You would be surprised how regular are the comings and goings of most people’s lives. And so, usually, it’s only a matter of following my target a distance away from his place of domicile and, at a suitable place, killing him.
I am avoiding the use of words like crime, assassination and murder for the obvious reasons. Words can have different significations. Language disguises thought, to the extent that sometimes it is not possible to determine the mental action which inspired it. So for now I will simply say that these are executions. It is true that they are not given the official sanction of law in any socially-contractual sense. All the same, this word ‘execution’ goes a long way to avoiding any tendency to pejorate what is after all my life’s work.
When I got closer to him I realised that he was a little taller than I had thought. Almost two metres. For the evening he wore yet another change of clothing. But it was more than that somehow. He seemed to embrace so many different fashions during the course of one day that one could have been forgiven for thinking that he had a brother or two. His walk was distinctive, however. Too distinctive to mistake him for someone else. He moved partly on tiptoe which lent him a nefarious air, as if he were hurrying from the scene of some dreadful deed.
More like hurrying to commit one, I thought at the time. It’s only a matter of time before neuronal connectivity makes itself apparent, for him just as for me. Freedom consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. But neither one of us was truly subordinate to his will. And the fact that all I could wish for is happening now can only be a favour granted by fate, so to speak. If I can alter something, I can alter only the limits of the world.
By removing him from it.
He turned into the High Street and for a brief moment I lost sight of him. What would he have seen if, like Tam o’Shanter, he looked back? No, that’s much too prosaic. It’s not that I meant to scare him, or to drag him down to hell. This is something that has to be done without malice. This merely corresponds with logic. Even God cannot do anything that would be contrary to the laws of logic. But one takes a certain pleasure in a logical method, for this endows meaning.
I caught him up as he tripped off to the right, down a long cobbled alleyway that led to the pub where normally he would drink several litres of the brew he considered to be palatable. Only this time it led to the moment which would not be an event in his life and which he was never meant to experience.
The gas-gun felt big and powerful in my hand as I pointed it at the back of his head. I do not understand this weapon’s kinetic properties except to say that they are formidable in something that is freely available over the counter, no licence required. Nothing like the air-gun I owned as a small boy.
Two of the shots were fired even before his knees had started to buckle. I waited until he hit the ground before emptying the rest of the clip into him at rather closer range. Not much blood, but it was immediately clear to me that the man, whose Lombroso-given identity was Charles Dickens, was dead. Then I holstered my weapon underneath my leather jacket and walked quickly away.
I never cared all that much for Dickens. The real Dickens that is, the English language’s greatest novelist. Give me Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert any day of the 168-hour week. But mostly I avoid novels altogether and prefer to read about the essence of the world, about the relative unimportance of and yet the possibilities for the individual case, of that which exists between the empirical and the formal, of the clarification of propositions. And there’s not much of that in Charles Dickens.
There’s not much of anything except the deaths of Little Nell and Nancy and Dora Copperfield, and both Pip’s and Oliver’s mothers. Not very safe being one of Dickens’s women. Not much I can do about that now. But at least now that the other Charles Dickens is dead, perhaps things will be that little bit safer for women everywhere. Of course, they’ll never know this. That’s unfortunate. But what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
2
THE THIRD EUROPEAN COMMUNITY SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNIQUES OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, HERBERT MARCUSE CENTRE, FRANKFURT, GREATER GERMAN REICH, 13.00 HOURS, 13 FEBRUARY 2013. SPEAKER: DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR ISADORA JAKOWICZ, M.SC, LONDON. METROPOLITAN POLICE FORCE.
MEMBER COUNTRY: UK. TITLE OF TEXT: INCREASE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MURDER.
It is Saturday evening, towards the beginning of the millennium. The wife is in bed. There are no children. You switch on the Nicamvision, settle your spectacles on your nose and select a videodisc. A Chinese takeaway and a few bottles of Japanese lager have put you in just the right mood. Your nicotine-free cigarettes are by your side, the futon cushions are soft beneath you, the central heating is on, and the air is warm and pleasantly de-ionised. In these blissful circumstances what kind of disc is it that you want to watch? Naturally it’s one about a murder. But what kind of murder?
Sixty years ago, George Orwell described what would be, from an English newspaper’s point of view, ‘the perfect murder’. ‘The murderer,’ he wrote, ‘should be a little man of the professional class. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it with all the utmost cunning and slip up over some tiny unforeseen detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison.’
Arguing the decline of this, the archetypal English murder, Orwell pointed to the case of Karl Hulten, an American Army deserter who, inspired by the false values of American cinema, wantonly murdered a taxi-driver for the sum of eight pounds sterling — about EC$3.
That the most-talked about murder of the last years of the Second World War was this, the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, and that it should have been committed by an American, was a cause of some regret to the curiously patriotic Orwell. For him, Hulten’s ‘meaningless’ crime could not begin to compare with the typically English murder which was ‘the product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.’
Today, however, crimes like Hulten‘s, pitiful, sordid and without much emotion behind them, are relatively commonplace. ‘Good murders’, of the kind that might have entertained the News of the World reader of Orwell’s day, are still committed. But these are of little interest to the public at large in comparison with the apparently motiveless kind of murder that has become the norm.
Nowadays, people are routinely murdered, often for no obvious reason. Just over half a century after Orwell’s death, society finds itself subject to a virtual epidemic of recreational murder, which is the work of a breed of killer even more purposeless than the comparatively innocent Karl Hulten. Indeed, were Hulten’s case to occur today, his crimes would rate no more than a couple of paragraphs in the local newspaper. It might seem incomprehensible to us in the year 2013 that the case of the Cleft Chin Murder should have been, as Orwell tells us, ‘the principal cause célèbre of the war years’.