Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Outside in the street Jake drew her weapon and shouted after him to surrender. He kept on running, and seeing his way impeded by two more men waving guns and badges, he raised the knife.

Jake stopped still, steadied her arm and aimed low. She saw Crawshaw and the other officer move smartly away from her line of fire. She felt the cold first pressure of the trigger, caught her breath for a millisecond, and then squeezed.

He catapulted forward onto the pavement, clutching at an instantly bloody thigh. Crawshaw moved in quickly to kick the knife away. Not that it mattered. Even before Jake had got to Parmenides where he lay on the pavement, even before she saw the wound, she knew that the bullet had severed the man’s femoral artery — the sheer quantity of blood told her that much.

Underneath the stubble the Greek’s face was deathly pale. He did not look as if he was in pain, rather that he had been somehow anaesthetised. His eyes focused briefly on Jake, flickered, closed and then opened again. For just a moment he seemed to smile at her. It was a smile she had seen once before, when her father was dying of a brain tumour. A smile, replete with silent contempt.

Crawshaw tore off his scarf and using his truncheon as a capstan made a quick tourniquet round the wounded thigh. He did his best to stem the flow of blood, but the wound was too severe and the man was dead even before WPC Edwards had finished radioing for an ambulance.

Jake walked to the unmarked police van where, according to the regulations, she calmly handed Chung her automatic. ‘For the inquiry,’ she explained.

Chung nodded and put the gun into his pocket.

‘I only meant to wound him,’ she heard herself say. ‘He had the knife. I thought he meant to use it when he saw the other two officers.’

‘You done right,’ he said. ‘You warned him and then aimed low. That’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s just too bad you hit him there. A centimetre either way and right now he’d be sitting on the pavement and calling you all sorts of fucking names.’

Jake sat on the edge of the van and considered her reaction to having killed a man. She thought she ought to have felt worse about it, despite the fact that Parmenides had murdered six women. That was awkward too. A confession might have made things just that little bit more convenient. As it was, she realised that she would now have to hope that the scenes-of-crime officers would find evidence that would help to convince a coroner’s court that her action had been justified.

By now the street, suddenly cordoned off at both ends, was full of policemen helping to bolt the stable door. Jake wondered how it was they had contrived to be on the scene quite so quickly. Then she remembered that Vine Street station was only round the corner. That would be where she would have to go now to make her statement.

‘You all right?’ said Chung anxiously.

Jake looked at him, frowning with puzzlement.

‘Me? I’m fine.’

It was almost twelve by the time she arrived back home from Vine Street. Everything in the flat seemed cold and lonely, but the central heating was soon working and she was glad that she would not have to explain what she had done to anyone else. The pictophone rang a couple of times, but she ignored it. Instead she turned on the television and poured out a large glass of whisky to try and divert her thoughts.

She ought to have known that the midnight television news would cover the shooting. But there was no reason for her to have suspected that the coverage would be quite so brutal and voyeuristic. She was aware that programmes shown after midnight were not obliged to conform to any broadcasting guidelines. This meant that late-night television was comprised mostly of pornographic films. Jake had no idea that the same freedom extended to news broadcasts.

The crew had arrived on the scene in Sackville Street less than fifteen minutes after Jake had left it. Dealing with the incident chronologically, they filmed first the kebab restaurant and then the pavement along which Parmenides had run. Next they filmed his knife, followed by a gun: not Jake’s Beretta automatic which had accompanied her to Vine Street, but another identical weapon as shown by one of the many other policemen. Last of all the hand-held camera moved down the street to where the Greek lay dead in a kidney-shaped swimming pool of blood: it focused in close on his bare thigh, the bloody tourniquet that Crawshaw had made, and the coin-sized hole from the.45-calibre bullet. Last, and most shocking of all, the television reporter lifted the dead man’s head by the hair the better to show his lifeless features to the camera.

The commentary was no less sensational than the pictures.

‘This criminal filth,’ snarled the reporter, shaking Parmenides by the hair, ‘was almost certainly responsible for the brutal murders of six young women.’ He bent forward to shout into the bloodstained ear.

‘You were scum,’ he yelled. ‘A filthy animal. Being shot like this was too easy for you, you shit. You should have been made to suffer, just like those women you murdered, you cunt. I hope that they give the police officer who plugged you the George medal for killing you. And if, somehow, your greasy spirit can still hear me, we all hope that you burn in hell, you scum. For what you did, you should have been—’

Jake found the remote control and turned it off. Then she drained her glass. What she had seen left her feeling sickened. Somehow she had had to see it on television for it to sink in that she had killed a man.

After a minute or so she began to be aware of an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach and her hands started to shake. Then her skin started turning hot and cold. Absurdly she found herself recalling details from her university first-year psychology notes about the way in which her own brain’s hypothalamus, like a tiny temperature gauge, would be trying to control her body’s autonomic nervous response to what had happened; and about René Descartes’s notion of human beings as reflex machines. It was strange how one thing put you in mind of another.

That smile she had seen on Parmenides’s face. Her father’s sardonic smile. She was quite shaken by the memory of it.

Tears welled in her eyes and when she walked to the bathroom her legs felt unsteady beneath her. She was retching before she was even halfway through the door.

Nobody understands me.

Certainly a lot of people think they do. The other day I was in the Mystery Bookshop and I stopped in front of this bookcase and it was full of studies in the psychology of multiple murderers, or serial killers as they are also sometimes known. Yes, I mean full. There must have been at least fifty different titles. I browsed through a few of them. But not one seemed to me to have properly listened to the words of the supernatural songs they each claimed to have understood so well.

Mostly these books on why people become multiple killers boil down to two separate theories.

There is the old-fashioned Marxist theory that interprets the multiple’s behaviour as the product of historical materialism: society’s original victim metamorphosing into society’s oppressor. And then there is the more modern, but essentially Nietzschean view that the multiple has an intense desire not to reject but to belong to society — a society in which fame is the touchstone to success and where murder is merely the short cut to its achievement.

Neither one of these vulgar interpretations of violent criminality seems particularly satisfactory. Perhaps I can explain it better.

In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Sherlock Holmes explains his ‘art’ of detection as ‘an impersonal thing — a thing beyond myself’.