A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

  ‘So what you’re saying is that someone’s been into your office and erased the record from your dayfile’s memory.’

  Maurice shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Looks that way,’ he said. ‘But who would do a thing like that?’

  ‘I’ve a pretty shrewd idea,’ said Jake.

  ‘Maybe I should report this.’

  Jake thought for a moment. While she couldn’t see Woodford or Waring snooping around the lab and erasing files from a technician’s PC, she had the feeling that they were behind it. No doubt there were others who were prepared to carry out their orders: police officers who did not wish to see the Lombroso Program and, as a corollary, the Government’s much-vaunted law and order platform irreparably damaged. As it certainly would be when the true facts became known of how Wittgenstein had exploited the very system that had been designed to control him.

  No doubt these same people would have preferred that Wittgenstein be dealt with rather more discreetly than an arrest and trial allowed. It was bad enough that Woodford and Waring were intent on having Wittgenstein remove himself from the equation. But it seemed infinitely worse that there should be policemen who were willing to obstruct evidence in order that they should be given sufficient time in which to carry out this intention. What was clear was that if she wished to continue with her investigation, then she would have to move more subtly than any inquiry into missing evidence would permit.

  ‘No, Maurice,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me for the moment, will you?’

  He looked relieved. Gratitude made him more respectful. ‘Yes, certainly Chief Inspector. Anything you say. I’ve more than enough work to do anyway, without answering a lot of questions.’

  Jake ended their conversation with a push of a button. It seemed that she could no longer rely on catching Wittgenstein through the genetic fingerprint on his identity card. But nor could she simply sit back and hope that one of the police teams watching the various London addresses which he had marked in his A-Z would get lucky. She reminded herself that being a detective meant that one was never satisfied with what one already had: that the process of enquiry was, of necessity, a continuing one. Quite simply it was a matter of reassessing something because there was absolutely no logical reason to do so.

  She turned to face her own computer screen and called up all her own case notes to check that nothing was missing. There wasn’t a great deal on the file, but everything she remembered was still there. Having accessed her notes, she decided to re-read them and so, page by page, Jake went through the file, hoping that some new line of enquiry might occur to her now. There was something in her mind of what Sir Jameson Lang had said about the real Wittgenstein’s preference for the more intuitive detective. Perhaps she herself could be more intuitive now. She knew from previous cases how, when an investigation was over, you could look back through the notes and see something you ought to have known was significant - something that had been there all along, just waiting to be noticed. She hit the ‘page-down’ button. Something so small she might have ignored it. Something she might have misunderstood, concerning the use of words perhaps. To some extent a detective’s job was a grammatical one. To shed light on a problem by clearing misunderstandings and ambiguities away, not to mention lies. She felt almost as if she were directing herself not towards phenomena but, as one might say, to the possibilities of phenomena.

  Jake smiled to herself. She was beginning to sound like Sir Jameson Lang. Well maybe he was right. Maybe a detective was a kind of philosopher and her criminal investigation was, in reality, a philosophical investigation. Perhaps it had been that all along.

  She needed a cigarette but found that she had run out. She had meant to buy another packet on her way back from the Home Office, only Woodford and Waring’s callous little suggestion had put it out of her mind. Cursing them both, Jake grabbed her bag and went outside again.

  The roar of the traffic on Victoria Street robbed Jake momentarily of her bearings. It was force of habit that turned her to the right, towards her usual source of supply for smokes and good coffee, the Chestnut Tree Café.

  In front of the Brain Research Institute, her arms folded against the draft from a passing water-tanker, Jake crossed the road. But as she made for the café’s open door she found her footsteps slowing.

  On the pavement, near to his monstrous black beetle of a machine, sat a motorcycle messenger, drinking from a large Styrofoam cup of steaming tea. Jake paused as she recollected that her Gynocide Squad was still trying to catch the motorcycle messenger who had murdered several office receptionists. But it was not this which had attracted her attention. It was what this grimy-faced youth was balancing on his leather-trousered knees. An A-Z London street atlas.

  ‘Yeah?’ said the youth, frowning as he noticed Jake’s attention. ‘What?’ He looked himself over as if checking that he had not caught fire.

  ‘Do you need any assistance?’ Jake said, half to herself.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Then she had nodded at the man’s A-Z.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said the messenger, his tone and expression making it clear that he thought Jake was probably mad. ‘I er ... know where I’m going. All right?’

  Jake went into the café and bought the cigarettes. But her thoughts were somewhere else. She had suddenly realised that this was where Wittgenstein had met her. Here, in the Chestnut Tree Café. She had dropped her change and he had helped her to pick it up. No wonder he had been able to recognise her perfume. She had been so close to him. Their hands had actually touched.

  Breathless with excitement, Jake sat down at the table where he had been sitting, lit one of her cigarettes and then glanced through the window. From here he would have had a perfect view of anyone going in or out of the Institute. He might even have come in here after his own Lombroso test.

  Wittgenstein’s face lay half-melted across the hard edge of her mind’s eye, Jake thought, like one of the soft watches in Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory. She roped her brain tightly onto the rack and tried to stretch out a full and accurate account of what she remembered.

