Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Men had a tendency to complicate matters, to look for problems before they looked for solutions. They were obsessed with their own importance and, it seemed to Jake, they did their best to guard this with unnecessary obfuscation.

Women were more straightforward, less romantic in their thinking. What was needed now was a simpler thought process than all the computers and laser-tracking technology seemed to allow.

It seemed impossible to dig the hole deeper, but perhaps she could dig the same hole in a different place.

The hospital where I work is only a short way south of the River Thames and close to the wreck of HMS Belfast, bombed by the IRA just over a decade ago. On the other side of the river is the Tower of London, and although it continues to receive many visitors every year, I have yet to see it myself, although I have worked in the lab as a pharmacy technician for several years. Perhaps one day I shall take a chance and walk across Tower Bridge and visit it, but there always seems to be something else more important to do.

Not that many people feel inclined to spend much time near the river these days. The large number of illegal immigrants living in boats on the river has made the area near the hospital as dangerous as it is insalubrious. In high summer the stink of untreated sewerage dumped straight into the Thames is almost overpowering. At night the area is such as Dickens might have described, containing a whole underworld of robbers, prostitutes, drug-dealers, sharps, scavengers, beggars, pickpockets and pimps. Of the police there is little evidence, except at the hospital where the protection of nursing staff from their own patients necessitates the presence of a large contingent of armed constables.

On one occasion, the dispensary itself was subjected to a well-organised raid when several men armed with sawn-off shotguns held us up and stole every drug we had, killing a dispensary porter who offered them resistance. You can still see the bloodstain on the dispensary floor where he fell. When two of the robbers were caught, it was this hospital which supplied the drugs to Wapping New Prison (formerly the offices of The Times newspaper), where their sentences were carried out. And it was me who prepared the two insulin injections which sent them into irreversible punitive coma. (Insulin is no longer used: the ticket being one way only. Today the penal system employs other substances, like TLG, or HL8, the effects of which can be reversed, although sentences of irreversible PC are frequently handed out. Especially for convicted murderers.)

It says something about the state of a modern hospital that it supplies drugs to prisons to put men into comas. This place used to be the most famous teaching hospital in the world. I once saw a film, made over fifty years ago, which was all about the humorous carefree lives of the nurses and medical students who were at this place. How quaint it all seemed then, and how very English. Of course the major changes are that this is no longer a teaching hospital, no longer part of something called the National Health Service, no longer surrounded by grass and trees. A high fence now encloses the hospital, and medical students now learn their medicine in Edinburgh — the one university hospital still to receive a direct grant of money from the Government — or somewhere abroad. Anyone who was a medical student here in 1953, when that film was made, and who saw the hospital now, probably wouldn’t even recognise it as a hospital at all.

Still, the work is satisfying enough, in an unimaginative sort of way: preparing ointments, capsules, suppositories and medicines. Most of it is cheap substitute stuff for more expensive drugs which are manufactured in Germany or Switzerland. I wouldn’t touch any of it myself. If I’m sick I attend a private clinic where they can get all the proper drugs. Mind you, I have to pay for it and so it’s just as well that I don’t have to manage on a pharmacy technician’s miserable allowance. Fortunately my parents left me a substantial income from a trust fund. The fact is, I needn’t work at all, however it is real work among real people and when I am doing it I don’t have to think about anything else. Dealing with drugs and medicines requires that one be very precise and this exactness in what I do is the most pleasing part of it. Everything is what it is and not another thing. And of course there’s always the added attraction of an armful of something decent.

I’m not at all unusual in this. Most of the people I work with are involved in some kind of substance abuse. There are even one or two of them supplementing their meagre incomes by manufacturing methadone at home which they then sell to the local Chinese.

Not that I can imagine why they want to bother with methadone when the junk-city contains plentiful supplies of good opium, which is about the only thing — apart from feeling-up the occasional cagegirl — to get me down there. A couple of afternoons a week you’ll find me aboard a particular junk moored close to Bermondsey Wall, smoking ten or fifteen pipes. Just like Dorian Gray. On average, I have about thirty or forty a week. This is not at all excessive. There are men I know, and not just Chinese, who smoke maybe two or three hundred pipes a week.

The best thing about opium is what it does to time. Or to be more precise, what it does to the way one judges time. After a couple of pipes you have the impression that you might have been on the boat for a day at least. You ask yourself ‘What time can it be?’ Then you pause for a moment, perhaps imagining some vast clock-face, before stating a time. The idea is accompanied by a feeling of great conviction, inasmuch as you say a time to yourself with perfect assurance and without feeling any doubt whatsoever. If you were to ask me the reason for this feeling of conviction I would have none. I could not explain it any more than I could describe the aroma of coffee.

So then, sometimes I will say to myself, ‘I am sure that several hours must have passed, and that it must be at least ten or eleven o’clock at night.’ But when I consult my watch and I see the correct time I realise that perhaps as little as ten or fifteen minutes have actually elapsed. That a quarter of an hour has become half a day. In this way it can be seen how time is little more than an aspect of human will.

It’s at times like these, when I’m wondering about the riddle of life in space and time, that I think the solution lies outside time and space altogether. Outside my own life itself perhaps. It’s true, suicide is a very old solution to a very old problem, but perhaps ultimately it is the only solution. What is certain is that it is the final solution.

The next day, Jake called Sir Jameson Lang to discover whether or not he intended to cooperate with Professor Waring’s plan.

‘I rather expected you’d be calling,’ he said. ‘Waring said you were opposed to his idea. But you see, I’ve really no choice but to do as they ask. Trinity is no longer as rich as it was. In fact, college finances are pretty tight. The University has been pursuing the Government for a rather lucrative grant. I don’t think it would be too pleased if I put the Government’s nose out of joint at this precise moment in time. You know, I’m not even sure if I should be talking to you, Chief Inspector. They warned me that you might try and dissuade me.’ He looked awkward and embarrassed on Jake’s pictophone screen.

‘Are you telling me that they threatened to withdraw this grant?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yes. And I don’t mind telling you, I wish I’d never set eyes on any of you people. The whole business has me worried sick. My academic reputation won’t be worth a damn if any of this ever gets out.’