn out to be existentialist. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all.’