  When she could think no more she walked quickly back to the Yard. Seated behind her desk again she called up the ComputaFit pictures of Wittgenstein on the screen of her terminal and compared her own mental image of the man in the café with the ones which had been constructed by Clare and Grubb after the murder of Descartes in Soho. Then she looked at the ComputaFit obtained from Doctor Chen, Wittgenstein’s psychotherapist at the Institute, through hypnosis.

  Of the three pictures, the one that most matched her own memory was Chen’s. So much for Professor Gleitmann’s opinion that Chen’s unconscious mind had lied.

  She wondered if she had devoted enough time to Chen. He was after all, the only person who had spoken at length to the killer. There could be no question that his hypnosis had been handled expertly. But had enough account been taken of the language barrier? Chen spoke excellent English, but was it his first language? Was it English that his subconscious mind used, or Chinese? Might that not make a difference to his answers to her questions? Questions which, directed to his subconscious, were also directed towards the essence of language. Might not those questions see in the essence only something that already lay open to view and that became surveyable by a rearrangement? But what about what lay beneath the surface of his answers? Was there something that lay within, which could be seen when you looked into it and which further analysis might dig out?

  Perhaps that was why the stroboscopic light effect on the silver cheese outside the Yard had seemed significant.

  Jake called the Brain Research Institute and asked to speak to Doctor Chen. She asked him if he minded being hypnotised once again, only this time she wanted to question him and for him to answer in Chinese.

  ‘What you’re saying’ — Chen grinned — ’is that you think there’s something wrong with the way I speak English.’

  Jake smiled back at him and shook her head
.

  ‘Not at all. Look,’ she said, ‘you learned English, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But you grew up speaking Chinese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These are very different languages.’

  ‘Only on the surface,’ he said. ‘Man is a syntactical animal, surely. And all languages share the same deep structure. The genetic universal grammar, as it were. The blueprint for language that’s in every newborn baby’s mind. It’s the merest accident that I grew up speaking Chinese rather than English.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Jake. ‘However my enquiry here relates to linguistic use. And that’s a factual question. I need to know how form and function interact. I have to try and understand your intentions. For instance, how what you say relates to the reality you have perceived.’

  They were in Chen’s office at the Institute. Jake was accompanied by Sergeant Chung who was setting up the stroboscopic light on Chen’s desk.

  ‘I want to speak to your unconscious in your natural language,’ she added. ‘The translation will be done by Sergeant Chung at a conscious level.’

  Chen shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a try, if you think it will help.’ He smiled inquisitively. ‘Are you planning to try and induce the trance yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jake. ‘I have a master’s in Psychology. Rest assured, I’ve done this before. But we’ll forgo the use of an intravenous substance this time. I don’t much like them, and of course you’ll be able to return to what you were doing, almost as soon as we’ve finished here.’

  Chen nodded and settled back in his armchair as Jake switched on the light.

  There is a popular misconception that good hypnotic subjects tend to be weak-willed acquiescent individuals who are given to submissive behaviour. But it is entirely the opposite state of affairs which is true: the more intelligent make the more susceptible hypnotic subjects, having a greater capacity for concentration than weaker-minded people. Chen was an easy subject and highly absorptive which, as Jake was aware, indicated a developed imagination.

  When she was satisfied that she had induced the hypnotic trance, she explained that she wanted to ask him some questions in Chinese and that he would hear another voice next. She told him that he should answer in Chinese and that he should now nod if he understood.

  Chen nodded slowly, and then they began.

  ‘Would you please ask him if he remembers the patient codenamed Wittgenstein,’ Jake instructed Chung.

  Chung translated the question into his own language.

  Jake thought that Chinese, with its high and low sounds existing so close together, sounded like someone trying to tune an old radio. Listening to the pair of them jabbering away, Jake found it hard to accept that Chinese could have anything in common with English, even at the deep, genetically preprogrammed level.

  ‘Ask him if he can remember some of the things Wittgenstein said.’

  Maybe she was wasting her time. Here she was, trying to investigate how language represents reality and yet she had given no consideration to the question of how anything manages to represent anything. It was not something they taught you at the Hendon Police Training College. Not something that anyone taught, except maybe people like Sir Jameson Lang. And just how far should any criminal investigation go? Had she not already gone a lot further than she was supposed to?

  ‘Ask him to describe Wittgenstein once again,’ she told Chung. ‘Let’s see if we didn’t miss something.’

  Once again Chung translated her question, frowning fiercely as he spoke. What was there about the Chinese language, Jake wondered, that seemed to make people irritated while they were speaking it? Chen sighed and then drooled slightly while he thought of his answer. He spoke hesitantly, adding one word to another and then another, almost at random.

  ‘Brown raincoat,’ Chung repeated. ‘Brown shoes, good ones. Brown tweed jacket, with leather bits on the elbows. He doesn’t know what you call them. A special word. Not badges. Like badges.’

  ‘Patches?’ said Jake.

  ‘Maybe, yes.’ Chung craned his head forwards so as not to miss the rest of Chen’s speech.

