‘Yes, but only in self-defence.’
‘Ever killed anyone?’
‘No.’
Doctor Blackwell’s tone stiffened a little. ‘You know,’ she said carefully, ‘perhaps you should have shot this tramp you met.’
Jake sat up on one elbow. ‘You’re joking,’ she said.
‘Am I? This is Neo-Existential therapy, Jake, not something behavioural. We approach psychotherapy from the point of view that the major emotional sickness of our times is the inability to endow life with meaning. Don’t you think it’s just possible you might have worked something out of yourself if you had murdered him?’
Jake was shocked. ‘But that’s just it,’ she said. ‘It would have been murder.’
‘You’ve said before that you’d like to have killed your own father, for the way he messed up your childhood.’
‘But that was different.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you had shot this tramp, perhaps in a way you could have killed your father. Exorcised his memory. Some worthless old man. What would it have mattered to anyone? And you a policewoman: who’d have questioned it?’
Jake frowned, angry now. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t believe that.’
Doctor Blackwell smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor do I. I just wanted to hear you say it.’
In the lab at the Yard, Jake handed over a plastic bag containing the photographs.
‘Run some tests on these, would you?’ she said to the technician, whose name was Maurice. ‘Fingerprints, fibres, hairs, and anything else you can think of.’
Maurice nodded coolly and then slipped on some gloves. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that disc you brought down? It was clean.’
Jake nodded uncomfortably.
‘Now what we got here?’ Maurice opened the bag and took out the photographs. ‘Be a couple of hours at least,’ he said.
‘All right,’ said Jake, sitting down. ‘But I’m staying here.’
Maurice frowned and was about to argue until he caught sight of the first picture.
‘Those photographs aren’t leaving my sight,’ she said determinedly. ‘Not for one second.’
Maurice shuffled through the rest of them and then grinned.
‘Anyone ever tell you? You sure one photogenic lady.’
‘Oh come on, Maurice,’ said Jake. ‘Those are fakes, photo-composites.’
‘If you say so.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Nice though. Real nice.’
Jake resisted the temptation to punch him on his black jaw.
‘There are ten of them,’ she said. ‘I want ten back. Have you got that?’
Maurice shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
‘Maurice, I’m saying so in capital letters as big as your stupid male libido. Right?’
‘Right.’ But the grin persisted.
Two hours later Maurice counted the pictures back into Jake’s hand. ‘Ten,’ he said.
She dropped them quickly into her shoulder bag and quickly zipped it up. ‘Find anything?’
Maurice stretched and rolled his head on his broad shoulders. ‘I found it all really interesting,’ he said, and then laughed as Jake thumped him on the chest. ‘All right, all right, take it easy. No prints. Not a one. But I got an eyelash. Not yours. Not your natural colour. And some traces of semen.’
Jake’s nose wrinkled with disgust. Men were like animals.
‘Looks like your admirer got hisself all excited at his own handiwork. Well that’s no surprise to me. I was beginning to get a little warm under the collar myself. Anyway I’ve subjected his stuff to gel electrophoresis, and you’re lucky — what we got was highly polymorphic.’
‘You’ve got a DNA type?’
‘Not quite. You’re going to have to wait until I confirm it with the autoradiograph. But looks like, yes.’
‘When you’ve got that we’ll be able to match him with anyone we arrest, right?’
‘Oh, for sure. Only there’s not enough sample should any ambiguities arise on an appeal, or anything like that. I want you to understand that now. I’ve used all the semen there was to get the autoradiograph.’
‘Thanks, Maurice. Thanks a lot. I won’t forget this.’
He grinned again. ‘Hell, I sure won’t.’
Several hours later, Jake asked the three senior members of her investigating team to attend a meeting in her office. Sergeant Chung was the last to arrive and seated himself at a short way’s distance from Detective Inspector Stanley and Detective Sergeant Jones. Jake sat on the edge of her desk. In her hand was a thin file supplied by the lab and containing the sheet of X-ray film used to produce Wittgenstein’s autoradiograph.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Jake. ‘I’ve called this meeting to inform you all of an important development.’ She brandished the file in front of them. ‘A DNA type.
‘This morning I received some photographs. At least what purported to be photographs, of me, but were in fact photo-composites. Mr Wittgenstein had married the photographs of me which recently appeared in one of the weekend colour supplements with some pornographic pictures.’
‘Do you think he was trying to blackmail you, ma’am?’ asked Jones.
‘No. I think he just meant to embarrass me. Well, he was only partly successful. The pictures are now in my safe and that’s where they’re going to stay for the time being. However, the lab has run some tests on them and found traces of semen. They ran a number of probes to see if they could determine some allele frequencies and found our killer’s genotype. Gentlemen, the man we’re looking for is most probably German, or of German parents.’
‘Like the real Wittgenstein then,’ said Jones.
‘Actually, he was Austrian,’ said Jake. ‘But for the purposes of the genotype, they’re more or less the same.’
Detective Inspector Stanley cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But aren’t we forgetting something? The European Court has ruled that genetic population tests are inadmissible as evidence on the ground of their obvious racism.’
‘We’re hardly at the stage of preparing a case for the courts,’ Jake said crisply. ‘Right now we’re trying to catch this bastard, not worry about his human fucking rights, Stanley. And if the database on allele frequencies within population structures speeds up the computer’s matching the killer’s DNA type to his identity card, then so be it. We’ll bridge questions of what is and what is not inadmissible as evidence once we’ve got this maniac in a cage, right?’
Stanley shrugged back at her, and then nodded.
‘Sergeant Chung,’ said Jake. ‘What is the current average time for matching?’
‘How long is a piece of string? Well, as a rough rule of thumb, it takes the computer twenty-four hours to make a million comparisons. If you were to assume that the killer was in the last million of population, then seventy million comparisons, seventy days.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, you could get lucky. He could turn up in the first million. There’s no other way to do it. Not yet anyway.’
‘Assuming he’s got a genuine identity card,’ said Jones. ‘He might be one of those Russo-German refugees who came here illegally after the Russian Civil War.’
‘Yes, he might,’ said Jake. ‘But let’s try and be a little optimistic, eh?
‘Sergeant Chung, how’s that random accessing program with the Lombroso computer coming along?’
‘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.’