But I feel there is one more murder of artistic merit which is worthy of mention, and that is the murder, in 1955, of David Blakely. He was the lover of Ruth Ellis who, having murdered him, was the last woman to be hanged for murder in England.
Blakely and Ellis had been lovers for two years. It was a turbulent, jealous relationship, with many infidelities on both sides. One night, Blakely left the Magnolia public house in Hampstead and found Ellis waiting for him with a revolver. She did not hesitate and shot Blakely several times at point-blank range. The artistic merit of this murder stems from a number of factors: the unfeminine choice of weapon, the unusual determination of the murderer herself and, of course (and most important of all), the singularity of the female artist. Just as it is difficult to find a female composer to rank alongside the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, or a female painter who stands as tall as Titian or Goya, so with the art of murder, there is a dearth of talent among the gentler sex.
Of course recent neurological research has revealed the true reason for this absence of murderous instinct among women; and only time will tell if other aspects of creativity find similar explanation. But let us recognise a real contribution from a woman when one does occur and praise it accordingly.
You will recall that earlier on, I posed the question: Has the twentieth century witnessed a renaissance in the art of murder? Let me now answer this question.
There has been such a renaissance, but it is only one such as Walter Pater might have recognised in that I am describing a temperament, an inwardness of response that is in itself a new form of perception. This temperament declares the weightlessness of modern men and the precariousness of their prejudices. It recognises that all knowledge is merely provisional and that there is no essential truth save death itself. Anything is permissible which might reveal the soul of the artist, including murder.
This renaissance, this outbreak of the art of murder, identifies not the fruit of experience but, given its awful brevity, experience itself as an end. It breathes an atmosphere of absolute uncertainty, of continuous change, of new opinions, of a refusal to acquiesce in some facile orthodoxy. As Victor Hugo says, we are all under sentence of death, but with an indefinite reprieve. Therefore, with this particular renaissance, what we are seeing is an appetite for a quickened sense of life, a multiplied consciousness.
Writing in 1891, Oscar Wilde attributed the commonplace character of literature to the decay of lying as an art. More than a century later I feel I can celebrate a century’s worth of literary and artistic excellence and attribute it to the renaissance of the murder as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, let me pass over the usual toasts to the Old Man of the Mountains, Charles the Hammer, the Jewish Sicarri, Burke and Hare, the Thugdom in all its branches, and give you my next victim, for I see that he is now abroad and so I must be about my business.
When Ocean Wharf, and other developments like it, was built, it seemed to herald a new lease of life for Docklands, an area which, at that time, had been in steep decline for over twenty years. It was but a temporary respite, but one bubble in the South Sea foam of bubbles that was the London property market of the late 1980s. Even before the last London brick had been laid, the final lick of paint applied to the mural of Churchill here, in the lobby of Winston Mansions, companies like the one which had built Ocean Wharf started to go bankrupt. And, as the years progressed and many of the other developments remained uncompleted, and the local council started to move more and more homeless families into flats which had once been on the market for hundreds of thousands of pounds, then dollars, buildings started to go unrepaired and prices tumbled even further.
The century came round a very sharp corner to find, once again, that Docklands was in steep decline. Indeed the decline seemed all the more dramatic because of all the money which had been spent trying to reclaim it for posterity, to no avail. As the first decade of the new millennium gave way to the second, there remained only a few isolated pockets of comparative affluence, like Ocean Wharf, in what was quickly becoming an urban nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
You might ask why, despite my wealth, I chose to come and live here, in what are virtually siege-like conditions: the architects who designed this development could never have foreseen that one day, Ocean Wharf would be surrounded by an electrified fence. Nor could they have ever envisaged that this would have been necessitated by a local crime rate equivalent to that of New York’s infamous South Bronx.
Staring out of my seventh-floor window here in Winston Mansions, insulated from most sound and unfiltered air, it was hard to know what it was they had envisaged when first they constructed their models. Did they ever imagine shops and stores closed down for lack of business, looted of all their fittings, becoming the first outposts of whole shanty towns of anarchic youth? Could they ever have thought that their neat little parklands with their brightly painted benches and streetlamps would one day be wastelands of abandoned cars and fly tips? And those pieces of plastic, those human replicas which had seemed to happily people the balsa wood scale models - what would the architects have said if they had been told of the statistical probability that each one of them was engaged in the commission of a crime? It was well-named, this Isle of Dogs. ‘Weialala leia Wallala leialala’ went the police car’s siren as it chased some lawless thugs across the unreal cityscape.
