‘Meaning is physiognomy.’ Yes, she liked that. It referred to how a word has meaning, but all the same it seemed to speak of something vaguely forensic too. Jake also appreciated the implicit warning to those who would make a case based on the purely circumstantial that was contained in the thought that ‘the most explicit evidence of intention is by itself insufficient evidence of intention’. And there was certainly a message for every detective in the answer to the question ‘What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.’ How often had she felt just like that fly?
Professor Jameson Lang had been right: there was so much common ground between the detective and the philosopher. More than she could ever have appreciated.
This growing interest in philosophy had, as its most important corollary, a sense of fascination for the man who had, indirectly at least, inspired it: the Lombroso killer. It was, she knew, not uncommon for multiples, spree-killers and lone gunmen trying to make a name for themselves by killing a public figure to arm themselves with some intellectual baggage as evidence of their being something better than a common criminal. Just as often it enabled their lawyers to try and shift the moral responsibility for their actions onto some hapless author, even to try and sue him if he was unfortunate enough still to be alive. Books do furnish a room, wrote Anthony Powell. Jake reflected that in these post-millenial days, books also furnished the well-educated life of many a mass-murderer.
Jerry Sherriff, the man who assassinated EC President, Pierre Delafons, had read him the whole of Eliot’s Waste Land before blowing his head off. Spree-killer Greg Harrison was listening to a disc of John Betjeman’s poetry when, armed with several hand-grenades, he ran amok through the streets of Slough, killing forty-one people. The American multiple Lyndon Topham claimed that he had killed twenty-seven people out riding in various parts of Texas, because they were the Black Horsemen from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And Jake had lost count of the number of serial killers who claimed that their actions had been influenced by Nietzsche.
There was something different about this particular killer, however: Jake had feelings for him that detectives were not supposed to have about multiple murderers. Admiration was too strong a word for it. Rather it was that she felt fascinated by him. Her imagination had been roused by him. Through him she had come to learn certain things about the world. About herself.
Trying to understand him, trying to catch him was about the most stimulating thing Jake had ever done.
Jake slept for four hours and woke in the dark with a question gnawing at her memory like a dog’s bone. Where the hell had he met her?
She rolled out of bed, pulled on her dressing-gown and went through to the kitchen where she put some ice and a slice of lime into a long glass, and poured herself some mineral water. She drank it greedily, like a small child after a nightmare. Then she sat down in front of her computer and switched it on.
If she could remember ‘where’ then she might also remember ‘who’. She typed ‘Where?’ and waited for inspiration. When, after several minutes, none came she erased the word and thought again.
Another question en route to ‘where’. When? When had he met her? As she typed ‘When?’ Jake was suddenly possessed of the certainty that he had already given her the answer. She felt a chill of excitement as she tried to recall what it was. Something small. Something in the very air around her. Something...
Her perfume. Rapture, by Luther Levine. He had complimented her on it.
Jake jumped up, grabbed her shoulder bag from off the back of the chair and emptied its contents onto the floor. Rapture had been a recent purchase. But when and where had she bought it? She sorted through the various till receipts and credit-card vouchers collected during the last few months thanking the slut in her who rarely ever tidied out her bag.
At last she found what she was looking for. Frankfurt Airport. That was where she had bought it. Until her trip to the European Law Enforcement Symposium, she had always worn Lolita, by Federico D’Atri. The purchase of the bottle of Rapture had been a spur of the moment thing. She had even scolded herself for buying it, imagining that she had succumbed to the sexy 48-sheet poster featuring a modern version of Fragonard’s painting, The Swing. Since she felt guilty that she had fallen for the hype, it had been some time before she had actually worn Rapture. She remembered wearing Lolita at the press conference where she had issued a description of Wittgenstein. And it had been several days after that before she had actually finished the bottle of Lolita.
The first time she had worn Rapture — had been the day she had gone to see Sir Jameson Lang. Whoever Wittgenstein was, he had met her after that. He had made a mistake, she was sure of it.
Now if she could only recollect everyone she had met since her trip to Cambridge...
The problem with the RA equipment is that it does not merely convey an approximation of physical pleasure, such as the sexual act, it also conveys a close approximation of pain. Or, to put it another way, just as I am able to experience an approximation of killing someone, I am also able to experience an approximation of being killed myself. Hence, the machine needs careful handling.
This morning, when I awoke, it seemed to me that there was a rhinoceros standing in the room with me. The huge beast, two metres high at the shoulder, stood squarely at the bottom of my bed, scraping the carpet with its umbrella-stand feet and jerking its huge scimitar of a horn in my direction. It was so close that I could feel the animal’s hot breath snorting from its nostrils onto my bare toes. I hardly dared to breathe, seeing that it had already turned most of the bedroom furniture into matchwood. I had the certain feeling that the slightest movement on my part would cause the rhino to charge.
My problem was this: if I was dreaming, then I could safely shake my head clear of the nightmare and jump out of bed; but if this was an approximation of reality, then, for reasons already described, I was in serious trouble. Even an approximate reality of a rhino’s horn up my arse was not something I was eager to experience.
So I closed my eyes and tried to isolate my mind from my senses, asking myself some logical questions. Had I fallen asleep wearing the RA outfit? I certainly remembered putting it on, but not taking it off. I remembered using the erotic software, but there was no way that this would have included a rhinoceros. If I was in fact wearing the RA equipment, the only possibility was that having fallen asleep, there had been a power-cut and that when the power returned, the machine simply picked out a program at random.
On the other hand there existed the possibility that even these deliberations were part of my dream.
Naturally I recognised the program that the RA machine had chosen — or the one I was dreaming it had chosen. It was a short program based on an incident which had occurred in a Cambridge lecture theatre, when I had refused to accept, as Russell had insisted, that there was not a rhinoceros in the room with us.
The program had not been particularly useful as providing an experience of a real philosophical argument with a Cambridge don, for the simple reason that computers are excessively literal. The machine translated the sense of assertion involved as being something psychological, that existence could be a matter of simple will, and created a two-ton rhino. All I had really meant to say was that it is hard to regard the non-existence of a two-ton white rhinoceros when true, as a fact, in quite the same sense in which the existence of a rhinoceros would be a fact if it were true. Something of which I was now only too acutely aware.