‘Detailed lab report on the dead girl’s clothes. The collar of her jacket showed light traces of olive oil. Her mother says that Mary was always very careful with her clothes. She spent a lot of money on them, and had things regularly dry-cleaned. So the chances are it didn’t come from her. The olive oil on the collar lapels would be consistent with the killer having grabbed hold of her. There was just a trace of the same olive oil on the clothes of one of the other victims too.’
Jake glanced over the sheet of paper.
‘ “Cold pressed olives from the Tuscany region of Italy”,’ she read, ‘ “producing extra virgin olive oil.” Interesting. So we could be looking for — ?’
‘- for a wop.’ Crawshaw grinned. He shook his head to indicate that he was joking. ‘For someone who eats pizza with his fingers. Or maybe someone who prepares it.’
‘For that matter it might be anyone involved in food preparation,’ said Jake. ‘I think I’ve got some Italian olive oil in my own kitchen at home.’
And that was probably all she had, Jake told herself. The kitchen might have contained every modern convenience, but of food itself there was really very little. Somehow the late supermarket was never quite late enough.
She sent back the paper. ‘Look, see if we can match this oil to a specific supplier.’
‘That’s not going to be easy,’ said Crawshaw. ‘This stuff’s pretty common. I mean olive oil is olive oil, right?’
Jake smiled. ‘I hear what you say, but do your best. By the way, how’s the golden apple operation coming along? The one in the Mystery Bookshop.’
‘No bites so far.’
‘You might take a look at their stock,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe our greasy-fingered killer left a few prints on a book.’
Crawshaw nodded.
‘Anything else?’
‘Er no.’ But Crawshaw stayed in the chair, shaking his head vaguely. ‘Well, yes: some of the squad were wondering what’s going to happen to Poison. I mean to Challis.’
‘Challis is suspended on full pay, pending the result of an inquiry. That’s all I can tell you, Ed.’
‘On full pay, eh? Shame. A meat-hook would have been better. The word is that it was Poison’s incompetence that got that copper killed.’
‘That’s for the inquiry to determine,’ Jake said firmly.
‘I guess so.’ Crawshaw smacked his thighs and stood up. ‘How’s it going anyway? This other thing. Making any progress?’
‘Some.’
‘Need any help?’
‘Thanks for the offer, Ed, but no. But what I need right now is a tame philosopher.’
My own feelings at the time of the death of Socrates were quite extraordinary. It never occurred to me to feel sorry for him, which you might have expected at the death of a brother. But he seemed quite happy, both in his manner and in what he said. He met his death obediently, without fear and with some nobility. I could not help reflecting that on his way to the other world he would be under the providence of God, and that when he arrived there, all would be well with him. So I felt no sadness or sense of remorse.
At the same time, however, I felt no satisfaction either. Before his death our conversation had taken the form of a philosophical discussion. Strange to describe, but I suppose I experienced a sense of pain and pleasure combined as my mind assimilated the fact that my brother was going to die, and that it was I who was going to kill him.
Largely our discussion centred around the topic of immortality, although I rather think that many of the views which he expressed to me were really Plato’s. But that’s another issue. At its most simple, we discussed whether it was a man’s body or his soul which matters most. Considering where we were at the outset of this dialogue — a gay bar in Chiswick — it is strange to report that Socrates was of the opinion that it is the latter which must be cultivated at the expense of the former. If this seems an unduly ascetic position to take, this may have been due to the fact that I had spiked his Brandy Alexanders, not with hemlock, as you might have thought, but with ZZT, the so-called Obedience Drug much favoured among S & M devotees, and thus he may have been led to agree with me.
Nevertheless, his famous last words seem to me to be curiously ambiguous. Before I shot him, he asked me to offer a cock to the god of medicine. Perhaps there was some humorous homosexual double entendre to this remark. Or he may have been trying a little irony with regard to the Lombroso Program. At the same time, and this is the interpretation which I myself favour, he may also have been trying to indicate that death itself is a cure for life.
It is often assumed that death is the negation of life. But how can this be? Anyone who understands negation knows that two negations yield an affirmation. Can it therefore be said that ‘this man is not alive’ and that two such negations would equal an affirmation, ergo, life? Of course not.
You see how mysterious life really is. Life is no more the negation of death than death is the affirmation of life. Yet it is only death which can confirm that there has indeed been life as we know it. Death is not the opposite of anything. It is death, and nothing else besides. Schopenhauer writes of how a state of non-existence is really man’s more natural condition, given that we spend so many billions of millennia in this fashion; and of how life itself is little more than an unnatural blip on the supramillennial screen.
Aside from an approximately real experience, the nearest one ever comes to the full comprehension of death is the contemplation of the non-existence of that which itself gave life: the death of a parent.
It is curious how this Brown Book works both as a journal of my life and as an event in my life. And you who come after me — well, to you this may be a book like any other: but just as I have read a story and then myself am a participant in it, I hope that this will be true of this story and you.
Perhaps now you can see what it means to speak of ‘living in the pages of a book’. This is because the human body is inessential for the occurrence of experience. Indeed, many of my most profound experiences have occurred within the pages of a book. Experiences which have affected my life. If we understand one sentence, even a sentence in a child’s comic, it has a certain depth for us.
Have you ever caught yourself reading? You know, you’re sitting in a chair engrossed in a good book, enjoying the story and the author’s prose-style, and then suddenly, it’s as if you have an out-of-the-body experience and you catch sight of yourself as you really are: not trading wisecracks with Philip Marlowe, or struggling with Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls, but as someone sitting alone in a room, with a book open on your lap. It can be quite shocking. Like a sudden jolting shot of phenothiazine to the schizophrenic. One minute he’s battling international Communism and the next he’s just a guy in a wet bed and a pair of dirty pyjamas.
It is this rare ability to step in or out of the picture which distinguishes reading. Perhaps Keats perceived as much when he wrote to his sister describing the pleasure he should take in being able to sit beside a window on Lake Geneva and spend all day reading, like the picture of someone reading. Like a picture of someone reading... that’s a lovely revealing sentence. And quite typical of those Romantics, always trying to escape themselves. It conjures up such a powerful image of someone not only living but lost in the pages of a book, oblivious to the exterior physical world, to the hand which turns the page, even to the eye and visual field which conducts the printed information to the brain. Without a book I am chained to the earth. Reading I am Prometheus Unbound.