The college Master made his appearance, apologising for the delay, only there had been a call from his copy editor querying a couple of points before his latest book went to press. Jake asked him if it was another Plato novel, and he said that it was. She added how much she had enjoyed the first. Sir Jameson Lang, a handsome man wearing a three-piece suit of Prince of Wales check, looked flattered. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, and with a shy, tight-looking mouth which gave the appearance of having suffered a small stroke, Lang appeared the quintessence of Englishness, although he was in fact Scottish.
‘How kind of you to say so,’ he drawled in the kind of voice which Jake felt might have suited some stuffy gentlemen’s club, and offered her a sherry.
While he filled two glasses from a matching decanter, Jake glanced up at the painting above a mantelpiece that was heavily populated with porcelain figures. The scene in the painting was Arcadian in its setting and seemed vaguely allegorical in its meaning. Lang handed Jake her glass and bending down to the scuttle retrieved a couple of lumps of coal the size of small meteorites which he dropped onto the fire. Noticing Jake’s interest in the painting he said, ‘Veronese’. Then he ushered her to a seat and sat down in an armchair facing her. ‘Belongs to the college.
‘I was intrigued by your call, Chief Inspector,’ he said, and sipped a little of his sherry. ‘Both as a philosopher and as someone with a tremendous fascination for — the detective form.’
His eyes narrowed and for a second Jake wondered if he was making some reference to her own body.
‘Now exactly how can I be of assistance to you?’
‘There are a number of questions I was hoping you might be able to answer, Professor,’ she said.
Lang’s crooked smile widened slowly.
‘Bertrand Russell once said that philosophy is made up of the questions we don’t know how to answer.’
‘I’ve never thought of myself as a philosopher,’ she admitted.
‘Oh, but you should, Chief Inspector. Think about it for a moment.’
Jake smiled. ‘Why not just give me a short tutorial?’
Lang frowned, uncertain whether or not Jake was being sarcastic.
‘No, really,’ Jake said. ‘I’m interested.’
Lang’s mouth relaxed into a smile again. It was already clear to Jake that it was a subject he had devoted a great deal of thought to, and one which he was keen to discuss.
‘Well then,’ he began. ‘Detection and philosophy both promote the idea that something can be known. The scene of our activity comes with clues which we must fit together in order to produce a true picture of reality. Both of us have, at the heart of our respective endeavour, a search for meaning, for a truth which has, for whatever reason, been concealed. A truth which exists behind appearances. We seek to penetrate appearances and we call that penetration, knowledge.
‘Now whereas the commission of a crime is natural, the task of the detective, like that of the philosopher, is counter-natural, involving the critical analysis of various presuppositions and beliefs, and the questioning of certain assumptions and perceptions. For example, you will seek to test an alibi just as I will aim to test a proposition. It’s the same thing, and it involves a quest for clarity. It doesn’t matter how you describe it, there exists the common intention of wresting form away from the god of Muddle. Of course, sometimes this is not a popular thing to do or to have done to you. It makes most people feel insecure and quite often they resist what we do very strongly indeed.’
Lang sipped some more of his excellent sherry and laid his head back against the antimacassar on his chair.
‘The work we do is often repetitive, going over familiar ground which one has already covered and breaking the stereotypical conclusions which may have been reached by others as well as by oneself. Indeed it is our Sisyphean fate often to be undoing what has already been done so as to grasp the nature of the problem more firmly.’ He looked across at Jake. ‘How am I doing so far?’
‘Well,’ said Jake.
He nodded. ‘Despite Nietzsche’s reservations about the dialectical method, that it is nothing more than a rhetorical play, our inquiry into truth, with its question and answer structure, has its origins in the Socratic form of dialogue. If confusion does arise it is because, to an inexperienced eye, it might seem that we are always looking for answers; but just as often, we are looking for the question. The real crux of what we both do is to attempt to see the anomaly in what appears familiar and then to formulate some really useful questions about it.
‘In its purest form, ours is a narrowly intellectual activity, involving a dialogue with the past. And where we fail it is more often because of some false assumption or conceptual error in that cognitive, explanatory activity of ours.
‘Of course, lack of proof is a recurrent problem with both of our activities. Much of our best work fails because we are unable to prove the validity of our thinking.’
Jake smiled. ‘Yes. And yet it seems to me that I have one great advantage over what you do, Professor. I may occasionally lack proof for my theories. But I can always trick a suspect into confessing. And sometimes, worse than that.’
‘Philosophers are not without their intellectual tricks,’ said Lang. ‘However, I take your point.’
‘Now I see how you managed to make a detective out of Plato,’ said Jake. ‘And how it works as well as it does. I wonder what he would have thought about us.’
‘Who, Plato?’
Jake nodded.
‘Oh, I am sure that he would have approved of you, Chief Inspector. As an auxiliary guardian, in the service of the state, you are pretty much what he suggested.’
‘Except that I’m a woman.’
‘Plato was generally in favour of equality between the sexes,’ said Lang. ‘So I guess that it would have been all right, your being a woman. On the other hand, I don’t think there can be any doubt that he would not have approved of me.’
‘Oh? And why’s that?’
‘A philosopher and a novelist as well? Unthinkable. Plato was enormously hostile to art of any kind. That’s what made writing a novel about him such fun.’
Lang stood up and fetched the sherry decanter.
‘Top you up?’ he asked.
Jake held out her glass.
‘But look here, I’m diverting you, Chief Inspector. I’m sure you didn’t come all this way for a philosophy tutorial.’
‘Oh, but I did, Professor. But not on Plato. I’m interested in Wittgenstein.’
‘Isn’t everyone?’ he said darkly, and sat down again. ‘Well, of course you’ve come to the right place. No doubt you already know that Wittgenstein was a member of this college. So what do you want to know about him? That he was a genius, but that he was wrong? No, that’s hardly fair. But this is too exciting, Chief Inspector. I’m as fond of reading conspiracy theories in the newspapers as the next man, but you’re not going to tell me that he was murdered, are you? That sixty-odd years ago, someone bumped him off? You know, from everything I’ve read about him, he was rather an irritating, punctilious sort of fellow. An ideal candidate for murder.’
Jake smiled and shook her head. ‘No, it’s not quite that,’ she said. ‘But before I tell you, I must ask for your undertaking to treat this matter as confidential. There are people’s lives at stake.’
‘Then consider it given, on one condition. That you tell me about it over lunch.’
‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’
‘No trouble at all. Mrs Hindley always makes too much, just in case I invite someone back.’
Jake thanked the professor and they adjourned to the dining room where Sir Jameson Lang’s housekeeper served them with chicken broth, Spam fritters with baked beans, and then creamed rice with tinned mandarin oranges. While they ate, Jake told him what she knew: about the Lombroso Program, and of how someone, codenamed Wittgenstein, was eliminating all the other men who had tested VMN-negative. And then, over the coffee, she played him the disc.