And yet it was for all these local attractions that I chose to come and live here. I had a vast amount of comfortable living space at my disposal, and at a very reasonable price too. Most important of all, I could indulge my taste for an outsider’s existence, of living on the very edge of things, in the clean margin of a very dirty notebook. And yet still very handy for central London.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Standing here, looking out across the river I found it easy to imagine myself singled out, alone. I have a temperamental hunger for solipsism. With me this is no intellectual posture, but a moral and mystical attitude, so strong that if I were to injure my leg it would lame my thoughts. For after all, knowing pain means being advised by some feature of our pain as to its whereabouts and being able to describe it. In the same way my kinesthetic sensations advise me of the movement and position of my limbs.
I let my index finger make an easy gathering movement of small amplitude. I either hardly feel it, or don’t feel it at all: but perhaps just a little, in the end of the finger, as a slight tension. Does this sensation advise me of the movement? For even without seeing I can describe the movement exactly. I must feel it, to know it - that seems certain. But knowing it only means being able to describe it.
Now if that same finger makes the same movement, but this time against the trigger of my gun, a slight pressure and metallic coldness against the flesh of my finger can advise me that it and the trigger are indeed moving. And watching the collapse of a man’s body in front of me, his head machine-gunning the air with blood, enables me, even without watching my finger, to know that it has moved at least once.
But to know that it has moved six times is not a matter of keeping count: the gun is almost silent, as I have described earlier. The ears are nevertheless affected more strongly than by silence. I don’t feel this in my ears, yet it has this effect. I know the number of the sounds because, after six, I move quickly in another direction.
15
‘ABSOLUTELY NOT,’ SAID Jake. She stared at Mark Woodford and Professor Waring with a mixture of surprise and contempt. ‘No way. I’m sorry.’
‘The Minister thought it was a good idea,’ Woodford said smoothly.
Jake shook her head firmly. ‘The Minister’s not investigating this case. I am, and I think it stinks.’
The meeting took place several days after Mr Parmenides had come to the Yard with Wittgenstein’s A-Z, in the Minister’s rooms at the Home Office, overlooking St James’s Park. Grace Miles was not present, as she was opening a new police station at her constituency in
Birmingham.
Jake sat back in her chair and glanced uncomfortably around her. She wondered about the incongruity of the room’s sleek, modern furniture, the cheap green china, and the pair of elephant tusks that were mounted on one of the beige-coloured walls. She thought this last item rather tasteless given that the elephant was now all but extinct, the few remaining kept in private zoos and safari parks. It was her favourite animal. She thought it ought to have been every policeman’s favourite animal, on the basis that an elephant never forgets. And here were these bastards asking her to do just that. To forget all about catching Wittgenstein.
Mark Woodford sighed and avoiding Jake’s eyes, inflated his lips thoughtfully. ‘Normally we pretty much go along with the constitutional separation of powers,’ he said, feigning some awkwardness. ‘Legislative, executive ...’
‘Spare me the constitutional lecture,’ said Jake. ‘I know what they are.’
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘But there are circumstances in which the legislative function might feel obliged to interfere in the workings of one of the other governmental functions.’
‘I think what you’re trying to say,’ said Jake, ‘is that you’ll have me taken off the case. Is that it?’
‘Yes,’ said Waring.
‘Go ahead and try,’ said Jake. ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at journalism.’
Woodford smiled placatingly. ‘There’s no question of that surely, Chief Inspector.’ He leaned across the table and folded his hands impatiently. ‘Look, I don’t understand what your objection is. Professor Waring’s suggestion might solve all of our problems.’
‘Everyone except Wittgenstein’s.’
Woodford shrugged. ‘I can’t say I care much about his problems,’ he said. ‘The last victim, Hegel, makes it twelve people he’s killed, for God’s sake.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Jake. ‘But he’s still got some rights. There is still a proper way of doing things. And even if it could work, which I doubt, your way would just sweep it all under the rug. What is more, if it didn’t work, he might break off contact with us altogether. Go underground for a while and then start this business all over again in about two years’ time. Worse still, you’ll end up making a legend out of this man, just like Jack the Ripper became a legend when he disappeared.’
‘Look, just listen to the professor explain the idea to you himself,’ Woodford insisted. ‘Hear him out, please.’
Jake shrugged. ‘Go ahead. But I can’t see that it’ll make much difference. Saint Francis could explain this to me and it would still smell like shit.’
Professor Waring glanced questioningly at Mark Woodford, who nodded at him as if to say that he ought to give it a try anyway. Woodford opened a file in front of him and started to turn the pages.
‘From a reading of all the transcripts of your telephone conversations with Wittgenstein, and from everything we know about him, I have formed a very distinct impression of the kind of character we are dealing with.
