A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (25 page)

Jake, who had received nothing but hindrance from her own father, admitted that there might be something in what he said.

The ascent to K10 came to an end before a plain black door above which was painted the name of the room’s occupant, one C. Von Heissmeyer. Jake wondered if this could be an Austrian name, and if so, whether there was anything suspicious in that.

The porter knocked and waited. ‘If the student’s in, we’ll need his permission,’ he said, and knocked again. Then, there being no reply, he produced a set of keys and opened the door.

The rooms were simplicity itself, consisting of a kitchen, a sitting room and a bedroom. The orange sofa and armchair were as hard on the eye as the blue carpet underfoot. The single bed, with its plain, purple cover had been carefully made. The kitchen was neatly kept, with three dinner plates draining on the rack like the three computer disks in their box on the desk.

Jake went over to the triple-arched window and sat on the edge of the desk. In the courtyard below sat a greenish bronze figure of a man. In the distance were two devil’s horns of the incongruous-looking Wolfson building. Her eye caught the reading list taped to the window pane, and then the matching pile of Penguin Classics.

It was strange how something so innocent, so commonplace as a pile of Penguin Classics could stir suspicion in her mind. This really was too absurd, she told herself. It smacked of something obsessive. But even though she knew it was ridiculous, Jake found herself paying close attention to the titles and their authors:
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins;
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie;
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James;
Fear and Trembling
by Soren Kierkegaard; and
The Last Days of Socrates
by Plato. Pure coincidence, she told herself. The same was true of the row of books by Wittgenstein ranged along the mantelpiece and the framed photograph of him which hung above these. And weren’t there many young people who liked to have a poster of a gun-toting Humphrey Bogart in their rooms: this one was from Howard Hawks’s production of
The Big Sleep.
‘The violence screen’s all-time rocker shocker,’ said the blurb at the top of the poster. ‘Bogy’n’ Baby paired off for a hot time and the big thrill in cold, cold crime.’

Hadn’t Professor Lang said something about how Wittgenstein had been interested in the American detective genre?

But what could have been more natural than that a student occupying Wittgenstein’s old rooms in Trinity should also have been interested in him? And like him, like any young man, interested in the hardboiled detective?

By the same token, what could have been more natural in the present circumstances than that she herself should have been interested in anyone who might feel he had some kind of spiritual affinity with Wittgenstein?

Sir Jameson Lang had surely missed one of the most important differences between the philosopher and the detective. For the detective, nothing is ever truly itself and nothing more. A cigarette end was never just a cigarette end: it was also sometimes a sign, a clue, a piece in a puzzle awaiting connection with something else. There was more semiology than philosophy in that particular aspect of her work.

Only connect. To be able to really know something was only to know how things were connected. Like a psychoanalyst, it required connecting the past to the present and thereby obtaining some sort of cathartic resolution.

Of course there were times when connections eluded her, when she could connect ‘nothing with nothing’, when something could not be known.

And there it remained only to make things fit.

To fit. No detective much liked the verb. It smacked of corruption and of malpractice, of suppressing some connections and highlighting others. It was much too active. Too premeditated.

But life was hard, and Jake found herself taking a note of the student’s name, just in case.