A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel (28 page)

‘Not bad. So far I’ve been able to get Lombroso to release about twenty names and addresses.’

‘How many answers to the advertisement?’

‘Ten,’ said Stanley. ‘One of them an imposter.’

‘Any of those with philosophers’ codenames?’

‘No,’ said Stanley, ‘but we’ve got them all under surveillance anyway.’

‘That still leaves fifty. How many of them are philosophers?’

Stanley opened his file and glanced down the list. ‘Sixteen, ma’am.’

‘Any luck with the gunsmiths?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Stanley. ‘With his own gas cylinder he can make as much of his own ammunition as he wants. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll get any leads from that direction.’

‘What about that student at Cambridge? Mr Heissmeyer - ’

Stanley shook his head. ‘The locals have got someone keeping an eye on him. But so far all he’s done is spend his time on the river. And for what it’s worth, ma’am, Mr Heissmeyer is an American, not an Austrian. Rowing scholarship, or something. Should get his blue this year.’

Jake shrugged and then turned to Jones. ‘Jameson Lang’s pictophone: is that installed yet?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I spoke to the professor on it earlier today.’

‘Call tracing. Where are we on that one? I want to be ready for this bastard when he phones.’

‘I’ve organised a digital trace for any normal telecommunications traffic, and a keyword satellite monitor of the whole country. If our man uses the words “Lombroso” or “Wittgenstein” on a phone, the satellite should be able to tell us where the signal is coming from.’

‘Discrecording facilities?’

‘Automatic on all your lines, ma’am,’ said Jones. ‘Here, at home, and on your portable.’ He grinned. ‘Best make sure you don’t say anything rude about the Commissioner, eh? We wouldn’t want you to get suspended like Mr Challis.’

Jake smiled at Jones, and wondered if he really meant what he had said.

 

 

Real meaning. There was never any doubt of what that amounted to with Mrs Grace Miles. She called towards the end of the day when Jake had started to think about going home. Jake noticed from the picture that the Minister herself was already at home. In the corner of the room she could see a baby crawling round Mrs Miles’s red dispatch box.

‘Gilmour tells me that you’ve got a genetic fingerprint. Is that right?’

‘Yes. We’re trying to find a match with an ID card.’

‘Good. Someone’s tabled a question about these killings in the House tomorrow. I want to be able to say that we expect to be making an arrest very shortly.’

‘Shortly could be as long as seventy days, Minister,’ said Jake. ‘It might take the computer all of that to make the comparisons.’

Jake watched the Minister frown and then tug nervously at the string of pearls she wore round her neck. Jake wondered if they were real. She was dressed to go out. The sequin-covered dress was cut low to reveal what appeared to be a child’s bare backside but was in fact the Minister’s chest. She wore her long black hair pinned back from her but loose about her shoulders so that she looked like some kind of ancient Persian princess.

‘Better to say something like “The police investigation is coming to a conclusion and they are confident of making an arrest before very long”,’ suggested Jake. ‘Then if we make an arrest within the next few days it will seem as you knew more but weren’t saying. That you were being tactically vague as opposed to being misleading. But to say that we will shortly be making an arrest seems rather wide of the mark, ma’am.’

Mrs Miles’s slow nod accelerated as she saw the wisdom of Jake’s advice. Even so she wasn’t inclined to be grateful for it. Instead her face took on an irritated aspect.

‘Yes, I expect you’re right,’ she said, and then added: ‘Oh and by the way, what do you mean by making this loony an offer of medical help at your press conference? I’m afraid I was away in Brussels at the time, and I’ve only just read the transcript of what you said. I certainly don’t recall anyone clearing that little idea with the Attorney General.’

‘I wanted him to make contact with us,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe even to give himself up. There’s not much percentage in that if all he has coming to him is a hypodermic needle and a long term of punitive coma. In my judgment — ’

‘In your judgment - ’ Her tone was contemptuous. ‘Need I remind you, Chief Inspector, that your job is to catch this maniac, not to determine whether or not he is to be regarded as fit to plead. Moreover, the theory of justice pursued by this Government, and for which we received an overwhelming mandate at the last election, is retributive. It is not reformative. No more does justice permit that individual offenders shall escape the full rigour of the law merely because of some alleged insanity. The public simply won’t stand for it. They must be satisfied that a criminal has been punished. I would hope that when this man is caught he will be sentenced to an irreversible period of coma. At the very least he should undergo a minimum vegetative state of thirty years. But having said all that, my own feeling is that it would be better for everyone if he were not to be taken alive. I just hope that he’s armed when you catch up with him, in which case you’ll have little choice but to shoot him dead.’