‘In many ways, he is like patients I have met before, in custody. My own clinical research has revealed that his type is commonly suicidal. His placing no value on the life of others, makes it probable that he places little value on his own.’
He cleared his throat as he approached what Jake knew to be the more delicate part of his thesis.
‘In this particular case, I’m certain of it. And given the killer’s identification with or delusion that he is Ludwig Wittgenstein, I see no reason why we may not turn his aggression against society towards himself. After all, one of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide and he himself had suicidal tendencies. I think that it is entirely feasible that Sir Jameson Lang might successfully maintain an argument for the killer to take his own life.’ Waring shook his head uncertainly.
‘As to the moral-judicial issues that the chief inspector mentions, I think we must keep before us the very real danger to society of allowing him to remain unchecked. Naturally, as a doctor I have reservations about recommending this particular course of action. It might be argued that it runs counter to my own Hippocratic oath. But that oath is worth nothing if it allows an even greater loss of life. And really, Chief Inspector, don’t you honestly think it would be better to kill yourself than to be sentenced to a lifetime’s punitive coma? I know which option I would prefer.’
‘That’s rich,’ Jake sneered at him, ‘considering that you were on the Home Office Select Committee that recommended implementing coma as a viable punishment.’
Waring frowned and looked at Woodford. ‘Perhaps the chief inspector is concerned that without an arrest at the end of her investigation, her career progress might be held up.’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she said quickly.
Woodford smiled thinly and helped himself to a rich tea biscuit. ‘Look, I understand what it must be like for you,’ he said. ‘You’ve given everything to this case with a very definite end in mind. And now we come along and suggest a different sort of goal. Well, I can see how it would be very frustrating. Nobody expected you to be happy about it.’
‘You’re damned right I’m not happy about it. Look, you people can do what you like, but I still intend going after Wittgenstein in my own way.’ To that end, Jake had already decided to say nothing of how Parmenides had brought her Wittgenstein’s list of targets, and of how these were being kept under permanent watch.
Woodford shrugged. ‘Well we certainly can’t stop you doing your duty,’ he said.
‘And what about Sir Jameson Lang?’ she asked. ‘What does he have to say about your little scheme? He doesn’t strike me as the type to go along with what you’re proposing. Technically speaking, this is a conspiracy to commit an unlawful homicide.’
‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’ said Woodford.
‘And as for Sir Jameson Lang,’ said Waring, ‘you leave him to us.’ He turned to Woodford. ‘I’ll call him this afternoon.’
Jake stood up, pressing her chair away with the backs of her legs.
‘Murder,’ she said quietly. ‘And don’t kid yourselves that it’s something else. Even Wittgenstein doesn’t do that.’
The lift down from the top floor was a slow one and by the time Jake reached the ground, she had all but recovered her temper. A security woman searched her and then, glancing at a computer screen, checked to see that Jake had not left any unauthorised bags or packages behind her.
While she waited for her security clearance, Jake surveyed the many Russians and East Europeans waiting patiently in the lobby for whichever jobsworth Home Office clerk would interrogate them about their status. She knew that some of them would have been waiting there for several days in order to prove that they were in Britain legally. No one cared much for their comfort or their convenience. No one tried to make the whole process less indifferent than it already was. Small wonder, thought Jake, that people sometimes got violent.
When her clearance arrived, she walked out of the petrol-pump-shaped building onto Tothill Street, turning almost immediately right towards New Scotland Yard and the famous revolving cheese on a pole which had identified it in a hundred television series. The silver cheese caught the hot midday sun at regular intervals, flashing at her like a slow stroboscopic light. She wondered why that particular image seemed to be significant. Back in her own office at the Yard, Jake called the lab.
‘Maurice? Where are we on that autoradiograph?’ she asked. ‘Has the computer matched an identity card with the sample yet?’
‘I wish you’d make up your mind,’ he snarled back. ‘You mean you want to start the DNA-matching program again?’
‘What do you mean again?’ she asked. ‘Who told you to stop?’
‘You did. I got a signed memo from you just yesterday. You told me to send you the graph too.’
‘And did you?’
‘You mean you haven’t got it?’
Jake was beginning to smell a rat. ‘Maurice. I’d like you to find that memo and then b
ring it to my office. Immediately.’
She waited several minutes and then he called back. Even on the pictophone screen, she could see he looked worried.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he said. ‘Because I’ve got better things to do, lady.’
‘It’s no joke,’ Jake said. ‘Well? Did you find the memo?’
‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t locate it.’
‘You say that the memo arrived on your computer screen yesterday, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I copied it onto my dayfile and made a hard copy to attach to the autoradiograph.’