A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (11 page)

The professor’s long dark face took on an exasperated sort of look.

‘Chief Inspector,’ he said pompously. ‘I don’t think you can have considered the substantial investment that a project like this represents. There are other ramifications beside the rather more manifest one of individual security. Need I remind you that this is a private facility? Any governmental association here results from a purely contractual obligation. I have a duty to my shareholders as well as to the patients. The financial, not to say political, implications of what you’re proposing - ’

Jake brought him to a halt with the only traffic signal she could still remember from her Hendon training. Several gold bangles shifted noisily on her strong, slim wrist like a tiny tambourine.

‘I have considered these factors,’ she said. ‘And I say to hell with them.’

Doctor St Pierre leaned forward across the table and clasped his wrestler-strangling hands. Jake considered that he was not the obvious army type. A bulky strong man, he wore his dark hair cropped labour-camp short and his beard Karl Marx bushy. Rimless glasses enhanced an appearance of some intellectuality. He looked like a well-read Hell’s Angel. She wondered if such an obviously masculine personal image might not mean that St Pierre was gay. He smiled and when he spoke it was with a slight defect, as if his moustache was interfering with the manipulation of his lips.

‘Will that be in your memorandum to the Minister?’ he asked.

Gleitmann butted in before Jake could reply. ‘Your brief, as I understand it, Chief Inspector, is merely to determine the source of our security breach. Is that not so?’ He wasn’t looking for an answer. ‘That hardly seems to cover something as important as the continued operation of the Program. I suggest that you stay within your original brief. Naturally we shall afford Detective Sergeant Chung here all the help we can. We’re as anxious as you are to clear this thing up. But anything more than that - ’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘As you prefer,’ said Jake. ‘However I would like to speak to each of your counsellors.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘So as not to waste any time I’d like to work on the assumption that the security breach occurred externally. Moreover that it was somebody who had himself been tested VMN-negative who was responsible. Let me explain. As I understand it, the Lombroso Program determines those men who may eventually suffer from a serious aggressive disorder. At least for the moment I’d like my investigation to proceed on the basis that one such VMN-negative male has done just that - developed a serious aggressive disorder - and that it is directed against those others like himself. It may be that one of your counsellors can recall an individual who may have exhibited a significant level of hostility towards the Program and its participants.’

‘You do appreciate that all men testing VMN-negative are given codenames by the computer,’ said St Pierre. ‘Even if one of our counsellors could remember such an individual as you describe, it would only be by that codename. I can’t see how that would help you.’

‘Nevertheless I should still like to question them. Or do you have objections to that as well?’

St Pierre combed his beard with both sets of fingers and then cleared his throat. ‘No objections at all, Chief Inspector. I’m just trying to save you some work, that’s all.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Perhaps I could show Sergeant Chung the Paradigm Five now.’

Jake nodded at Yat who drained his tea cup and stood up. While he and St Pierre were on their way out of the room Jake stared at the smudged red-crescent her lipstick had left on her own cup and wondered how Crawshaw would be getting on. This was going to be harder than she had imagined. Gleitmann and his people didn’t look like they were going to be much help. She already had troubles back at the Yard with her superior because of his having been removed from the case. Except for the ban on smoking in all office buildings she would have had a cigarette. Probably two. Then Gleitmann said something to her.

‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘I said, Let’s hope your man can sort this out.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ Jake agreed. She helped herself to more of the coffee. ‘We were discussing your counsellors,’ she said.

‘Yes. Doctor Cleobury is head of psychiatry here at the Institute. She’s responsible for all the counsellors. Would you like me to ask her to join us?’

Jake shook her head. ‘No that won’t be necessary at this stage. We’ll start here in London and then question the counsellors in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow.’

‘All of them?’

‘All of them. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you could provide me with an office with a pictophone and a computer, from where I can conduct my enquiries.’

‘Of course. I’ll have my secretary arrange it. But please speak to the computer if you need anything else. This is an intelligent building, after all. Meanwhile I’ll have Doctor Cleobury make all the counsellors available to you.’

‘Thank you.’

She watched him make the call and then turned her attention to his library. Quite a few of the books were familiar to her from her days as a forensic psychologist with the European Bureau of Investigation; and quite a few had been written by Gleitmann himself, some of them collected in bulk as if he had been running a bookshop. On one shelf alone she counted fifty copies of
The Social Implications of Human Sexual Dimorphism.
He was proud of his work, that much was clear. She pulled a copy down and started to read.

‘I’d like to borrow this,’ she told him when he had finished on the pictophone.

Gleitmann smiled sheepishly. ‘Help yourself.’

 

 

When she returned home Jake ate the remains of a tuna salad she had made the night before. Then she sat down at her electronic piano. She selected a disc from the many she had collected and slid it into the piano’s software-port. It was the Schubert piano trio in B flat, or at least the recordings of the cello and violin parts, with the score for the piano appearing on the keyboard’s integrated LCD screen.

Jake, who had been an accomplished pianist as a teenager, played with precision, although she lacked the skill of the two string players on the recording to add the expression that made the piece such a masterpiece of youthful optimism. She particularly relished playing the scherzo with its extended staccato crotchets and quavers and its artful counterpoint. If there was one piece of music that was almost guaranteed to put her in a good humour it was this Opus 99 scherzo. And when the gypsy-like rondo of the fourth and last movement had brought her playing to its charging, bouncing climax, she collapsed into an armchair and sighed with pleasure.

The memory of the music lingered on her finger ends and in her invigorated senses for several minutes afterwards; and later on, she was even equal to the task of reading Gleitmann’s book.

It was, she considered, not a bad book at all. She liked it better than she had expected. It was true, a lot of it was guesswork, but it was intelligent plausible guesswork.

Jake was reminded of her own work in the field of male sexual psychology with the EBI, before a career at Scotland Yard had beckoned. Sometimes she was asked why she had joined such a male-dominated institution as the Yard, especially when men were so obnoxious to her. For Jake the answer was simple: with so many women falling victim to male criminals it did not seem politic to entrust the protection of women exclusively to men. Women had the responsibility to help protect themselves.

When at last she put Gleitmann’s book down, having read almost half of it, she was amused to discover that he had previously signed it.

That, she told herself, was just men all over.

Perhaps you will say that killing isn’t much of a vocation compared with painting. But I ask you to look beyond the
conventional moralities and consider the phenomenology of the matter.
I
blush to use a word like ‘existentialism’; however, that is the essence
of what I
am describing. Think
of the
character
of Meursault in L’Etranger and you have it. Only the prospect of death - one’s own, or of others, it makes no difference — makes life real. Death is the one true certainty. When we die the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Death is not an event in life. But killing
...
killing is.