Jake started to disagree but found herself, once again, cut short.

‘That is standard practice, Chief Inspector: to shoot and kill all armed criminals. Or don’t you read your own police policy documents?’

‘Yes and I’ve written some of them too,’ said Jake. ‘All the same, we owe it to criminology to bring this man into custody. There’s a great deal to be learnt from a subject like this in terms of forensic profiling.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘That’s your speciality, isn’t it? Well Chief Inspector, the only thing the voters are interested in learning about this maniac is that he cries for his mother when they come to stick the needle in him. I hope I’ve made myself clear to you. Goodnight.’

The screen flashed and then went blank. After a couple of seconds, the machine asked Jake if she wished to save the automatic recording that had been made of her conversation with the Minister. Jake stabbed the ‘yes’ button angrily, sensing that it might be useful to keep a record of all her future conversations with a woman like Mrs Miles.

Jake swung around in her chair and stared at the blackened window in which her reflection was floating.

That was probably what it was like to be in a punitive coma, she decided. To be there and yet not there at all. A half-existence between life and death. Awful. She knew very well that Mrs Miles had not exaggerated about criminals facing an icy hypodermic full of limbo crying for their mothers. She herself had been obliged to attend the induction of several punitive coma states. As punishments went it was worse than a long term of imprisonment and almost worse than death itself. But this was what happened when society had become morally squeamish about capital punishment and when prisons had become too overcrowded and expensive to be practical for any but minor offenders.

Jake knew all the arguments in favour of PC. Coma was cheap compared with the cost of keeping a man in prison for ten or fifteen years. The advent of so-called intelligent beds, self-controlled pods operating, by means of individual computers, inexpensive heart/lung machines and intravenous feeding devices, as developed for the health-care sector, but hi-jacked by the prison system, meant that a convict could be kept in a year’s coma for less than a tenth of the cost of an equivalent prison term. Coma removed the opportunities for engaging in further criminality that had been afforded by prison. Overnight, it destroyed criminal society and made expensive prison riots a thing of the past. And depending on the choice of chemical substance, coma was reversible with few deleterious physical or mental effects. There was even evidence from the United States, which had been the first country to introduce PC, that it was helping to deter violent, drug-related crime.

The arguments against PC were harder to maintain. To the objection that depriving a man of his consciousness was analogous to depriving him of life, the proponents of PC asserted that coma was more analogous to sleep, and that to be sentenced to a long period of sleep was, if anything, kinder than depriving a conscious man of an equivalent period of liberty, with all its attendant discomforts and indignities.

To the objection, heard in the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, that PC was a cruel and unusual punishment, it had been successfully argued that since the whole future of manned space-travel was dependent on deep-sleeping astronauts who had volunteered for their five-year missions to Mars and Venus, PC could not therefore be regarded as cruel.

The argument that in a subjective respect death concerns only consciousness did not survive the evidence of those convicts who had been returned from coma and reported their comatose dreams, which was itself confirmed by observations of electrical neuron activity in the brains of nearly all comatose convicts.

But a cold shiver ran down Jake’s spine as she stared into the void and tried to imagine it. She knew that she was ambiguous in her own attitude to PC. There were obvious advantages from the point of view of society in general. But from the viewpoint of the individual she could think of life as being of value only as a necessary condition of consciousness.

What had Wittgenstein said about it?

Jake retrieved her increasingly dog-eared copy of the Tractatus from her desk drawer, turned to the last few pages and read.

‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.’

That seemed logical enough. And this propositional form could easily be adapted to show that being unconscious was without question an event in life, and that it was perfectly feasible, with so much of the average human life being spent asleep, that people did live to experience the unconscious state as well. Hadn’t Freud proved that consciousness was not a necessary condition of an interesting life?

Where then was meaning? Where in that impersonal black sky of frightful grandeur that was the universe was significance?

As Jake stared at her reflection, the depth of what lay beyond helped to bring herself into focus. A sense of other realities, of the trivialities of everyday life, of something different from the routine, all of these sensations gradually made themselves felt within her. To see yourself you had to look where you were not. To find meaning you had to have the will to turn away from yourself.

Was that why men like the one calling himself Wittgenstein killed? For a momentary flash of identity? For a few seconds of significance? To escape from a lifetime’s lack of meaning?

Earlier that same day, Jake had felt a brief hatred for him. But now she found she could feel real pity.