Discovering her own mother’s suicide left Jake with an abiding horror of suicide. Not to mention a fully focused hatred for her father; and by the time he himself died of a brain tumour some three years afterwards, which at least explained his appalling behaviour, Jake’s hatred for the most important man in her life had become something altogether more generic...
‘... do you think it’s possible you might not have hated men in general?’
Jake paused for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s possible.’
‘And in theory, do you think it’s possible that you might have experienced a satisfactory relationship with a man?’
‘That’s a hard question. If you were in my line of work and you saw some of the things that men, and only men, are capable of... Jesus.’
She thought of Mary Woolnoth’s dead body, and the abuse lipsticked on it.
‘Well in theory, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But look, I’m not here because I think there’s something wrong with my sexual make-up.’
‘Yes, I know, you’re here because you think your life has no meaning.’
‘That’s right.’
‘All the same, your life has no meaning because of your own ontological insecurity, Jake. Because you’re divided against yourself. The division in you manifests itself in these pathological displays of hostility to men. You’re an intelligent woman. You don’t need me to tell you that.’
Jake sat up and covered her bare breasts with her hands. She sighed deeply and swung her legs off the couch. Doctor Blackwell stood up and walked back to her desk where she sat down again, and made a note on Jake’s file.
‘You know, we’ve made real progress today,’ she said with equanimity. ‘This is the first occasion when you’ve admitted that but for your father things might have been different for you.’
Jake got off the couch, picked the gown off the carpet where she had dropped it, and slipped it on.
‘So what does that prove?’ she said.
‘Oh I don’t know that it proves anything. Proof is not something that’s accorded particular importance in Neo-Existential therapy. But it’s obviously something that’s of fundamental importance in your life.’
‘Of course it is. I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake...’
‘That’s just fine. Only I question its validity as the sole criterion for determining your personal life as well. The violence and hostility are merely reinforcement techniques for what it is that you’re trying to prove to yourself. And what you’re trying to repress. Perhaps when you have accepted the veracity of the choices you do have, proof will seem to be of less importance to you. But you know, before anything improves, I think you have to discover at least one man you can whole-heartedly admire, in the same way that you once admired your father. Maybe then you’ll start to feel authentic again.’
Jake nodded sullenly. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘That’s what choice is all about.’
Jake, who was in her mid-thirties, lived alone in Battersea, close by the Royal Academy of Dancing. She remembered a time when she wanted to be a ballet dancer, only her father had told her she was too tall and for once, he had been right.
Her flat was on the top floor of an old-style modern building and, from a small concrete terrace which hosted an unlikely profusion of greenery, it commanded a fine view of the river. Jake loved her flat and her garden terrace and if it had a disadvantage it was that it was too close to the Westland Heliport. White-bodied helicopters had a tendency to circle noisily above her terrace, like giant seagulls, especially when she was sun-bathing.
For a brief period Jake had tried sharing her home with a lodger, a girl called Merion, whose mother was a friend of Jake’s mother. At first she and Merion had got along well enough. Jake had not even minded when Merion started bringing her hairy boyfriend Jono back to the flat, to make noisy love in Jake’s bathtub. She had not even objected that they did not clean it particularly well afterwards. But when, in an unforgivable state of total sobriety, Jono had made a very determined pass at Jake and Jake had responded by punching him out cold, Merion took exception to Jake’s forthright manner and left soon afterwards.
There followed a period of intense promiscuity in which Jake engaged as much to celebrate the return of her privacy as it was born of any real appetite, and which matched an equally intense, equally protracted and equally unsatisfactory period of promiscuity during her twenties. After that she had a brief and inevitably stormy relationship with an actor who lived in Muswell Hill and who maintained a fashionable hostility to South London and the police, with Jake an occasional and simultaneous exception.
Since then two years had passed, during which Jake had remained more or less celibate. The more when a man she had been questioning kicked her in the crotch and left her having to take four weeks off work; and the less the previous New Year’s Eve, at a party with an equally callous man who worked for the BBC.
When Jake arrived home she watered her plants and then cooked herself a microwave dinner. Then she turned on the television and picked up the evening paper.
French had been right. The shooting had made the final edition of the Evening Standard, and although there was no mention of the Lombroso Program, the writer was still able to say that the police were working on the assumption that the attack on Mayhew was connected with a number of other recent and unsolved killings.
Jake took an extra interest in the report, knowing that it contained an important piece of misinformation. At her own order, the Press Office at New Scotland Yard had concealed the fact of Mayhew’s death. Instead they had fed the newspapers the story that a policeman was remaining beside Mayhew’s bed night and day in the hope that he might recover consciousness and offer a description of his assailant. It was Jake’s vague hope that the killer might be moved to try and finish the job. She knew it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was worth a try. If the killer did show his face at the Westminster Hospital, he would find the Tactical Firearms Squad waiting there for him.
Fat chance, she thought. That sort of thing only ever happened in the movies. Which was why she was at home and not at the hospital, and thinking about a bath and an early night. Professor Gleitmann’s book was on her bedside table and looked like providing her with an effective soporific. But first she turned on the Nicamvision to see if there was anything about Mayhew.
The TV news didn’t even bother to report it. It was only a shooting after all, and nothing to compare with the stories of war, famine, and human disaster which constituted the greater part of the bulletin. After the news there was a programme which devoted itself to the pros and cons of punitive coma. This was timely, because an IRA terrorist, Declan Fingal, was to have his sentence of irreversible coma carried out at Wandsworth Gaol the following evening.
Tony Bedford, MP, the opposition spokesman on Crime and Punishment, had joined a number of demonstrators outside the prison to protest against the sentence, and told the cameras of his repugnance at what was being done in the name of the law. He was his usual windy self and while Jake was generally in sympathy with most of what he said about punitive coma, she was left with the impression that if Bedford had been Home Secretary he would have sent Fingal back to Ireland with nothing worse than a stiff lecture.
There followed a studio interview with Grace Miles. Looking more relaxed than she had been in Frankfurt, Mrs Miles wore a black dress with jewelled buttons that were the size and shape of Viking brooches, and which was cut low on her well-bosomed chest. She looked more glamorous than a rockful of sirens. The camera cut to a wide shot of the Minister sitting in her chair and almost as if she had heard a cue, Mrs Miles crossed her legs to reveal just a fraction too much thigh, and, Jake could hardly believe it, a stocking top. That was one for the tabloids, she found herself thinking. Mrs Miles was the only woman in the Government who could, and did, trade on her own sex appeal.