Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

‘The last time we spoke you described yourself as an artist. I don’t doubt it. Only as such, yours is a common dilemma: the sin of living life in the imaginative as opposed to the real world, of Art instead of Being. Naturally God plays the crucial role in your heightened sense of despair. In your secret torment, God is your only hope, and yet you love the torment and will not abandon it. Somehow you are aware that what you must do is let go of your torment and take it upon yourself in faith, and that you cannot do. So your defiance of God intensifies and you kill others to prove it. But, as I say, real defiance is shown most of all by killing oneself.’

Wittgenstein sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘What you say about the artist’s existence feels true.’

‘How do you feel about killing yourself?’

There was a long silence.

The car left Southwark Street and sped along Southwark Bridge Road into Borough. St Thomas Street. Guy’s Hospital. The security guards on the gate lifted the barrier and stepped quickly back as the car roared past.

‘Does it make you feel afraid?’

Jake cursed Lang loudly.

‘Do you believe in eternal life?’

‘Eternal life,’ Wittgenstein whispered, ‘belongs to those who live in the present.’

Jake heard him smile as he added:

‘Is some riddle solved by me surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question. Well then. The riddle does not exist. And the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’ Then he rang off.

Jake buttoned down the electric window and leaned out of the car to address the gate-keeper.

‘Where’s the nurses’ home?’ she asked.

‘Nurses’ home? You’re a bit out-of-date, aren’t you? That closed two years ago.’

‘Drive on,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll try inside the butcher’s shop.’

The car accelerated forward and came to a screeching halt at the hospital’s front steps. Jake sprang out of the car and raced up to the front door where, startled by the speed of her arrival, two police guards met her with pointed guns. She waved her ID in front of their bovine faces and demanded to be taken to the hospital administrator.

The first policeman took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Don’t have one, ma’am,’ he said.

‘The manager then,’ she said. ‘The director. Whoever’s in charge.’

Both men continued to look puzzled.

‘Who is in charge?’ the first policeman said to his colleague. ‘I dunno.’

‘Ask her,’ suggested the other, and pointed to a nurse.

‘We want the person in charge,’ the first policeman said to the nurse. ‘The one that runs the place.’

The nurse smiled unpleasantly, as if she had been about to provide some very nasty medicine.

‘Make your mind up please,’ she said. ‘Which is it to be? The person in charge, or the person who runs the place? They’re not the same.’

Jake resisted the temptation to draw her weapon and press it to the nurse’s forehead.

‘We want someone who knows about the personnel who work here,’ she said patiently.

‘Well why didn’t you say? You don’t want the person who runs the place. You want a personnel director. But which one? Student, surgical, nursing, administrative, technical or...’

‘Technical,’ yelled Jake. ‘I want a pharmacy technician.’

‘All the way down that corridor, then second corridor on your right, fourth door on the left,’ said the nurse and walked quickly away.

Jake turned to look for Detective Inspector Stanley and found him leaning against one of the graffitied walls, already looking decidedly greenish. Hardly disguising her contempt, Jake said: ‘Oh yes, I was forgetting about your stomach, wasn’t I. You’d better wait outside.’

Stanley nodded weakly and staggered out of the doors.

‘I’ll come with you ma’am,’ said one of the policemen. ‘It’s best I do, to be quite frank. You never know who’s hanging around in this place. There are some very dodgy types who walk in and out of these doors, I can tell you. It’s not like the Metropolitan Police Clinic at Hendon.’

‘All right,’ said Jake. ‘Come on then.’

They walked briskly down the foul-smelling corridor the nurse had directed them to. Further away from the entrance hall, they started to find that the corridor was lined with patients lying on the floor, some of whom got up from their dirty mattresses to beg for a few dollars towards their hospital bills. The guard thrust them all roughly aside.

The technical personnel director’s office was opposite what looked like a bank vault, but was in fact the hospital dispensary. Another two armed guards stood on either side of a barred window in a steel-plated door. The door to the personnel director’s office was made of reinforced glass. Jake’s guard pressed the bell and lifted his mug towards the video camera scanning the both of them.

‘Visitor for the TPD,’ he said.

The door buzzed and sprang open.

The technical personnel director’s office was small and barely furnished. The telephones looked like they’d been there since the hospital was built. The computer was a cheap Strad such as the poorest student might have owned. A half-eaten hamburger lay on the desk. On the television were some girls doing aerobics in costumes that were a couple of sizes too small. From the prurient camera-angles it didn’t look like the kind of aerobics that the viewer was meant to join in with.

Jake confronted a Welshman wearing a pinstripe suit and a zip-up cardigan who smelt heavily of sweat and fried food. She handed him her identity card.

‘I’m Chief Inspector Jakowicz,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to find one of your employees, Paul Esterhazy, at the nurses’ home, however I understand from the gate-keeper that it has closed. Is Mr Esterhazy currently in the building?’

‘It’s his day off,’ said the director, examining Jake’s identity card with considerable interest. ‘Murder Squad, eh? Is Paul in trouble or something.’

‘It is very urgent that I speak to him, sir,’ said Jake. ‘Do you have his present home address?’

‘He only lived in the men’s hostel very briefly,’ said the director. ‘Temporary like. Just while he found himself somewhere permanent to live.’

‘Well then if you could just oblige me by telling me where that is.’

The man’s piggy eyes narrowed. ‘Paul wouldn’t harm a fly, you know. I’ve known him for years. Gentle as a lamb, he is.’

Jake, who wished she had a dollar for every time she’d heard that, said that she merely wanted Esterhazy in order that he could help her with her enquiries.

‘But that’s always what you people say when you arrest someone. Are you going to arrest Paul? Because if you are, I’ll have to speak to the hospital lawyer before I can give you his address.’

Jake sighed and asked why.

The man smiled a patronising sort of smile. ‘Believe me, Chief Inspector,’ he said, ‘there’s not much that we do in this hospital that we don’t speak to the lawyer first of all. If you only knew the number of malpractice suits we have to deal with here.’

‘Look,’ Jake hissed back at him. ‘I’m not one of your damned patients, and I’m in a hurry, so if you wouldn’t mind...’

The director tut-tutted and shook his head. ‘Well, put the case that I did give you Paul Esterhazy’s address, which I’m not saying I do have, mind. And put the case that you went there to arrest him. Put the case that while you were there arresting him you, or one of your men, shot Esterhazy. Put the case that prevented by law from suing the police, he or his family might well decide to sue the hospital instead, for releasing confidential information to you.’