  ‘White shirt. No, not a shirt. Like a pullover, but not like a pullover. A pullover with a polo neck. But not made of wool. Made of the same material as a shirt.’ Chung shrugged. ‘A white polo neck anyway.’

  Chung’s words seemed to touch something deep within Jake’s own memory.

  It was curious that Wittgenstein had mentioned her perfume, because a sense of smell - something clinical and antiseptic - was what she remembered most about him now.

  ‘Yat,’ she said, ‘ask Doctor Chen if it’s the same kind of white polo neck that a dentist might wear.’

  Chung translated and then, hearing Chen’s reply, nodded.

  ‘Yes, he could have been a dentist.’

  Jake shook her head.

  She had offered to help Wittgenstein and he had smiled at her with what he might have thought looked like confidence. But what Jake had seen had been teeth that were scaled and yellow - teeth that were badly in need of dental work.

  ‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think he’s a dentist. His teeth aren’t good enough. I’ve never ever seen a dentist with bad teeth.

  ‘Yat, you remember you said that the only way the killer could have broken into the Lombroso system would have been if he was using a computer that was already on the EC Data Network?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Ask Doctor Chen if he thinks that Wittgenstein might be a male nurse or some other kind of hospital auxiliary staff?’

  Chung put the question and Chen replied that he thought he probably was.

  ‘Just like the real Wittgenstein,’ said Jake. ‘He worked in a hospital for a while, during the Second World War. It was one of the reasons that enabled him to avoid being imprisoned as an enemy alien.’

  Chung shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble with you British,’ he said. ‘It was the same with the boat people back in Hong Kong. You always locking people up who couldn’t possibly do you any bloody harm.’

  Jake brought Chen out of the trance.

  ‘Find anything useful in there?’ he said pleasantly.

  Jake explained her hunch about Wittgenstein working at a hospital.

  ‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, and then stood up and stretched.

  ‘Well,’ said Jake, looking at her watch. ‘I think we’ve taken up enough of your time, Doctor Chen. I’m grateful.’ It was probably too late to find anyone still working at the Ministry of Health.

  ‘No problem,’ he said again. ‘Next time see if you can’t help me to stop smoking.’

  Jake and Chung returned to the office they used when they were at the Institute, where Jake called the Ministry. She found herself connected with a picture of an impossibly fit and healthy looking girl in a leotard, and an incongruously brusque male voice on an answering-machine which informed her that the Ministry was closed until nine o’clock the following morning.

  ‘Well I guess that’s it until tomorrow,’ said Jake. ‘Thanks a lot for your help, Yat. I really think that was useful.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Translation makes a nice change from computers.’

  They walked back to the Yard.

  ‘Your train goes from Paddington, doesn’t it?’ said Jake. ‘Can I offer you a lift?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But only on one condition. That you let me take you to the best Chinese restaurant in Soho first. It’s owned by a cousin of mine.’

  Jake grinned. ‘All right. It’s a deal. But won’t your wife be waiting for you?’

  Chung smiled back. ‘Her mother’s staying with us at the moment. She thinks her daughter should not have married a man from Hong Kong.’

  ‘It’s because she’s narrow-minded,’ Jake offered.

  ‘No.’ Chung laughed. ‘It’s because she’s never eaten at my cousin’s restaurant.’

  My brain hurts. Really, it d
oes.

  But is it any wonder? Is it any wonder when there are over 30,000 different kinds of protein swilling around in there? Is it any wonder it hurts when you consider that one gram of brain tissue uses up more energy in keeping you conscious than a gram of muscle uses to lift a barbell? When you consider that your brain consumes about a quarter of all the calories you use in a day?

  But before you calorie-conscious people start getting excited and reaching for your philosophy textbooks, let me quickly add that bending your brain to understanding something like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception uses no more calories than having a dump, or picking your nose. Unfortunately for fatties, the fact is most of the calories get used in just keeping the old head-set humming, otherwise G. E. Moore might unwittingly have been responsible for the world’s first Cambridge diet.

  Even so it seems to me that my own Gulliver must have been putting in a lot of overtime lately. Sustained thought on the subject of Murder during the last few months must have been using that little bit more energy. Thus the skull-fracturing headache.

  The problem is that brain cells are determinedly social. They will insist on speaking to their neighbours - up to 100,000 of them at any one time. And with all the mental sensation that is the inevitable corollary of mass-murder, the electrical firing that’s been going on inside the central coconut must look like the sky above El Alamein.

  If only the brain wasn’t such an efficient little bastard - just 2 per cent of body weight, as a matter of fact. In my case that’s about 1.7 kilograms. It will insist on making hundreds of back-up copies of thoughts - even the thoughts one had hoped one had forgotten - storing them in all sorts of different neuronal nooks and cranial crannies. It is like a prudent man going abroad who, having considered the possibility of being robbed, separates his cash and spreads it throughout his luggage and person. This is why when one part of the brain is physically destroyed, for example that part dealing with the recognition of colour, there’s another part of the brain which can manage it just as well.